Page 124 of Nothing Like the Movies

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

“You love me. Real, or not real?”

—The Hunger Games

Wes

I have to find her.

I was listening to AJ, but my eyes were everywhere. I needed to find Liz and win the bet.

“So she’s wearing a long robe, like she’s a wizard or royalty or something. This chick isn’t showing a bit of her body, like I’m not even sure it is a girl—could be a man or a tall child or a short yeti—but Mick looked at her and was like, ‘I’ll be right back.’?”

“Yeah?” I said, turning my body to look at the people on the other side of the room.

“Yeah. He’s been gone for, like, an hour.” AJ shook his head and said, “So I’m not sure if he’s getting action or getting murdered.”

“I mean, who can really say, right?” I muttered.

“Are you even listening to me?” AJ asked, sounding annoyed behind his mask.

“No.” I glanced toward the kitchen. “I’m trying to find Liz.”

“Buxxie,” he said, grinning and shaking his head. “I love this whole bet thing. You have to find her because I’ll be bored when your adventure ends.”

“So glad I can entertain you.”

“What about that one?” he said, pointing toward the person in the cat costume.

It was a costume Liz would wear (she would know the name of theCatscat for sure), but as I watched, I just knew it wasn’t her. Not because I’d know the curves of her body in a lineup (come on, but Iwould) or anything like that, but because of her hands.

Is it weird to love someone’s hands?

The cat had average hands, with long pink fingernails, but they weren’tLiz’shands. I’d watched her play piano so many times, and I’d always been distracted by the sight of her long, graceful fingers, moving over the keys.

With perfectly clipped and almost-always polished fingernails, her hands were capable of so much.

I’m losing it when her hands make me want to write a haiku, right?

I searched like a man on a mission, but no one was her.

An hour later, I was starting to panic.

What if she wasn’t there? Or what if she was, but I was failing?

I hadn’t even considered the possibility of not winning.

I was stressing out when I went upstairs to look for Mick, and then I found her.

The hallway was full of people, and I was about to give up whenI caught a whiff of her perfume. I froze, looking around. There was a person dressed as a Pop-Tart—not Liz—someone wearing a latex Batgirl costume—definitelynot Liz—a cupid whose hairy chest totally ruled out the Liz possibility, and Scooby-Doo—whose feet were way too big to belong to Buxbaum.

I was gettingveryimpatient.

I was about to go downstairs when Batgirl turned sideways, talking to the cupid. It was too loud for me to hear her voice, but blue eyes—not green—were looking out from the ski mask.

Her lips, though.

I looked closer, and her slick, wet, shiny red lips were turned up in a smile that I knew better than my own reflection.

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