More Happy Than Not

When we get to the theater, Thomas pulls me by my elbow toward the parking lot. We pass a couple of emergency exits before continuing down an alleyway I know we have no business walking through. He pulls out a savings card for a drugstore and slides it down the crack of a door until there’s a click. He turns and smiles when he opens the door.

I only feel slightly guilty, and it’s such a rush that I’m not scared of getting caught. It’s also a good trick to know for when Genevieve gets back, even if seeing a movie is the last thing I’ll want to do after she’s been gone for three weeks. The door leads us out by the bathrooms. We head for the concession stand, buy some popcorn—See? We’re not total criminals—and go to the condiment bar where he drowns his popcorn in butter.

“I always come to this theater for midnight showings,” Thomas says. “The energy always surprises me. No one on my block would ever dress up on a day that’s not Halloween because they’re not comfortable in their own skin. But for the midnight showing of Scorpius Hawthorne, so many people who I wish I’d made friends with were dressed up as demonic wizards and specters.”

“I didn’t know you read that series!”

“Hell yeah,” Thomas says. “I brought my copy to the midnight showing and readers signed their names and underlined their favorite passages.”

I wish I’d gone. “Did you dress up?”

“I was the only brown Scorpius Hawthorne,” Thomas says. He tells me about other midnight showings too, where he had people sign the video game cases and comic book anthologies that inspired them all. These are all cool mementos. But I’m just happy to have another friend who’s read and seen the Scorpius Hawthorne series.

We look at the movie posters to decide what we’re going to see. Thomas wishes a new Spielberg movie was out but is ready to settle on a black-and-white film about a boy dancing on a bus. “No thanks,” I say.

“What about that new movie, The Final Chase?” Thomas stands in front of a poster of a pretty blue-eyed girl sitting at the edge of a dock like it’s a park bench, and a guy in a sweater vest reaching out for her. “I didn’t realize this was out yet. You down?”

I’m pretty sure the commercial for this movie leans toward the romance side of things. “I don’t think I can.”

“It’s PG-13. You are of age, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, smart-ass. Looks like something Genevieve might like. There’s nothing else you want to see?”

Thomas looks around and turns his back on movies promising explosions and gunfights. “I wouldn’t mind seeing that French movie again. It starts in an hour, though.”

It’s obvious he doesn’t want to see the French movie again because who in the hell would want to see a French movie twice? “Let’s go see The Final Chase. I can always see it again when she gets back.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. If it sucks, she’s on her own.”

We go inside and there are plenty of seats available. “Preference?”

“The back row but don’t ask why,” I say.

“Why?”

“I have this pretty irrational fear of having my throat sliced inside a movie theater, so I figure that can’t happen if no one sits behind me.”

Thomas stops chewing on his popcorn. His eyes are grilling me on whether I’m being

serious or not before he busts out laughing so hard he almost chokes. I sit down in the back row, and he collapses into the seat next to mine as his laugh winds down.

I flip him off. “Don’t act like you’ve never been freaked out by something ridiculous.”

“No, I definitely have. I used to bother my mother when I was a kid, maybe nine or ten, to let me watch horror movies, especially slasher flicks.”

“Probably not the best thing to say to someone afraid of having his throat sliced.”

“Shut up. So my mother finally gave in one evening and let me watch Scream. I was scared shitless and was up until five in the morning. Ma always encouraged me to count sheep when I couldn’t sleep but it only made things worse. I was counting sheep that night and every time they hopped over the fence . . .” Dramatic pause. “The Scream guy would stab each of them and they would fall down, bloody and dead.”

I laugh so loudly other people shush me, even though previews haven’t started yet, and it’s hard to stop. “You are so disturbed! How long did this go on for?”

“Never stopped.” Thomas screeches and mimes someone getting stabbed. The previews come on and we shut up.

There’s a rom-com, Next Stop: Love, which is about a train conductor crushing on this new attendant; a typical horror movie where creepy little girls appear after someone turns a corner; a miniseries called Don’t You Forget About Me about a husband trying to convince his wife not to forget him with a Leteo procedure; and, finally, a comedy about four postgrad guys on a cruise ship that doesn’t look funny at all.

“Those all looked terrible,” I say.