by Sonia Hartl
After we got home from the game, I spent some time in my room sketching baseball jerseys. No White Sox, definitely no Tigers, but I could do baseball movies as a theme. Maybe all the reasons why A League of Their Own was the superior movie, even if it went out of its way to hide the queer history behind the true story. Part of me wanted to rush it, just throw something together and put it up while the nineties rom-coms had so much traction, but that wouldn’t help my long game. Quality over quantity.
I had a magic number I wanted to hit. A million views. Then I’d feel legit, like I’d actually made it. When I hit a million, I’d do my Say Anything review. I was holding on to it because it meant the most. It had started everything.
A lot of people thought Say Anything was just a romance movie from the eighties, but it was so much more than that. It was about a girl named Diane Court who’d been sheltered by her father, had her life planned out for her, until she met a guy named Lloyd Dobler, who had nothing planned. He showed her what it felt like to be free, while she showed him what it meant to have a future. They worked because they gave each other something the other needed.
While most kids got the Talk in middle school, Gram and Mom sat me down to watch Say Anything, and when it was over, they talked to me not just about condoms and consent (though they’d covered those, too), but about female sexuality in general. How cis-men would try to control it or shame us for it or shove us into boxes where we couldn’t be smart and funny and sexual all at the same time. They made sure I knew that who I wanted to be was my choice, not the choice of a man who marked boxes for me. I grew up watching eighties and nineties movies because they were Mom and Gram’s common ground. They disagreed on nearly everything, except movies and the kinds of messages they sent to girls.
While I’d found the entire thing mortifying back then, it was also the first time I really understood that movies were magic. Not special effects and explosions, but they could speak to your soul, start conversations, reflect the things you needed to say. It was the whole reason why I’d started doing reviews. To dig into what others considered mindless entertainment, and pull out those nuggets of truth. To look at the way people connected to certain stories in a way that made us real and human. It was all I ever wanted to do for the rest of my life.
“Morning.” Mom drifted down the hall, rubbing sleep out of her eyes.
“Someone call a reporter,” I said. “Gracie Evans, sleeping past nine. Which means pigs are taking flight and they’re building an ice rink in Hell as we speak.”
“Har.” She ran a hand over my hair, which had started to resemble an unruly dandelion once the summer humidity hit. “I like Charlie’s new look.”
Charlie, the ceramic parrot Gram had won on Wheel of Fortune in 1984, back when there was still a shopping round, sat directly in front of the window, his place of honor since Gram had brought him home before Mom was even born. I’d put the KC hat on him. Sometimes he wore Santa hats or Uncle Sam hats, and I figured catching a fly ball was as good as a holiday.
“We should make a Royals outfit for one of the Vannas,” I said.
Mom stuck out her tongue. “Now you’re going too far.”
The Vannas were Gram’s collection of Vanna White dolls. She displayed them above the fireplace, and other than the light layer of nicotine-stained dust, they remained in their boxes and in mint condition. They gave me nightmares as a child.
I followed Mom into the kitchen, where Gram and Peg had their quilting patterns spread out on the dining room table. It was that time of year again.
“You two got in late last night,” Gram said. “How was the game?”
“I’m still wondering how I got so lucky in the daughter department. Macy caught a fly ball.” Mom gave me a knowing look over her coffee mug. “And a boy.”
“What’s this about a boy?” Gram lit a cigarette and fixed her steely gaze on me. She barely cleared five feet but had a way of making everyone else around her feel smaller.
“It’s nothing.” I shot Mom the stink eye. “I didn’t even get his number.”
“For Heaven’s sake, why not?” Peg crossed her arms. She lived down the street, but ever since Gramps died, she spent all her time here. She’d probably move in if we had an extra room to spare. “This is what we old people mean when we say youth is wasted on the young.”
Desperate for a subject change, I picked up one of the quilting patterns. “What are the Bees thinking their theme will be this year?”
“We’re debating that now,” Gram said. “Peg doesn’t like First Love.”
The Bees were the queens of the Shelby County Fair quilt show. They had most of the main quilt done already, but every year they picked a theme and hand-embroidered the squares before piecing them together on a giant frame that took the place of the dining room table while they worked. None of the other quilting bees in the county could compete. Most of them embroidered on machines and picked basic designs from a book. They treated it like a hobby.
The Bees made it their reason for living.
“Because it’s boring,” Peg said. “What else have you got?”
“You’re just saying that because you’ve never been in love,” I said, taking a seat in Iris’s old chair. RIP. I wished I could say I missed her, but she was a mean old biddy who used to poke my hand with her needle. Not entirely on accident, either.
Peg smacked the back of my head. “And what do you know about love, wise one, when you can’t even get a phone number from a boy?”
“Love is overrated,” I said.
“All right, no one here likes love.” Gram threw the pattern into the tulip-shaped waste basket by her feet. “What about something to commemorate Iris?”
“Lordy, that would be the ugliest damned quilt.” Peg winked at me. “I’m not sure how well the Satan theme would go over with the judges.”
“That’s not very nice.” Gram sniffed. Even if she agreed, she’d handpicked all the Bees, and acted personally responsible for keeping their hive harmonious.
