“Moot point now,” I said. “Keep it.”
Dani nodded, but her smile faded. “It’s sad that all this history can be gone just like that.” And I knew she didn’t mean the Cinegore.
Six months before Dani had landed in my homeroom, her mom and her little brother had been flying to a family wedding in Mexico City. The weather had been shitty, thunderstorms up and down the Gulf. They’d just cleared Corpus Christi when lightning struck an engine. The plane had floated, powerless, and then plunged. The wreckage had been scattered for a mile along the pretty spring break beaches of South Padre. Up in the dunes, somebody found the wedding present Dani’s mom had been carrying. It had washed ashore, perfectly intact.
I rifled through the dusty cardboard box for a pair of black-framed 3-D glasses. “So, um, apparently? These help you see things that are invisible otherwise,” I said, hoping to bring her back from the brink of sad. “Supposedly, there’s a special effect where it looks like demons are coming out through the screen—that’s how the whole gateway to hell rumor got started. The effect was a huge deal. And nobody knows how they did it.”
“Really?” Dani spun a pair of glasses around by the temple piece. “Should we give DemonVision a try?”
“On three,” I said. “One.”
“Two.”
“Three,” we said, and slid them on.
On-screen, it was just an early 1960s take on an old mansion. Lots of wood paneling, framed oil paintings, and taxidermied animal heads. The James Dean–like Jimmy Reynolds leaned against a fireplace in full angst-rebellious mode, even though he wore an early nineteenth-century suit with a cravat. Fact: Nobody looks badass in a cravat. Beautiful Natalia Marcova lounged on a divan, her raven mane curled over the shoulders of her ball gown. Beside her, square-jawed Alistair Findlay-Cushing gulped what I supposed was a manly Scotch from a crystal tumbler and delivered his lines in a world-weary Mid-Atlantic accent: “I’ve heard the rumors about your family. Madness is in the blood. You’re originally from the Carpathian Mountains, if I’m not mistaken.”
Lightning flashed, revealing waxwork-like creatures with hideous mouths peering in through the mansion’s windows. And then, suddenly, Jimmy Reynolds raced toward the screen in a panic: “Please, get out while you can! Take off your glasses and leave this theater at once. You’re in great danger!”
“Whoa. Super meta,” Dani muttered.
“Yeah. Very Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” My shoulder touched hers, and I wanted there to be a word for the current that shot up my arm, a word like ShoulderSplosion! or AlmostSex.
“Please, you must believe me,” Jimmy Reynolds continued. “They’ll come for you, soon. I’ve seen it before. You won’t survive. Turn it off now, I beg you! That’s the only way!”
Natalia Marcova glanced nervously toward the audience and back to Jimmy Reynolds. “Now, Thomas, what are you saying? You’re not yourself.”
“Man, this is so-o-o bad. Still. It’s oddly … compelling,” Dani said, her words a bit dreamy.
“I love how inventive they were with the special effects back then, you know? All those models, double exposures, split screens, and stop-motion. They used foam latex to make the outfit for Creature from the Black Lagoon. And all those stabbing sounds? That’s just guys dropping fruits and letting them splat.”
“Yeah? Cool,” Dani said.
For the first time ever, I didn’t care about the movie. I just wanted to be with Dani, talking about stupid shit that eventually became meaningful shit, and then, if everything went well, we could stay up all night and watch dawn creep over the flat grassland, turning everything a golden pink as we shared our first kiss.
Sweat slickened my palms, and I rubbed them against my jeans. “Hey, um, are you, like, sticking around this summer?”
Dani was still engrossed in the movie, so I tapped her arm.
“Huh? Oh. Sorry.” She turned to me. The oversize 3-D glasses gave her a mutant bug creature quality. I dug it. “Yeah. Yeah, I am. I’ve got a job nannying for the Cooper twins. They’re total booger-eating firestarters. But the money’s decent.”
Lame dialogue drifted up from inside the theater: “You know this old house has its secrets…” “Why are we continuing this pantomime? We know how it ends. I want out of my contract. I want to leave!” “Sh-h-h, Jimmy. He’ll hear you.”
“Well, this summer, when you’re not, like, tending to the children of the damned…” It was like I was trying to swallow an air egg. “I was just wondering if maybe you’d want…”
The door to the projection room swung open and Dave burst in, cradling three giant Cokes and several boxes of no doubt stolen candy. “Refreshments!”
“Awesome.” Dani removed her glasses. She pocketed a box of Milk Duds, then took a sweating paper cup from Dave and punched a straw through its plastic top.
“Yeah. Thanks. Great timing,” I snarked, grabbing my Coke.
Dave dropped onto the stool by the projector and slipped Dani’s abandoned glasses over his eyes. “Whoa. You guys are green. No, red! Green and red. Why, you’re three-dimensional!”
Dani snorted. “At least some of us are.”
“Harsh, García!” Dave pushed the big black frames up on the top of his head like a starlet. “You know what? Alastair Findlay-Cushing is kinda hot. I’d do him.”
“Your list of men you’d do isn’t exactly discriminating. You have a crush on Coach Pelson,” I said.
“Coach Pelson is a hottie. In a former-wrestler-going-to-seed kind of way. I’ll bet he talks dirty.”
“A-a-ah, stop!” Dani laughed. “You are ruining my beautiful, sepia-toned memories of gym class.”
That was the thing about Dave—everybody liked him. Even his obnoxiousness had a certain charm to it, like the time he’d scarfed down my red Jell-O in the cafeteria and pretended to “vomit Ebola” on a screaming Lyla Sparks, who was mean-girling Jennifer Trujillo for having a “starter mustache, just like a baby lesbo.” Junior year, when Dave had come out, he’d actually gotten a bump in popularity. He’d been my best friend since seventh-grade science class. In two months, he’d leave for Stanford, and I wasn’t sure how I’d cope with the loss of him.
Downstairs, the movie continued, unconcerned with my fate: “It’s the cloven foot—the calling card of the one who must not be named. Lucifer himself.”
“Dude, he just said he should not be named, and then he’s all, ‘Oh, yeah, let me just say Lucifer right now.’ Hey. You know about old Alastair, don’t you?” His thick eyebrows drawbridged up and down. Dave was practically a walking Google search of salacious Hollywood gossip. “Total Team Dorothy. He tried to kill himself once.”
I raised my soda in toast. “That’s a big party upper. Thanks, Dave.”
“Slow your roll, holmes. He didn’t try to kill himself in some tired, tragic gay-hatred moment. No. Before his attempt, Alastair begged a priest to perform an exorcism and cleanse his soul. He claimed that he’d made a deal with the devil for fame, and he hadn’t had a moment’s peace since. He claimed that I Walk This Earth wasn’t a movie; it was a living thing that demanded souls and a willing sacrifice. Don’t you think it’s weird that the only two times they showed the movie, the theaters burned down?”
“Yeah. That’s pretty freaky, all right,” Dani said, dangling Cthulhu Shortcake by its string. “But this is not a night for the tragedies of the past. This is about avoiding the tragedies of the future.” She looked me right in the eyes. It made me want to be a better man. “The old gods demand an answer to last week’s burning question.”