Quite frankly, none of it sounded very obvious to Gael, but it didn’t matter. He liked the way she got so excited about nerdy things.
“Very cool,” he said, as he followed her out of the lecture hall and into the crisp fall evening. The lamplight cast an eerie glow over the UNC lower quad, and he zipped his jacket up all the way to block the wind. It was one of those fall days that feels like winter, that reminded you of what was to come.
Gael wondered where his life would be by the time winter arrived. Would he and Cara be properly in a relationship by then? Would they be sharing nachos and hunting for non-“weird” movies to potentially enjoy together?
A Christian campus group had set up a stand and was handing out hot chocolate, and Sammy ran ahead and grabbed two cups without even needing to ask if Gael wanted some. (I may have urged the organizer to plop her table right outside Murphey Hall.) When she came back, her cheeks were strawberry red and the lidless cups were steaming.
“For you, good sir,” she said, giving a mock curtsy.
“Thanks.” Gael nodded up the path. “Which way are you going?”
Sammy glanced back behind them. “I should probably get back to my dorm, but I’ll walk as far as Franklin with you. I love campus at night.”
So the two of them followed the brick pathway of the lower quad, walking slowly while they waited for the hot chocolate to cool.
“So what’s your favorite horror movie?” she asked.
“Easy,” Gael said. “The Birds.” Not even its recent association with Anika could quell his love for the masterpiece.
“Umm, The Birds totally doesn’t count as horror.”
“Of course it does!” Gael ventured a sip of his hot chocolate, but it was still too hot. “What are you talking about?”
“No one even dies,” Sammy protested. “You can’t have a horror movie without at least one death.”
“The schoolteacher dies,” Gael said.
Sammy rolled her eyes. “Fine, fine. Favorite slasher film, then. You know, where there’s a killer, and the killer is not, like, a pigeon.”
It was actually mainly crows and seagulls in The Birds, but Gael let that one slide. “Psycho.”
Sammy burst out laughing. “You, my friend, are a broken record when it comes to Hitchcock. You need to expand your repertoire.”
They crossed Cameron Avenue and made their way onto the upper quad. It was quieter there, fewer people, less revelry. Just them and the moon. Gael shrugged. “He’s the best.”
“Right,” Sammy said. “So then we should only read, I don’t know, War and Peace over and over instead of other good books because they’re not the best book of all time.”
She had a point, he had to admit.
“Have you even seen Friday the 13th?” Sammy asked.
“That’s the one with Freddy Krueger, right?”
Sammy stopped so short that a bit of hot chocolate sloshed out of her cup. “Wow, for a movie-lover you are totally lacking in the horror department. Friday the 13th is Jason. Freddy Krueger is—”
“Halloween,” he guessed.
“No!” she said with disdain. “A Nightmare on Elm Street! And coincidentally Johnny Depp’s first movie, if you need a reason to watch it besides the fact that it’s fabulous. Michael Myers is Halloween. You seriously need an education.”
And you’re the perfect one to give it to me, he thought.
But then—no—that wouldn’t really work. Once he and Cara were dating, he was certainly not going to be hanging out one-on-one with Sammy all the time. It would be, to borrow Cara’s oft-used term, weird.
Sammy started walking again and took a sip of her drink.
“All right,” Gael said. “I’m not so knowledgeable in what you would call true horror, you know, movies with no plot and a bunch of gore that aren’t half as awesome as the shower scene in Psycho.”
They reached the top of the upper quad. Franklin Street waited for them, with all its shops and restaurants and promise.
Sammy turned to him and smiled. “At least you stick to your principles,” she said.
“Hitchcock forevah.” Gael held up four fingers with his free hand.
They both laughed.
On Franklin, a group of sexy cops and nurses stumbled down the street, likely headed for a pre-Halloween frat party.
“So what are you doing for Halloween?” she asked.
Gael shrugged. “Nothing much. Just going to walk Franklin Street with Cara.”
Sammy’s eyes looked blank for a second, but then she smiled. “You guys are getting serious, huh?”
“I’m not sure about that,” he said with a shrug. “But we’re getting to know each other, I guess.”
Suddenly, he had an idea.
(All right, all right, I may have given him said idea.)
“Did you want to come with us? I mean, since you’re friends with her, too?”