Chapter 15
E llie and Drake should’ve left the cinema as soon as her next memory started to play.
If there were ever a moment to call it a night early, this was it.
But Ellie’s logic flew out the window as she connected with this younger version of herself on-screen.
She was confident, carefree, and so very in shape.
It was hard to let this Ellie slip away.
By the time Drake stood and tilted his head toward the exit, it was too late.
“Ellie?” Drake looped around her in circles by the snack bar. She was the nucleus of his panic. “I think we should talk about this.”
For once, Ellie leaned on the rules. She held her hands up in protest underneath the behemoth chandelier. “But we can’t.”
Drake gnawed on the edge of his thumbnail. Ellie could sense him rummaging for an excuse. “I guess we can’t talk about it,” he considered, then snapped his fingers in the air with an aha . “Although, technically, we’re still in the theater. Right?”
Ellie sighed. If they were going to have this discussion, they needed a private location without the ticket boy or Natalie as their audience.
Then, she remembered the empty ladies’ lounge and pulled him toward the small carpeted staircase leading to the basement.
“I think I might throw up,” Drake said as his hand planted a firm grip on the cold brass railing.
“Great,” Ellie said. “That’s exactly the reaction I was hoping for.”
The ladies’ lounge defied the concept of a modern restroom.
Rosebuds burst from light pink wallpaper that wrapped around a tufted mahogany chaise rising from the middle of the plush mauve carpet.
Gold vines circled six vanity mirrors paired with round accent stools below, and a slip-shade chandelier kept watch over it all.
In the attached room where the actual toilets were, each stall door was carved from marble.
“Way nicer than the men’s room,” Drake observed. Ellie guided him over to the chaise. The color had drained from his cheeks.
“Are you really going to throw up?” She rubbed his back.
“No,” Drake said. “I … maybe.”
It was just sex , Ellie thought. If his reaction was this extreme for something so harmless, how could he possibly handle what was next?
A dripping faucet in the attached toilet room stole her focus.
She got up and turned it off, then came back to admire herself in all the vanity mirrors.
It was a relief to find that she still had it.
Maybe she didn’t have it in the way she’d had it at eighteen, but she looked good.
“Who was that guy?” Drake blurted. “In the movie.”
Ellie sat down again. Drake was jealous of the landlord she’d had a total of three interactions with—a landlord who was illequipped in more ways than one.
She’d lived in a truly awful apartment her freshman year of college.
Her mom had eventually insisted she move to the campus dorms where she could be around less ominous influences.
“He was the landlord,” Ellie said. “He was there to fix the dishwasher.”
“So, he fixed the dishwasher, and then—”
“Oh, no. He didn’t fix it. Terrible landlord.”
Drake winced. The thought of an appliance remaining broken that could be easily fixed was too much for him to handle.
“Why that guy?” he asked. It was hard to believe the “why” part was up for debate.
The landlord was cut straight from an early 2000s teen movie with gym-rat muscles and an unfortunate puka-shell necklace.
“That thing you were doing on the bed looked like a health hazard.”
“I used to love health hazards.” Ellie glanced up to see the two of them there on the chaise.
There were so many mirrors, and in all of them, his judgment flashed back at her.
Not everyone was as lucky as Drake—meeting a perfect person with their own store and a whimsical cat named Pasta.
Pasta . Ellie had repeated the name in her head since she’d heard it.
“She came with the name when I adopted her,” Melinda had said in the memory.
Drake used the same line the night when he first described Nancy.
Was that a coincidence, or was he nodding to something from his past?
The door of the ladies’ lounge swung open.
Natalie cleared her throat to make herself known as she moved through the sitting area and ducked into a stall.
Once Ellie heard the lock slide closed, she motioned Drake toward the door.
The two of them scooted out of the room and back to the stairwell that ran up to the main lobby.
“Why are you freaking out?” Ellie asked at the bottom of the stairs.
“This guy must have meant something to you.”
“Hilarious,” she said, without humor.
“Well, if he didn’t mean something, then why are we seeing it?”
Drake had a point. Ellie had wondered the same thing herself. She’d almost mourned that the cinema skipped over so many childhood and teenage memories she assumed would be in the cut. Already, it had jumped to her as a young adult. What was it trying to tell them?
And then, she remembered the robbery. They had left the auditorium before the robbery played out.
Ellie shared how in the moments that followed their escapade, someone walked into the apartment and stole her broken television set.
After hearing the noise, the landlord went into the living room in his underwear, holding a hanger—the only sharp object in the bedroom—to find that both the robber and the television were gone.
“It was scary at the time, but in retrospect, it’s really funny,” Ellie said.
She felt herself starting to laugh, just as she had when she’d told Jen the story a few hangouts into their friendship.
They had laughed so hard, in fact, that the students in the dorm below them started to bang on the ceiling.
“I don’t get why that’s funny,” Drake said.
“Because the television was broken,” Ellie explained. “It’s funny because of the bad luck for the robber. Of all the things they could have taken. Sort of a tragicomedy.”
“You were robbed, Ellie. You didn’t lock your doors?” Drake had flipped the switch from jealousy to concern. She rolled her eyes.
“No, I didn’t lock the doors. Nobody locked the doors back then.”
“Back … That’s not true.” Drake climbed up and down the stairs, collecting his thoughts with each one. “You were being irresponsible.”
Ellie followed him halfway up. She had earned her chance to point fingers. “Speaking of relationships,” she said, “what happens next with the two of you?”
Drake stopped moving. “What?”
“Melinda,” Ellie said. “How far does this go? She’s been in two memories now. I mean, I never even saw you as the mascot. I didn’t see your college years. I’ve barely seen your parents. Melinda is the main plotline. She must be pretty important, right?”
“I don’t want to …” His mood shifted at the mention of Melinda. Ellie had caught him on a tightrope. It was her turn to feel sick. “Look, Ellie, you were right.”
“What was I right about?”
“The rules. We should stick to the rules.”
“Got it. So, we’re going to stick to the rules when it’s convenient for you.”
“It’s not like that.”
“That’s what it sounds like.”
Natalie bounded back up the stairs and pretended to have her blinders on, which made her presence much more apparent. Her signature gold suit was hard to miss.
“Hey, I didn’t mean to judge you,” Drake said.
He stepped down to face Ellie in a silent compromise, his hands soft on her arms. “I was worried. I was worried about you, okay? Worried about the guy you chose, worried about the locks.” He was calming down.
“I wanted to protect you in that moment, and I couldn’t. ”
Ellie still wanted to fight. It was her turn to sink her teeth in and dissect Drake’s life. He felt it was acceptable to critique her experiences but wouldn’t even give her answers about his own.
“Let’s get out of here,” Drake said. “Can we just go? Leave this behind like we’re supposed to? I’m sorry I got weird.”
Ellie nodded, but she wasn’t agreeing, exactly.
Her mind was already elsewhere. She was making plans to do research when they got home.
She needed to see what had silenced him and made him change his tune—why he was acting so strangely.
When Drake went to bed later that night, what she was looking for was so easy to pull up.
Soon, the address to My Mother’s Shop appeared on her glowing laptop screen.