Summer Days and Summer Nights: Twelve Love Stories

by Stephanie Perkins

  On the last night of the Cinegore, the sky looked like it needed to call in sick, all yellow-green going dark around the edges like an infected cut, a summer storm heading in hard. Across the highway, bulldozers sat waiting like an army that had the advantage. Come Monday morning, they’d advance to pulverize the old Cinegore Theater into dust, and in its place would be new condos, a phone store, and a Starbucks. Oh, yay.

  “Kevin! Just in time.”

  As I shimmied under the concessions counter, my best friend, Dave, reached over and dragged me to him into selfie position, his phone held high above our faces.

  I sighed. “Don’t do this.”

  “C’mon, dude. We should record this moment.”

  “Can’t the moment just be a moment?”

  “Sh-h-h. Try to look pretty.” Dave pursed his lips coyly. I wore my usual expression, something between resignation and disdain—resigdain. The camera blinked, and Dave released me so he could type. “Hashtag: LastNightAtTheCinegore.”

  “Yeah,” I said, checking the pressure in the soda jets. “Going out with a bang.”

  “Exactly. Last night,” Dave said meaningfully. He jerked his head in the direction of the lobby’s far end, where the object of my unrequited affections, Dani García, had positioned the yellow DO NOT FALL ON YOUR ASS AND SUE US cone in front of the ladies’ lounge while she mopped. Her aqua-dyed hair had been cut into a Bettie Page do, then shaved on one side, above an ear that sported an array of earrings stacked like tiny silver vertebrae. For months, I’d been making a movie in my head starring the two of us. In that movie, we fought off a variety of monsters and saved the free world. Then we had celebratory sex. Which meant that there was a narrative in which we had also had a date. Which we hadn’t. Not even close.

  “You do the deed yet?” Dave asked around a mouthful of half-chewed gummi bears. Rainbow spit dribbled down his chin.

  I grimaced and handed him a napkin.

  Dave moaned, “Aw, you pussied out, didn’t you?”

  “‘Pussied out’ is sexist. I prefer ‘made a strong choice for cowardice.’”

  “Keva-a-a-an—”

  “Dude. Shut up.” I glanced over at the bathroom. Dani had moved inside with her mop. The door was closed. “I’m gonna do it,” I said quietly, pushing my glasses up on my nose. “Just … not tonight.”

  Dave tossed two gummi bears at me in rapid succession. “Why? Not?”

  “Ow?”

  Dave threatened a third attack-gummi. I put up my hand. “It’s … just not the right moment.”

  “Dude. Did Lincoln wait for the right moment to make the Gettysburg Address?”

  “Yeah, Dave. He waited for Gettysburg to happen.”

  “Whatever.” The third gummi bear bounced off my cheek and landed in the Sartresque territory beneath the ice bin. “The point is, you make it the right moment. Tonight’s the last night you’re gonna see her up close and personal. You’ve got two months of summer left, and then she’s off to college, and then you’ll be kicking yourself at our high school reunion because she’ll be married to some heavily tattooed, Bentley-driving rock star and she won’t even remember your name. She’ll be all, ‘Oh, hey, Kyle, right? Didn’t we work together or something? Wait, you’re that lame ginger dude who didn’t have the stones to ask me out!’”

  I yanked my skinny, freckled arms through the sleeves of my regulation red Cinegore usher’s jacket, the one that made me look like a deranged Michael Jackson tribute band member. “Thanks for the encouragement, Dave. You always know just the right thing to say.”

  Dave ignored my sarcasm. “I’m here to save you from yourself. And from a life of perpetual masturbation.”

  “Dave.”

  “Yes, Pookie Bear?”

  “Die in a fire.”

  “You’re so pretty when you’re angry,” Dave said, and kissed me on the cheek. “Ask her.”

  “Ask her what?” Dani had emerged from the bathrooms. She wiped her hands on a paper towel, wadded it into a tight ball, and arced it toward the trash can, pumping her fist when it landed inside, a perfect two-pointer.

  “Oh, um. We were talking about I Walk This Earth,” I said quickly, pouring the artificial butter mixture—the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Going to Kill Me—into the popcorn hopper.

  Dani snorted. I found it devastatingly attractive. In the movie in my head, she did that a lot. It was an audience pleaser. She grabbed the tongs and poked with disinterest at the overcooked hot dogs sweating under the heat lamps. “Ri-i-ight. The movie that’s supposed to be cursed. Ooh!”

