Hanging on the posts at the head of Mitch’s bed are his mum garters from freshman and sophomore year homecoming. Mums are one of those things that are so specifically southern that I both love and hate them. The best mums are homemade with giant artificial chrysanthemums on cardboard backing with huge streams of ribbon hanging from them. Since they’re for homecoming, they’re made in school colors and the ribbons usually have glitter letters that spell out different things, like you and your boyfriend’s names or your school mascot. It used to be that girls would pin them to their shirts, but, like most things in Texas, they’ve only gotten bigger. Now, mums are so heavy that they have to be worn around your neck. And guys—especially football players like Mitch—wear miniature versions of garters around their arms. It’s all pretty ridiculous, but in a Dolly kind of way.
On the walls of his room are a few random video game posters, but one in particular sticks out to me. A girl’s torso takes up most of the poster. She holds a machine gun with a chaos of zombies behind her. Taped over whatever she might be wearing is a knee-length dress made out of a paper grocery bag. I point to the poster. “What happened there?”
“Ugh, my mom. It’s my favorite game—or at least it was before the sequel came out—and she always hated the poster.” He lifts the paper bag dress to reveal a low cut crop top and olive green shorts so tiny they could be underwear. “She wasn’t too crazy over me having a half-naked girl in my room. Even if she was 2D. This was her compromise. Every time I take it down, she cuts a new dress.”
“Why don’t you just take the poster down?”
He sits on the edge of his bed. “I don’t know. I like the game. I don’t really care about the naked girl.”
“Okay?”
He waves his hands, like he’s trying to erase what he said. “Not that I don’t like naked girls. I mean, I don’t go looking for naked girls. I”—he takes a deep breath—“I meant that I play the game because she’s a badass. Not because you can see her ass cheeks.” He whispers those last two words.
“It’s okay,” I whisper back. I pull out his desk chair and sit down because it’s too weird to sit on a boy’s bed.
“So you want to hang out here and watch a movie or something? We could go out, too. I figured keep it low-key?”
“A movie sounds good.”
“Okay. Cool. We can watch in here on my laptop. Or in the living room.”
“In here is fine. Or the living room.”
“We can sit on my bed or I could sit on the floor and you could sit on—”
I sit down next to him on his bed. “Calm down.” I’m so used to being the spastic one, the one who needs to take a deep breath. It’s sort of a relief to not feel like I could fall off a cliff at any moment. “This is fine. It’s not like sitting on your bed is going to get me pregnant.”
“You should tell my mom that.”
I laugh. “Well, at least we left the door open for the Holy Ghost.”
He dims his lights and pulls out his laptop, which he sets up on a pile of pillows in front of us. “So if you want, they made a movie out of that video game or we could rent something online.”
“I kinda want to see what this zombie movie is all about.”
We settle back as the glow of the laptop washes over us. The movie is just as the video game poster advertised except the main character doesn’t wear a brown-bag dress. I can tell that Mitch has seen this thing hundreds of times. His lips move with the actors as they say his favorite lines of dialogue. He laughs a few beats before every joke and grimaces before every scary part and, seeing as I’ve never much liked scary movies, I can appreciate the warning.
I almost miss most of the ending, because instead of the movie, my eyes focus in on Mitch’s hand as it inches toward mine.
I should pull my hand away.
His pinkie brushes mine.
Then the laptop explodes.
Well, actually the hospital full of zombies in the movie explodes, but since I’m not paying attention, it scares me so much that I scream.
“What in baby Jesus’s name are you subjecting that girl to?” hollers Mitch’s mom.
“Final Death 3!” yells Mitch.
“I’m fine, ma’am!” I call back.
The credits roll, sending his room into a near pitch-dark. “You hungry?” he asks.
I am starving. “I could eat.”
“There’s that taco stand down on Dawson. We could walk and hang out for a little while before you go home.”
I follow Mitch to the kitchen where his mom is tallying up receipts on one of those old calculators with the receipt paper. “You two hungry?”