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SO SHANNA GOT A new job at the movie theater, we thought we’d play a fun prank on her, and now most of us are dead, and I’m really starting to feel kind of guilty about it all.
I’d like to say it wasn’t my idea, that we all thought of it spontaneously, just started saying parts of the prank out loud that jigsawed together in the air, one quarter my plan, a quarter Danielle’s, Tim and JR competing to finish out the rest.
It was kind of only me, though.
Let me explain.
First, Shanna’s job at the movie theater, the big one down by the lake. Her mom was making her do it. Not work—Shanna’s had jobs since she was in junior high—but working there specifically, her checks going straight home to pay for what happened to their side lawn, which is a whole different thing and not my fault at all, not completely. The reason it was that movie theater and not the dollar show or the drive-in or the even bigger cineplex farther down 30 toward Dallas was, first, it was that that one’s the main one in Rockwall, and closest, but, second, and probably the real reason, Shanna’s mom had dated that theater’s main security guard in high school, and he could keep an eye on his long-ago ex-girlfriend’s daughter. He thought.
Two weekends in, Shanna used her usher powers to sneak us in the emergency exit at the back of theater 14, the last one on that side, and the farthest from the manager’s offices, which is where security was. It was less because we wanted to see a movie than that we wanted the thrill of not paying for a movie. You know. Anyway, with assigned seating, we were having to move the four of us to a new place with about every third clump of people who came in. It was kind of a giveaway, ended up with the assistant manager coming in to count heads, and us claiming we’d thrown our ticket stubs away already, who keeps ticket stubs? The only problem was we couldn’t remember where our seats had been.
It probably would have worked, or, it could have worked, but then the assistant manager asked us what movie this even was, surely we knew that, right?
Not really.
Worse, it turned out to be a senior citizen kind of movie—four old dudes escaping their nursing homes and doting children and county jail situations to have one last golf game—which was when we all kind of shrugged and gave up. Better to get busted than claim having wanted to see that.
Because we were sophomores the same as Shanna, it didn’t take long before they were asking her questions about did she maybe know us. Of course we all temp-unfriended her while being perp-walked out, but that didn’t erase snapshots, and there were a lot of those. Even under the filters and markups, it was kind of obviously the five of us, from elementary on up until this very night, including one group selfie from our stolen seats, posted right on her timeline.
So, the result of us sneaking in and not knowing to sit in the very front row until the show started was (A) Shanna would now work in tandem with a more trusted “experience provider,” and (B) there would be random head counts of all movies she was in charge of.
It was bullshit, especially since she could be making more in tips at the car wash with Danielle—because of the Porta-Potty situation, girls didn’t work there so much, so they pulled tens and even twenties sometimes—but she still had six hundred to go in paying her mom’s landscaping tab, so she was stuck.
Anyway, the prank.
JR lives kind of out in the sticks, right? Way out on Rabbit Ridge, technically in Heath? Back behind his fence, there’s this big hill we used to always roll down in boxes. Stupid kid stuff, pretty much turned us into instant chigger-bait, so we were looking like we had pimples before we even really had them. Anyway, in sixth grade Tim was going for the record in his box, and it crashed him through the trees, into the dark stinky muck of the creek that had never been actual water, had always been just mud.
None of us went in there anymore since Danielle had gotten poison oak or ivy or we didn’t know, so we were all standing there waiting when Tim came back limping, bleeding from the forehead, and carrying a pale white arm kind of bent in cheery fashion at the elbow.
We braved the woods to see the rest of this.
There in the black slime of the creek bed was a naked white mannequin, this giant Ken Doll reaching for the sky with the one arm he had left.
You better believe he was our toy for that whole summer.
We traded him between our houses, carrying him a piece at a time bungee-corded to skateboards and bikes, or stuffed halfway into a camping backpack. We stole our dads’ clothes to dress him up, leave him here and there. He had so many names, but he was finally just “Manny,” for, you know, mannequin. Real clever, I know.
When we finally got bored with him, he ended up in my garage, straddling the Kawasaki 750 my dad had laid over, the motorcycle forbidden by my mom from ever being ridden again, but that didn’t mean Dad had to sell it, which is a whole thing with them, but never mind.
So, Manny was a joke from when we’d been kids, before life had gotten all serious and SAT. Me having the idea to bring him back for this perfect prank was a way of honoring the kids we’d been, I figured. And it would be one last blast for Manny. Better, Shanna would get the joke right off. That was very important. It was kind of how we’d be telling her we were sorry for the hot water at her new job. Well, and for the landscaping she was paying off with that job too. For a lot of stuff, okay? I mean, she’d always been the toughest of us, the meanest when she needed to be, the least likely to cry or complain about cuts or scrapes, the best at earning WoodScouts badges, but that didn’t mean she didn’t like nice things too, we figured. Like being included in the prank to end all pranks, the one that could, someday, summarize our whole high school experience and, right now, blast us off into the future in the most fitting way.
So, we raided our dads’ closets again, and dug into the costume trunk in our old fort that nobody’d found yet, way back in the trees behind Holy Trinity. We were needing clothes for Manny, but for us as well.
We were going nineties-baggy for that Friday night.
Danielle shoved a whole mannequin arm down the leg of the pants she was wearing, which kind of made us all . . . look away but not look away? I mean, okay, Danielle was always just one of us, a girl, yeah, whatever, but she’d never been like a dating prospect, right? Mostly because none of us were dating, didn’t need boyfriends or girlfriends since we had each other. Or maybe we just didn’t have the nerve, were hiding in the safety of friendship, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter now. And Shanna was like my third cousin on my mom’s side anyway. But, Danielle, the thing with her, why she’d never been in the realm of possibility—it was probably that we’d all seen each other with snotty noses in elementary, we’d all ridden the acne highway of junior high together, and now we were telling each other horror stories about the swarm of college questions constantly spewing up from the mouths of grandparents and family friends. It’s like we were too close for anything romantic, if that makes sense? Any of us going out with any of the rest of us had never been a real consideration, or even a distant maybe.
Still, seeing that mannequin arm reach down the front of her pants? I had to kind of look far, far away, I don’t know about Tim and JR. Then she did the same with the other arm, and tied bandannas around her thighs to keep the arms in place, and part of me was wondering why we hadn’t been playing this particular game for a long time already.