Just Like You Said It Would Be Read online

  I squinted at him, automatically returning his smile. I had to wonder if he had any idea how he looked when he grinned, how the sight would make a healthy percentage of girls (and boys) want to bounce a thousand watt smile back and climb into his lap. “Maybe that’s the weed too,” I joked. “It’s playing with our heads.”

  Darragh scraped his teeth against his bottom lip, grin digging deeper into his face.

  “But seriously,” I asked, because I still wanted to know, “what are you hoping for with the band—what would be your personal definition of success?”

  Darragh shrugged and crossed his legs at the ankles. “I just want to get the music out there. Whatever happens has to be about the music. I want to be in this for the long run. And for that I reckon you need to keep your head in the right place and hold on to your artistic integrity. There’s not much point playing music without it.” He patted the grass under his hands and knocked his elbow gently against mine. “You could work for Rolling Stone, you know that?”

  I laughed into the dark. “Actually, I was just about to ask about your influences and inspiration,” I kidded. “You might as well get used to it.”

  Darragh eyes sparkled as they caught the moonlight. “Next time I’m interviewing you, Amira.” At first I was surprised that he’d remembered my name, but I’d remembered his, why shouldn’t he remember mine? “Actually, most people don’t take musicians seriously unless they’re already a big name. If you say you’re in a band they’re more likely to say, ah yeah, my cousin was in a band, but then he got involved with the drugs or I wanted to be in a band meself when I was in school, I have a rare pair of lungs, you know. Does your band need someone to do a bit of singing?” He blinked at me, suddenly serious. “It’s one of those things everyone thinks they can do, especially after all those ridiculous Pop Idol shows on the telly.”

  “Just like everyone thinks they have a book in them,” I said. “And I bet everybody thinks they could write a movie too, if they wanted.”

  “Ah, yeah,” Darragh said emphatically. “People think these things are easy. They’ve no idea how much work it really is. No idea.”

  “So I guess you’re not going to tell me you have a dozen ideas for a screenplay that you’re thinking about knocking out sometime?”

  “I’m not.” Darragh smiled that awe-inspiring smile of his again. “Someone else will probably tell you that the second you mention wanting to write one, but it won’t be me. Words are tricky. Getting the lyrics right is the hardest bit for me. Music is purer. Words can be clumsy.”

  “I thought Zoey wrote the lyrics.”

  “Mostly, yeah. But I like to keep a hand in.”

  We talked for a few more minutes. Darragh told me about his day job working for his uncle’s home renovation business. A highly-strung Pekingese had bitten him on the calf the other day and he joked, “You don’t think of a hairball like that as an attack dog, but he really clamped on. Broke the skin with his tiny Dracula teeth and then sulked like I was the problem when his owner started shouting at him.”

  I hunched over, laughing lightly. “So now what—you’re going to turn into a Pekingese?”

  “Any time now.” Darragh was laughing a bit too. “If I try to bite you when it happens just give me a good kick in the head.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do. You don’t need that kind of tragedy in your life. The humiliation of being attacked by something that couldn’t be more than eight pounds soaking wet.”

  I was still smiling when Rory sauntered out looking for Darragh and steered him into a conversation about Gaelic football. Waving goodbye to the two of them, I hopped up and sauntered back to the house, afraid my aunt and uncle might discover me loitering in the backyard if I lingered too long. I couldn’t afford to get grounded before the Battle of the Bands contest. Summer was only beginning. I wasn’t sure what to expect from it anymore, except that for the moment I had my breath back, and it would be hours before I’d be able to fall asleep again.

  Chapter 5

  You have to have someone to say these things to.

  The IFI did have a summer screenwriting class, like Darragh had suggested, and the next day I asked Zoey for directions to the closest bus stop and made my way into downtown Dublin to hand in writing samples for it. Luckily I still had copies of the short stories I’d written for English on my laptop and my cousin had printed out the best ones for me. The six-week course was scheduled to begin on July first. I’d have to use the emergency credit card my parents had given me to cover the cost.