  “Have you never seen Showgirls? Movies can be cursed.” Dave raised his right hand. “Truth.”

  Dani rolled her eyes. “I didn’t say bad. I said cursed. As in, not supposed to be seen by human eyes. Ever. How did Scratsche get his hands on a copy of it, anyway? I thought it was in some lead-lined safe deposit box somewhere.”

  I broke open a carton of straws and started shoving handfuls of them into the pop-up dispenser on the counter. “Beats me. As for the curse: according to that paragon of journalistic integrity, the Deadwood Daily Herald—circulation eight hundred and two, unless somebody died this afternoon—I Walk This Earth allegedly opens a gateway to hell as it’s played. Kinda like when you sync up The Wizard of Oz and Dark Side of the Moon, but minus the drugs and plus demons.”

  Dani smiled big, and it kick-started my own movie montage.

  SCENE 12: Dani and Kevin run through a meadow of bluebonnets while a sensitive rock-folk band on a nearby hill plays an acerbic but heartfelt love song. Dani wears a white sundress that exposes the cool Japanese cherry tree tattoo with her little brother’s name under it that decorates her upper arm.

  “Take this mug I made for you in Ironic Ceramics class,” she says, and hands me a cup that’s completely solid, no hole.

  “Thanks. I love ironic coffee most of all,” I answer, and the camera catches the sexy stubble that lines my action-hero jaw.

  Our faces move in for a kiss. We never notice the zombie horde advancing toward the emo folk singers.

  I snapped out of my reverie to see Dani looking at me, eyebrows raised.

  “Anyway,” I said, blushing. “What with this being the end of the Cinegore, you’d think Scratsche would show up tonight.”

  Dani grabbed two straws and shoved them over her incisors like fangs. “He’s probably home roasting children in his oven.”

  Dave shrugged and double dipped in the nacho cheese sauce. “Just more grist for the Scratsche rumor mill.”

  For several decades, Mr. Scratsche had been Deadwood, Texas’s, favorite urban legend. He’d moved to town in 1963, when the nation was still mourning its beautiful promise of a president, and promptly bought Deadwood’s run-down 1920s movie palace, the Cinemore Theater. Within a year, he’d turned it into a horror movie palace nicknamed “the Cinegore,” due to its bloody slate of films. The Cinegore featured state-of-the-art details like Smell-O-Vision, Tingler shocker seats, skeletons that zoomed above the audience’s heads on an invisible wire, and the only screen outfitted for 3-D in a forty-mile radius. People used to come from as far away as Abilene to see a first run. Personally, I can’t imagine why anybody would want to build anything in Deadwood, Texas, which is true to its name. Leaving Deadwood is pretty much the best option out there. If you’re somebody who has options.

  Anyway.

  No one had seen old Scratsche in years, not even us. When the Cinegore staff was hired, we’d each had to fill out a short, weird questionnaire about our hopes, dreams, and fears. Afterward, I’d gotten a brief note in the mail, written in very formal script, that said, Congratulations. You are a good fit for the Cinegore, Mr. Grant. Sincerely, Mr. Nicholas Scratsche.

  His reclusiveness fed the appetite for speculation: He was from Transylvania. He was from a circus town in Florida. He was tall. He was short. He was a defrocked priest specializing in off-book exorcisms. He’d killed the son of a nobleman back in the old country and was hiding out here. The
re were dozens of rumors but only three pieces of tangible evidence that Mr. Scratsche had ever existed at all. One was the Cinegore. Two was his signature on our paychecks. And three was a framed black-and-white photo that hung on the badly lit wall of the staircase leading up to the projection room, a photo of Scratsche cutting the ribbon at the opening of the Cinegore, October 31, 1964.

  I’d never much liked that picture. In it, Mr. Scratsche has on this shiny, sharkskin suit, the kind of thing that looked like it would go up with one match. But it wasn’t Scratsche’s questionable fashion choices that gave me the creeps; it was his eyes. They were dead-of-night black. You could look into them and see nothing but yourself staring back. Every time I passed that picture, those eyes found me, judged me. They made the hair on the back of my neck whisper dread to my insides. They made me look.

  Overhead, the Gothic chandelier bulbs flickered and dimmed—a power surge, one of the Cinegore’s infamous quirks. A few seconds later, they blazed back up to full wattage. We let out a collective exhale.

