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The Cardboard Doorway
The doorway fell over before anyone entered it. Felix caught the cardboard frame against his yellow overshirt and looked through the empty rectangle at Zadie. "Is this the difficult second film?" he asked. "It's the first." "Good. We have somewhere to go." Behind him, sunlight crossed the rehearsal room floor in long pale bars. Beyond the open windows, Larkspur Quay was getting on with a summer that had not been asked to appear in their production.
Zadie was sixteen, with brown skin, short dark curls and cobalt dungarees over a coral T-shirt. She had written twelve pages, drawn twenty little pictures and dreamed three times about an audience laughing in the correct places. Della, also sixteen, sat backwards on a chair, her long braids tied away from her dark face. Her plum shirt and green trousers made her look like someone who had already been cast in a better film. Seventeen-year-old Felix, pale and freckled beneath copper curls, lowered the doorway onto its broad wooden feet.
Their comedy was called The Important Person. A director tried to shoot a grand farewell scene while an extra repeatedly asked where he should stand. Zadie would direct and operate their single borrowed camera; Della would play the director, Felix the extra. Della knew the part poked fun at Zadie's habits. "I accepted before you added the chair speech," she said. "The chair speech is essential." "That's what makes it such good research."
For a moment Zadie stood inside the doorway to demonstrate the farewell. Della rested a hand beside the camera on its tripod; Felix watched with an expression Zadie had not written for him. She tried the line about never looking back and immediately looked back. Both her friends laughed. It was unexpected, standing on this side of the lens. There was no recording light yet, no performance to keep or explain. There was only the room, the three of them, and a perfectly ordinary chance to try something.