Thanks for the Trouble - Tommy Wallach Page 0,13
going to make sure we never did.
“So tell me, Parker, what do you and your friends do next, after you go shopping?”
I don’t have friends. And if I did, we wouldn’t go shopping.
“You don’t have friends? Don’t be silly. Everyone has friends.”
Not really. There are kids I talk to at school, but no one I actually hang out with.
“Then I suppose you’ll have to pretend. Imagine you’re the most popular kid in your whole class, all right? You have friends and girlfriends galore. A jam-packed social calendar. Now, what would you and your vast coterie do after a morning of retail therapy? Remember, I’m looking for the authentic teenage experience here.”
Once again, I had no idea how to answer Zelda’s question, because I wasn’t really living the authentic teenage experience. But then I realized it didn’t matter how I answered, because if she really was this clueless, she wouldn’t know if I was right anyway. I could’ve told her that after a few hours of shopping, most kids liked playing laser tag, or spray-painting the insides of churches, or freestyle walking at the nearest retirement home. So I decided to go with the most romantic thing I could think to do in the middle of the day at a mall.
M-o-v-i-e, I finger spelled.
Zelda’s face lit up. “Of course! Something frightfully bad, I hope. About superheroes, maybe, or young idiots falling in love.” She clapped her hands together in joyful anticipation. “Perfect! Let’s do that!”
I knew she meant Let’s go see a movie, but a part of me heard it differently, as if what she’d really meant was Let’s go fall in love.
WHAT YOU DO AT A MOVIE THEATER
YOU SIT IN THE BACK row. The nearest other people are two rows away: an elderly couple who will spend the entire movie slowly unwrapping hard candies. You have a large bag of popcorn so drenched in butter it smells a little like paint thinner. You have big waxy red cups full of rum and Coke. Your arm rests at your side, not daring to step up to the actual armrest, which is a fraught location not unlike the no-man’s-land that existed between the trenches during World War I. This is the first time you’ve ever been alone in a movie theater with a girl—a critical adolescent milestone, you are well aware—and you’re terrified of screwing it up. When you reach for a particularly juicy kernel of popcorn and find a couple of greasy fingers waiting for you, you pull away so fast she asks if you’re okay. But eventually, you let your elbow creep onto the back portion of the armrest, where it meets another elbow. You wonder if she knows that she is touching your elbow, because it might be that she just hasn’t noticed yet, and the film has started now and it’s sorta funny, so it’s always possible that she’s just not focused on her elbow at the moment. (Because how often are we ever really focused on the sensations in our elbows?) So you move your arm just a little bit—“I’m here!” your elbow announces—but she doesn’t move, which means she must know that your elbow is there, and more importantly, that it is touching her elbow. Of course, you aren’t sure if elbow contact really has any meaning, romantically speaking. Elbow contact could be a form of friend contact, like the way athletes are always smacking each other’s asses, or the way the drama kids at school are always giving each other back massages on the steps in front of the theater. But fortune favors the bold and all that shit, so after twenty minutes or so, you put your whole arm up on the plush pillow of the armrest and let it lie against her arm. There’s no denying this, then. It’s skin against skin. Only a moment later, she moves her arm off the armrest, and the whole world begins to collapse like an imploded building, except then she picks up the tub of popcorn and puts it on the floor, raises the armrest, and nestles herself into your side. There is no hesitation or doubt in her movements, and you wonder how it is she manages to do everything this way, with such extreme confidence. She stays there for the rest of the movie, so close that you’re afraid you’ll dislodge her if you breathe too heavily. Then, as the credits begin to roll, she tilts her head toward you, and you feel her