The high-schoolers were trying to decide which restaurant to go to. “While you make up your minds, I’m going to go get a funnel cake,” I said to the nearest of them, who didn’t even look up from her smartphone, and went to check the time of the next showing, which should be at 6:40.
It wasn’t. It was at seven thirty, and the one after that was at ten. I stared at the board for a long minute, contemplating what that meant, and then went to try to find the end of the ticket line.
It was ten times longer than it had been when we’d first arrived, snaking all the way back to the Death Star Diner, and it was barely moving. It was a good thing I wasn’t trying to actually get in. I wouldn’t make it even halfway to the front before the last light-rail train home.
I wondered how long I needed to stand here. Jack had said it wasn’t safe to use his phone, but he might have been able to borrow someone else’s and send me a text from it, so I turned on my phone and looked at my messages.
There weren’t any from him, but there were four from Zara, all of them asking, “Where r u?” except the last one, which said, “Assume ur not ansring means u finally got in 2 Xmas Cpr. How was it?”
I needed to text her back, but not till I was far enough along the line that it wouldn’t look like I’d just gotten into it. I didn’t want her wondering what I’d been doing all this time—she was way too quick to draw connections to Jack. So I switched off my phone and then stood there, periodically inching forward, and thinking about Zara’s text. “How was it?” she’d asked.
Great, I thought, and remembered those boys complaining about Lethal Rampage and my thinking I’d had a much better time at the movies than they had.
And how did I know that wasn’t what I’d just experienced—an afternoon at the movies? That I hadn’t just been participating in a romantic spy adventure concocted by Jack, who knew how much I wanted to believe he’d had a good reason for going off without saying a word to me and who’d heard me complain countless times about going to a movie with Zara and Kett and ending up not getting to see it?
There could have been lots of reasons that that passage was there. It could’ve been a shortcut between theaters for the projectionist, or some sort of required evacuation route in case of fire that Jack had appropriated for his own private Tunnel of Love. He could have bribed the usher to tell me I couldn’t get in and to put Christmas Caper up on Theater 28’s marquee after the audience for Make Way for Ducklings was inside. And the other stuff—the vomit and the spilled gingerbread latte and Santa—could all have been coincidences, and Jack had simply made them sound like a conspiracy.
Don’t be ridiculous, I told myself. Do you honestly think he’d go to that much trouble just to get you into bed?
Of course he would. Look how much trouble he went to just to play a practical joke on the dean. And the whole thing had been just like the plot of How to Steal a Million or I Love Trouble, complete with spies, slapstick, a sparring couple forced together into a small confined space, and a hero who was lying to the heroine.
And believing it was a scam made a lot more sense than believing that some vast Hollywood conspiracy lay behind this decorated-for-Christmas Cinedrome.
There isn’t any conspiracy, I thought. You’ve been had, that’s all. Again. Christmas Caper is showing right now in Theater 56 or 79 or 100. And Jack is off plotting some other practical joke—or the seduction of some other gullible girl—while I stand here in this stupid line trying to protect him from a danger that never existed.
I looked back at the end of the line, which I was only a dozen people away from. I still couldn’t text Zara, but for a completely different reason now—she couldn’t ever find out what an idiot I’d been.
So I continued to stand there, thinking about how easy it would have been for Jack to bribe somebody on the staff to put a NO TICKETS AVAILABLE sign on the schedule board, just like he’d bribed some farmer to lend him those geese. And to pay somebody to block me on my way across the lobby. And thinking how, when I found Christmas Caper was sold-out, I should just have gone to see A Star-Crossed Season instead.
Three Hanover freshmen leaned over the barrier to talk to the girls ahead of me in line. “What are you going to?” one of them asked.
“We haven’t decided,” one of the girls said. “We were thinking maybe Saw 7. Or A Star-Crossed Season.”
“Don’t!” the trio shouted, and the middle one said, “We just saw it. It was beyond boring!”
“Well worth the trip!”
—comingsoon.com
I waited another ten minutes, during which I moved forward about a foot and then called Zara.
“Where have you been?” she asked. “I’ve been texting and texting you.”
“You have?” I said. “I haven’t gotten them. I think there’s something wrong with my phone.”
“So where are you now?”
“Where do you think? In line.”
“In line?” she said. “You mean you still haven’t seen Christmas Card?”
“Caper,” I corrected her. “No, not yet. All three afternoon showings sold out before I got to the front of the line, so I’m trying to get a ticket to the seven o’clock.”
“Where are you exactly?” she asked.
I told her.
“I’ll be right there,” she said, which I doubted. It would take her at least twenty minutes to disentangle herself and Kett from the guys, and then on the way here they’d be delayed by the dress Zoe Deschanel wore in Son of Elf or some other guys, and by that time I’d hopefully be far enough forward in the line to make it look like I’d been in line since the 12:10.
But she showed up almost immediately and alone. “This is all the farther you’ve gotten?” she said. “What happened to Jack?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “Where’s Kett?”
Zara rolled her eyes. “She texted Noah and they went off to the Dirty Dancing Club. Did he tell you where he’s been all these months?”
“Who? Noah?”
“Very funny,” Zara said. “No. Jack.”
“No. In jail, probably.”
“It’s too bad,” Zara said, shaking her head sadly. “I was hoping you might get back together. I mean, I know he’s kind of a …”
Scoundrel, I thought.
“… wanker,” Zara said. “But he’s so scorching!”
That he is, I thought. “What are you going to do now?” I asked her, to change the subject.
“I don’t know,” she said, sighing. “This trip’s been a complete bust. I didn’t meet anybody even lukewarm, and I couldn’t find anything for my family for Christmas. I suppose I should go over to the Pretty Woman store and see if they have anything my mom would like, but I think maybe I’ll just go see Christmas Caper with you. When did you say the next showing was?”
“Seven.”
She checked the time on her phone. “It’s already 6:30,” she said, looking at her phone and then up at the line ahead of us. “We’ll never make it.”
“When’s the showing after that?” I asked her, but before she could look it up, Kett came up, looking annoyed.
“What happened to Noah?” Zara asked her.