“Come off it. You know as well as I do she was a miserable bitch.” Peg reached over to Gram’s lap and took a few sheets of patterns to look through. “You’ve got some good ones in here. Donna will lose her mind over this flower power one.” Peg leaned closer to me. “That one peaked in high school. Make sure you don’t get too attached to this time in your life.”
“Yes, ma’am.” That wouldn’t be a problem for me. I couldn’t think of anything I was less attached to than the high school experience.
Gram snapped her fingers. “How about we do Defining Moments in History?”
Peg tapped a finger to her papery lips. “I like it, but we have a more pressing problem. Our pattern is going to be off without Iris.”
“We could put out a call in the paper,” Gram said. “Or put it on that one list a gentleman named Craig owns? Little Larry suggested that when I needed to sell my old snowblower.”
Little Larry lived two streets over, a forty-five-year-old pediatrician who worked in the next town. Due to being named after his father, he’d been Little Larry since they’d brought him home from the hospital, and no amount of aging or professionalism would change that.
“You mean the Craigslist,” Peg said. “I learned about it on the World Wide Web. You don’t want to put an ad on there.”
“Why not?” I asked, though I wasn’t sure if I wanted to hear the answer.
“That’s where people go to buy sex.” Peg gave a curt nod as if that settled the matter.
I rubbed my hands over my cheeks. Some questions were better left unasked.
“Well. We certainly don’t need any more of that business around here.” Gram glanced at Mom—because she really didn’t know when to let things go—and pulled out a packet of envelopes tied with paisley-print ribbon. Her filing system on prospective future Bees. “Iris has been gone six months now—I don’t suppose it would be disrespectful to give her spot to someone else. Or do you think we need a full year for mourning?”
“You were mourning?” I asked.
Peg chuckled into her sun tea, which she turned into a cough when Gram gave her a stern glare. Patting her chest, Peg straightened up, but the ghost of a smile remained. “I don’t think Iris needs a full year. If she knew we were preserving her spot out of some sentimental obligation, she’d admonish us all for partaking in fanciful wish-wash.”
Gram sighed and spread the envelopes out in front of her. “Maybe we should look at someone new. What about Glenn Harris?”
“Dead,” Peg said.
“Oh my. I guess we waited a bit too long on that one.” Gram frowned as she pulled out another envelope. “Sylvia Clair?”
“Just married,” Peg said. “So as good as dead.”
Gram went through more envelopes, looking for a decent candidate. “One more dead, and another moved away. I really should cull this list more often. Or see if there is anyone new in town we haven’t met yet.”
“I doubt there is,” Mom said. And she had a good point. People didn’t really come to Honeyfield. It was more the kind of place people drove away from, tires squealing, their rearview mirrors ripped off.
Peg clutched Gram’s hand. “Why don’t we put this away for now? Hearing about our dead contemporaries isn’t how I’d like to spend this morning.”
The doorbell rang and I jumped. “That’s Elise. Gotta run.”
“You didn’t even have breakfast.” Mom frowned. On her list of transgressions, not eating breakfast was right up there with reading CliffsNotes instead of the assigned book, swearing in public, and wearing pajamas to the store.
I grabbed my lunch and a generic toaster pastry off the counter, and dashed out the door. Elise’s truck rumbled in the driveway. The rusty hinges creaked when I got in, and I offered her the toaster pastry. I wasn’t that hungry.
Elise flipped her long braid over her shoulder and ripped off the cellophane. She had a sweet tooth and a weakness for anything strawberry flavored. “Momma said you caught a fly ball. And a boy.”
I rolled my eyes. By noon the whole damn town would be talking about this boy I’d supposedly caught. Gossip was its own form of currency in Honeyfield. A juicy enough story earned lunch invitations for a week straight.
Of course my mom had to tell Momma Gomez about Eric, who I’d never see again. Our moms had been close since the toddler park days. It didn’t surprise me that Elise already knew about the fly ball, even though I hadn’t yet posted that picture to Instagram.
“My mom overexaggerated,” I said. “I just happened to sit next to a guy who was sort of a tool, but cute. I didn’t even get his number, so whatever. But I did catch that ball.”
“Why didn’t you get his number?”
It’s not like I couldn’t ask for a guy’s number. I dated. It was a thing I’d done. But he lived in Kansas City and I lived two hours north, and why couldn’t I just be awkward and weird and call it flirting with a cute stranger and leave it there? My mom was a hopeless romantic, and she ended up pregnant at sixteen and stuck in a dead-end job with no hope of escape. I wasn’t anti-love, but I had other things I wanted more.
I hunched down in my seat. “You sound like Peg.”
“Peg has seen some shit.” Elise shuddered. “She knows.”
I snorted. Peg had seen about as much as the rest of us who lived in this town, which wasn’t a whole lot more than miles of corn and cows. Unless Elise counted that one time the septic system broke down. Then we’d all seen some shit.
Elise parked behind Honeyfield Video and Repair, where I worked on the video side and she worked on the repair side. The front window display had a washer and dryer with VHS tapes and DVDs stacked on top, in case anyone got confused over exactly what we offered. Dishwasher break down? Stop on in and let us know, and pick up a movie from 1978 while you’re at it.