  “Dodged that one,” Dani said and high-fived me.

  I enjoyed the momentary feel of her skin against mine, even if it was just some palm-to-palm action. Fact: When most of your nights are spent threading old horror movies through an artifact of a projector, any human contact is exciting. Which sounds kind of pathetic. That’s probably because I am a little pathetic. In life as in film, find your niche and work it.

  John-O, our resident freshman, signaled urgently from outside that he was ready to release the velvet rope barrier keeping the ticket holders in line. John-O was a short spark plug of a kid with a learner’s permit and a habit of telling us the plot of every movie we’d still like to see. In an act of petty revenge for this, Dave, Dani, and I all pretended not to understand his wild gestures. We added some of our own, turning it into a dance, until finally, in frustration, John-O opened the door and yelled in, “Uh, you guys? I’m gonna let people in now, okay?”

  “Do it, pumpkin! Be you!” Dave finger-gunned at John-O, who stiffened and ran over to the rope, fiddling nervously with the brass release hook. Dave sighed. “God bless freshmen.”

  “Here we go. Last stand at the Cinegore,” I said as people swarmed in through the doors. “We who are about to die salute you.”

  * * *

  Maybe a third of the seats were filled. Even on our last night, with a supposedly haunted movie, we couldn’t draw a crowd. No wonder they were bulldozing us. Dave reminded everyone about turning off cell phones just before he snapped pics of the audience, who were, in turn, memorializing themselves and uploading it all.

  Then I went into my bit. “Welcome to the last night of the Cinegore Theater, your premier vintage horror movie experience.”

  “Shut up and start the movie!” Bryan Jenks called from the back row. There was a reason we called him Bryan Jerks.

  I took a deep breath. “As you know, I Walk This Earth is cursed—”

  “Mo-vie! Mo-vie! Mo-vie!” Bryan and his pals chanted. A couple of the hipsters tried to shut them down with an apathetic “Dude, c’mon” chorus, but that only made Bryan try harder.

  “Hey, Jerks—your mother still cut the crusts off your sandwiches?” Dani was suddenly beside me, shining her usher’s flashlight right in Bryan’s eyes.

  He held up a hand. “Damn, girl. Don’t blind me.”

  “Don’t piss me off, and I won’t,” she said. “Got your back, vato,” she whispered in my ear. Her breath sent a shiver down my neck.

  “All the people who worked on this movie died in mysterious ways,” I continued. “The lead actress, Natalia Marcova, hung herself in a cheap motel room. Teen heartthrob Jimmy Reynolds was beheaded when he crashed his car into a tree. The mileage on his odometer? Six hundred sixty-six miles.”

  “Ohmigod,” a girl in the front row said, giggling nervously with her friends. The booze on their breath was eye-wateringly potent.

  “Lead actor, Alistair Findlay-Cushing—”

  “That was his actual name, not a stage name,” one of the local college hipsters said smugly.

  Dani mouthed, “Wikipediot.”

  Fighting a grin, I said, louder, “Alistair was found facedown on his bed, a pentagram scrawled on the floor, his heart nailed to the center of it.” I stopped to enjoy the audience’s squirms. “But the creepiest part? When director Rudolph Van Hesse was on his deathbed, he confessed that he’d sold his soul to the devil to make the film, and that it had the power to corrupt anyone who watched it. ‘There is evil woven into this film. A powerful darkness shines out from each frame. It must not be seen by human eyes!’”

  “How can darkness ‘shine out’?” Hipster Dick said.

  In my movie, he would die slowly and painfully, thanks to sentient, malevolent facial hair. I ignored him. “Van Hesse may have spent the last ten years of his life in a mental institution, but it didn’t stop him from having every print of his film destroyed … except for one copy kept under lock and key for the past fifty-five years. That single existing copy is the one you’re about to watch.”

  “Ooh,” the audience said.

  “So put on your special DemonVision 3-D glasses and enjoy the show. We’ll see you at the end—if you survive.”

  The theater went dark, and I stumbled into Dani on the way out. “Sorry! You okay? Jeez, I’m so … sorry.”

  The smell of her vanilla perfume made me want to bury my face in the crook of her neck. She quirked an eyebrow, and I realized I was still holding on to her. I sprang back. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” Dani said, and pushed through the theater doors into the bright lobby. I hung behind for a second to get my shit together.

  “Sorry,” I said again to the dark. But really I was just sorry I had to let go.