  I didn’t think they’d object considering it was something that would look good on a university application and anyway, I had to be accepted into the class first. I’d called the IFI first thing that morning and the woman on the phone had informed me that although the closing date for acceptance was the previous Friday, I could be in luck because there were still two spaces left in the class.

  I was nervous but determined as I hopped off a double decker bus in downtown Dublin. The IFI was clearly marked on the map Zoey had printed out for me along with my stories and I wandered down O’Connell Street and across the bridge, throngs of people swooshing by me—way more than you’d ever see on the busiest Toronto streets. The crowd weren’t as uniformly white as they first appeared. The more faces I scanned, the more pockets of diversity I noticed. Some of the faces were Asian and several others were black. There were even a small group of women in glamourous hijabs. I wasn’t a rarity after all. Well, not quite the rarity I’d believed I was. Somewhere in the streets of Dublin there must have been other mixed Egyptian-Irish girls like me.

  Soon I was back in the narrow lanes of Temple Bar, framed by trendy restaurants and coffee bars, feeling proud of myself for getting my bearings. A bunch of olive-skinned foreign language students were gathered around a second-hand book kiosk in the small piazza and I wove through them, glancing over their shoulders at the selection of paperbacks.

  The IFI shop was populated with clusters of film types peering closely at shelves crammed with DVDs, box-sets, and books on filmmaking. I hurried by the shop and then the café bar, heading for the box office where a balding man with a soul patch made a phone call for me, summoning a young pony-tailed woman who gathered my submission materials along with my phone number.

  “I’ll give you a ring once the instructor has had a read of these,” she offered, poking at her glasses. “The class starts on Monday. I should be in touch within the next few days.”

  “Okay, thank you.” Being inside the walls of the IFI had kicked up my anxiety a notch and I gulped in oxygen and asked, “Do many people get turned down for the class? I really want to get in.”

  “I can see that.” The smallest of smiles swept across the woman’s face as she touched my arm conspiratorially. “The introductory level course is easier to get accepted into than the intermediate one. There aren’t any guarantees, but if your talent level matches your enthusiasm I’d say you’re in with a shot.”

  I smiled gratefully back at her, too wired to go back to the house after handing over my stories. Wrestling the course info print-out from my back pocket, I read through it one more time before wandering off to explore Dublin.

  SCREENWRITING 1

  This intensive six-week course is designed to cover the fundamentals of writing for the screen:

   the winning idea

   the story treatment

   screenplay formatting

   plot and character development

  Each student will be expected to complete several screenwriting exercises, culminating in the completion of a short screenplay (20 – 30 pages) by the end of the class. During class-time we will critically examine a selection of produced screenplays and discuss the students’ own works in progress.

  Instructor: Dermot O’Shea, Writer/Producer.

  Class Schedule: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, 10 A.M. – 1 P.M., beginning July 1

  It wasn’t long before I reached Grafton Street, a pe
destrian shopping area. People with bulging bags planted themselves in the centre of the road and chatted as lanky teenagers, couples attached at the hip, and parents with kids in tow squeezed around them. A Chinese man in a leather cap was playing the saw in front of Marks and Spencer. Further up the street two boys that couldn’t have been more than fifteen were pounding out Social Distortion on their guitars, the massive crowd around them slowing the already idle flow of foot traffic to a faint trickle. I listened to the boys bark out the chorus, and then I dropped into shop after unfamiliar shop, people watching and soaking up the atmosphere. The place felt electric and I honestly couldn’t tell how much of it was the course print-out in my pocket or how much was Dublin itself.

  If I was accepted into screenwriting class I’d have to admit that in some ways my parents had done me a favour by sending me to Ireland for the summer. I might’ve believed my future was beginning to fall into place—that it could all unfold approximately like I wanted—if only the trouble Jocelyn’s family was in could magically evaporate.

