Free The Boy Who Never Grew Up by David Handler Page B

right back up. And grabbed the radio controls for a toy car, a Lamborghini Countach that was parked on the floor by the TV. He flicked it on and sent it speeding around the set, watching it intently. I sat, watching him. He reminded me of a kid who has just been left with his new babysitter.
    “It’s a prototype,” he explained, his eyes never leaving it. “I know the guy who makes ’em. He sends ’em to me.”
    He sent it under the easy chair where I sat, then over toward the fireplace, where Lulu was. She didn’t like that. She thought it was an alien chasing her. She scampered over to me and crouched between my legs, trembling.
    “Don’t mind Ma, Meat,” Matthew said, his eyes still on the car. “She means well.”
    “I’m sure she does.”
    We both sat there watching the car zip around, its high-pitched whine the only sound in that vast, airtight building. It was odd sitting there on that set, surrounded by all of that blackness. It felt as if the cameras were rolling and our dialogue was already scripted for us. It felt as if none of this was quite real. I never lost that feeling the whole time I worked with Matthew Wax. I was always waiting for someone to yell “Cut!”
    “So tell me what you need, Meat,” Matthew said.
    “Your attention, for starters.”
    “You’ve got it,” he assured me, as the car zipped around the sofa and toward me.
    I intercepted it with my foot and picked it up, its wheels spinning in midair.
    “Hey, put that back!”
    I had other plans. I hurled it as high and as far as I could out into the darkness beyond the set. It clattered on the pavement, then was silent.
    “What did you do that for?” he cried, outraged.
    “When we work, we work,” I said quietly.
    He stared at me like I was a madman. I stared right back at him like I was a madman. I’m very good at that. It isn’t much of a stretch in my case.
    He backed down first. “Okay, okay. I’m sorry. You’re right. We work.”
    “Fine.”
    Matthew cleared his throat. “I guess I’m just …” He lowered his chin to his chest and tugged at a lock of hair, jittery and at a loss for words. “I’m not used to giving interviews, I guess.”
    “This isn’t an interview.”
    “Right,” he acknowledged quickly. “I know that. So … what can I tell you?”
    “How you are.”
    “I’m great.” He smiled at me easily. “Really great.”
    I nodded patiently. I’m used to being lied to. People lie to me all the time in my business. Almost as often as they try to use me. “I’m glad to hear that, Matthew. And who, may I ask, does your hair?”
    Startled, he dropped his hand to his lap. It flopped around there, like a live animal.
    “Let’s try that one again,” I said. “How are you, Matthew?”
    He took his time answering. He shrugged his narrow shoulders, sniffled. Laid his head back on the sofa, gazed up into the overhead lights. He had an unusually short neck for someone so gangly. Actually, the more I looked at him, the more he seemed to have been assembled entirely out of spare parts. “Not so great,” he finally said, softly. “I’m trying to stay up for Ma. I don’t want her to worry about me.”
    “No offense, but I don’t think you’re fooling her.”
    “I don’t think I am either,” he admitted. “I feel, I don’t know, like a tree that’s trying to make it through a hurricane.” He sat up, warming to the idea. “The wind is howling …” He made a whistling noise through his teeth. The wind. Howling. “My trunk is bent over. My limbs are snapping off, one by one by one …” He was turning it all into a scene, the stirring climax of Matty, the Little Maple Tree Who Could. Coming soon to a theater near you. “There I am, the wind is building and I’m—”
    “Are you bitter?” I broke in.
    He frowned. “Bitter? It’s not in my nature to be bitter. Why, were you?”
    “Me?”
    “Wasn’t your love life smeared all over the papers, too?”
    “Still is, when I’m not