Chapter 18
Ava
My world had been pretty small since waking up in the limo. I’d been to the hospital, the blue house, the neighborhood, and taken the walk to Big Harry’s Diner.
But that was it. That was all I knew.
Riding in the car with Tucker was a surprise a minute.
The road could go up into the air! It was like we were flying!
I clutched the door as we passed over the city. Entire buildings were below us, and other roads with cars crossed underneath.
“Isn’t this terrifying?” I asked Tucker.
He laughed. “You get used to it.”
I was relieved when we finally went down again with grass on either side of the street.
“There aren’t any roads in the air on Schitt’s Creek!” This couldn’t be normal.
“That show is set in a very tiny town,” he said. “Only cities have elevated roads.”
We turned right, and a huge building loomed in front of us, stretching on and on with parking lots the size of my entire neighborhood around it.
“What is this?”
“Barton Creek Mall,” he said. “They’re showing Superman. Plus, there are restaurants and stores inside. You can see a lot of things at once in a mall.”
Mall. The word was familiar. I had a vague sense of the mall being a good place. A fun spot to go. But there were no malls in Schitt’s Creek either. And I couldn’t picture one.
“Nobody has talked about a mall at the diner.”
“They are a dying breed,” Tucker said. “Northcross Mall is gone. Highland Mall became part of the community college. We only have Barton Creek Mall and Lakeline Mall left.”
“Why are they dying?”
“Online shopping has hurt them. There’s a lot of empty indoor space that has to be maintained in a mall, which makes them expensive. Things like the Domain and the Hill Country Galleria, where the shops are all outside, are more popular.”
I peeled my sweating thigh off the vinyl seat. It was seriously hot outside today, and Tucker’s car hadn’t cooled down much despite the air blowing on us. “Why would anyone want to be outside when they could be inside?”
“That’s a question I often ask myself. I love malls.”
Tucker parked the car, and we walked the long stretch to the big glass doors. People streamed into the building, which had two levels.
We entered next to a long desk with movie posters on screens above it. I spotted Superman, as well as the Naked Gun movie Tucker had mentioned.
“Thirteen dollars to see a movie?” I asked him. “I only get four dollars in tips at a typical table. So, I have to serve four of them just to watch a movie?”
Tucker walked up to a screen and tapped the glass. “Life is expensive.”
“Maybe we should walk around. That doesn’t cost anything, does it?”
He paused. “We can do that. But we can afford a movie.”
“Do you make more money than four dollars a table?”
“We have a budget that shows how much we earn and how much everything costs. We could look at it when we go home.”
“Okay.”
“Should I buy tickets?” he asked.
I stuffed down my concern. Tucker surely knew what we could do. “Yes. Okay.”
But when we went inside and I saw the prices of drinks and popcorn, I said, “No way. I bought popcorn at the store. It was five dollars for six bags. They are charging ten dollars for one!”
Tucker laughed. “Pretty much everyone agrees with you there.”
We walked along a long hall to the door with the number that the man checking our tickets said was ours.
Inside, the air was frigid. After the hot car ride, it was pure bliss.
We walked up a ramp, then I stopped so suddenly that Tucker almost ran into me.
“You okay?” he asked.
But I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was a TV screen, but it filled an entire wall. I turned to him. “How did they make it so big?”
“It’s actually a big surface where they project the image. There were movies like this before there were televisions.”
“Really? They shrunk the screens? Why don’t we have something this big at home?”
He passed me. “Some people do.”
“I want to do that.” I followed him up a few stairs to a row of big, cushioned chairs.
When I sat on one next to him, it was like settling onto my sofa. “This is great!”
“It gets better.” He pushed a button next to my arm, and the back moved down, and my feet moved up!
I gasped. “You could sleep on this!”
“You might if the movie gets boring.”
I pushed the button again and again, moving up and down, until someone sat in the chair next to me and frowned.
I giggled and moved closer to Tucker, not that I could reach him. The chairs had wide arms. “I think I annoyed her,” I whispered.
“It’s all right,” he said.
The screen was flashing images of various businesses, but then suddenly, music came on, so loud I had to cover my ears.
A woman filled the screen. “I’m Maria Menounos,” she said. “And this is Noovie, your pre-movie entertainment.”
Tucker leaned over. “You’ll get used to the sound. It’s startling at first.”
“Why is it so loud?”
“Some people are hard of hearing.”
I tried to parse that phrase. Hard to hear, maybe he meant? But he was right. As Maria kept talking, asking us trivia questions about movies I’d never heard of, I was able to uncover my ears.
Everyone around us had drinks and popcorn, rattling wrappers. The smell was heavenly.
Tucker noticed me staring. “What if we shared? Then it would be like half-price. You love popcorn.”
I did. I was drawn to the boxes in my cabinet. Harry showed me how to microwave them. When we ran out, I replaced them the first time Harry took me to the store.
“Okay,” I said.
“Do you want to wait here? I’ll be right back.”
I glanced around. “Yes. I will be all right.”
He crossed in front of me. I watched the huge screen flash colors and light. Maria was beautiful, and I kept wanting to shift my shoulders like she did to angle my head and chin. The only person I’d seen as beautiful as her was Alexis on Schitt’s Creek.
Tucker returned. “Here you go.” He handed me a bucket of popcorn and set a drink in a holder between us.
“Oh, that’s a lot of popcorn!” The smell of the butter and salt made me want to shove my face into the kernels.
“Wait until you try it. There’s no popcorn like movie popcorn.”
I picked up a few pieces and popped them into my mouth.
Oh. Oh! Tucker was right. The flavor was so much more intense. More salt. More butter. I wanted to scoop up huge handfuls.
“Good, right?” he said.
“We should have done this before!” I said.
He smiled. “We can do it whenever we like.”
“You mean whenever we can pay for it.”
“That, too.”
I angled the bucket toward him to share. Maria said goodbye until next time, and my whole body rumbled as the noise levels lifted with a scene of a lone woman in a beautiful pink dress with pale blonde hair.
I sat up, unable to look away. I had never felt like this before, like everything inside me was bursting to get out.
And then she started singing. And a woman with a green face and a pointy hat flew down on a broom.
They sang to each other, and I forgot about the popcorn, the seat that moved, and Tucker beside me. I started crying. Everything was so beautiful and sad and wonderful and sharp.
I couldn’t contain everything I felt. My chest was so full. When finally, the screen went black with the words, “Coming in November,” I turned to Tucker. “What just happened?”
“It’s a powerful movie. We’ll watch the first one and then come back in November for the second.”
I reached out to squeeze my hand, and I clutched it like the one thing that I knew was familiar.
Other scenes came on, and some of them were bright or intense. One made everyone laugh, but I couldn’t follow it. Everything happened too fast.
But then there was another pause, and a strange stillness came over the theater, like everyone was finally paying attention.
Tucker leaned over. “Superman is starting.”
I pushed the button to lift my feet a little more.
I was full of popcorn, and there was so much left.
I balanced it on my belly. It didn’t matter anymore if Superman was a good movie or not.
I had already experienced what it was like to live another life and feel things like other people, just from the short pieces I’d watched.
I grabbed hold of Tucker’s hand in case the feelings got that strong again.
I loved this entire experience so far, even the parts I didn’t quite understand. No matter what else we did today, this was really, really good.