  She and I were supposed to Skype later that afternoon and I checked my watch and decided I had another hour to spare before I had to head home. It was surprisingly warm as I strolled up Grafton Street towards the park marked on the map. The sun wasn’t out when I’d left that morning, but now it glinted off shop windows, making me squint and roll up my sleeves. Two tween girls with orange popsicles whizzed by on in-line skates, their mothers straggling behind them. All in all it was a convincing imitation of summer and when I reached St. Stephen’s Green every patch of grass was littered with people, students and backpacking tourists mostly, lying across the neatly tended lawn. I tossed my knapsack to one side and spread out on the grass, feeling grateful for the heat as I folded my hands under my head.

  The teenage boy character I’d begun to think of as Sebastian was back in my head as I lay in the park absorbing warmth and jotting down notes. He stayed with me all the way home, but the moment I booted up my laptop and signed into Skype, Jocelyn drove every other thought from my head. “Before you can ask, I don’t want to talk about Ajay or my family today,” she declared, staring out at me from the screen with agitated brown eyes. “I’m tired of thinking about it every waking minute.”

  The trial was roughly three weeks away and I nodded indulgently. “So what else is going on? How’re things at work?” She’d started a summer job at an accessories store a week ago.

  “Not as busy as they could be so far—lots of dusting and standing around smiling at potential customers.” Joss pushed her bangs away from her eyes with her palms. “But listen, I went back to the dog park yesterday and you know who was there.”

  Last fall we’d spent a lot of time at the dog park. Her Westie, Bert, loved running off leash with the other dogs, and at the time Joss had a harmless flirtation thing going with an older guy who brought his mutt Cosmo to the park nearly nightly. From what I saw back then it was more her than him fanning the flames and when she started going out with her ex, Anthony, she dropped the dog park. There were other places, closer to her house, where she could walk Bert.

  “Really?” I prompted. “You saw Noah?” That was his name—Joss had uncovered it the third time we’d bumped into him at the park.

  “More than saw him.” Her cheeks puffed out like she could barely contain her excitement. “I got him to drive me home and we kissed in his car.”

  “Wait. You kissed?” Noah was a full grown man. He had to be twenty-five.

  “The sky was getting ready to storm,” she said quickly. “He had his car parked nearby because he was going to pick up groceries after the park and I said, ‘all these clouds and you’re not going to offer to drive me home?’ So he did. And it happened when he was dropping me off, right in front of my parents’ driveway.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Watching Joss through the screen made her look smaller in a way that had nothing to do with size. “So are you going back to the park?” I asked finally.

  “Probably. But I also know where he lives now.”

  I must have furrowed my brow or screwed up my eyes because she frowned back at me, “What?” she said, her voice as dry as summer grass.

  “Just…be careful.” I’d thought Noah was the kind of guy who knew a girl Joss’s age was off limits and that all their talk was just that. But now I wasn’t so sure.

  “I don’t want to be careful. Could you just be happy for me for a minute that something fun happened for a change.”

  “No, I am,” I insisted. “I am. I can be happy for you and still think you should be careful.” I shoved my hands under my legs to keep them still. “How did he kiss?”

  “Like he really knew how.” Joss’s eyes dared me to contradict her. “But like he was holding back too.”

  “So you were the one who kissed him?”

  “I did,” she admitted, planting an elbow on the desk in front of her and resting her head against her hand. “And I might do it again if I get the chance.” She waved her hand frantically in the air as though invoking a spell. “But I’ll be careful too, okay? So don’t worry. Noah is the good news.”

  Once upon a time Anthony was good news, and I’d definitely never had to worry about him. He was the type who’d rush to pick up a pen Joss had dropped on the floor so she wouldn’t have to. He listened closely whenever she spoke, didn’t mind her little sister tagging along to the movies with them, and wasn’t in any rush to have sex. The trouble was Anthony liked Joss more than she liked him. The longer they were together the more she thought of him as a friend until she didn’t believe it was fair to him to stay together. And that was the end of Anthony. Last I heard he was going out with a tenth grade girl named Sachiko.

