It wasn’t the best job in the world, but it certainly wasn’t the worst, and she got to see all the movies for free. She’d proved herself to be so reliable that she’d been given a set of keys, and the added responsibility of locking up every Monday night. She took that responsibility very seriously.
Monday nights were usually pretty dead, anyway. They were closed on Tuesday, and Wednesday was when they changed the feature, so by Monday night, pretty much everyone already had the current film.
Besides, who goes to the movies on Monday night?
This past week they’d been running this French animated film called Fantastic Planet, which she had to admit she didn’t really understand. Clearly she wasn’t the only one, since it hadn’t been very popular, and this last late show had been nearly empty—except for a young couple who were way more into each other than the movie. And that same creepy guy with the glasses who’d come in alone every Monday night for the past month.
For some reason, that guy had left early, twenty minutes before the end of the movie, and Miranda wasn’t sorry to see him go. She always had the feeling that he was watching her when she wasn’t looking.
As she reached into her purse to get the keys to lock up the theater, her fingers brushed against a bottle of Miss Clairol Born Blonde hair bleach. She’d been carrying it in her purse for a full week now, trying to get up the nerve to use it. On her way through the lobby, she paused to look at her own reflection in the mirror behind the candy counter.
Skinny, no kind of body at all beneath her polyester uniform. Freckles. Stick-straight brown hair. Such a blah-bland Breck girl. No wonder Matt barely even noticed that she existed.
Matt MacIntyre was the shift manager. He was twenty-five, and knew every single movie ever made. He had a bleach-blond shag haircut and an earring in one ear. He liked Ziggy Stardust and the New York Dolls, and made all his own clothes, or bought them from thrift stores and ripped them up, embellished them, and remade them so they looked way cooler than anything you could buy in the trendy boutiques.
She once complimented him on a purple scarf he was wearing and he’d smiled and wrapped it around her neck, telling her she could have it, that it matched her “Liz Taylor eyes.” That had been the best day of her entire life.
She wore that scarf every single day, and when it stopped smelling like him, she’d gone over to the Liberty House department store at Union Square and secretly doused it with the spicy cologne he wore—Halston Z-14 for Men.
When she went home, she wrapped that fragrant scarf around her face and listened to “Bad Girl” by the New York Dolls, over and over again, imagining that she was that bad girl in the song. The kind of girl that guys would beg to be with. A tough, sassy blonde, with glitter eye shadow and platform shoes, and attitude to spare.
The kind of girl that Matt would notice.
But every time she’d take that bottle of bleach out of her purse and set it on the edge of the sink, she’d chicken out at the last minute. What if it didn’t come out right? What if she ended up looking stupid, like Rita Bianchini back in eight grade, who’d tried to dye her black hair blond and turned it a terrible frizzy orange. Rita had to wear a hat for the whole rest of the year, and everyone teased her mercilessly about it. Miranda couldn’t take that kind of humiliation.
As she left the theater, walking alone down 16th Street toward Hoff, she decided that it was time to take the plunge. No more girly indecisiveness. She would bleach her hair that night, as soon as she got home. Of course, her mom would flip out, but so what? She was a grown woman now, just turned eighteen and ready to move out of her parents’ suburban house and find her own apartment in the city.
It was time for her to be her own person. She’d been a good girl for way too long.
Miranda was ready to be bad.
* * *
The ride back was a nightmare.
Nina drove like a maniac, flooring it the whole way, and Walter sat rigid in his seat, afraid at every second that she would wreck the car, or kill somebody, or attract the attention of the police. And he didn’t understand why she was trying. There was no way they were going to make it. It was too far, and there wasn’t nearly enough time.
Then, as they neared the city and he checked his watch, the nightmare got worse, because somehow she had managed it. She had driven so fast that the theater was within reach. As they came off the Golden Gate Bridge and started south into the steep hills of Divisadero Street they still had thirty minutes to spare.
That’s when they hit some kind of traffic jam that had everything snarled up for as far as they could see. Walter’s fingers dug into the seat as they crawled through the Fillmore district. Nina leapt at gaps, jerking the big car forward one second, then stomping on the brakes the next. But there was no point. There was nowhere to go.
Ten minutes later, they were only at Haight Street. And a few blocks later, when they turned left on 16 th, it got even worse, as a large multi-car accident was revealed at the intersection with Market.
He checked his watch as they inched past the pile-up and headed into the Mission District. Two minutes. Maybe the killer would be late. Maybe the girl wouldn’t show up. Maybe they would make all the lights and get there on time.
But four minutes later the bright marquee of the Roxie came into view. Nina pulled up in front and Walter jumped out of the back seat before the car had come to a complete stop, stumbling and catching himself at the last minute as he ran to the glass doors.
Locked.
He banged on the door, cupping his hands to peer inside, but he didn’t see anyone.
“Hello?” he called. “Hello!”
Nothing. No response. They must have just missed her.
Walter ran back to the car and dove into the back seat, rifling through the file for his translation of that last page of the Zodiac’s notebook.
“...she parks her car on Hoff Street,” Walter read out loud. “Where the hell is Hoff Street?”
“There,” Nina said, pointing through the windshield and stomping on the gas, cutting off a honking Dodge Dart. “Just a few blocks down.”
“For God’s sake,” Walter said. “Hurry.”
* * *
When Miranda turned down Hoff, a sudden cold wind whipped the ends of Matt’s purple scarf up into her face. She clutched it tighter around her neck and quickened her step, making a beeline for the parking lot where she kept the hated Honda CVCC she’d received for her birthday, instead of the cute Beetle she’d wanted.
“So much more practical,” her father had said. “And better gas mileage. Next time OPEC pulls another oil embargo, you’ll thank me.”
Which pretty much summed up the entire 18 years of her life so far. Practical. Carefully thought out in advance. She was so ready to break out of that expectation. To be extravagant and wild. To hell with oil embargos.
She had her hand half raised to wave at Dio, the friendly parking lot attendant, but when she looked over at the little booth where he always sat, she was surprised to see that it was empty, the door left hanging open. Maybe he’d gone to the bathroom or something, but it seemed kind of weird that he would just leave the door open like that.
She took a step closer, frowning.
Inside the booth, Dio’s little portable heater was running at the foot of the stool he sat on. His transistor radio played the crackly religious station he always listened to. There was a half-eaten Zagnut bar sitting on top of the radio. A faded snapshot of Dio’s five daughters had fallen off the shelf and landed against the grate of the little heater, dangerously close to the glowing coils within.