“We’ll be careful,” said Colin. He picked up the laundry bags again before heading for the stairs. The trapezius muscles of his shoulders stood out beautifully. His biceps and triceps popped. “Maybe you should too.”
His last words were lost on me. I was too busy staring at his arms.
Thirty-One
COLIN
Taking Claudia out to the movies had been Brandon’s idea. But bringing her to the old, abandoned drive-in theater?
That had been mine.
At first it sounded silly, trying something this weird. The place was far out in the middle of nowhere, a vast field of broken pavement and jutting grasses, entirely lost to time. I’d seen it on the old maps, and had looked at it with the past satellite images. No one had seen a movie there since… well… thirty or forty years ago, it looked like.
Even so, I loved places like this. Places that once held the hustle and bustle of activity and life, but were now totally and completely forgotten. Abandoned shopping malls, run down factories with all the windows broken… if you could say I actually had a hobby, visiting and photographing these places was sort of my thing.
Claudia was blindfolded as we drove her up to where the old screen still stood. It was half-collapsed backward, but what remained was white enough and flat enough for what we intended to do.
“We’re here,” I announced, indicating to Brandon that he could remove her blindfold. I parked in the first row, up near the screen. Pulled up next to a rusty steel pole that I knew once held one of the old speaker-boxes.
“Ummmm…” Claudia said, looking around in complete dismay. “Where exactly is here?”
“The Silver Moon Drive-In Theater,” I announced proudly and loudly.
Now both Claudia and Brandon were scanning around. The place was unrecognizable. Utterly dark and deserted. Small trees grew from crevasses in the asphalt, where cars once parked to watch the big, gargantuan screen.
“I hate to break it to you,” Claudia said ominously. “But I’m thinking they might be closed.”
I laughed loudly. “Not tonight,” I said. “Not for us.”
I popped the trunk, and Brandon got out to retrieve the one possible thing that could salvage movie night for us: my portable projector.
“Plug it in here,” I pointed as he got back in. “I’ll queue up the movie.”
There was plenty of room in the front seat of my old Chevy Caprice Classic. There was room in the back seat too, for what we really wanted. What was once my father’s first car — and apparently a family heirloom — was now all mine.
“You can do this?” Claudia asked incredulously. She
pointed out through the windshield. “You can play a movie on that screen?”
“Using my laptop and this projector?” I said without looking up. “Yup. That’s the plan.”
“Well,” Brandon added with a flirtatious wink, “part of the plan.”
The playground had been reclaimed by the forest. The snack bar was nothing but a broken skeleton of splintered beams and corrugated tin walls.
But from where we were parked? I had a straight shot at the movie screen.
Claudia’s continued astonishment was almost adorable. She sat between us in the front seat, staring around in child-like wonder.
“What movie are we going to see?”
“The Notebook,” I said casually, pressing on some keys.
Her whole face lit up with joy. Like a kid on Christmas, who just opened the exact present they wanted.
“Really?” She clapped her hands together. “We’re really going to watch the—”
“No silly,” I laughed. “We’re watching Die Hard.”