Summer Days and Summer Nights (9 page)

“Is it going to kill us?” Mimi asks.

“Oh, come
on
,” he says. “Nobody has ever died from tea.”

I don't take a single sip, but it warms my hands as the air grows cooler.

“In honor of you, Flora, I'm singing exclusively love songs tonight,” Hope says.

Mimi heats up minestrone over the campfire and divides it among four bowls. Every move she makes is enchanting. A drop of soup splashes on her thumb, and she sucks it off. She hands me a bowl, and our fingers touch.

She doesn't say much, but she's still telling me things. She's saying that yes, there are Januarys, and the terrible things people do to each other when they are no longer in love. She's telling me that
the end of love
is a fine phrase to ponder, but it's a poor choice for a tattoo. Because just as there are Post-its and red condominium doors, there are also tree branches and coastlines. There are sleeping bags and tents and pinpricks of stars, there are people like her, there is the person I'm becoming.

I'm going to have to drive home tomorrow. Maybe my parents will yell at me for going away like this. Maybe they'll smile and ask if it was fun. Either way will hurt.

In two weeks, our house will be empty. And then the stagers will descend with the trucks full of no one's furniture and art and try to make it look like a different family lived there, an imaginary family with no photographs or mail or food in their refrigerator. In real life, we were sometimes messy. We didn't always do the dishes. We left pots soaking. We let the papers pile up, and left too many pairs of shoes by the door, and didn't vacuum as much as we should have.

We were not always happy, but we were always us.

Tomorrow I'll walk in and we won't be us anymore, we'll be different people; we won't belong in the way we did before. I don't know what to do with that yet, but I know that it's true.

Hope's singing another love song, though, just as she promised. She strums a little clumsily, but her voice is clear and sweet, and she knows all the songs by heart. When she finishes, she announces that she's going to bed, and soon after, she and Travis disappear.

Mimi leans in close. I can smell mint on her breath—not like toothpaste or gum, like something real that's from the earth—and then her lips are on my ear and she's whispering, “I don't really snore.”

I'm smiling.

Our heads pivot, until it's my mouth against her ear, and I say, “I know.”

We're alone by the fire now, and the wind is picking up, and she takes my hand, and we walk together to her tent. I can hear everything: The pounding of my pulse. The crunch underneath our feet. The rustle of her clothes when she bends over to reach the tent's zipper. And then it begins: the sound of unzipping, from the ground on one side, and up, and up, and down again. I close my eyes even though it's already dark, because of this
sound
. It's like my life opening up.

And then it stops.

And we climb in.

 

On the last night of the Cinegore, the sky looked like it needed to call in sick, all yellow-green going dark around the edges like an infected cut, a summer storm heading in hard. Across the highway, bulldozers sat waiting like an army that had the advantage. Come Monday morning, they'd advance to pulverize the old Cinegore Theater into dust, and in its place would be new condos, a phone store, and a Starbucks. Oh, yay.

“Kevin! Just in time.”

As I shimmied under the concessions counter, my best friend, Dave, reached over and dragged me to him into selfie position, his phone held high above our faces.

I sighed. “Don't do this.”

“C'mon, dude. We should record this moment.”

“Can't the moment just be a moment?”

“Sh-h-h. Try to look pretty.” Dave pursed his lips coyly. I wore my usual expression, something between resignation and disdain—resigdain. The camera blinked, and Dave released me so he could type. “Hashtag: LastNightAtTheCinegore.”

“Yeah,” I said, checking the pressure in the soda jets. “Going out with a bang.”

“Exactly.
Last night
,” Dave said meaningfully. He jerked his head in the direction of the lobby's far end, where the object of my unrequited affections, Dani García, had positioned the yellow
DO NOT FALL ON YOUR ASS AND SUE US
cone in front of the ladies' lounge while she mopped. Her aqua-dyed hair had been cut into a Bettie Page do, then shaved on one side, above an ear that sported an array of earrings stacked like tiny silver vertebrae. For months, I'd been making a movie in my head starring the two of us. In that movie, we fought off a variety of monsters and saved the free world. Then we had celebratory sex. Which meant that there was a narrative in which we had also had a date. Which we hadn't. Not even close.