“Ready for another exciting day at work?” I asked.
“Nope.” Elise got out of her truck and grabbed her toolbox from the back.
She always took tools home with her because she picked up side jobs around town with her dad. By next year, she hoped she’d have enough saved to put a down payment on her own repair shop, I’d grow my YouTube viewership, and we’d be on our way to Chicago. Some people took a gap year after high school. We were taking a gap life. Neither of us had plans for college. In my house, college just meant taking on a bunch more debt only to end up waiting tables until your feet fell off.
Elise went around the back, where someone had dropped off a leaky refrigerator. They’d found it on the side of the road and wanted it repaired so they could flip it. I went through the front door and waved at Mr. Nobel and Mr. Crouch—two old men who spent their summers camped out on the bench in front of the store. They didn’t wave back, too distracted by their daily debate over the best war movies. A bell above the door dinged to announce my arrival back from my first Saturday off in over a month. I gave a little twirl and a bow at the entrance.
“Who missed me?” I said to the nearly empty store. We wouldn’t pick up until lunchtime, when everyone with nothing better to do would come in and pretend to browse movies while hoping to pick up on some gossip to get them through the rest of the day.
Midnight, the shift supervisor (a title she’d given herself), pushed a VHS tape into the rewinder. She scratched her eye, smudging the thick black liner she wore like armor. “I missed having someone here yesterday to rewind these tapes. New guy will be here any minute.”
We usually took on an extra person in the summer due to the pass-through traffic we got from people on their way to better places. They were our biggest source of revenue. We kept a hundred working VCRs—that stayed working thanks to the repair shop—and tourists had no problem dropping twenty dollars on the “VCR plus two movies” rental deal so they could experience the marvels of VHS. DVD rentals kept us current, but Gen X nostalgia was our biggest draw.
“Cool.” I tossed my backpack with my lunch into the tiny closet we called a break room. “You can show him how to rewind the tapes.”
She gave me her “I’d rather be at Hot Topic” look. Which was both true and depressing, since there wasn’t a mall within a hundred miles of Honeyfield. Thankfully for her, and her discount goth look, they were willing to ship to the middle of nowhere. She’d graduated last year, but not from my school. At least, I think so. I couldn’t remember ever passing her in the halls, and she was someone I’d definitely remember. She didn’t talk about herself all that much. I didn’t even know if she lived in Honeyfield. The only thing I did know was that Midnight wasn’t her real name, but I had no idea what it was. I’d never bothered to ask, and she’d never bothered to supply it, so we called her what she wanted.
Butch, the fifty-year-old ex-Marine, who was technically the manager, slept off a hangover in his office on the repair side. Though it was a shock that he showed up at all. Usually he left us to our own devices and only came in when his wife kicked him out of the house again and he needed a place to crash for a little while.
I uploaded the picture of me and Mom with the fly ball to Instagram while Midnight put out the popcorn on the counter. Our employer didn’t provide snacks for sale, or much of anything really, so Midnight bought popcorn and candy from the grocery store and sold the packages individually. A somewhat lucrative side hustle I was mad I hadn’t thought of first.
The entrance bell dinged and a huge Asian guy with a soft face took up the entrance. I recognized him from school. He seemed a little lost, and did that thing with his hands where he’d clasp them together then put them back at his sides because he wasn’t sure what to do with them. I connected with his general discomfort on a visceral level.
“You must be Brady.” Midnight used her (self-appointed) shift supervisor voice. The all-business tone, short spiked black hair, and heavy eyeliner were an intimidating effect. Brady took a full step back. “Macy is going to train you while I do paperwork in the back.”
His dad owned the pharmacy, which made his appearance a lit
tle surprising. I didn’t think the rich kids had to work like the rest of us. Or at least the kids who were as rich as anyone could be in Honeyfield.
I hooked my arm through Brady’s. “You’re one of us now,” I said.
“Okay,” Brady’s voice cracked, and his cheeks pinkened as he cleared his throat.
“What made you get a job here anyway? I’m not trying to be rude, but I know I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have to be.”
“My dad said I couldn’t spend all summer playing video games. He wants me to show initiative and responsibility or something. So here I am.”
“Here you are.” I pulled him toward the back of the store. “I’ll give you the grand tour. Should take all of five seconds.”
I pointed out where the thin carpeting met the concrete floor, to differentiate the video store from the repair shop. After I showed Brady how the Action, Drama, Comedy, and Children’s sections were divided by rows and kept in alphabetical order, I brought him over to the spinning DVD racks. We had way more DVDs than VHS tapes, but they took up a fraction of the space, since whoever owned this place put more emphasis on saving wall space for the tapes in the summer. The Tuesday after Labor Day, we closed the store and moved the tapes to the racks and the DVDs to the walls, since most of our winter business came from local farms too remote to get any decent streaming services.
A narrow wall by the register held our staff picks. We each got to choose five movies and write up an index card with a short description. “The top row is mine,” I said.
Brady pursed his lips as he read my index card for Toy Story. “‘Middle-aged cowboy has existential crisis over emerging technology’?”