As it turned out, “uh-oh” was right.
The manager and the assistant manager were ducking up and down the rows now, and we were all in our far - from - each - other/we’re - not - a - group strategically distant unguilty seats just trying to enjoy the movie we paid for, and each ticket stub that showed up under a dim flashlight was one ticket stub closer to us fizzing over with so much held-back laughter.
We’d put Manny in the best seat in the house, of course. That translates to about the hardest one to get to. And, since the manager was working from the top, the assistant manager from the bottom, it was also just about the last. I guess maybe the idea was that, in a house half full like that one was, it being the fifth or sixth week of the movie already, the best seats would have been taken already, meaning the sneakers-in would have to take what’s left.
I was already planning how I wasn’t going to say directly to Shanna that this was my idea, but she’d be able to connect the dots. We all knew which of us still had Manny, right?
It was going to be perfect, wonderful, legendary.
Until the assistant manager actually got to that middle seat.
I couldn’t see Danielle’s or Tim’s or JR’s eyes, Shanna’s either, but I could feel them looking at me, and each other.
What we expected was for the assistant manager to startle and fall over the back of the seat in front of him, hopefully into someone’s popcorn, which he’d then have to replace, or we expected him to immediately start trying to administer the CPR Shanna said she’d had to get certified in, in case of Milk Dud failure or whatever.
Instead, the assistant manager lowered his flashlight down below knee level like he’d been doing to see stubs and not blind everyone in the place, and then he nodded, kept crouching along that row.
What the hell, right? What the fuckity fuck.
I stood up from my seat to, I don’t know, to call foul, to explain the joke and how wonderful it had been about to be, but as soon as I did the dude behind me grumbled for me to sit, so I sank back down. But it was like my chair was still floating away, right? This. Did. Not. Track. Not even a little. Yes, Manny had a ticket, that was going to be the next part of the joke, one of us peeling it up from his shirt pocket, but Manny couldn’t flash his own ticket. All Manny could do was sit there.
And had the assistant manager not clocked that frozen-in-place face, that empty expression, that Ken Doll drugged-out happiness?
I shook my head no, no, this wasn’t right, this wasn’t even in the general arena of being close to right. If—if this prank wasn’t working, then . . . then nothing held, right? Nothing was real. Everything was cut loose and falling just wherever, it didn’t matter because rules didn’t count anymore.
And then, in the middle of me forgetting how to breathe, how to process, how to not run shrieking away into permanent crazyland, the assistant manager got to me to check my ticket. Just because he was authority and I was banned, I kept my face down kind of on automatic, let him do his necessary thing and slide right past, but then Tim, a few seats down, he couldn’t find his stub anywhere. Which pretty much figured for him. In trying to explain that he’d really paid, the assistant manager finally figured out who he was, which instantly turned into a big thing, Shanna getting reeled into it all unawares, both of them getting marched down the carpeted stairs.
I hardly looked up when they were led past, practically in cuffs. I just scooched my knees over to the side, kept my face down.
For the rest of the movie, then, in the dead space after the failed and failing prank, in the impossible afterplace of everything having gone wrong, I wasn’t checked in to the whole superhero parade on-screen. What I was glued one hundred and fifty percent to was the man sitting up so straight in the center of the movie theater, his red-and-white cap on at the same rakish angle I’d put it on him, all my hopes and dreams packed into his twenty-five pounds of department store plastic, my heart beating so hard, my eyes so laser-focused, my mouth so dry, everything I thought I knew dripping out my ear, my nose, my fingertips.
When the credits rolled, Manny didn’t wait for the tag-on scene we knew came later, he just stood up, didn’t look around, and filed out with the rest of the crowd, his legs stiff but moving, his arms swinging in a limited range, like action-figure arms.
I leaned over, threw up into and through the bottom of my cupholder, and then smushed my cup down into it like to hide it.
3
ON THE LONG WALK home, up through the wide streets of the Richie Rich mansions, Danielle and JR were jittery with ideas for what could have happened. The reason Tim and Shanna weren’t there was that they were in movie jail, the kind you only get bailed out of under the withering glare of the mom or dad you have to use your one call for.
Danielle was ninety percent sure Manny getting up and walking out had been a double prank, which I didn’t think was really a thing. Her idea was that some college kids had seen what we were smuggling in, and they’d crept over, laid Manny down into the aisle and pulled him down to the door little by little, smuggled him out that way, a piece at a time probably, then creeped his outfit back in on someone else during a big action scene. For who knows what reason. Is it just automatic to steal any mannequin you happen to encounter?
“We would have,” Danielle countered.
JR and me shrugged, couldn’t exactly deny that.
JR’s idea was that the assistant manager had actually recognized either Danielle or me or JR or Tim, and somehow immediately figured out exactly what we were doing, there being nothing new under the sun, whatever that stupid song is. Anyway, when he’d shined his assistant manager light down for the ticket stub, he’d just been miming it. Or, he’d really done it, but we couldn’t see if he was shining his light onto a ticket stub or just his own open palm.
Then, maybe because there’s a secret door for the projector in back or something, he’d sneaked Manny out, switched clothes, and sneaked back in, sat in that same place, only ducking into the hat at the last moment. Just to teach us a lesson, via freaking us out.
“It worked,” Danielle said, mostly talking about me, I think, since my muscles kept twitching and jerking with nerves, like I was about to burst—it was my third day of forgetting my meds, I guess I should say. They usually tamp my nerves down so people can’t see them.
Not tonight, though. Tonight my insides were on full display.
“But what did he do with Manny, then?” my stupid nerves made me ask.
JR studied me for maybe five seconds, like he was trying to make sense of my question, and then he didn’t have an answer.
“What do you think then, Einstein?” he said.
It was what they’d been calling me since I’d started taking AP courses, which my mom said would calm me down, keep my brain clicking on other stuff instead of obsessing about all the wrong stuff and then having to recount it for whoever would listen. So, “Einstein,” yeah. You can’t do anything about a name that’s both an insult and a compliment. AP had kept my mind occupied somewhat, though. Until this.
“We don’t know anything about him, do we?” I said to the two of them.
“The assistant manager?” Danielle said. “My mom says he played basketball the year we went to regionals, but he didn’t start.”