“You do the deed yet?” Dave asked around a mouthful of half-chewed gummi bears. Rainbow spit dribbled down his chin.

I grimaced and handed him a napkin.

Dave moaned, “Aw, you pussied out, didn't you?”

“‘Pussied out' is sexist. I prefer ‘made a strong choice for cowardice.'”

“Keva-a-a-an—”

“Dude. Shut up.” I glanced over at the bathroom. Dani had moved inside with her mop. The door was closed. “I'm gonna do it,” I said quietly, pushing my glasses up on my nose. “Just … not tonight.”

Dave tossed two gummi bears at me in rapid succession. “Why? Not?”

“Ow?”

Dave threatened a third attack-gummi. I put up my hand. “It's … just not the right moment.”

“Dude. Did Lincoln wait for the right moment to make the Gettysburg Address?”

“Yeah, Dave. He waited for Gettysburg to happen.”

“Whatever.” The third gummi bear bounced off my cheek and landed in the Sartresque territory beneath the ice bin. “The point is, you
make
it the right moment. Tonight's the last night you're gonna see her up close and personal. You've got two months of summer left, and then she's off to college, and then you'll be kicking yourself at our high school reunion because she'll be married to some heavily tattooed, Bentley-driving rock star and she won't even remember your name. She'll be all, ‘Oh, hey, Kyle, right? Didn't we work together or something? Wait, you're that lame ginger dude who
didn't have the stones to ask me out
!'”

I yanked my skinny, freckled arms through the sleeves of my regulation red Cinegore usher's jacket, the one that made me look like a deranged Michael Jackson tribute band member. “Thanks for the encouragement, Dave. You always know just the right thing to say.”

Dave ignored my sarcasm. “I'm here to save you from yourself. And from a life of perpetual masturbation.”

“Dave.”

“Yes, Pookie Bear?”

“Die in a fire.”

“You're so pretty when you're angry,” Dave said, and kissed me on the cheek. “Ask her.”

“Ask her what?” Dani had emerged from the bathrooms. She wiped her hands on a paper towel, wadded it into a tight ball, and arced it toward the trash can, pumping her fist when it landed inside, a perfect two-pointer.

“Oh, um. We were talking about
I Walk This Earth
,” I said quickly, pouring the artificial butter mixture—the I Can't Believe It's Not Going to Kill Me—into the popcorn hopper.

Dani snorted. I found it devastatingly attractive. In the movie in my head, she did that a lot. It was an audience pleaser. She grabbed the tongs and poked with disinterest at the overcooked hot dogs sweating under the heat lamps. “Ri-i-ight. The movie that's supposed to be cursed. Ooh!”

“Have you never seen
Showgirls
? Movies can be cursed.” Dave raised his right hand. “Truth.”

Dani rolled her eyes. “I didn't say
bad
. I said
cursed
. As in, not supposed to be seen by human eyes. Ever. How did Scratsche get his hands on a copy of it, anyway? I thought it was in some lead-lined safe deposit box somewhere.”

I broke open a carton of straws and started shoving handfuls of them into the pop-up dispenser on the counter. “Beats me. As for the curse: according to that paragon of journalistic integrity, the
Deadwood Daily Herald
—circulation eight hundred and two, unless somebody died this afternoon—
I Walk This Earth
allegedly opens a gateway to hell as it's played. Kinda like when you sync up
The Wizard of Oz
and
Dark Side of the Moon
, but minus the drugs and plus demons.”

Dani smiled big, and it kick-started my own movie montage.

SCENE 12: Dani and Kevin run through a meadow of bluebonnets while a sensitive rock-folk band on a nearby hill plays an acerbic but heartfelt love song. Dani wears a white sundress that exposes the cool Japanese cherry tree tattoo with her little brother's name under it that decorates her upper arm.

