She TRIPS! She FALLS! The KNIFE flies out of her hand!
WOMAN (OFF-SCREEN)
(evil)
Hi, Lisa.
Lisa looks up. It’s FRANCESCA. A beautiful woman with heavy red lipstick and thick blue eye shadow.
LISA
Francesca?!
FRANCESCA
Happy to see me?
LISA
No! You stole my husband!
Francesca is witheringly condescending.
FRANCESCA
I didn’t “steal” your husband. I distracted him. I really want YOU.
Lisa scrambles backward. She’s edging closer to THE KNIFE.
FRANCESCA
I stole Jim so that you would come to your vacation cabin alone.
LISA
Why did you do that?
FRANCESCA
Because I want you to join us!
LISA
Join who?
FRANCESCA
The brides of Satan!
LISA
What?!?!
FRANCESCA
Your husband is tied to a tree back there. All you have to do is sacrifice him with that knife, and then Satan will make us both all-powerful!
Lisa leans over and picks up the KNIFE, considers it.
LISA
So all I have to do is kill Jim . . .
FRANCESCA
Think of how easily he left you!
LISA
. . . Like this?
Lisa LUNGES forward and STABS Francesca in the heart.
Francesca SCREAMS and FALLS to her KNEES.
FRANCESCA
We could have been . . . all-powerful . . .
Francesca DIES.
Lisa stands, catching her breath. She looks up and off into the woods. She REALIZES.
LISA
Jim!!! I’m coming!
FADE TO BLACK.
PART I
LAX WORLD
1999
In the fall of our senior year, my buddy Max Platt was arrested for shining a laser pointer at an airplane. We didn’t even know this was illegal. It was one of the least bad things Max ever did, and it was hilarious that it ended up being the thing he got in trouble for. (This was still a few months before the whole thing with the private school girl.)
We were at Denny’s when we heard the story, of course. The lacrosse team practically owned Denny’s. But that night it was just Max and me and my old buddy Richard Roth.
Been doing it since August, Max said. He’d cut class, go out to the empty field behind the auditorium, and lie on the sandy grass, pointing the red light at the sky, slowly waving it back and forth. Like the Bat-Signal.
Really? Richard said.
It always got under my skin how Richard was so impressed with Max. So I said, But why, Batman? What’s the point?
Fucks with the pilots, Max said.
Max did a lot of things we wished we had the balls for. But this one, personally, I never understood the appeal.
He told the story again at practice. The story was better with all of us there. Max stood up and did his impression of the cop who caught him. “What are you doing?” he said, in a big Yosemite Sam voice. He waddled around with his hands out to the side, like he was too fat to put his arms all the way down.
“I slipped and fell,” I shouted, Max said, or I tried to shout, I dunno, I was so fucking high, who knows. I put my hands up over my head, they felt like jelly, like I was moving them through jelly.
We all nodded like we knew what he meant. Like we’d all been too high to raise our arms. Even though I knew for a fact some of those guys had never smoked.
The cop goes, “Get over here, son. Put your arms down.” I just leave my bowl in the grass, he never checked, too lazy to walk a hundred feet, Max said. He had no fucking clue.
We were all cracking up listening to the story. The cop had no clue Max was high! We shook our heads.
Cops are such dumbasses, I said. Everyone laughed.
But the next Monday, Max wasn’t at practice. He was suspended. Coach told us the laser pointer thing was actually a federal crime. A $250,000 fine and up to five years in prison. We were all super low that day. The state championships were only eight months away. We wondered if Max would be in prison then. We wondered if he would tell the FBI that we smoked weed. For a while we discussed nothing else, jogging in anxious circles around the track.
But in the end nothing really happened. We were only seventeen. And Max’s dad was a CPA, so maybe he knew a good lawyer. Max didn’t even have to do community service. He was put on probation and had to check in with a cop every month for a year. That was basically it. The only other thing was that he had to get up in front of the whole school and give a speech about the dangers of laser pointers. It was, of course, hilarious.
Say it with me: watch where you stick your pointer, Max said, pointing his thumb over the podium like Bill Clinton. And everyone in the auditorium said it with him: WATCH WHERE YOU STICK YOUR POINTER.
Mr. Kaminsky, the English teacher, tried to step in—“Thank you, Max, that’s enough”—but the whole school just kept chanting it: WATCH WHERE YOU STICK YOUR POINTER! WATCH WHERE YOU STICK YOUR POINTER!
In the end it took two administrators to quiet everyone down, Max grinning onstage the whole time. We sat in the back and cheered him on. We knew that he was with us again.
The only thing was, now he had a record, so he couldn’t get caught again. But we didn’t think that would be a problem. If we could get out of a felony, we could get out of anything.
* * *
• • •
I MADE VARSITY SOPHOMORE YEAR, a year earlier than Max. Richard and I had gone to lax camp and we were pretty good. Only two other sophomores made varsity that year, Ham Tierney and Alan Byron.