Free Flicker & Burn: A Cold Fury Novel by T.M. Goeglein

gone, I decided to tell the truth as well as I could. “I ran a lot,” I said, omitting that it had been from creatures, and added, “and I read a ton,” thinking of the countless times I combed the notebook. “Also, I hung out with Doug almost every day.”
    Max nodded and asked, “What about your family?”
    “Um, well, you know how summer is. People get busy,” I said with a shrug. “It’s like I didn’t see them at all.” He looked at me suspiciously, since it sounded like I was holding back information. I ran, read, hung out with Doug, and didn’t see my family? That’s it? The doubt in Max’s eyes, the idea that he had even the slightest negative thought toward me, was scary. I stumbled past it, asking too loudly if Doug told him what the theme was this week in Classic Movie Club.
    “He didn’t mention it,” Max said, avoiding my gaze.
    I took his hand and squeezed it like he does to mine. “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Whatever it is, as long as we’re watching together, it will be great.”
    “Yeah. You’re right,” he said, looking at me with a grin in place. “Or if not great, then at least interesting,” he added, “since Roger Ebert Jr. is in charge.” I’d handed leadership of the Classic Movie Club to Doug this year (Doug, Max, and I were still, pathetically, its only members), and he’d proclaimed that we would view films based on themes of his choice, instituted at his whim. In the past, his obsessions shifted between actors, genres, and directors, but now they were based solely on finding my family—basically, everything we watched was research. Of course, Max didn’t know this, and Doug would never give it away. Instead, he framed the series of three movies (the club normally met Monday, Wednesday and Friday) by theme. For the first week of school, it was “Disappearance.” We watched
The Lady Vanishes
from 1938,
Frantic
from 1988, and finally
L’Avventura
from 1960.
    The last one gave me pause, since it felt like real life.
    Afterward, I looked in Doug’s book,
The Great Movies,
and read Roger Ebert’s quote about the film
L’Avventura,
in which a woman vanishes during a trip to an island, never to be seen again: “What we saw was a search without a conclusion, a disappearance without a solution.”
    Thinking about it caused a pang of anxiety, but it didn’t affect me nearly as much as the Sausage King of Chicago.
    The second week’s theme was closer to home—“Chicago-centric.” The first two were
Angels with Dirty Faces
and
The Untouchables,
but it wasn’t until Friday that I saw and heard something that rattled me. For years, when my family couldn’t agree on a movie to watch, we would default to
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
since there are things in the film that appeal to each of us.
    Lou’s favorite part of the movie takes place in a fancy restaurant.
    Ferris is trying to BS a maître d’ into giving him a table by claiming to be someone he’s not. The maître d’, with his weasel mustache and puffy pompadour, looks at the reservation book, then at fresh-faced, teenaged Ferris, and the scene goes like this:
    MAÎTRE D’: You’re Abe Froman?
    FERRIS: That’s right, I’m Abe Froman.
    MAÎTRE D’: The Sausage King of Chicago?
    FERRIS: Uh, yeah, that’s me.
    I would ask Lou, but isn’t it just lying—isn’t he just a con man? My brother would shrug and say that a con man is a glorified thief, and Ferris doesn’t steal anything; he borrows the alternate identity of Abe Froman, gets a great table, and pays for a delightful meal. It’s all about having the self-confidence to take a risk and seize an opportunity. Afterward, whenever Lou encountered an act of bravado—a Cubs player committing a daring base steal or one of those stories where someone leaps onto the subway tracks to save a life—he’d murmur, “Abe Froman,” and I’d know exactly what he meant. Sometimes, whether a chance pays off or not, it has to be taken, since the