‘Only sort of,’ Elena said.
‘OK. So. If I go to a football party at my brother’s house, I don’t know anything about football, and I’m the nerd. And if I go dancing with my friend who likes to dance, well, I don’t dance, and I don’t like loud music, so I’m the nerd. But now, even if I go see a comic-book movie, the whole world is there—so I’m still the nerd. I would have thought that a Star Wars line would be safe,’ he said, waving his arm around the way Elena had. ‘No way am I going to feel like a social outcast in a Star Wars line. No way am I going to have to sit next to one of the cool girls for four days.’
‘Whoa,’ Elena said. ‘I’m not a cool girl.’
‘Give me a break.’
She held up her index finger. ‘I feel like I need to say that everyone should be welcome in a Star Wars line, socially successful or not, but also, whoa. I am a nerd,’ she said. ‘That’s what this was supposed to be, a chance to talk to people who wouldn’t care that I’m awkward in literally every other situation.’
‘That’s not true,’ he said, rolling his eyes.
‘It is.’
‘You have friends. You have a clique. You walk down the hall like you own the place.’
‘You seem to have mistaken me for the movie Mean Girls,’ Elena said. ‘Also, are you saying you don’t have friends at your school? Have you considered that maybe it’s your silent pouting that drives people away?’
‘I have friends,’ Gabe said. ‘That’s not the point.’
‘So you have friends, but you think I have a clique.’
‘I’m pretty sure of it.’
‘I feel like you’re projecting your clearly problematic girl issues on me,’ she said.
Gabe rolled his eyes again. ‘I thought you said you couldn’t talk to people,’ he said. ‘You don’t seem to have any problems talking to me.’
‘I’m having a lot of problems talking to you.’
‘OK, then, let’s stop.’
Was Gabe really mad? She couldn’t tell.
Was Elena mad? She also couldn’t tell . . .
Yes. Yes, Elena was mad. Who was Gabe to take her inventory like this? He didn’t know her. And he was giving her zero benefit of the doubt; she’d been giving him nothing but benefit of the doubt for thirty-six hours.
‘For what it’s worth,’ she said, without looking at him, ‘I haven’t thought, Whoa, Gabe sure is a nerd, even once since I sat down.’
He didn’t say anything.
Elena squirmed. She wrapped her sleeping bag as tightly as she could and rearranged her legs. ‘Uggggggggch.’
‘I get it,’ he said. ‘You think I’m a jerk.’
‘No. Yes, but no—I have to pee again.’
‘You just went.‘
‘I know, I can’t help it. Sometimes it happens in waves.’
‘Can you wait?’
‘No.’
Gabe sighed and stood up. ’Come on. Let’s go back to the dumpster.’
‘I threw away the cup!’ Elena said.
‘You still have your hot-water bottle—’
‘No.’
Gabe clicked his tongue like he was thinking. Elena started rooting through her backpack. Everything she’d brought was in plastic bags.
‘Aha!’ Gabe said. He reached behind her sleeping bag and pulled out her Starbucks cup. ‘This is perfect,’ he said. ‘It’s already got your name on it.’
They left their sleeping bags and shuffled to the back of the theater again. It was no less humiliating the second time around.
‘You’re definitely getting a nickname,’ Gabe said when she sat down again.
Elena crawled into her sleeping bag, feeling more unbelievably tired than unbelievably uncomfortable, like maybe she’d be able to get some sleep for real now.
‘I was born at the wrong time,’ she said. ‘And in the wrong climate. It should be 1983, and I should be sitting outside Mann’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, California.’
‘They’re camping outside the Chinese Theatre tonight,’ Gabe said. ‘Troy says we’re all one line.’
‘I’m probably last in that one, too,’ Elena said.
She rolled away from Gabe and fell asleep.
Wednesday 16 December 2015
‘The Force awakens!’ Troy shouted.
Elena pulled her hat down over her eyes.
‘Come on, Elena,’ Troy said. ‘We’re hoping you’ll get coffee again.’
‘Because I’m a woman?’
‘No. Because you probably have to pee,’ Gabe said.
Elena did. ‘Fine, tell me what you want.’
Twenty minutes later she was staring at herself in the Starbucks mirror. She was starting to look like someone who slept on the street and washed up in Starbucks bathrooms.
There’d been an actual homeless person sitting outside the Starbucks when Elena walked in, and it made her feel like a big creep to think she was doing this for fun. (It wasn’t even fun!) She told the barista their names were ‘Tarkin’, ‘Veers’ and ‘Ozzel’.
‘Feeling your dark side today, huh?’ Troy said when she handed him his cup.
‘Pretty much,’ Elena said, dropping to the ground. ‘Fear, anger, hate, suffering . . .’
‘T-minus one!’ Troy said. ‘One more day. One more day! I can’t believe we’ve waited ten years for this, though honestly I never thought it would come. Real sequels . . .’
‘What’s your favorite Star Wars movie?’ Gabe asked. Uncharacteristically. Elena looked over at him.
‘You might as well ask me who my favorite child is,’ Troy said.
‘Do you have children?’ Elena asked him.
‘I meant hypothetically,’ Troy said. He exhaled hard. ‘This is tough, this is really tough. I’m going to have to go with The Empire Strikes Back.’
The next half-hour was taken up by Troy justifying his choice. At several points he considered changing his answer, but he kept landing back on Hoth.
‘What about you, Elena?’ Gabe finally asked.
She frowned at him. Suspicious. ‘Empire,’ she said. ‘For all the reasons Troy just said. Plus the kissing. What’s yours?’
‘Episode Six,’ Gabe said.
‘Jedi?’ she asked.
He nodded.
‘Solid choice,’ Troy said. ‘Very solid.’
Gabe didn’t expound; instead he turned back to Elena. ‘So, what’s your least favorite?’
‘Why do I have to go first?’
‘You don’t have to,’ he said.
She held her coffee cup in both hands. ‘No, it’s fine. Jedi. I still love it. But yeah.’
Troy acted like he’d been shot. ‘Jedi?’
Gabe was shocked, too. ‘You think Episode Six is worse than Episode Two? Worse than Anakin and Padmé frolicking among the shaaks?’
‘The shaaks!’ Troy said. ‘Geonosis!’
Those sounded like nonsense words to Elena. She didn’t want to be found out. She bit her lip. ‘I wasn’t really considering the prequels. You said least favorite, not worst.’
‘Ahhhh,’ Troy said, ‘you did say that.’
‘True,’ Gabe said.
They moved on to Troy’s least favorite (III—’the violence just struck me as mindless’) and then to Gabe’s (II—’love on the fields of Naboo’).
And then Troy had to take a call from his girlfriend.
‘So,’ Gabe said to Elena, ‘who’s your favorite character?’
‘What are you doing?’ Elena said.
‘Talking about Star Wars.’
‘Why?’
‘I thought this was what you wanted.’
‘So now you’re trying to give me what I want?’
Gabe sighed. ’Not exactly. Just . . . maybe you were right.’