by Josh Farrar
“So do I,” says Mary Agnes.
“We’ll sit behind you guys. That okay with you, Bijou?” I nod. So embarrassing. If Alex does anything more than put his arm around my shoulder, I’ll elbow him right in the belly, I swear it. No matter how much I like him.
“I get it, everybody wants privacy,” Ira says, quite loudly.
“Shhh!” hisses someone from the middle of the theater.
“Settle down, Ira,” whispers Nomura, who takes the seat between Mary Agnes and Maricel. Ira sits next to Alex.
“Great, I’m sitting next to my own sister,” Ira says. “Next thing, Aunt Malinda’s going to magically appear in my lap.”
“Quiet, the trailers are starting,” says Mary Agnes.
Alex sits back in his chair, gives me a glance and a quick, not-quite-comfortable smile. In the first preview, a handsome, boyish-looking man—not so different from an older Alex, really—is sitting cross-legged with a pretty white girl, eating cereal on a bed with rumpled covers. They give each other naughty glances while walking through New York City. What will happen to them? Will he get sick? Will she have to choose between him and a job? I feel I have seen this movie more than once before; anyone who has watched a single episode of Tous Mes Enfants knows this story by heart.
In the next preview, a teenage girl is in love with a strong, fit dancing man. They are in love, but her parents do not want them to be. It looks like a sweet story—love wins in the end, of course—but not very much like real life.
“Did you ever see the original Dirty Dancing?” Alex asks. “My mom and my sister love that movie. I guess they remade it.” I shake my head. No, I haven’t seen it, but I’m quite sure I know how it ends.
Now, our movie has started. I didn’t know we would be seeing one of these movies, where a masked killer chases down teenagers one by one, and they spend an hour and a half running for their lives. I asked Mary Agnes what Terror Lake was about yesterday, and she giggled and said, “It’s a romantic comedy.” Very funny. But these movies don’t scare me; they bore me.
Alex and I are not touching, but we are sitting very close. There’s really no choice—this is an old theater, and the seats are not very large. If he makes his “move,” what will I do? I don’t want to create a scene and embarrass both of us. If Alex is a gentleman about it, I will let him put his arm around me, but no more.
I take a quick peek at him. He looks quite nervous, actually. Tense as a stretched rubber band, and pale, too. He doesn’t seem like someone who is about to make a move; he looks like someone who wants to run away and hide.
“Do you want anything?” he whispers suddenly. “From the concession stand?” I shake my head. I’m not hungry or thirsty. Does he really want to leave the movie only ten minutes after it’s begun? “I’m going to get some popcorn,” he says.
“Me too!” Ira whispers. “This movie sucks.”
Alex breathes a sigh of exasperation. He seems always to be irritated with Ira. Are they friends or not?
They are gone for eight or ten minutes; half of the people in the movie are already dead. But by the time Alex comes back to his seat with a bag of popcorn, a Coke for himself, and a lemonade for me—“In case you get thirsty,” he says—there is a pause in the action. Ira sits, for some reason, behind us. We are one group, but are now sitting in not two, but three rows? So odd. And these people find Haitian culture strange?
Alex takes a deep breath, probably relieved that nothing too scary is happening. The camera now follows a new couple, who are driving toward the lake house where the chase happened. They are navigating a deserted road, unaware of the terrible death that awaits them there. She’s a long-legged redhead, and he wears a backward baseball cap and has an ugly dot of beard hair on his chin. He tells silly jokes, and the girl laughs, but she slaps at his hands when he tries to grope and grab at her. Alex had better not be getting any ideas, because if I slap at his hands, it won’t be a joke. My slaps hurt.
I look at the row in front of us. Mary Agnes is leaning so far into Nomura, she is nearly in his lap. He sits as stiff as a soldier, not pushing Mary Agnes away, not pulling her toward him, either. But Mary Agnes has never needed encouragement, has she?
