Page 22 of Sizzle Reel

I take her phone, scan each email for typos, and hit Send. When I look back at her, everything from her face to her shoulders has relaxed. She puts a hand to her chest.

“I kinda love you,” she says as she leans her head on my shoulder. Her voice lowers as she says the words, but they still have that playful edge.

I smile as I lean my head against hers. “I kinda love you too.”

I eat a couple of Cheetos from the bag using shitty 7-Eleven chopsticks and return to my camera. Wyatt and Romy have been making fun of me for eating chips like that for years, but guess who doesn’t have to clean her fingers before touching her equipment?

I pull focus to go between putting the 7-Eleven sign completely in frame and using just enough of a piece of the color pop to get the contrast. I’m a huge fan of kitsch, but sometimes you gotta wonder if you’re playing into spotlighting brands when you’re just trying to use the image itself.

“This is gonna be so badass,” I say.

Romy leans back in the bed of the car. “Man, remember when we used to collab in your filmmaking class because you couldn’t write?”

I whip my gaze over to give her the stink eye. She giggles. She would “script doctor” my shorts for production classes. I still did all the visual storytelling. And the writing. I did write.

But it was really fun.

I wonder if we could write something really gay and personal, now that we’re kind of in the same boat. I’ve had this image stuck in my head for months of roommates in college kissing while trying to study for an exam together. I’d utilize the shitty lighting in dorm rooms—ours didn’t have an overhead light, so we had only Bed Bath & Beyond lamps. I’d use a shot from the other lofted dorm bed, a straight shot to their bodies connecting. Then one from the bottom, watching as the cheap bed shifts under their moving bodies.

A lot of people in my production classes would have these graphic sex scenes in their works. Romance in some capacity. I’d never done it because I always made Romy act in my films opposite me. (Were there other actors at U.S.C.? Yes. But I hated the theater kids.) Anyway, I never wrote kissing scenes because I’d feel bad making Romy ever kiss a man, and if it came to Romy kissing a girl, it’d have to be me because of lack of resources and—

And we were friends. And I thought I was straight and it’d been weird.

Thinking about that theoretical short, though, I think about it being the two of us. What image our entangled bodies would make. How my theoretical lighting and shots would look with us.

Which means I need to stop thinking.

“Are there legit ways to tell if someone’s gay?” I ask.

Romy presses her lips into a thin line. “I mean, this isn’t everyone, but short nails are a good indication. Do you remember Valeria’s nails?”

I lean closer to her. “What does fingernail length have to do with being into girls?”

Romy gives a wry smile. Looks down at her Hostess cupcake package. Her green eyes light up. “All right, my Padawan, imagine this cupcake is a pussy.”

Which…is not a phrase I ever expected to hear in my life.

Romy then proceeds to dig a hole in the bottom of the cupcake. Like just casual vaginal construction. But of course she chose a Hostess cupcake, so then the filling falls onto her hand. Romy looks down at it with a sort of whoopsie expression, like she truly didn’t see this coming.

“I shouldn’t have used a filled cupcake for—anyway, it’s a vagina. Here’s a hole.”

She shows me the hollowed-out cupcake. I’m imagining a vagina and it’s horrifying.

“So a good queer girl such as yourself, knowing what activities she’ll likely participate in, takes the time to make sure her fingers are as smooth as possible.”

Romy slides her finger into the cupcake hole, dipping it in and out and running it along the edges. It’s like a parody of eroticism, but there’s always a droplet of sincerity in it, and I hate that she’s showing me how she fingers her partners. Fuck. This was not what I meant when I was telling myself to cool down.

“But long fingernails, well…”

She reaches over, grabs my chopstick, and the visual has gone ten steps past too far, and I suddenly have opened Pandora’s box and know everything and it’s horrible and makes a shit ton of sense, wow, I need to trim my nails and—

“Okay, I get it!”

Romy pats me on the back with her clean hand as she licks the cream off the other.

“But yeah, when you interview with Valeria, look for short fingernails.”

I look at Romy. I’ve known her for six years, yet I swear we’ve never gotten this intimate before. And this was a joke. She’s always been pretty open about sexual stuff, but the willingness with which she just schooled me is…is the word kind? It feels kind. Anyone else would’ve just said, You don’t wanna scratch the vagina during fingering, but she made me this wacky demonstration.

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