Because this was during the time when Josh mostly stayed at my house navigating the tributary with me, I didn’t have the chance to bring it up to Veronica, because I simply didn’t see her. Even if I had, I’m not sure what I could have said that would have worked in his favor, aside from simply saying that he was a nice guy. But I needed to convey the message. It seemed like Alex had taken a liking to me and might continue to sit with me regardless of whether I held up my end of the agreement, but whether or not he realized it, he had done me a tremendous favor, and I wanted to return it.
I told Josh about the situation, but he just made fun of Alex. Part of me understood why Josh found it funny, but I insisted that he talk to Veronica since Alex had done a nice thing for me. He told me that he would tell his sister because I wanted him to, though I doubted that he would. Josh was annoyed that people seemed to be so taken with his sister. I remember him calling her an ugly crow. I never said anything to Josh, but I remember wanting to say, even then, that Veronica was pretty and would one day be beautiful.
I was right.
When I was fourteen, I was a freshman at a high school that was comprised of two distinct populations of students. The majority of the students lived in the district for that school, and they attended it as regular pupils, but there was a small percentage of the student body that commuted to the school to attend a completely separate program with a fundamentally different curriculum that was designed to prepare students for college. I was in this program.
The school was located in a predominantly poor area, and as is often the case for whatever reason, this poverty was coexistent with an underperformance of many of the school’s general population. Some of these students had full-time jobs by their junior year, while others simply elected not to come to class. As a result, the school, as a whole, was a failing one. Because the collective grade of the school was an “F,” its funding from the state had been significantly reduced, which meant that it became more difficult to get the necessary resources to raise the grade of the school. As a last resort out of this true “catch-22,” my program was placed in the school to raise the overall grade without having to address any of the actual reasons why the school was failing to begin with.
I had hoped that the fact that my program attracted kids from all over the city would mean that Josh and I might finally attend the same school again, since it had been ten years since we were in the same class, not to mention the same school. But there was a good deal of stigma attached to attending a program like this, and so I understood why Josh apparently decided to attend his district school. Other kids from my first elementary school, however, had made different choices.
For the most part, this common origin didn’t translate into easier conversation like I had expected it might. But it did allow me to befriend someone from my elementary school that I hadn’t actually known that well when I was a kid, though I remembered him very distinctly.
When I saw him, I recognized him immediately; although his hair was longer than it had been back then, his face hadn’t changed that much, and I could still picture him crying and pouting after our kindergarten teacher scolded him for releasing his balloon too early.
It was Chris.
He had apparently forgotten about that episode, and when I brought it up, he attempted to deny it coolly, but laughed so hard that he completely confirmed it. The memory of him clutching the empty air with his tight fist held just out of the frame of the class photograph catalyzed a fit of laughter in the both of us. I got to know him and his friends Ryan and Adam fairly well. We didn’t have that much in common, in the end, but we had similar senses of humor, and we all liked movies — and that was enough.
As a result of our one common interest, we had taken to frequenting special screenings of old movies at a place we had come to call “The Dirt Theatre.” It was probably nice at some point, but time and neglect had weathered the place severely. I’m not sure if the building was built as a theatre or if it had been repurposed. The floors were level, and rather than rows of fixed seats, there were movable tables and chairs. This latter fact was actually the attempted selling point of the business — their portable furniture was featured in every commercial and advertisement.
The interior layout was so bad that when the theatre was even partially full, there were very few places you could sit and see the whole screen. In some of the theatres, there were actually support columns in the middle of the room that blocked entire portions of the screen if you were unlucky enough to sit anywhere behind them.
Despite all this, the theatre was still open, and I imagine that there were three reasons for this: 1) the tickets and concessions were cheap; 2) they showed a different cult movie on Friday and Saturday twice a month at midnight; and 3) they sold beer to underage kids during the midnight showings. I went for the first two.
The theatre showed movies during the day — ones that had just left real theatres — and as near as I could tell, the day showings accounted for the majority of The Dirt Theatre’s business. But in all the times that I had gone to see a matinee there, not once had a movie ever started on time. In fact, there had been a time when the movie had started twenty minutes late, and the projectionist had actually sped up the film so that the schedule wouldn’t be compromised. Despite all this, the midnight showings always started at exactly midnight. It was a strange business model, but one that must have worked because, as far as I know, the theatre is still open for business.
In my sophomore year of high school, when I was fifteen, Chris, Adam, Ryan, and I went to The Dirt Theatre to see Scanners by David Cronenberg for a dollar. We had arrived with enough time to secure virtually whatever seats we wanted, but we sat in the very back of the theatre. I wanted to sit closer to the front for a good view, but since Ryan had driven us, the choice was his; rather than a good view, we were left with virtually no view at all, but for some reason Adam and I were the only ones who seemed bothered by this.
There were no previews before the midnight feature, so much of the audience would slide in close to show time. Just a few minutes before the movie started, a group of attractive girls walked into the steadily-filling theatre . Whatever conversation my friends and I were having stalled and quickly died away as we watched them make their way to the seats they had chosen. Chris and the other two in our party made unsavory comments while I sat silently and watched the girls continue on their path. Each of the girls was attractive in her own way, but whatever beauty the other girls might have had, it was eclipsed by the girl with the dirty blonde hair — even though I had only caught a glimpse of her profile. As she turned to move her seat, I caught a full view of her face, and it gave me the feeling of butterflies in my stomach. It was Veronica.
I hadn’t seen her in a long time. Josh and I saw progressively less of one another after we snuck out to my old house that night when we were ten, and usually when I would visit him, she’d be out with friends. But here she was. Of all the places she could have been, she was sitting right in front of me at the worst movie theatre in the city. I couldn’t stop looking at her. While everyone stared at the screen, I stared at Veronica — only looking away when the feeling that I was being a creep overcame me, but that feeling would quickly subside, and my eyes would return to her. She really was beautiful, just like I had thought she’d be when I was a kid.