Outside, Skinny-Dave is playing handball. He lets me join him, which is great because it keeps me busy enough to suffer through his small talk about “procrastination masturbation,” where you save a porn link for later because you can’t be bothered with the cleanup at that moment. But it’s not long before he stops playing so he can check on his laundry, leaving me alone with a handball I “better not fucking lose” or he’ll castrate me and my future sons. (Sorry, Faust.)

Twenty days.

I only have to survive twenty more days without her.

“Hello?”

“Hey, it’s Aaron.”

“I know, Stretch. What’s up?”

“Nothing, which is a problem. I should be doing something instead of sitting here and only missing Genevieve. You free to hang out?”

“I’m sort of in the middle of something right now. You doing anything tomorrow morning?”

“Nope. Unless whatever you’re about to suggest is stupid, in which case, yeah, I have plans to save the world or something.”

“Well, if you’re done saving the world before noon we could go see a movie.”

“I guess the city can take care of itself for a couple hours. So what are you up to right now?”

“Nothing,” he says.

He sounds kind of ashamed and dodgy, sort of like the way someone (not Skinny-Dave) gets really uncomfortable when you ask them if they watch porn or not, even if the answer is obvious. But I let it go and instead get him to talk to me about stupid things, like what superpower he would like to have—invincibility, which Skinny-Dave always confuses for invisibility.

It’s better than handball, at least.

8

NO HOMO

   Thomas looks tired as hell when I meet him on the corner of his block the next morning.

It’s a little after 11:00. Not sure if he got any sleep or if he’ll be able to stay awake for the entire movie.

“Are you cloning yourself?”

“What?” Thomas groggily asks.

“I’m trying to figure out what you’re obsessively working on.”

“I don’t think anyone wants two clueless Thomases walking around.” We take a shortcut through some shady projects to get to the theater as fast as possible. “I don’t want to tell you or you’ll think I’m some lost puppy.”

“Nah, you’re more like a work in progress. We all are,” I say. I hold my hands up in surrender. “But I’ll drop it.”

“You’re supposed to try and force me to spill the beans.”

“Okay. Spill the beans.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

So we don’t.

Again.

Instead, he goes on about how he loves summertime mornings because of the eight-dollar ticket charge for a movie, which usually doesn’t even matter since he knows how to get in for free because he worked there for two weekends last summer before—you guessed it—quitting.

“But you want to be a director. Isn’t working at the movies a good first step?”

“I thought it would be, but you don’t get a vision for any projects working behind the concession stands. You’re constantly burning yourself from popcorn oil, and your classmates bully you at the box office when you don’t let them into R-rated movies. Ripping off tickets won’t turn me into a director.”

“That makes sense.”

“I figure if I keep taking odd jobs I’ll get some material for my own scripts. I just haven’t figured out a story to tell yet.”

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.”