Dumplin - Julie Murphy Page 0,51
those last two words.
“It’s okay,” I whisper back. I pull out his desk chair and sit down because it’s too weird to sit on a boy’s bed.
“So you want to hang out here and watch a movie or something? We could go out, too. I figured keep it low-key?”
“A movie sounds good.”
“Okay. Cool. We can watch in here on my laptop. Or in the living room.”
“In here is fine. Or the living room.”
“We can sit on my bed or I could sit on the floor and you could sit on—”
I sit down next to him on his bed. “Calm down.” I’m so used to being the spastic one, the one who needs to take a deep breath. It’s sort of a relief to not feel like I could fall off a cliff at any moment. “This is fine. It’s not like sitting on your bed is going to get me pregnant.”
“You should tell my mom that.”
I laugh. “Well, at least we left the door open for the Holy Ghost.”
He dims his lights and pulls out his laptop, which he sets up on a pile of pillows in front of us. “So if you want, they made a movie out of that video game or we could rent something online.”
“I kinda want to see what this zombie movie is all about.”
We settle back as the glow of the laptop washes over us. The movie is just as the video game poster advertised except the main character doesn’t wear a brown-bag dress. I can tell that Mitch has seen this thing hundreds of times. His lips move with the actors as they say his favorite lines of dialogue. He laughs a few beats before every joke and grimaces before every scary part and, seeing as I’ve never much liked scary movies, I can appreciate the warning.
I almost miss most of the ending, because instead of the movie, my eyes focus in on Mitch’s hand as it inches toward mine.
I should pull my hand away.
His pinkie brushes mine.
Then the laptop explodes.
Well, actually the hospital full of zombies in the movie explodes, but since I’m not paying attention, it scares me so much that I scream.
“What in baby Jesus’s name are you subjecting that girl to?” hollers Mitch’s mom.
“Final Death 3!” yells Mitch.
“I’m fine, ma’am!” I call back.
The credits roll, sending his room into a near pitch-dark. “You hungry?” he asks.
I am starving. “I could eat.”
“There’s that taco stand down on Dawson. We could walk and hang out for a little while before you go home.”
I follow Mitch to the kitchen where his mom is tallying up receipts on one of those old calculators with the receipt paper. “You two hungry?”
“Actually, I think we’re going to walk down the street to Taki’s Tacos.”
She takes her reading glasses off and they hang around her neck, bouncing against the kittens and their balls of yarn on her shirt. “Well, why would you do that when I went grocery shopping this morning? I’ll make salami sandwiches. Or there’s some leftover chicken spaghetti casserole, too.” She turns to me. “Not to brag, but my chicken spaghetti casserole is something to behold.”
“We want to get out of the house, Mom. Why is that such a big deal?”
“It’s wasteful is all.” She puts her glasses back on. “But it is a Saturday night. Be home before midnight.”
The taco stand is on an old car lot. Weeds creep up through the cracks in the pavement as a reminder that the focus here is tacos and not landscaping. Next to the stand is a rusted playground set that looks like it was plucked from a city park and dropped in this parking lot. We sit on a bench at the edge of the circle of light put off by the taco stand to get as far away from the mosquitoes as possible.
After we eat, we wander into the playground. I sit on a swing and so does Mitch. The chains groan against his weight.
“Good tacos,” I say.
He nods. “Did you like the movie?”
“It was . . . bloody. But I liked it.”
“So you really entered the Miss Teen Blue Bonnet Pageant?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I did. I’m pretty screwed. I need a talent and I’ve got nothing.”
I walk back in the swing and let the momentum push me forward as I pump my legs. “Not to mention these other girls ended up entering because I did. It’s like I’m supposed to be guiding them or something. But I don’t even know what I’m doing.