I am such a sucker for Queen’s Cinema.
The four of us stood between the stained red stanchions and passed a bottle of Coke back and forth. I was still in the velvet dress, but it felt a little less like wearing nothing now that I was back in my leather jacket. The jacket put a barrier between my velvety self and the sharp, cold world. The Coke tasted flat. I drank it anyway. We meandered a little farther down the line, and I let myself tune back into the conversation.
Daisy was explaining the reportedly God-shattering hookup she’d had in the single stall bathroom round the back. “I had to lather myself with rubbing alcohol afterward,” she said smoothly, “but it was completely worth it.”
“You’re a public menace,” Jing said. It sounded bizarrely like praise.
“Four tickets to the cheesy horror movie.” Yates bounced on her toes, smoothed her hands against the ticket counter and smiled up at the employee with the radiance of twenty thousand cherubim. The employee behind the ticket counter yawned. Said employee was a posterchild for mono symptoms, or maybe for cocaine addiction. It was hard to tell in this town.
“Together or separate?” said Dark Undereye Circles Girl. Her voice was completely devoid of inflection. I thought she might croak as soon as we looked away. Her nametag might have said Kaylee or Baylee or Shaylee, something like that, but I didn’t pay too much attention.
“Together,” said Daisy as she slapped down her credit card.
I opened my mouth to protest.
Jing shot me a look.
“IDs?” said D.U.C. Girl. “We’re supposed to ID folks for R-rated movies.”
I reached for my wallet, but Jing waved a hand at me. She looked up at D.U.C Girl and cocked a brow. “Do you care?”
“That’s a good point,” said D.U.C. Girl. Her eyes rolled up in her head. “Last theater to the left. Enjoy your film.”
The four of us ambled onward toward the snack line, which was where most people seemed to be haphazardly slapped together. They held processed snack food in their claws. Someone in line was vaping, and their breath bleached the air above them like smokestack exhaust. Jing breathed some comment about losers that I didn’t quite catch. I saw a barrage of letter jackets. Vineyard Vines. Tattered jeans. A trio of older women, primed with matching Coach bags and feathered bobs, were interrogating a second D.U.C. girl about whether popcorn was gluten free. A kid bawled at their feet.
Yates tossed her arm around my shoulders.
Daisy knelt beside the candy racks and ogled at the baggies like senior boys ogle freshman girls. Her tongue dipped out of the corner of her mouth. She reached her hands into the racks and dragged her fingertips across the surface of every single package, touching everything, coffin nails warping the plastic wrap as she dragged them along. It was a motion I associated with selecting tarot cards, but on Daisy, the typical tarot introspection was replaced with something ravenous and canine. She plucked three boxes from the back of each stack, sprang upright and tucked them against her ribs. It was more candy than we could possibly eat. Her eyes burned bright. “Don’t worry, guys,” she said. “I picked the best ones.”
“I can believe it,” said Jing.
I could believe it, too.
It was the rest of this whole going to a place I like with people who like me bit that I was having trouble with.
Jing shoulder-checked her way through a group of jock types to the front of the line. “XL popcorn and XL slushy, please. White Cherry. No butter on the popcorn.” She paused, rolled her eyes toward me. “You don’t like butter on your popcorn, do you?”
“All popcorn is good popcorn. Do what you will,” I said. I shoved my hands in my pockets.
She pursed her lips. I took that as affirmation.
The bag of popcorn was roughly the size of Jing’s torso. Yates reached inside it, hooked a golden fistful between her fingers, and tossed it between her teeth with an audible crunch. Daisy did the same, which was impressive, considering how constricted her arms were by the candy she was carrying.
I let my hands stay put.
Daisy shifted forward, pulling out not her credit card again, but instead a fistful of twenty-dollar bills, looking as cool as if she was tucking said twenties into a stripper’s G-string. I offhandedly assumed that those twenties covered Jing’s slushy and her popcorn. If they didn’t, then Jing’s snacks were technically stolen. Not that D.U.C. girl seemed to give even a single fuck about that.