  “But now I want to hear the latest with you,” Joss declared. “You’re in a whole different country, but you’ve hardly said anything about what it’s like.”

  Together Noah, Ajay, and the lipstick Joss had shoplifted from the drugstore weeks ago were forming a collage of anxiety inside my head. Shifting my thoughts away from it was pretty impossible, but I faked it for her and began describing Zoey’s birthday party and then telling her about the IFI course.

  “You’ll get in,” Jocelyn assured me, faking too. “There’s no way you won’t.”

  “I hope so.”

  “You will, you will.” Joss leaned in closer to the camera. “And you have to hit that battle of the bands thing too. It sounds like fun.”

  “I’ll give you a full report,” I promised, momentarily veering back to serious. “And I know you don’t want to go into things with your family today but keep me up to date, all right?”

  We made more strained small talk for a few minutes before saying goodbye. Glad as I was that Joss’s family hadn’t gone any further off the rails, I felt as off-balance as ever (Exactly what was Joss’s Noah plan?) when the woman from the IFI called early the following afternoon to let me know I’d been accepted. She suggested that I come in tomorrow to pay the class fee and finish the paperwork.

  It was Wednesday when I went into the IFI again and just as sunny as it’d been the day before. But I was steeped in gloom as I stepped inside to complete my enrolment, my mind refusing to obey Joss’s command not to worry about her.

  “Congratulations,” the woman said, handing me my receipt. “You got your wish.”

  “Thank you.” I felt lighter as I gripped it between my fingers, suddenly grasping the receipt’s significance. Weeks of film classes to revel in stretched out ahead of me. Beyond that, film school maybe. Given time, everything I wanted was within reach.

  I stuffed the credit card receipt in my pocket and headed for Grafton Street, the same as I had yesterday. Just the night before my uncle had recommended Bewley’s Café as a Dublin institution and the day’s milestone deserved a sugary celebration. The café stood halfway up Grafton Street, radiating a confident yet daintily European appeal, and I scooted inside to examine their pastry counter.

  I selected a pear Danish and finished it off i
n record time but was still nursing a latte when I passed a group of teenage girls doing henna tattoos and hair beading from a patchwork quilt spread out on the pavement. The sound of Irish voices streamed by me—a smattering of Eastern European accents and American tourists thrown into the mix—while trendy shoppers breezed in and out of Dublin’s hippest stores. Part way up the street a group of classical musicians were playing a heart-wrenching rendition of Yesterday that threatened to drag me back into sadness. I dropped a euro in their open violin case and was standing back to listen when someone tapped my shoulder.

  I swung to find Darragh standing behind me in a mocha-brown T-shirt, Debbie Harry’s face plastered across his chest and Ursula’s tan arm wrapped around his waist.

  “Amira,” he said, his bright blue eyes even clearer in the strong sunlight, “what’re you up to?”

  “Hey.” I tightened my grip on my coffee cup. “I was just over at the IFI signing up for a screenwriting class.”

  It was a surprise to see him in broad daylight. I wish I could say he wasn’t as good looking as I’d remembered and that he’d gone back to being the guy I’d barely noticed at the restaurant. But that would be a lie. Darragh’s song, and our subsequent conversation in Zoey’s backyard, seemed to have flicked a switch inside my head that I didn’t have the power to turn off.

  On the inside of his left forearm there was a medium sized black and grey tattoo that I hadn’t noticed on Saturday because he’d been wearing long sleeves. Celtic imagery arranged in the shape of a guitar. I’d never been into tattoos but on him it wasn’t a turnoff. And it would’ve caught Kérane’s attention for sure; tattoos and piercings on guys was her kryptonite.

  “So you found one.” Darragh said that like we were people who ran into each other in the street and had these kinds of conversations all the time while Ursula appeared bored in a vintage sundress that made her look as though she’d stepped out of an Audrey Hepburn movie.