Chapter 10
T he next Saturday night, they found the cinema open again.
Round marquee bulbs hummed around the title— The Story of You —and cast a welcoming glow over the alley.
Ellie peeked through the doors. The chandelier gleamed without a speck of dust in sight.
Outside, the ticket boy was perched at the booth wearing his familiar white uniform and apathy.
“That’ll be ten dollars,” he said, pulling the second movie ticket from each of their labeled boxes.
“Can we talk to the manager?” Drake asked as he gathered the bills from his wallet. “Before we watch.”
Natalie wasn’t who Ellie expected. She readied herself for another surly teenager or video store clerk who moonlit at a vintage theater.
The person who surfaced behind the concession counter was a generation older than them and had the confident build of a stunt woman.
She was ready to fight fires and villains in a billowing gold suit.
The only thing interrupting all the gold was regal, wavy gray hair leading to a name tag that read Natalie , with a customizable section beneath the name where she’d written “Ask me about the beach.”
“I heard you were looking for the manager?” Natalie asked. When she stepped out from behind the counter, Ellie’s focus moved to her shoes. Natalie was wearing, along with the gold suit, a pair of white Chuck Taylors pulled fresh from the box.
They waited a beat too long to answer her question. Drake was stalling. Ellie was supposed to tee this discussion up, it seemed. Where could she possibly begin? “We were just curious about … you know,” was where she landed.
“Yeah, I hear ya.” Natalie sighed with her whole body, as if accepting her role in a fight sequence she’d ultimately leave unscathed. Another truck on fire, another damsel in distress, another day. “I know it’s not great.”
“What isn’t great?” Drake asked.
“The popcorn.” Natalie glanced over her shoulder to face the popcorn in question.
The ticket boy had moved inside and was in the middle of preparing a fresh batch.
He poured hot microwaved butter sauce over the kernels in a practiced zigzag.
“It’s an old machine and it comes with a lot of quirks.
We think it might have belonged to a carnival in a past life.
” Ellie noticed some soft music emerging from the machine.
It had the light tinkle of an ice cream truck.
“The popcorn is fine,” Ellie said. “I mean, we haven’t tried it, but I’m sure it’s good.” She could feel Drake’s questions becoming more imminent.
“Phew. That’s good to hear. I get riled up about the popcorn.
” Natalie propped her elbows on the counter behind her and leaned back, like she was still at the beach, with imaginary palm trees swaying above her toned arms and calves.
Ellie guessed Natalie didn’t worry about things like sweat, bugs, time-share presentations.
“Well, what is it then? Is it the picture quality?”
Drake was about to burst. “We need to know why your movie theater is playing our lives . And why it only opens for us. And how it looks completely worn down one moment and then minutes later—”
“Okay. Wow.” Natalie nodded.“Lots of questions.” She tapped on her name tag.
“You know what’s great about the beach? Almost no questions.
What was not great about the beach was the lobster.
You’d think they’d do lobster well, being by the water, but it was fishy.
Fishy .” Natalie curved back behind the counter to grab a nibble of the popcorn from the silver pail.
“Uh-huh,” she said, munching on a few kernels.
Her face scrunched up, confirming her earlier assessment.
“Speaking of fishy, you were too nice about this popcorn.” She turned her attention to the ticket boy. “Not your fault, bud.”
“The popcorn is fine!” Ellie and Drake insisted, in unison. Natalie drowned her sorrows with a shot of generic cola. After a sip, she smiled, wandered out from behind the counter and spread her hands like she was finally about to reveal something.
“Let’s chat.”
She waved for them to follow as she strode across the lobby and up the grand steps of the right-side stairwell, leading to a second level.
They were climbing a towering, tiered cake.
“By now, you’ve probably figured out that this movie theater isn’t like other movie theaters you’ve visited,” Natalie acknowledged.
“We only open for one movie every Saturday at midnight, and that is The Story of You .”
“Yeah, we’ve noticed,” Drake snapped. His need for information was insatiable.
“ The Story of You ,” Natalie said, “ is a movie that combines the memories of its audience.”
“Why are we the audience?” Drake asked.
Natalie paused halfway up the stairs and leaned forward to examine the subtext of their relationship, reading them less like an eye chart and more like a crystal ball.