We took our snacks and hauled them down the hallway to the left. We passed an animated reimagining/slaughtering of some eighties cartoon and the fourth sequel to an action series that I didn’t care about. After that there was a shitty-looking spy movie, a rom-com that was miasmic to even walk by, an Oscar-baiting bore fest. Our movie, naturally, was in the backmost projector room.
Ghastly. The dripping letters on the poster taped above the door were bubblegum pink and featured an ambiguous white boy with a gag between his teeth. The trailers were already rolling inside.
Daisy cut to the front of our pack and brought us deeper and deeper into the belly of the theater. We sat in one of the first rows, dead center in the buttery darkness. Moviegoing for me had historically been my dads and me toward the back at the latest sci-fi matinee. Sitting in the front felt different on my skin. It was vaguely like spell casting. Too loud, too hot, as hyper as an intravenous caffeine drip.
The lights dropped, and the screen lit up.
And they say there’s no such thing as love at first sight.
Cue the muffled screaming. The camera swept over electric-blue eyes and panned outward to reveal the boy from the poster, an overly handsome blond boy with a ribbon in his teeth. He thrashed in his letter jacket, eyes whirling around and around in their sockets, but the zip-ties didn’t snap. He tried to heave himself upright, but the minty turf was slick. He slipped, fell on his hip. One of the football floodlights flicked on, and long shadows fell across him. His rabbit eyes popped wide. A group of countless girls in hooded pastel robes stood around him in a circle, and the leader, marked by her distinctive Barbie-pink cloak, took a step toward him. She withdrew a mean pair of scissors from her sleeve and the hooded figures clapped, jeered, pulled out their iPhones, and hit record. “The sisterhood has identified you as a cheating asshole,” said the leader girl. She brandished the scissors like an athame. “So, like, die.”
G-H-A-S-T-L-Y.
Yates smothered a laugh with her hand, and Jing punched her in the shoulder.
The camera panned over Main Character, a horrifically generic new girl who was Not Like Those Other Slutty Girls. She naturally didn’t have friends, because that’s what happens to people who act like condescending pricks to everyone who approaches them, so she logically set her heart on befriending conventionally attractive Jock Boy for some reason. Unfortunately for her, Jock Boy was revealed to be the newest boyfriend of Bitchy Cheerleader, the school’s uncontested tyrant who ran the student body like some sort of forties Mafioso. Bitchy Cheerleader was, from my perspective, ridiculously hot and deeply cool.
Despite his relationship with Bitchy Cheerleader, Jock Boy flirted with Main Character, and the two of them acquired some sort of instant magic love connection despite having zero chemistry. I wasn’t sure if that was a legit thing with heterosexual kids, but it wasn’t any more convincing in this movie than it had been in any other movie Hollywood ever made prior to this one. Main Character and Jock Boy nearly screw in the passenger’s seat of his Italian car. Of course, they don’t commit the deed, because Main Character feels the need to remind him and the audience that she’s Not Like Those Other Sluts. It broke Jock Boy’s heart. He called Bitchy Cheerleader to voice his doubts about their relationship, outright admitting to cheating in the process, an admission which spelled out his obvious and much deserved demise.
Bitchy Cheerleader took it upon herself to correct the whole situation. She invited Main Character to a party of hers, which Main Character attended in the hopes of flirting with Jock Boy some more
, but when Main Character arrived at the ritzy Victorian mansion she’d been directed to, she didn’t arrive at a party. Instead, Bitchy Cheerleader and all her friends stood waiting. They’d donned their pastel robes. They all smiled at her. They offered her a pink robe of her very own.
“Join the sisterhood,” said Bitchy Cheerleader. She handed over the scissors. “We used to make Valentines with these. Stupid gifts for stupid boys who use us, screw us, leave us. Now we use them for better things. I know you cheated with him, but I will forgive you if you kill him for us. For yourself. For the sisterhood. We don’t need boys like him. They’re better off dead.”
Main Character hesitantly accepted the scissors. She used them to slash at Bitchy Cheerleader’s face.