  * * *

  I met Dani halfway through our junior year, when she moved to Deadwood from San Antonio and landed in my alphabetically appointed homeroom class (A–G, Dani García, Kevin Grant). She had pink pigtails and the air of somebody from the Big City. Plus, she wore a Bikini Kill T-shirt. I was toast.

  “Hey. Nice shirt,” I’d said, pointing.

  “Oh my gosh,” Lana French had shouted. “Kevin just pointed to the new girl’s boobs!”

  For two weeks solid, I was known as McBoobster. After that, my exchanges with Dani were on a strictly “Heyhowareyou/Wellseeyalater” basis. I’d watched from the sidelines as she cycled through short-term-parking romantic partners: Paul Peterson (he of the any-surface-can-be-skateboarded fame), Ignacio Aguilar (a strange, mostly texting-based relationship), Martha Dixon (the brief bi-curious period, documented through a variety of Hot Topic T-shirts), and the true horror show, Mike Everett, who had broken up with Dani three days before the Valentine’s dance so he could go with Talisha Graham instead, which was just wrong—like, adult-diaper-party wrong.

  And then, by some spring miracle, Dani had taken a shift at the Cinegore. “Thought I’d see what all the fuss is about,” she’d said. “Besides, it beats working the fry baskets at Whataburger.”

  For the past four months, we’d been toiling side by side, our Saturday nights playing out like a montage from every bad teen romance ever filmed: Wayward fingers briefly touching in the vast fields of popcorn. Heads bending in sympathy as we restocked the Raisinets. Eyes glancing while we talked smack with Dave about which Richard Matheson movie adaptation was the best: The Last Man on Earth (me), The Omega Man (Dani), or I Am Legend (Dave, who was a sucker for both Will Smith and German shepherds). When our shifts ended, we’d stagger down the road to IHOP at two a.m. for plates of spongy pancakes and endless cups of burned coffee. Sitting there with my best friend in the world and the girl I secretly loved, I would feel like a vampire, staring out through night-painted windows at the lonely semis crying down the interstate, willing the dawn to stay tucked in for just a few hours more so I could suck up all the living I could get.

  When the first streaks of pink lit up the West Texas scrub, we’d wobble out to our cars. “Later. U
nless we’re killed in our sleep by malevolent forces,” I’d say. Dani would laugh and give me a half-wave, and for the entire ride home I’d obsess about the meaning of that one gesture, reading hope into every flutter of her fingers. I’d let myself into the house, stepping carefully over my mom’s empty vodka bottles. Then I’d crawl into bed and let the Dani–Kevin horror movie in my head spool out toward its inevitable victorious-romantic conclusion.

  * * *

  “And we … are … go,” I said, as the dramatic score blared from the Cinegore’s speakers. Through the projection booth window, I could just make out the grainy opening credits before I walked away.

  “Aren’t you going to watch this marvel of cinematic art?” Dave taunted from the floor, where he sat hunched over his bag of weed.

  “Maybe later.” I glanced pointedly at Dani, but Dave was already engrossed in his Olympic-caliber spliff-rolling skills.

  “I wish we’d at least go out with something good, like Final Destination 12: We Really Mean It This Time. Now that is a rad movie,” he said.

  Unlike me, Dave thought that vintage horror films were crap. He couldn’t see the beauty in blood splatters made from chocolate syrup and werewolf transformations achieved via painstaking stop-motion. If it didn’t feature multimillion-dollar explosions and a heavy body count, Dave wasn’t interested.

  “Like, why would you come here and pay twelve bucks and eat stale corn and get gum on your new kicks,” Dave said, his voice tight with held smoke, “when you could stream that shit on your phone from your toilet?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Classy.”

  “Dude, that’s the future. This…” Dave gestured to the small confines of the projection room as he exhaled a gust of weed fumes. “This is a graveyard.”

  He offered the joint to me. I shook my head, and he offered it to Dani.

  “No, thanks. I’ll just enjoy the inevitable contact high.”

  Dave shrugged and took another hit.

  “Yeah, but what about the ritual of getting your ticket and your snacks, finding the perfect seat,” I countered. “All those strangers watching the movie with you, they change how you see it, you know? You should hear their gasps and laughter and sniffling. It’s a communal experience. You can’t get that on your laptop or phone. That sharing, it’s the foundation of storytelling. It reminds us that we’re…”