Chapter Eighteen
It takes a lot of scrubbing to wash off all the sand and mud and sweat accumulated from the kickball game, doing my best to
ignore Jackson’s usual couch-related questions. I spend too long in the bedroom, trying on every T-shirt I own, changing my
mind over and over, and then feeling ridiculous that I care this much. I’m going out to a drive-in movie theater. I’m going
to be covered in bug spray, and I’ll end up throwing my sweatshirt on in a couple hours anyway. Why does it matter what T-shirt
I wear?
It’s not like this is a date. We’re going with Katy and Marcus. This is four grown adults spending an evening seeing a movie.
I grab my sweatshirt and my sunglasses and leave the cottage.
Unlike almost everything I’ve seen so far on Cape Cod, the Wellfleet Drive-in Theatre is hard to miss. It’s right off Route
6, marked by a big arrow-shaped sign and one of those marquee light boxes with individual letters assembled to spell out July 11th Feature: Jaws. I snap a picture of it and text it to Rika.
Nathan swings his car into a small, mostly empty parking lot right behind the sign, where Marcus and Katy are already waiting
in Marcus’s blue pickup truck.
“I threw some blankets in the back,” Katy says, leaning out of the passenger window. “You want to climb back there now or squish in with us?”
“I think it’ll be a bit tight with four, Kate,” Nathan says, levering himself up over the back bumper and into the flat bed
of the pickup truck. “We’ll be fine back here.” He turns around, extending a hand to me.
I look doubtfully at the pickup. “Is this . . . safe? Or, like, legal?”
He grins. “It would be very illegal if we were actually hitting the road, but we’re just driving to the ticket booth, which
is right up there.” He jerks his head in the direction of the narrow road that leads away into the trees. “We’ve done this
before. We’ll be fine.”
I grab his hand and let him pull me into the back of the truck, which is piled with blankets and old cushions. I crouch awkwardly,
grasping the side, as Marcus rumbles out of the parking lot, joining the line of cars heading for a solitary red ticket booth
that marks the entrance to the drive-in. Beyond is an enormous parking lot, where a man in a neon vest waves us to a parking
spot with a glow stick. The truck bobs up and down as we drive, like a boat on the waves, the asphalt undulating gently underneath
us. Marcus carefully backs into a parking space, inching up one of the small mounds in the asphalt, so the back end of the
truck is tipped up ever so slightly, and suddenly I get it. It’s just like an actual movie theater—aiming us up so the screen
fills our field of vision.
Katy slides open the truck’s rear window. An upbeat Motown song filters over the speakers. “Okay, we should be all set,” she
says, climbing out of the cab and then clambering into the bed of the truck.
I glance back at the radio. “Is that for the sound?”
“Yeah, you tune to this one channel,” Nathan says, “and they broadcast the sound that way. It’ll switch once the movie starts.”
“In the old days, they used to use those.” Marcus hoists himself into the back of the truck and points to a large, ancient-looking brick of a metal speaker, sitting in a cradle on an upright pole that’s fixed to the asphalt.
It looks like something out of the atomic age.
“I’m pretty sure they still work, actually.
You hook it onto your car door. They just sound like shit. ”
“Oh, should we get popcorn?” Katy pauses, in the middle of arranging cushions. “I feel like for Jaws, you need popcorn, right?”
Nathan pushes himself up. “We can get it.” He glances at me. “Harlowe, you want to give me a hand?”
“Sure.” I clamber out of the truck behind him and the two of us head for the concession stand, a long, low shack at the edge
of the parking lot. The buttery, salty smell of popcorn mixes with the sugary sweetness of caramel and candy as we join the
back of the line.
Nathan taps his fingers against one leg. He seems preoccupied, a line of tension in his shoulders.
“You okay?” I ask.
He glances at me and his fingers still. “Yeah. Sorry. I’m trying to quit smoking, so . . .” He ducks his head, looking self-conscious.
“Oh.” I think back to the weeks after my grandmother quit smoking, back in Indiana. The way she’d stick toothpicks in her
mouth or chew gum. The way her fingers would fidget. “That’s great,” I say. “How’s it going?”
He huffs out a laugh. “Ask me in a month. That’s how far I got last time before I broke.”
“I think you can do it. My grandma did, after smoking for fifty years.”
His eyebrows rise. “No kidding.”
I nod. “Ate carrots constantly but she never smoked again.”
“They say carrots are good for your eyesight.” He pulls several crumpled bills out of his pocket as we get closer to the counter,
and then a credit card. I catch myself wondering if he owns a wallet.
“Um, this is on me,” I say, pulling out my own wallet.
He looks up in surprise. “You don’t need to.”