The finale of the movie was a tempest of jump scares and bloodbaths, but it was ultimately uninspiring, as Main Character found obviously hidden Jock Boy, who had been tied up and left on Bitchy Cheerleader’s bed. The camera shook as Main Character cut off his zip-ties and led him downstairs, where a pissed-off group of hooded girls laid in wait. They ran, hid, screamed too loudly. They both miraculously made it out alive. A few of the sisters didn’t. Bitchy Cheerleader stared down the camera and vowed revenge.
Credits rolled.
Lights went up.
The four of us unceremoniously climbed to our feet.
“Lame,” I said. Every single vertebra in my spine popped when I stood up. My back sounded like Rice Krispies. I rolled my shoulders, snatched up my bag. “She shoulda joined the cult. The sisterhood had their collective shit together. Fuckboy wasn’t worth it.”
“Agreed,” said Jing, “Also, that was gross as all hell, Sideways. Tell your skeleton to chill.”
Yates had a huge, weary smile on her face. She glued herself to my side and pressed her face to my shoulder. “I’m not going to sleep tonight,” she said. “I’m never going to sleep again. Or turn off the lights. Or touch scissors.”
Daisy snickered. Somehow, over the course of the movie, she’d managed to eat the vast majority of that mega-jumbo popcorn without snagging any in her hair or teeth. She was still tossing candy in her mouth faster than moms around here pop Xanax. “Aw, was Yatesy scared by the big bad movie?”
“Bite me!”
Daisy made grabby hands at Yates’ shoulder and smacked her lips, wagged her brows, cackled like a cartoon robber. “Better run, pretty kitty. I vant to suck your blood!”
Yates squeaked, and without warning me beforehand, scrambled half up my back. She tossed her arms around my neck, looped her legs around my waist, and said, “Sideways, save me!” into the hair above my ear.
I toppled forward. Fuck. I grappled at the back of the seat in front of me and sucked in a breath. Yates adjusted herself on my back, and I coughed once, twice, thrice, until it occurred to her that her headlock was choking me to death.
When I could breathe again, she felt like next to nothing. She was annoyingly light, and, let’s call me stocky.
I piggybacked her out into the aisle.
Jing had started down it ahead of us. She slammed to a stop mid-step.
I hovered a step behind her. My brows screwed into a V.
Blocking our way was a boy built like an ice chest. His friends were identical, all Ralph Lauren generics with snapbacks and matching haircuts. They stood behind him in a loose formation, and their laughter curdled something in my stomach.
It was the Austin fucking Grass posse.
I fucking hate the Austin Grass posse.
Wasn’t sure if Austin recalled kneeling on my hair and markering slurs all over my face after PE when we were fourteen. Wasn’t sure if he recalled any of the subsequent little torture bouts, either. I knew this, though: I sure as fuck remembered.
He gave Jing a sloppy little chuckle, the kind of chuckle that all high school boys of this delineation seemed to possess: two isolated huh-huhs that triggered a round of answering huh-huhs from the rest of his pack. “Jing. So, what was that party about, baby? You into some sorta Satanist shit now? That shit was legit freaky. Man, my boy Tony nearly pussied out and went home, he got so freaked. How’d you do it? Does scissoring give you magic fucking powers, now?”
“As if I’d spill how I did it to the likes of you,” Jing’s expression hardened into an icy, imposing smile. That exact look had terrified me when I was twelve, rendered me slack-jawed and reverent at fifteen. I was quickly growing to admire that look as the world’s most unparalleled statement of Fuck you, I’m the true Plantagenet here. “Didn’t you scream like a little kid when the lights cut out? I think you and your boys have something in common.”
“Nah. No way. You got it wrong,” Austin snickered, and his buddies snickered with him, but the snickers shriveled when Jing pulled out her phone and conjured up the video she had shown me. She didn’t start it, but the sight of it alone was enough for his face to fall off-kilter.
She twisted her lips into a smile.
Austin’s mouth twitched. His gaze lasered over her shoulder and rested on me, and then the hyena laughter was back. He looked behind him at his friends. The group of them shared some wordless affirmation—I swear, West High boys have a hive mind—and looked back at Jing like we’d just dealt him a Royal Flush. He cleared his throat and smiled. “Playing for Team Lesbo now? It’s a damn shame. You’re hot as hell, you know that, Jing. You could bone any guy you wanted. You’re too pretty to play on that team.”