In the next scene in the movie, the redhead and the baseball-cap boy are looking around the abandoned house in the middle of the woods. Everything is covered in dust and dirt, but there is a half-eaten plate of food sitting on a messy table. The girl is scared, but the boy is still joking around, bouncing on a rusty iron bed and trying to get her to “try it out” with him. The girl ignores him and fixes her eyes on an old wooden chest in the corner of the room. She approaches it and begins to open it up, while the music on the soundtrack gets louder and scarier. Because the trunk is locked, the boy begins to pry at it with some kind of bar, and finally, as he breaks the lock, a cat jumps out of the trunk, right onto the girl’s face.
“Aaah!” Alex yells, holding his arms up as if the cat is going to pounce at him through the screen.
Without thinking, I reach out and grab his hand. “Are you okay?” I whisper.
At first, I can’t tell who has scared Alex more: the crazy cat or me. But then he takes a deep breath, smiles, and squeezes back. “Yeah,” he says. “Thanks.”
21
Pretending to Yawn
“So you’re gonna try to make out with her, right?” Ira asks. He’s rephrased the question about ten different times since he and Nomura showed up two minutes ago. I, of course, have been waiting for them in front of the Pavilion for twenty minutes (I couldn’t be late, could I? Not when Bijou’s schedule is so tight). And I was so amped I barely slept last night. “Maricel said you were.”
“Maricel?” I ask. “How would she know? Does she have ESP?”
“She knows because it’s what you’re supposed to do,” Ira says. “Otherwise, what are we all doing here?”
“You’d rather be at home with your PlayStation, I take it?” I ask.
“Than on a group date with my sister? And I’m the weird one?”
“Ira does have a point,” Nomura says. “It didn’t necessarily have to be a group thing. You could have asked Bijou out yourself.”
I shake my head. “I already went out with her alone once, remember?” I say. “This is a group thing because of you, not me. Or Mary Agnes, anyway.” I bask in the chance to play the teacherly role normally occupied by Nomura. “You don’t get it, do you? Mary Agnes has basically been stalking you ever since she found out I liked Bijou. You think she cares about Bijou and me so much that she’d be willing to go out of her way to put us together like this?”
“Well, if you put it that way …,” Nomura says, although he’s looking for a quick way to change the subject. “But why Maricel and Ira, too?”
“Elementary, my dear Nomura,” I say, stroking my chin as if a wise man’s beard were there instead of seven strands of peach fuzz (and to be honest, distracting myself from my jitters over the fact that the girls will be here any second). “She got Maricel and Ira to come so the pressure would be off not just for me and Bijou, but for you. She doesn’t want to scare you off.”
“Not bad,” Nomura says.
“So, Nomura, what’s your move going to be?” Ira asks. “Please, tell me somebody’s going to man up and try something.”
When Ira, who still looks and acts like a ten-year-old, is telling us to “man up,” I know we’re all in trouble.
On our way up the stairs to the tiny theater where Terror Lake is playing, the girls say they need to hit the bathroom, and I’m secretly grateful for one last chance to check my hair and my resolve. Nomura, who always gets it, gives me a little breathing room, but Ira won’t leave me alone.
“You’re such a girl,” he says as I sprinkle some water on my head and sweep my bangs off my forehead. As usual, he’s got that stupid video cam out. “Checking yourself out in the mirror, like Maricel.”
Despite the fact that he’s filming me in this incredibly private moment, I try to keep
my cool. “Maybe you should try it yourself sometime,” I say. “Unless you’re okay with having a nasty zit right in the middle of your nose.”
“Bull. Where?” he says.
Once he realizes I’m pranking him, I say, “Now will you please turn off that stupid camera? Whatever winds up happening today, I don’t want it on film.”
“Fine, fine,” he says, turning it off.
“We don’t need another Rocky and Trevor situation,” Nomura says.
“Huh? What situation?” asks Ira.
Nomura and I get him up to speed on the nutty comments about “brown sugar” and immigration marriages. I’m the one who notices that his stupid camera is still recording.
“Ira,” I say. “Turn that thing off. And erase those stupid videos, please. God.”
Once we’re in the theater, Ira insists on sitting next to Bijou and me. First, he grilled me about making a move on Bijou, and now he insists on getting a front-row seat to the action? I swear, I don’t understand what goes on in the kid’s brain sometimes. I can literally smell his breath right now (if I’m not mistaken, his lunch was peanut butter smeared on a sesame bagel), and believe me, any knowledge of Ira’s gastronomic goings-on does not put me in a romantic mind-set.
