In the fast, funny, and furious story that follows, she takes us out for a night at the movies that turns out to be a lot trickier and more complicated than just buying a ticket.
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Connie Willis
“A charming, lighthearted comedy!”
—Entertainment Daily
The Saturday before Christmas break, Zara came into my dorm room and asked me if I wanted to go to the movies with her and Kett at the Cinedrome.
“What’s playing?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, shrugging. “Lots of stuff,” which meant the point of going wasn’t to see a movie at all. Big surprise.
“No, thanks,” I said and went back to typing my econ paper.
“Oh, come on, Lindsay, it’ll be fun,” she said, flopping down on my bed. “X-Force is playing, and The Twelve Days of Christmas and the reboot of Twilight. The Drome’s got a hundred movies. There must be something you want to see. How about Christmas Caper? Didn’t you want to see that?”
Yes, I thought. At least I had eight months ago when I’d seen the preview. But things had changed since then.
“I can’t,” I said. “I’ve got to study.”
“We’ve all got to study,” Zara said. “But it’s Christmas. The Drome will be all decorated and everybody will be there.”
“Exactly, which means the light rail will be packed and security will take forever.”
“Is this about Jack?”
“Jack?” I said, wondering if I could get away with, “Jack who?”
Better not. This was Zara. I said instead, “Why would my not going to the Drome with you have anything to do with Jack Weaver?”
“It’s … I don’t know,” she stammered, “it’s just that you’ve been so … grim since he left, and you two used to watch a lot of movies together.”
That was an understatement. Jack was the only guy I’d ever met who liked movies as much as I did, and all kinds, not just comic-book-hero and slasher films. He’d loved everything from Bollywood to romcoms like French Kiss to black-and-whites like The Shop Around the Corner and Captain Blood, and we’d gone to dozens of them at the Drome and streamed hundreds more in the semester we’d been together. Correction, semester minus one week.
Zara was still talking. “And you haven’t gone to the Drome once since—”
“Since you talked me into going with you to see Monsoon Gate,” I said, “and then when we got there you wanted to eat and talk to guys, and I never did get to see it.”
“That won’t happen this time. Kett and I promise we’ll go to the movie. Come on, it’ll be good for you. There’ll be tons of guys there. Remember that Sig Tau who said he liked you? Noah? He might be there. Come on. Please come with us. This is our last chance. We won’t be able to go next weekend because of finals, and then we’ll be gone on break.”
And nobody at home would want to see Christmas Caper. If I suggested going to the movies, my sister would insist on us going to A Despicable Me Noel with her kids, and we’d end up spending the whole afternoon in the arcade playing Minion Mash and buying Madagascar stuffed giraffes and Ice Age Icees. By the time I got back to school, Christmas Caper would be gone. And it wasn’t like Jack would magically show up and take me like he’d promised. If I wanted to see it on the big screen, I needed to do it now.
“Okay,” I said. “But I’m not going with you to meet guys. I’m going because I really want to see Christmas Caper. Understood?”
“Yeah, sure,” she said, getting out her phone and punching keys. “I’ll just text Kett and—”
“I mean it,” I said. “You have to promise me you won’t get sidetracked like last time, that we’ll actually go to the movie.”
“I promise,” she said. “No guys and no eating till afterward.”
“And no shopping,” I said. I had missed Monsoon Gate because Zara was trying on Polly Pepper shoes in The Devil Wears Prada boutique. “Promise me.”
Zara sighed. “Fine. I promise. Cross my heart.”
“A sweet romantic comedy with lots of action!”
—popcorn.com
Zara’s promise meant about as much as the ones Jack had made me. Zara began texting the second we arrived, and we weren’t even through the preliminary bag and phone check at the Drome before Kett said, “The NWU guys behind me in line just asked me to ask you if we want to go see the cast of The Bourne Dynasty. They’re holo-skyping over at the Universal booth.”
Zara looked hopefully at me. “We could go to the 12:10 instead of the ten o’clock.”
“Or the 2:20,” Kett said.
“No,” I said.
“Sorry,” Zara said to the guys. “We promised Lindsay we’d go to Christmas Caper with her first,” and they promptly began hitting on the girls behind them.
“I don’t see why we couldn’t have gone to a later showing,” Kett said, pouting, as we went through the explosives check.
“Because after the holo-skyping was over, they’d have wanted to play Skyfall or go eat at Harold and Kumar’s White Castle, and we’d have missed the 2:20 and the 4:30,” I said, and as soon as we made it through the body- and retinal-scans and into the Drome, I headed straight for the tickets kiosks, ignoring the barrage of previews and holograms and ads and elves passing out coupons for free cookies and video games and schedules of today’s autographing sessions.
“I thought you were going to get the tickets online before we left,” Zara said.
“I tried,” I said, “but it’s playing a special limited engagement, so you have to get them here.” I dragged my finger down the list of movies—Ripper 2, X-Force, The House on Zombie Hill, The Queen’s Consort, Switching Gears, Just When You Thought You Were Over Him …
Honestly, you’d think with a hundred movies, they’d put them in alphabetical order. Lethal Rampage, The Twelve Days of Christmas, Texas Chainsaw Massacre—The Musical, A Star-Crossed Season, Back to Back to the Future, Wicked—
Here it was. Christmas Caper. I tapped the tickets button and “3” and swiped my card.
“Unavailable,” the screen said. “Tickets must be purchased at ticket counter,” which meant we had to get in line, one of the worst things about going to the Drome.
You’d think as huge as it is and as many people as it has to cope with, they’d have Disneyverse-style back-and-forth lines, but they only use those to line people up for showings. The tickets lines snaked single file all the way back through the Drome’s football-field-sized lobby, the Hunger Games paintball stadium, the No Reservations food court, Wetaworks’ Last Homely House, the virtual-reality terrace, and half a mile of souvenir shops and boutiques.