The Auteur

It wasn’t that he didn’t like coming to a new place, he’d grown used to it after the tenth, and learned to enjoy it after the fourteenth, but this was twenty, and it was a milestone, and it just seemed different. He put the smile on his face he had become accomplished at doing, the smile that charmed nearly a hundred teachers in those twenty states into smiling back and giving him reasonable grades and not hassling him into being overly accountable for the work he missed. That smile, with the pale whiteness of his skin and those dark, dark eyelashes almost fluttering over bright blue pupils and the military burnish of his nearly black hair gave him a youthful innocence that said ‘sweet.’ He played that card, too, when he had to, when his father had a king and a queen on the table and he had a jack and needed to come up with an ace. He opened those baby blues wide, fluttered the long black lashes, radiated that smile and sweetness read like a billboard. He usually avoided trouble. He hoped it worked today. Today was the first day of number twenty. He looked around the room and regretted coming in early. It was a pretty regular room: chrome desks with plastic, wood grained tops. He turned on his S100 and looked through the eye piece. High Definition video was his only hobby. Sometimes he thought he wanted to be a voyeur but that would mean standing on the sideline. He really liked to be out in the middle of things, but looking at them through the Canon eyepiece. The door opened and he heard someone come in. He flipped the camera off and put it back in its case. When he turned around there was a canvas belt standing in front of his desk with a plain metal buckle. He looked up and his smile turned on. It was a comparison and contrast essay. The one in the desk had dark hair, the one standing was lighter, nearly brown. Sitting was clean and sleek; standing needed a shave, a bit frayed. Polo, Dockers, thongs; frayed Grateful Dead tee shirt, Pooka shells, jeans with the knee gone and well worn tennis shoes, his canvas belt hung a good foot below his waist. Oh, yes, and standing was a study in mystery, from the slight enigma of his almost smile to the darkened view of the gold rimmed Aviators, while sitting could not have been more open. The truth? There was no mystery in standing and there was a world of ambiguity behind the smile. “I’m gonna sit behind you,” the stander said. “I don’t like my picture taken unless I get paid for it.” He stepped around the desk and slipped into the chair behind. After a lengthy pause filled with a staggering amount of concentration given over to who should speak and what should be said, the stander-now-sitting continued with, “Name’s Cody.”