The previews are okay. I try to forget that Ira is two millimeters away from me and concentrate on the fact that Bijou is. I try to keep the chat casual. I figure, if she and her mom have watched every episode of All My Children, they must have seen the all-time-favorite girlie movie Dirty Dancing, but no dice. Still, Bijou seems relaxed and happy enough to be hanging out, so I try to let her mellowness rub off on me, and it seems to be working.
But then Terror Lake starts, and I instantly regret not trying to get Mary Agnes to choose a different movie. There’s no warm-up, no scenes of teenagers having fun on their way to a house out in the woods. Nope, right away, some blond girl is about to open a closet. The camera shows her from several different angles, reaching for the door handle, thinking better of it, then reaching again. What should take three seconds is drawn out into a long minute of torture. In real life, would the redhead take this long to see what is in store for her? Never. You see a closet door, you open it, you shut it; you take control. But in movies like this, which are specifically designed to freak out people like me, the moment stretches into infinity and beyond.
I come up with the brilliant idea of going to get popcorn and Cokes, and excuse myself to Bijou.
Ira, of course, comes bounding after me. Why? He loves spatter-flicks like this; he should be in nerd heaven by now. But he’s got something else on his oddball brain.
“When are you gonna man up?” he asks me. The concession guy is putting about two gallons of butter on Ira’s popcorn, which I guess Ira considers a manly amount.
“Seriously, Ira, why do you care? You’re the least masculine guy in this entire movie theater. The only manly things you’ve ever done have happened in Call of Duty.”
“Whatever. You and Nomura have girls, and I don’t. But when I do, you won’t see me acting like such a nervous wimp.”
“Yeah, we’ll see.” I’m seething, but it’s well established that I’m bad at comebacks. Why are we even friends at all? is what I’m wondering.
I order my popcorn, asking for the tiniest amount of butter, figuring that if Bijou is anything like Dolly, she won’t touch it if there’s an ocean of buttery fat dripping down the bag. As for Ira, I go for the silent treatment, also something I learned from over a decade of living with my sweet sister. We pay for our stuff and head back up to the theater in silence. Before I walk into Bijou’s row, I say, “Find somewhere else to sit, man,” and for once, Ira actually listens.
Thank God there’s a break in the action when I find my seat again. I hand Bijou a lemonade, settle into the chair, and contemplate pretending to yawn. I think back to the source of that information. While Nomura is my best friend and a proven genius in many areas, he has even less than the tiny amount of romantic experience I do. He recommended calling Bijou at home, which turned out to be a bad move. So I rely on his wisdom for the sole reason that I have nobody else to turn to. Possibly not the best strategy in the world?
Pretending to yawn seems completely ridiculous, like a circus trick invented by dorks. A loser move performed only by lame guys (not that Nomura is lame, but perhaps his advice sometimes is) who are so afraid of rejection, they need to disguise their actual desires with shenanigans, with clumsy sleight of hand. No, Alex Schrader will not be performing any circus tricks today. No shenanigans for Alex.
And then Ira’s voice pops back in my head, and I wonder if, in his words, I’m not manning up. And then I do something even less manly: scream like a four-year-old girl when this absolutely freaky-looking cat jumps out of an old wooden trunk and pounces on some poor girl’s face. When the scream comes out of my mouth, I think, I have ruined it. Again.
But then Bijou grabs my hand, and a shock of sensation rushes through my entire body. Did she do it on purpose? She must have. Absolutely. She’s trying to comfort me, and as I realize that our bare skin is touching, I start to feel less like a four-year-old girl and more like the luckiest guy on the planet.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
And I think, Now I am. But what I say is, “Yeah. Thanks.”
Then, I up the ante and make a move of my own. I don’t need to do a fake yawn; I’ve got everything I need right here. We’re already touching, after all. I take a slow breath in, then interlace her fingers within mine. I feel her sit up in her seat—she’s a little surprised, and I would have been, too—but once our hands are intertwined, she seems to be liking it well enough. I stroke my thumb along the outside of her hand, and she squeezes more tightly.
