the actress was being interviewed close-up; she sat in a director’s chair with the ocean behind her. She had changed out of the dress, lost the hairdo—had fast-forwarded a lifetime, Knox thought. She wore yellow-tinted sunglasses; the wind kept whipping tendrils of hair into her lip gloss, where they stuck until she felt them and pulled them gracefully away from her face.
“Who is she,” Knox said. “She’s pretty.”
Robbie cut her a look, then rearranged the blanket around his shoulders. “You know her,” he said. “We just saw her on Letterman, talking about this movie.”
“Oh.”
Robbie trained the remote at the screen. “Do you want to watch any more of this,” he said. His voice was low and unmeasured; television had sucked the inflection out of it. His hair stood up from his forehead in a cowlick that looked like the result of a sweat-tossed sleep. His skin was ashy in the room’s low light.
Knox hesitated. She did want to watch. There was something about the saturated blue of the water behind the woman’s chair, the way her eyes remained trained on the interviewer, as if she couldn’t wait for the next question to come out of his smarmy mouth. She wondered where the movie was being filmed. On some Greek island? In Italy? Turkey? All places she had never been.
“I guess I don’t care,” Knox said. “I should go to bed.”
“Me too.”
But Robbie squinted his eyes, as if the television were backing farther away and he were trying to draw a bead on it. He pushed a few buttons on the remote. The screen went gray, and a question appeared: ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO ORDER THIS PAY-PER-VIEW EVENT? Robbie used the remote to scroll down to YES, adding three dollars and ninety-five cents, according to the prompter, to their parents’ cable bill.
“I’m ordering a movie,” he said.
Knox licked her lips, which were dry. “Okay,” she said, though he hadn’t asked her permission. Neither of them moved. An image of a boxer receiving a punch to his jaw stretched to the edges of the television screen and remained frozen for a moment before motion began. Then a crowd was all of a sudden booing; a mouth-guard flew out of Sylvester Stallone’s lips in a swanning trajectory that the camera followed; white drops of sweat erupted from his hairline, the sides of his wet, contorted face; he was going down.
Knox pulled her own blanket up to her chin; the air-conditioning in the house was so cranked they needed help to keep warm. “A-dri-an,” she offered softly, going for the South Philly accent, her voice rasping in mock pain as Rocky hit the floor.
Robbie turned up the volume a little, ignoring her. It was one-thirty in the morning. Their parents were asleep upstairs. Two clear plastic containers lay open on the coffee table, still half full of the taco salad Knox had picked up that afternoon from a drive-through place in town.
“Well, I’m going,” she said.
The ref rushed to Rocky’s side to count: One. The crowd counted with him. Two! He pounded the floor. Adrian looked scared to death in her high-necked cotton dress.
“How many times have you seen this,” Knox said. “Ten?”
“I dunno,” Robbie said. “Like fourteen.”
Knox waited. She herself wouldn’t ask. If Robbie wanted to stay where he was and watch Rocky for the fifteenth time, then that was what she truly wanted him to do. For some reason, it was completely up to him to ask. If she said anything about it, expressed any desire before he did, she would feel exposed and foolish, she knew.
Robbie glanced at her, then back at Rocky, who was in the process of taking a futile swing, meeting only air with his glove. He clicked the television off. Knox reeled for a second in the dark, the screen’s light still firing on her retina.
“I’m going to swim,” Robbie said. “You want to? Come on if you want.”
Knox breathed out in a rush. She nodded. This was what she looked forward to, though she knew she should make Robbie go to sleep.
She stood, folded both of their blankets quickly, and draped them over the back of the couch. Robbie was waiting for her in the back hall, his shirt blue-white in the gloom. He let himself out first. Knox reached the screen door at the moment before it snapped shut with a whine that might be loud enough to wake her parents—or at least to disturb them; she wasn’t sure they were sleeping nights—and