Sammy smirked. “Oh, and the movies you like are so much better? I’ve seen the shelves in your room. Seventies crime movies. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Wes Anderson. Don’t tell me Wes Anderson isn’t super predictable. A young boy struggles to find his place in the world, and the girls are all quirky, and the colors look way more vivid than they do in real life!”
Gael laughed. “Hey, his movies are so fun to watch.”
Sammy crossed her arms defiantly. “So are romantic comedies. There’s nothing wrong with genre movies.”
Gael rolled his eyes. “All right, so some movies I like are a little predictable. But you can’t seriously argue that movies like Serpico and Taxi Driver are basic. They’re epic.”
“Ooh well, I actually like Serpico,” she said, as they waited to cross the street. “But let me do it anyway: Young guy tries to beat all the bad guys, gets in over his head, caves under the pressure, messes up his love life, but still wins in the end!”
Gael ignored her rather sound argument as a car stopped, letting them cross. “None of my friends have even heard of Serpico, much less seen it.”
Sammy shrugged. “My dad is from Brooklyn, and he’s like obsessed with movies that were made in New York during that time—he’s always saying that the seventies were the last time that New York was really New York, even though he was like eight years old then and my grandma talks about how she could never take him to the park because of all the drug needles lying around.”
“Wow,” Gael said. “I can’t imagine growing up in Brooklyn. That’s so cool.”
The two of them cut down the alleyway between Rosemary and Franklin Street, the same alleyway where the flower lady had told Gael, not even two weeks ago, that Anika wasn’t worth it. Gael wanted to laugh out loud at the memory. Who knew that flower sellers were so wise?
“All right,” Gael continued. “Do Eternal Sunshine, then,” he said. “You can’t very well say that’s predictable.”
Sammy bit her lip.
“What?” he asked.
“I haven’t exactly seen it.”
Gael stopped in his tracks right in the middle of the alley. “Are you kidding me?”
Sammy put a hand on her hip. “It’s like anyone who thinks they’re a movie person loves that movie. It can’t be that good. I read the description. It sounds awful.”
“Just watch it,” Gael said.
“Yeah, yeah.”
“I’m serious. I am not moving from this dank alleyway until you promise you’ll watch it.”
She started to walk ahead, but he didn’t budge.
She walked about ten feet before she realized he wasn’t behind her. She turned back to him. “Really?” She put a hand on her hip.
He put one on his, too. Mocking. But the nice kind of mocking. “I told you I’m not moving. If you want to go to the movie by yourself, go right ahead.”
Sammy took one step closer. “Are you seriously holding me hostage with what’s probably an overhyped hipster movie?”
He nodded. “Oh, believe me, I am.”
She paused, assessing him. Then her face broke into a smile. “All right,” she said, lifting one hand in the air. “Promise.”
“Was that so hard?” he asked, running to catch up to her.
The two of them emerged onto Franklin.
“If I watch Eternal Sunshine, you owe me one of my choice,” Sammy argued, as they got into line behind four other people.
“Isn’t this your choice?”
Sammy rolled her eyes. She was good at that. “This is what I picked because it was playing at the right time—and really, I think it’s going to be good. But it’s not, like, the movie I want you to see. Get your hands on When Harry Met Sally. Believe me.”
The people in front of them finished paying and stepped aside.
“Can I help you?” The ticket taker had two eyebrow piercings and a tattoo of the jack of spades peeking from beneath his black T-shirt. He looked particularly macabre behind the cobweb-decorated box office window.
“Two for Goodbye Yesterday,” Gael said. He glanced over at Sammy as the guy handed him the tickets: “I hear it’s a good one.”
a brief peek into mason’s world
While Sammy and Gael were watching the love interest of Goodbye Yesterday make his inevitable grand gesture to get back the girl, Mason was busy working on a grand gesture of his own.
He’d canceled plans with Anika and headed to the craft store for poster board and supplies.
Now he was sitting at the dining room table, a forkful of his mom’s leftover fettuccine alfredo in one hand and a glue stick in the other.
He meticulously researched each element. He drudged through a mire of Wikipedia articles without any of them really sinking in. He, for once all year, actually did the assigned chemistry reading.
He clipped and glued and wrote in fine-tip Sharpie.
He didn’t care how long it took. He didn’t care if he had to stay up all night.
He was determined to do something—anything—to finally make this better.
and the truth finally comes out
It was dark when Gael and Sammy left the theater, the street lamps on, casting a glow upon the kids in line for Coldstone and the students coming out of the T-shirt shop with gear for the weekend’s big football game. They walked lazily, meandering past each brick storefront, past Krispy Kreme and Sutton’s, the old-fashioned pharmacy that sold malted milkshakes and had barely changed since the fifties.