“I know, but . . . Marcus paid for the tickets, and I never did buy you a drink.”
His lips twitch into a smile. “All right. Thanks.”
We buy a few pin-striped bags of popcorn and some sodas and head back to the truck, where Marcus and Katy have set up cushions
and blankets and are leaning back against the truck’s cab, resting their shoulders against each other.
“So, Harlowe,” Katy says, as I hand her a bag of popcorn, “you said you haven’t seen Jaws, right? Like, you haven’t seen any of it?”
“I haven’t seen any of it,” I confirm. “And please don’t say it’s a classic.”
“It is a classic,” Marcus says, taking a soda from Nathan. “I mean, I think that’s kind of an objective statement at this point,
according to pretty much every film buff.”
I sigh. “I know. It’s just that my ex kept trying to get me to watch this movie, and that was always his argument. It’s a classic. He seemed to think that would convince me to watch it.”
“Is this the ex you’re here to escape?” Marcus asks.
“Yeah.”
“How’s that going?”
Terribly. He’s stuck in my bathroom.
But all I say is “Jury’s still out.”
Nathan grabs one of the cushions and sits down, setting it between his back and the side of the truck. “The actual reason
to watch this movie is the shark,” he says.
“Oh, here we go,” Marcus grumbles.
“We put up with your weird cat facts,” Katy says, slapping Marcus’s arm. “You can put up with Nathan’s shark facts.”
“What shark facts?” I ask.
“Nathan went to college for marine biology,” Katy says. “Ergo . . . weird shark facts.”
“Oh, really?” I ask, doing my best to sound like I don’t already know what Nathan studied in college, courtesy of whatever version of him keeps turning up in the cottage bedroom.
He shakes his head, a faint flush in his cheeks. “I just remember a few things here and there,” he says. “It’s not much. Do
you want to sit down?”
He gestures at a cushion next to him. I carefully sink down onto it, balancing my popcorn and my soda, and lean back against
the side of the truck. My sleeve brushes Nathan’s, and I can’t help noticing the last of the daylight catching in the hair
on his arm, golden against his tan skin.
Behind us, the truck radio cuts out for a moment, static crackling, and then a voice with an unmistakable 1950s accent blares
through.
“Welcome to the Wellfleet Drive-in Theatre! Visit our refreshment center during the intermission . . . or any time!”
The giant screen at one end of the parking lot flickers to life, displaying a chipper animated hot dog that looks like it
belongs in a Looney Tunes cartoon. It gives us a wink and a big thumbs-up, before the screen switches to an idyllic drawing
of an ocean, fluffy pink clouds floating through the sky, while an atomic-era font flashes across the screen: Make this drive-in theatre a regular habit!
“What do you think?” Marcus leans around Katy, looking at me. “Feel cocooned in white, suburban fifties America yet?”
“Yeah. Wow.” On the screen in front of us, a list of rules pops up, like no driving over ten miles per hour. “Is this actually from the fifties?”
“Oh, yeah, it’s been playing ever since the drive-in opened,” Katy says. “I remember it from when I was a kid.”
“Terrifying,” Marcus says.
Katy shoots him a look of mock offense. “Nostalgic!”
“For what, exactly?”
“Segregation, McCarthyism, nuclear anxiety, and raids on gay bars, obviously,” Nathan says, tossing a handful of popcorn into his mouth.
The cartoon images flicker and vanish, and the static from the radio disappears. A cheer goes through the parking lot around
us. Most of the spaces are filled—a sea of cars and trucks, with a few people sitting in lawn chairs on the pavement.
Behind the screen, the sky is almost completely dark now, the last hints of lighter blue fading into dusk. The screen flickers
to life again, zooming along a sandy ocean floor, the colors all slightly pale and washed out. Music crackles over the car
radio—the bah-dump, bah-dump of the Jaws theme I know immediately even though I’ve never seen the movie.
I lean back, resting my elbow against the hump over the truck’s rear wheel, and take a sip of my root beer.
I’m finally seeing Jaws. Just like Jackson always wanted. There’s still no buzz from my phone as the ominous music cuts out and the scene changes
to a crowd around a campfire on the beach, a guy playing harmonica—so maybe Rika hasn’t seen my text yet. Maybe she and Yasmin
are out somewhere, if Yasmin isn’t on a long hospital shift.
Maybe they’re even out with Jackson.
The thought doesn’t eat at me, the way I expect it to. Instead, a tiny, petty piece of me hopes they are out with Jackson. Hopes even that Rika shows him my text. Just so he knows that I’m finally watching the movie he kept pushing
at me, only I’m not watching it with him.
“Ugh, I hate this part.” Katy squeezes her eyes as the young woman on the screen runs into the dark water for a midnight swim.