“Take this mug I made for you in Ironic Ceramics class,” she says, and hands me a cup that's completely solid, no hole.

“Thanks. I love ironic coffee most of all,” I answer, and the camera catches the sexy stubble that lines my action-hero jaw.

Our faces move in for a kiss. We never notice the zombie horde advancing toward the emo folk singers.

I snapped out of my reverie to see Dani looking at me, eyebrows raised.

“Anyway,” I said, blushing. “What with this being the end of the Cinegore, you'd think Scratsche would show up tonight.”

Dani grabbed two straws and shoved them over her incisors like fangs. “He's probably home roasting children in his oven.”

Dave shrugged and double dipped in the nacho cheese sauce. “Just more grist for the Scratsche rumor mill.”

For several decades, Mr. Scratsche had been Deadwood, Texas's, favorite urban legend. He'd moved to town in 1963, when the nation was still mourning its beautiful promise of a president, and promptly bought Deadwood's run-down 1920s movie palace, the Cinemore Theater. Within a year, he'd turned it into a horror movie palace nicknamed “the Cinegore,” due to its bloody slate of films. The Cinegore featured state-of-the-art details like Smell-O-Vision, Tingler shocker seats, skeletons that zoomed above the audience's heads on an invisible wire, and the only screen outfitted for 3-D in a forty-mile radius. People used to come from as far away as Abilene to see a first run. Personally, I can't imagine why anybody would want to build anything in Deadwood, Texas, which is true to its name. Leaving Deadwood is pretty much the best option out there. If you're somebody who has options.

Anyway.

No one had seen old Scratsche in years, not even us. When the Cinegore staff was hired, we'd each had to fill out a short, weird questionnaire about our hopes, dreams, and fears. Afterward, I'd gotten a brief note in the mail, written in very formal script, that said,
Congratulations. You are a good fit for the Cinegore, Mr. Grant. Sincerely, Mr. Nicholas Scratsche.

His reclusiveness fed the appetite for speculation: He was from Transylvania. He was from a circus town in Florida. He was tall. He was short. He was a defrocked priest specializing in off-book exorcisms. He'd killed the son of a nobleman back in the old country and was hiding out here. There were dozens of rumors but only three pieces of tangible evidence that Mr. Scratsche had ever existed at all. One was the Cinegore. Two was his signature on our paychecks. And three was a framed black-and-white photo that hung on the badly lit wall of the staircase leading up to the projection room, a photo of Scratsche cutting the ribbon at the opening of the Cinegore, October 31, 1964.

I'd never much liked that picture. In it, Mr. Scratsche has on this shiny, sharkskin suit, the kind of thing that looked like it would go up with one match. But it wasn't Scratsche's questionable fashion choices that gave me the creeps; it was his eyes. They were dead-of-night black. You could look into them and see nothing but yourself staring back. Every time I passed that picture, those eyes found me, judged me. They made the hair on the back of my neck whisper dread to my insides. They made me
look
.

Overhead, the Gothic chandelier bulbs flickered and dimmed—a power surge, one of the Cinegore's infamous quirks. A few seconds later, they blazed back up to full wattage. We let out a collective exhale.

“Dodged that one,” Dani said and high-fived me.

I enjoyed the momentary feel of her skin against mine, even if it was just some palm-to-palm action. Fact: When most of your nights are spent threading old horror movies through an artifact of a projector, any human contact is exciting. Which sounds kind of pathetic. That's probably because I
am
a little pathetic. In life as in film, find your niche and work it.

John-O, our resident freshman, signaled urgently from outside that he was ready to release the velvet rope barrier keeping the ticket holders in line. John-O was a short spark plug of a kid with a learner's permit and a habit of telling us the plot of every movie we'd still like to see. In an act of petty revenge for this, Dave, Dani, and I all pretended not to understand his wild gestures. We added some of our own, turning it into a dance, until finally, in frustration, John-O opened the door and yelled in, “Uh, you guys? I'm gonna let people in now, okay?”