Double Feature

Pops said yes to the truck without asking why.

Which meant Noelle got the passenger seat and Chandler and I were in the back, which was fine. That was just how it sorted. It had nothing to do with anything.

The drive-in was twenty minutes outside town, past the point where the streetlights gave up and the sky opened the way it only did when you got far enough from everything. Emory drove himself and Maekynzie and Tinsley in his mom’s Subaru and somehow beat us there, which he credited to superior navigation and which Maekynzie credited to two yellow lights.

The lot was already half-full when we pulled in, cars and trucks nosed up to the low speaker poles, lawn chairs and blankets arranged in beds and on hoods. It smelled like popcorn and cut grass and gasoline and that outdoor-night smell that didn’t have a name but meant summer was still trying. Two kids in front of us were arguing about which spot had the best angle on the screen. An older couple had a full folding table set up beside their SUV, actual plates and everything, which I appreciated as a commitment to the bit.

Stetson pulled into a spot in the middle row. Good angle, not too close, close enough to borrow sound from the next speaker pole over if the clip didn’t hold. He’d been here enough times to know all of that without thinking about it.

Chandler spread the blankets in the truck bed before anyone else had their shoes on the asphalt. He did it without making it a project, just shook them out and layered them and settled back against the wheel well like that was where he always sat, which it was. I climbed up and sat beside him and pulled the blanket over my legs and didn’t make anything of the fact that the leg was already aching.

Emory had the camp chairs out of the Subaru before Maekynzie finished reading the concession stand menu out loud, which she was doing in the voice of someone announcing a royal banquet.

“Loaded nachos. Funnel cake. Corn dogs, which I will not be ordering but I admire the audacity.”

“Get the funnel cake,” Emory said.

“I’m getting the funnel cake.”

Tinsley had already claimed a spot against the side of the truck bed, blanket arranged, with the settled energy of someone who had arrived with opinions and intended to deploy them.

“The problem with modern horror,” she said, to the general air, “is the color grading. Everything is teal and orange and it flattens the fear response.”

“What does that mean,” Emory said.

“It means you stop being scared because everything looks the same.”

“I am going to be scared,” Emory said. “Regardless of the color grading.”

“You are going to cover your eyes.”

“I am going to be scared and then cover my eyes, in that order, which is the correct order.”

Maekynzie was already heading toward the concession stand, listing items under her breath. Chandler stood up from the wheel well without a word and went with her.

I watched Emory fight a camp chair that had decided not to cooperate. It was its own entertainment.

They came back together. Maekynzie had a quantity of food that suggested she had interpreted the word snacks very loosely, funnel cake and nachos and two sodas and something wrapped in foil she declined to explain. Chandler had a white paper bag with the concession stand logo on it. He held it out toward me without ceremony.

“I didn’t ask for anything.”

“Extra pickles,” he said. “And waffle fries.”

My exact order at every drive-in we’d ever been to. I took the bag.

“Thank you.”

“Mm.” He settled back against the wheel well. The first film was starting, the sound crackling through the speaker clipped to the side of the truck. Stetson’s arm came through the open cab window to adjust the volume, his dirty blonde hair catching the last of the evening light before he disappeared back inside.

I leaned back and pulled the blanket up a little. The night was warm enough to be out but cool enough to want it. The screen was doing its opening-credits thing, orchestral horror music that was more funny than scary at this distance. The burger was good. I hadn’t expected to be hungry and I was, which felt like a small win, my body deciding to cooperate for twenty minutes.

Emory: “This is going to be terrible.”

Maekynzie: “This is going to be incredible.”

Both, as it turned out.

The first film was objectively bad in a way that was deeply enjoyable. The monster’s motivations were unclear. Several characters made decisions that defied basic survival instinct. At one point the protagonist ran upstairs instead of out the front door, and Emory stood up from his camp chair.

“Sir,” he said to the screen.

“He can’t hear you,” Maekynzie said.

“I know he can’t hear me. I’m expressing a feeling.”

He provided live commentary for the rest of the film with the commitment of someone doing color analysis for a sporting event, and Maekynzie laughed at things thirty seconds before the rest of us caught up, which meant she’d either seen it before or just processed horror comedy faster than everyone else. Through the open cab window I could hear Noelle and Stetson talking in low voices, the particular rhythm of two people who had stopped pretending they were only talking.

Tinsley, to her credit, was right about the color grading.

I ate the burger. Extra pickles, waffle fries, exactly right. I ate most of it without thinking about the appointment or the X-ray or the word malignancy sitting somewhere in the back of my chest like a stone I’d gotten used to carrying. The leg ached. I shifted position once, just redistributing weight, nothing dramatic. Chandler was looking at the screen.

He noticed. I knew because his jaw moved, that small thing he did when he was registering something and deciding not to comment. He didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything. The movie kept going.

