She thought I was there to give her shit about not getting me back home sooner. I mentioned how Yusuf told me about the footage team and I could already see the arguments building up behind the hard line of her mouth. The longer side of her hair was tucked behind her ear. “Think of all the secrets that are buried in that footage,” I told her, playing to her rational side. She needed more hands on deck. I was already here and I knew to keep quiet.

“I’m not a physicist or whatever, but film I know. And…” I trailed, breathing deep and nodding slowly, beaming a quiet aura of deference out to the cheap seats in the back. “I really want to be part of something this important.”

With her sigh, I knew I roped her in.

“We’ll keep you around for a few weeks,” she said. “Probationary. The second you get in the way, you’re gone.”

“That’s all I can ask for.”

In my head, the Storyteller voice rumbled attaboy.

*   *   *

I guess my biggest mistake in all of this was thinking I pulled one over on Kaori, or that I had her figured out at all.

I’m going to interrupt our regularly scheduled programming again to talk about some plot black holes that you might think are going to suck in this whole narrative.

Most of my life I’ve heard my teachers tell my mom things like I really wish he’d apply himself more when they thought I wasn’t listening. Yeah, since applying myself like a thick coat of paint would make me smarter or something. I’d like to think my brain works in ways you can’t really measure with grades. It spins me waking dreams I try to capture on film and makes me feel so connected to everything else that a holo-ad on the subway for donations to an animal shelter sends me into a nosedive for the rest of the day. Most days, my brain is a jiggly pudding of conflicting emotions. Which is to say I know I’m not a rocket scientist.

Maybe someone else could’ve seen some of this coming. Or not, because what you need to know is that if this is Hayes’s Disaster Drive-In Theater, Kaori is and has always been in the projection booth calling the shots. She controls what we see. If she doesn’t like what’s playing, she can splice in some of her own footage, and we won’t even notice the change.