“Better watch out,” chimed Yates, the parrot on my shoulder. “Sideways might curse you for being such an asshole.”
“She made all that chalk crawl on Jing’s walls,” Daisy added from behind me. “Who’s to say she couldn’t make your pecker shrivel up like a raisin?”
An image of my new friends at the party, laughing with his arms around their shoulders, wandered back to my mind.
Jing put her hands on her hips. “Ladies, please. That’d be such a waste of Sideways’ time. Alexis told me all about Austin, here. He’s got nothing for Sideways to shrivel.” She rolled her eyes and shouldered past him, and the three of us, Yates and Daisy and I, moved to follow behind her. I could feel my pulse in the soles of my shoes.
“Whatever. Too many fags around here, man.”
There it was. That one little syllable was a teakettle screaming in my ears. My vision speckled and a big black hole ripped open under the velvet and sucked up all my insides, erased any thought I’d had of leaving, of being quiet, of stuffing all this down in the back of my head and mostly forgetting it. Everything was pulsating. The floor throbbed under my feet. The ceiling warped above me. The whole world tasted vile. I shouldered off Yates, felt her skitter to the floor behind me. I spun on my heel, spat on the carpet.
Austin’s eyes went round as Easter eggs.
My knuckles met his nose with a crunch.
Jing killed the radio.
Daisy cussed her out for killing the radio, because it was her turn with the AUX chord, goddamn it.
Jing respectfully ignored everything that came out of Daisy’s mouth.
“Eloise,” said Jing. Her eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. Her face was sharp, but it was always sharp. Her tone was impossible to parse. With a look like that, it might have been my death rattle.
“It’s Eloise Marie, if you’re gonna full-name me,” I said, fumbling around my jacket pockets like there might be an anxiety antidote just laying around in there. My knuckles skimmed my zipper. My lungs tied themselves up in knots. The thing about fracturing a bone is that it heals stronger than before. Damn hard to break the same bone twice. By this point, my knuckles had diamond cores, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t jack up the skin on top. Austin’s face had really jacked up the skin on top, old maroon bruises turning scarlet. The back of my hand smelled like salt. “What?”
“You know that if he’d called the cops, you’d have been fatally fucked. Orange Is the New Black isn’t cute in real life. That could’ve been you.”
I leaned my temple on the window, let my eyes roll back
in my head. “Yeah, well, he didn’t, and Queen’s doesn’t have any cameras in the theaters, just in the lobby. So, it doesn’t matter.”
“I didn’t know you had the guts,” said Jing. “I thought Daisy was our only berserker. Look. He fucking deserved it. You let him off easy. I know that you already know he’s worthless. So I’m gonna say this instead. Daisy’s the most vicious bitch you know, yes?”
“Yeah,” I said.
Daisy tossed her hair over her shoulder.
“Well, she told me that I should just give that dress to you, because it looks so damn good on you that people would accuse me of wearing your dress instead of the other way around,” said Jing.
I sat for a moment in silence.
“She really did say that,” Yates quietly added from the seat to my left.
“You don’t have to make shit up to make me feel better,” I snapped. “I’m fine. I can take it. He’s nothing new, and it’s, whatever.” There was a horrible buzzing heat in my cheeks, and I tried to hide it against the window glass. My cheeks rubied up.
Screw. That. I’m supposed to be teen Rasputin or some suburban Circe, not a sniveling loser who chokes up at casual assholery. The compliment just didn’t change anything. My throat felt tight and I focused on the flat darkness outside.
“Eloise,” Jing started, but she didn’t finish.
“What’s with calling me Eloise all of a sudden?” I felt myself overenunciating the fricatives, which was stupid, and I knew it, because I’d been so damn excited about being friends with these three all of twenty minutes ago. Now, I deeply wanted nothing more but for them to shut up and keep their fingers out of my papercut. I fought the impulse to slam my bad hand against the car door. Same impulse that’d ruined my quasi-friendships with the Drama kids, actually.
The Scapegracers Page 7