I ate the last waffle fry and looked at the screen and let myself just be here.

This. All of it, the terrible movie and Emory’s commentary and Tinsley’s cinematography opinions and Noelle’s voice through the cab window going quieter. I pressed it in. Held it.

I didn’t finish the thought past that, because finishing it meant looking at what it was up against, and I wasn’t doing that tonight.

The first film ended to collective groaning that was at least fifty percent performative. Emory declared the monster’s third-act decision personally offensive. Maekynzie ate the rest of the funnel cake standing up, powdered sugar on her jacket that she either didn’t notice or didn’t care about. Tinsley gave a brief but thorough assessment of the final sequence’s lighting that nobody had requested and everyone listened to anyway. Noelle climbed out of the cab and pulled herself up into the truck bed, Stetson right behind her, both of them settling in with the easy comfort of people who had been pretending to be just friends long enough that the act was starting to get thin.

Noelle dropped down beside me. “How’s the leg?”

“Fine.”

She looked at me the way she looked at things she didn’t believe but had decided not to push on yet. “Okay.” She reached over and broke off a piece of Maekynzie’s abandoned funnel cake without asking. Maekynzie didn’t look up. “The second one’s supposed to be better.”

“Tinsley thinks the cinematography is going to redeem the franchise.”

“I said it has potential,” Tinsley said, without turning around. “Which is different.”

The intermission title card was spinning on the screen, that old-fashioned countdown style with the reel marks, when I heard someone cross the gravel nearby and looked up.

Evan. Hands in his jacket pockets, unhurried, like he’d just been heading in this direction anyway. He stopped at the side of the truck bed and looked at me with that easy half-smile, the one that was friendly and a little pointed at the same time.

“You never texted back,” he said. Not an accusation. Just a fact laid on the table to see what I’d do with it.

Chandler had gone still beside me. Arms crossed, eyes on the spinning title card, jaw set in the way it got when he was processing something and had decided not to say it. Not looking at Evan. Not looking at me. Just very specifically looking at the screen.

“I know,” I said. “Sorry.”

Evan studied me for a second, that quiet inventory he did, and then the smile shifted into something lighter. “No offense taken.” He glanced at Chandler once, brief, the kind of look that was taking notes without appearing to. Chandler didn’t turn his head.

“See you around,” Evan said, and drifted back toward wherever he’d come from, unhurried all the way.

I watched him go for a second. Then I looked at the title card. Then I looked at Chandler.

He was still watching the screen. Jaw still set. He didn’t say anything about any of it.

Neither did I.

The lights went down.

The second film started darker, quieter, more interested in atmosphere than spectacle. Tinsley made an approving sound in the first five minutes and said nothing else for the rest of it, which was its own review.

Somewhere in the second act I shifted so my shoulder was against Chandler’s arm. He was warm through his hoodie. I adjusted once more, the leg doing what it was going to do, and he didn’t comment or ask. He just moved his arm slightly so I had more room to settle.

I don’t know when I fell asleep.

I know I was watching the screen and then I wasn’t watching anything, and when I came back it was the credits rolling and Emory was saying something and Maekynzie was laughing and the night had gotten darker and colder and Chandler hadn’t moved.

His shoulder was solid under my cheek. His arm was around me in that way that was casual and careful at the same time, the way you held something you didn’t want to jostle. I stayed still for a second in that half-awake window before everything came back.

The leg. The appointment. The word sitting in my chest.

All of it right where I’d left it. Patient. Waiting.

I stayed still one more second. Just one. Then I sat up.

Chandler handed me my cold drink without looking at me. I took it, and the cold of the cup finished waking me up the rest of the way. Around us the lot was starting to shift, engines turning over, headlights beginning to move. The screen had gone dark.

“Good nap?” Stetson asked, through the rear window.

“I wasn’t asleep.”

“You were absolutely asleep.”

“The film was atmospheric.”

“You snored,” Noelle said helpfully.

“I don’t snore.”

Chandler had developed a sudden intense interest in the label on his cup.

I looked at him. He was looking at his cup with the expression of someone working very hard to keep their face neutral and not entirely succeeding. The corner of his mouth was doing the thing it did.

“Don’t,” I said.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were about to.”

“I really wasn’t.” He looked at me then, and there it was, that thing in his eyes that was half amusement and half something steadier underneath it. “Atmospheric,” he said, like he was tasting the word. “Sure.”

“It was.”

“You were out in the first twenty minutes.”

“That’s called being relaxed.”

The corner of his mouth pulled wider. He looked away first, back toward the lot moving around us, and didn’t push it any further. He didn’t need to. The warmth in my ears said enough.

I looked at the blank screen for one more second before I climbed out of the truck bed. The leg protested. I kept my face where it was.

Three more seconds of this. Then the drive home. Then tomorrow.

I could do three more seconds.