Nothing much happens after that, at least nothing easy to describe. But I learn quickly that there’s a whole universe of awesomeness that lives inside that simple phrase “holding hands.” We squeeze, we tickle, we caress, we stroke, and a chain reaction of tiny electric currents goes up my arm, into my shoulders and chest. Suddenly the supposedly scary movie taking place on-screen seems as distant as the moon. Ready to hide under my seat only a few minutes ago, I now want this idiotic horror film to last forever.
I can honestly say that I’ve never felt this close to another person, and all we’re actually doing is holding hands. That’s not even first base, is it? But who cares? Holding hands with someone you like? It’s completely amazing.
Something crazy happens on-screen, but I barely even register it. “Are you scared?” Bijou whispers, so close it tickles my eardrum.
“No, not anymore,” I say. “Are you?”
We’re walking along Windsor Place, girls in front, boys behind.
Ira and Nomura are comparing notes on the movie when I hear Mary Agnes say to Maricel and Bijou, “Nothing happened yet. I need to give him more time.”
To which Bijou responds, “Please, Mary Agnes. We need to get back.”
I check my phone: it’s four forty. I know Bijou needs to be back at Mary Agnes’s place before five thirty, but that’s only a five-minute walk from here. If I were walking beside her, still holding hands (as soon as the movie was over, Mary Agnes and Maricel bum-rushed Bijou, and we were instantly back to the bleak days of gender segregation), I would tell her not to worry. I know this neighborhood almost as well as I know Ditmas, and I won’t let us get too far away.
We stop in front of Uncle Louie G’s, an ice-cream parlor with a giant mural of a pudgy bald man eating a scoopful from a cup. “Oooh, let’s get some,” Mary Agnes says. “John, buy me a cone? We can share it.” It’s hilarious that she calls Nomura “John,” like he’s forty years old or something. Nomura will never be a “John.” Nomura is Nomura is Nomura.
“I’m not superhungry,” Nomura says, either clueless or deliberately trying to escape Mary Agnes’s sticky web. I give him a jab, though. I couldn’t care less about ice cream right now, but it might give me another chance to break out of the boys-only ranks and get c
lose to Bijou.
But Bijou says, “We should be getting back,” and she looks like she means it. She’s not having fun anymore. But we still have at least a half hour! I want to scream. Lady Bijou, I, Sir Alex Schrader, will see to it that you are safely delivered in prompt fashion to the meeting place previously decided upon by yourself and your stern uncle!
“Share one with me, then, please?” Mary Agnes asks Nomura, batting her lashes like a lovesick puppy.
“Okay, okay,” Nomura relents.
“Mary Agnes, we really need to get back,” Bijou says. “Please.”
“Okay, we gotta be out of here anyway,” Maricel says, maybe trying to help Bijou out. “Come on, Ira.” Maricel kisses us, and Ira waves good-bye. He and Maricel cross the street to head to the subway.
Mary Agnes holds out her hand to Bijou. “Here, you can have the key. Alex can walk you home. Let yourself in the front door. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes, max.”
I check my phone again. It’s four fifty. We’ll be back at Mary Agnes’s in plenty of time.
“My uncle can’t come back to see me there alone. And I don’t want your mom seeing me come back alone, either. She will be back in ten minutes, yes?”
I hadn’t realized Mary Agnes’s mom figured into the plan.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.” Mary Agnes puts on a look that says, Okay, we’ll do it your way, but I don’t have to like it. “You and your strict uncle,” she mutters, although she was really the only one who wanted ice cream.
The four of us take a right on Seventeenth Street and walk north toward Eighth Avenue. Bijou and I in front, Mary Agnes and Nomura following us. Once we turn the corner, we’ll only be five blocks away from Mary Agnes’s.
“Did you like the movie?” Bijou asks, still stressed but at least trying to keep things light.
I kick a leaf, sweeping it from the sidewalk into the gutter. “To tell you the truth, I hate movies like that,” I say. “Scary movies. Could you tell?”