Page 56 of Not You Again
“I like ridiculous. Specifically seeing you being ridiculous.” Adam gave a side smile. “Should we do one? The incentive being that I don’t have a creative bone in my body and will likely humiliate myself.”
Carly considered her options. She could continue to deflect and hope that Adam moved on to something else. Or she could just embrace that today would be about her. Afterall, she needed comfort. He needed comfort. The five-senses brainstorm was usually just that.
“Okay,” she acquiesced. “Let’s go find a cozy spot.”
The spot they found was an apple orchard down the road. For all the loops Carly had spent in Julian, she hadn’t bothered to spend a day in one of its iconic orchards. She was a city mouse, unsure of what to do in a field. Sure, there was the obvious act of reaching up and eating an apple from a tree. But how many times could a person do that? Twice? 249 times?
“You said you wanted cozy, picturesque.” Adam swept his hand to the view around them. “There’s a spot just up through the trees that has a great lookout point. We could sit and see the valley below?”
“Yeah, that sounds obnoxiously idyllic. Let’s do it.” Carly began to follow Adam up the small hill. “You sure do seem to know your way around an apple orchard. Is this what people in Julian do for fun, normally?”
Adam shielded his eyes against the sunlight as he said, “Dean used to work here in the summer when we were in high school. I’d come visit on his lunch break and we’d sit up here and shoot the shit.”
This was maybe the first time Carly had heard Dean’s name mentioned without hateful vitriol attached. She wondered about that. “Must be weird to not be able to talk to your best friend anymore,” she said.
“I still get these urges to text him. Like, if I’m reminded of something from childhood, or even now, being here...” He drifted off. “It’s just harder with Dean, because so much of my life and my memories involve him.”
They got to the clearing, and Adam pointed out to thevalley. When Carly looked at the stretch of green hills dotted with trees, and the sun lighting all of it in a glow, it was almost impossible to imagine any of it was real. “This looks like a simulation of a countryside,” she said. “Do you think there’s a glitch in the matrix? Maybe we’re just all looping because someone’s video game is faulty? It’s a much better option than, you know, the wormhole.”
“Can’t argue that.” Adam sat on the grass, brought his knees up and wrapped his arms around them as he stared out. “So, what do we do now? We have the setting. Do we fantasize about a thriller in an orchard?”
Carly raised her brows. “Not the worst pitch I’ve ever heard. But no, this is called the five-senses brainstorm. We use sight, smell, taste, touch and what we hear to think of story ideas.”
“Gotcha,” he said with the kind of tone that conveyed he very much did not get it.
And that was okay, because Carly found she was excited to explain it. “So if we start with sight, we can look out at this view and think,Who owns this farm?What kind of a person might we want to imagine has a view like this? Could be anything, like, maybe this is a hundred-acre estate held by a wealthy family who just spends their summers here. Or maybe it’s a farmer who’s had this land for generations, and they’re trying to make enough money to not have to sell it off.”
“Or maybe someone inherited it? After a family member passed away?” Adam suggested.
“Exactly.” Carly winced at the reminder of her dad and the theater she’d inherited from him. She changed the subject. “For smell, the apple trees add a kind of sweetness to the air. It reminds me of summer in Los Angeles. The figs fall off the trees and get sticky on the concrete, and the smell is this mix of like, dirt and jam.”
Adam let out a huff and she glanced at him. “What, is this too touchy-feely?”
“No, it’s just...” He trailed off, then shook his head. “This smell reminds me of how Shireen and I started dating, actually.”
“How did you?”
“It’s too embarrassing to share.”
“Well, then you must.” Carly grinned.
He rolled his eyes but began to talk. “I was in high school. Senior year. Every fall our school went on a field trip to Crowley’s Corner Farms, which is one of the apple orchards here. Part of the field trip is learning about farming and apple production. They have all of these ladders and tractors and things around but tell you not to actually get on them. It’s not safe.”
“And you always follow the rules,” Carly said.
“I do love rules.” Adam gave her a small smile. “But Shireen was standing near me and mentioned to her friend that she wished she could reach the apples at the top of the tree. I was trying to impress her. So I decided I would climb this really tall ladder they had to get her some.”
“That’s sweet.” Carly’s expression softened. “I’m worried about thebutthat’s coming.”
“Butsomething happened. Maybe a gust of wind. Or the rumbling of the school bus as it came up the path. I’ll never really know, but I fell.” He used a hand to reenact falling from a great height. “I went through the tree limbs, which shielded my fall considerably. The doctors said I was lucky I didn’t break anything. That’s when Shireen and I started dating, though.”
“Did you get her an apple?” Carly asked.
He chuckled. “I did, actually!”
“An apple hero,” she said with a smile. “I might have to borrow that story for a screenplay. I never had a grand romanticgesture like that in high school. I didn’t even have a date to the prom. I just stayed home and watched movies.”
Sometimes Carly worried that not enough had happened in her own life to be interesting on the page. She’d grown up in Burbank and hadn’t moved anywhere else. She’d gone to school at USC, just a quick drive away. She’d lost her mom at a young enough age where she only wondered what could’ve been. She spent her time bartending, or on her laptop. It wasn’t until the loop when she’d finally said “fuck it” and just spent her days doing whatever whim suited her best.
