“Cool,” I said.
Yates and Daisy looked at each other, and then at me, as if I would tell them what they hadn’t telepathically understood. I shrugged.
“Yeah.” Jing put down the lipstick and leaned back, gave herself a once-over in the mirror. Her reflection met my gaze. “I’m bisexual. I’m pretty goddamn sure about that.” Her tone was casual, nonchalant, but I heard the edge in it and understood. “Discreetly, that is. For now.”
“Roger.” I nodded, and Yates and Daisy gave their scattered agreements.
Jing snapped three pale clips in her hair, tossed her head back, and looked down her nose at herself. “Good,” she sneered. She bounced on the balls of her feet and whirled around, snatched a jacket off her chair. “Let’s go seize the world.”
FOUR
AT THE LATE-NIGHT DOUBLE FEATURE PICTURE SHOW
There were three theaters within a reasonable drive from Sycamore Gorge. Two of them were part of huge chain corporations, their tickets were expensive, and the snacks were subpar. No one went to either. Instead, the dive of choice was the Gorge’s own dilapidated Queen’s Cinema. It ought to be condemned. It was a crumbling ramshackle slot at the end of Main Street, splattered with spray paint and dripping hairy vines, and the second light-up E in QUEEN’S had been broken for the past three years. A group of cardinals had nested inside it. Through the industrial doors, the inside smelled like pickle brine and caramel. Outdated movie posters sat crooked and warped behind cracked glass cases, and seedy pop music mixed with the techno jingle of arcade games. The staff wasn’t paid enough to give a damn about mopping up the slushy splatters or the crushed popcorn, so every step on the bowling-alley carpet crunched underfoot.
I am such a sucker for Queen’s Cinema.
The four of us stood between the stained red stanchions and passed a bottle of Coke back and forth. I was still in the velvet dress, but it felt a little less like wearing nothing now that I was back in my leather jacket. The jacket put a barrier between my velvety self and the sharp, cold world. The Coke tasted flat. I drank it anyway. We meandered a little farther down the line, and I let myself tune back into the conversation.
Daisy was explaining the reportedly God-shattering hookup she’d had in the single stall bathroom round the back. “I had to lather myself with rubbing alcohol afterward,” she said smoothly, “but it was completely worth it.”
“You’re a public menace,” Jing said. It sounded bizarrely like praise.
“Four tickets to the cheesy horror movie.” Yates bounced on her toes, smoothed her hands against the ticket counter and smiled up at the employee with the radiance of twenty thousand cherubim. The employee behind the ticket counter yawned. Said employee was a posterchild for mono symptoms, or maybe for cocaine addiction. It was hard to tell in this town.
“Together or separate?” said Dark Undereye Circles Girl. Her voice was completely devoid of inflection. I thought she might croak as soon as we looked away. Her nametag might have said Kaylee or Baylee or Shaylee, something like that, but I didn’t pay too much attention.
“Together,” said Daisy as she slapped down her credit card.
I opened my mouth to protest.
Jing shot me a look.
“IDs?” said D.U.C. Girl. “We’re supposed to ID folks for R-rated movies.”
I reached for my wallet, but Jing waved a hand at me. She looked up at D.U.C Girl and cocked a brow. “Do you care?”
“That’s a good point,” said D.U.C. Girl. Her eyes rolled up in her head. “Last theater to the left. Enjoy your film.”
The four of us ambled onward toward the snack line, which was where most people seemed to be haphazardly slapped together. They held processed snack food in their claws. Someone in line was vaping, and their breath bleached the air above them like smokestack exhaust. Jing breathed some comment about losers that I didn’t quite catch. I saw a barrage of letter jackets. Vineyard Vines. Tattered jeans. A trio of older women, primed with matching Coach bags and feathered bobs, were interrogating a second D.U.C. girl about whether popcorn was gluten free. A kid bawled at their feet.
Yates tossed her arm around my shoulders.
Daisy knelt beside the candy racks and ogled at the baggies like senior boys ogle freshman girls. Her tongue dipped out of the corner of her mouth. She reached her hands into the racks and dragged her fingertips across the surface of every single package, touching everything, coffin nails warping the plastic wrap as she dragged them along. It was a motion I associated with selecting tarot cards, but on Daisy, the typical tarot introspection was replaced with something ravenous and canine. She plucked three boxes from the back of each stack, sprang upright and tucked them against her ribs. It was more candy than we could possibly eat. Her eyes burned bright. “Don’t worry, guys,” she said. “I picked the best ones.”
“I can believe it,” said Jing.
I could believe it, too.
It was the rest of this whole going to a place I like with people who like me bit that I was having trouble with.
Jing shoulder-checked her way through a group of jock types to the front of the line. “XL popcorn and XL slushy, please. White Cherry. No butter on the popcorn.” She paused, rolled her eyes toward me. “You don’t like butter on your popcorn, do you?”
“All popcorn is good popcorn. Do what you will,” I said. I shoved my hands in my pockets.
She pursed her lips. I took that as affirmation.
The bag of popcorn was roughly the size of Jing’s torso. Yates reached inside it, hooked a golden fistful between her fingers, and tossed it between her teeth with an audible crunch. Daisy did the same, which was impressive, considering how constricted her arms were by the candy she was carrying.
I let my hands stay put.
Daisy shifted forward, pulling out not her credit card again, but instead a fistful of twenty-dollar bills, looking as cool as if she was tucking said twenties into a stripper’s G-string. I offhandedly assumed that those twenties covered Jing’s slushy and her popcorn. If they didn’t, then Jing’s snacks were technically stolen. Not that D.U.C. girl seemed to give even a single fuck about that.
We took our snacks and hauled them down the hallway to the left. We passed an animated reimagining/slaughtering of some eighties cartoon and the fourth sequel to an action series that I didn’t care about. After that there was a shitty-looking spy movie, a rom-com that was miasmic to even walk by, an Oscar-baiting bore fest. Our movie, naturally, was in the backmost projector room.
Ghastly. The dripping letters on the poster taped above the door were bubblegum pink and featured an ambiguous white boy with a gag between his teeth. The trailers were already rolling inside.
Daisy cut to the front of our pack and brought us deeper and deeper into the belly of the theater. We sat in one of the first rows, dead center in the buttery darkness. Moviegoing for me had historically been my dads and me toward the back at the latest sci-fi matinee. Sitting in the front felt different on my skin. It was vaguely like spell casting. Too loud, too hot, as hyper as an intravenous caffeine drip.
The lights dropped, and the screen lit up.
And they say there’s no such thing as love at first sight.
Cue the muffled screaming. The camera swept over electric-blue eyes and panned outward to reveal the boy from the poster, an overly handsome blond boy with a ribbon in his teeth. He thrashed in his letter jacket, eyes whirling around and around in their sockets, but the zip-ties didn’t snap. He tried to heave himself upright, but the minty turf was slick. He slipped, fell on his hip. One of the football floodlights flicked on, and long shadows fell across him. His rabbit eyes popped wide. A group of countless girls in hooded pastel robes stood around him in a circle, and the leader, marked by her distinctive Barbie-pink cloak, took a step toward him. She withdrew a mean pair of scissors from her sleeve and the hooded figures clapped, jeered, pulled out their iPhones, and hit record. “The sisterhood has identified you as a cheating asshole,” said the leader girl. She brandished the scissors like an athame. “So, like, die.”