She didn’t seem to find what she was looking for.
“Well, maybe there’s something you need to revisit.
From your past. Something that’s keeping you from moving forward? ”
“No,” Drake said, lightning fast.
Absolutely , Ellie thought. She swallowed and changed the subject to a less loaded one. “What about the tickets?” she asked. “Why are there only ten showings? I mean, watching someone’s memories could be never-ending.”
They were on the move again. At the top of the second level, Natalie peered over the banister.
She seemed proud of the place, more the impassioned tour guide, less the employee.
They were eye level with the chandelier.
Each individual strand of soaring jewelry sparkled.
Ellie joined her in appreciative silence, but Drake refused to settle down. He was a ball of chaos.
Natalie stepped back from the railing. “Have you ever seen Miss Congeniality 2 ?”
“ Armed and Fabulous ,” Drake filled in.
“Right. Well, in Miss Congeniality 2 , you don’t see boring parts of Sandra Bullock’s day, do you?”
“What?” Ellie and Drake asked, in unison, again.
“You see all the high stakes, right? But not once do you see Sandra reading the back of a cereal box to find out the iron content.”
“Umm,” Ellie started.
“When you go in there”—Natalie pointed to the auditorium— “you’re only going to see cinematic parts of your lives. Things worthy of a big screen. For the two of you, that’s ten tickets. For some people it’s longer. Or shorter. Each movie is bound together by a theme, something like—”
“ Babies ,” Ellie filled in. “That’s the one we saw the other night.”
“Exactly,” Natalie replied, moving them to finish their ascent up the stairs.
With a little push, Natalie guided them inside the open doors of the balcony entrance.
They had missed this second level of seating on their first visit.
“This right here is the best spot in the house,” she said.
Ellie agreed. It felt more intimate than the rows down below.
She liked being high up, slightly removed from the action.
“Here’s all you need to know,” Natalie explained.
“You want to watch the movie? You enter the auditorium where we are now. If you want to stop the movie and go to the bathroom, you exit to the lobby.” Natalie pointed to the entrance line that separated the second-level lobby from the inside of the auditorium.
“When you come back in, it’ll pick up where you left off. Make sense?”
“Is it safe?” Drake needed to know.
“Movies are only dangerous when you overthink them,” Natalie said.
“But back to my main question,” Drake pushed. “How does any of this actually work ?” He held his hand up to Natalie like he was about to touch her to see if she was an apparition.
“I’m just the manager.” Natalie’s tone was light. “Look, the magic of cinema is that it’s supposed to leave you with questions,” she said. “Go with it. Enjoy the show.”
By the time Drake turned around to protest—and before either of them could ask her about the beach—Natalie was gone.
As soon as they found their seats, the cartoon hot dogs started to do the Charleston. Once they took a bow, a title appeared over the screen.
TICKET TWO: SCHOOL
Drake looked about ten now, and the little girl crying in the front row of the classroom had a hold on him.
No one else bothered to check on her after the bell rang.
Kids bumped through the rows of desks, their shoes squealing past cardboard dioramas and bad volcano projects. Then, Drake and the girl were alone.
“My mom cries sometimes, too,” he said, pulling at the sleeves of his blue-striped shirt. “Usually about game shows. Seeing people bring home a new dishwasher makes her feel things.” The girl sniffled and rubbed the tears off her porcelain cheeks. “Do you want to eat lunch together, Sarah?”
“Sure,” Sarah said, gathering up an Everest of tissues.
At the cafeteria table farthest from the other kids, Sarah and Drake shared peanut butter sandwiches.
Hers was messy, and Drake’s came inside a brown paper bag decorated by hand-drawn balloons.
He offered Sarah a bite of his off-brand chips, but she waved them away.
“It’s my clothes,” she admitted, prying open the lid on a milk carton.
The straw dove in through the open diamond. She took a tiny sip.
“What is?”
Sarah did a facepalm. “My clothes are why nobody got me a gift for Valentine’s Day.
They’re all hand-me-downs.” She gestured to her enormous overalls.
A faded floral blouse was tucked into the sides of the denim.
Most of the girls in their class had gotten gifts, she told him. There was something wrong with her.
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Drake said. As quickly as he reached out to touch her shoulder, his hand jerked away. The gesture must have seemed too grown-up.