Fade Out (19 page)

We’re about four blocks from the Little Art—and the Midnight Movie, the one starring Rita Hayworth, is about to begin. Inside that theater we will find Jackson and his girlfriend, Elissa, not to mention his other girlfriend, Bella. Worlds are already colliding in the darkness just blocks from where we’re standing and here we are hesitating on the sidewalk. Well, girlfriends are colliding, anyway, and we’re so close.

I guess I took too long to answer because Austin answers for me. “Let’s just go,” he says, with a glance at me. “The movie’s starting.”

So that’s how I find myself stepping into Theater 1 at close to 10:15 on a Saturday night when I’m supposed to be home grounded. I slip into the back row and cast my eyes out over the darkened theater, searching for Elissa and then for Bella, but not finding either in the rows and rows of seats.

Jackson was hoping his Midnight Movies would draw a crowd—he planned on getting a take from the box office for his car fund. And, actually, there are dozens of people here, dozens and dozens. I can imagine Jackson sitting up there on his throne in the projection booth, looking out over the crowd and feeling like a rock star. He made this happen. He’ll have his car in no time.

It’s like whatever Jackson wants, Jackson gets. Everything—and anyone.

The picture comes up and a hush falls over the audience. No one here has any idea what’s about to happen—and I don’t just mean the movie.

In
The Lady from Shanghai
, Rita Hayworth has gone blond. I almost don’t recognize her. Then I remember how it happened.
Supposedly the guy making the movie—Orson Welles, her husband at the time—talked her into changing her hair for the character, bleaching it platinum blond and cutting it short. When she did, people freaked. The Rita Hayworth they knew and loved had changed—and she hadn’t asked permission.

They thought she was one thing, and how dare she go and become something else.

It makes me wonder how people see
me
. Maybe they think I’m the mean one, the selfish one. The one who told Bella to come here. The one who wants to hurt Elissa by forcing her to face the truth. The one who can’t be with Jackson so she wants no one to have him—but that’s wrong, and not who I am, not at all. I just don’t know how to prove otherwise.

Taylor elbows me as if she can hear my thoughts and wants to get her vote in. On-screen, Rita Hayworth is gazing out at the audience, making it so no one can look away, not the guy she wants to like her in the movie, and not me.

“What?” I whisper.

“Look,” says Taylor.

“I
know
,” I breathe. “She’s perfect, no matter what color her hair is.”

“Huh?” Taylor says. She’s not pointing at the glamorous
movie star, she’s pointing at the left-hand side of the theater. With the reflection of light casting off Rita Hayworth’s bright blond hair, we can see a little better. And it looks like Taylor’s found Elissa. She’s right there, sitting in a row with a group of friends.

But Taylor’s not done yet. “Look,” she insists. Now she’s pointing at the other side of the theater, the right-hand side, opposite of where Elissa is sitting.

In those seats, a few girls can be made out in the darkness. I recognize one as Nichole. And the other, the one sitting in the aisle? It’s Bella. I see her only in profile, the flip of her hair, the line of her nose and lips.

She’s here.

19
The Femme Fatale, Take Two

C
all it detective smarts,
call it plain old intuition, but I have a bad feeling.

I can picture the final scene and it sends shivers all up and down my spine: Bella will be with Jackson in one part of the theater, and Elissa will be with Jackson in another part of the theater. He’ll be running back and forth, lying to them both. The girls won’t ever be in the same place at the same time, so they’ll never know the truth. Jackson will get away with this the way people in movies can get away with murder.

Or—what’s worse?—Jackson will be with Bella in the lobby. They won’t be getting popcorn. And, right then, Elissa will come out and see them together, and her heart will break in pieces all over the black-painted floor, and it won’t look like a universe of stars in the night sky but like a heart that got broken, which I don’t think even looks like anything, and I’ll never be able to eat popcorn again.

I can’t let it happen. Not to Elissa, no matter that she’s mad at me and got me in trouble with my mom. “I’m going to tell her,” I say. I climb over Taylor so I can slip out into the aisle.

Only, someone’s holding me back. Literally. Taylor has a good grip on my sleeve and is tugging at me to keep me from escaping into the aisle. She pulls me down into a seat. “You can’t just go down there and tell Elissa,” she says.

“Why not?”

“In front of her friends? In the middle of the movie? It’ll just make things worse.”

“Wouldn’t you want someone to tell you?”

“I don’t know,” she says, after thinking about it. “Maybe I’d be too embarrassed.”

“But—” I stop talking when someone in the next row
shushes me. Maybe Taylor’s right. Maybe I should wait for the right moment. Whenever that is.

On screen, Rita Hayworth is being her usual incredible self, except the movie’s making it seem like we’re not supposed to trust her. Come to think of it, I’m beginning to wonder about this movie, about why Jackson chose it.

The music is filled with loud horns and wicked violins. We focus on a room surrounded on all sides by mirrors, a carnival fun house. Then the music cuts out and Rita Hayworth’s standing in the dark with a white-hot flashlight in her hand. In the mirror maze there are now four Rita Hayworths, the blaze of her eyes multiplied out into forever. She steps closer, and in all the many mirrors she takes one step closer more times than you can count.

“We could have run off together,” Rita Hayworth says to her secret boyfriend. Her voice is flat. Her eyes betray nothing. She loves no one, not even herself.

Then some other guy steps onto the screen—her husband. The mirrors show three of him, six, eight, more. She looks scared now, caught.

He tells her she’d better not fire that gun she’s holding. “With all these mirrors, it’s difficult to tell,” he says. “You
are
aiming at me, aren’t you?”

Shots ring out, and glass shatters and is reflected shattering and shattering.

That’s the movie.

But then I lose sight of the movie because right here in the theater someone stands up. A girl. Light bounces off the screen and makes her glow around the edges like an approaching eclipse. I can’t make out her face, but I don’t need to see the face to know who it is. She’s Bella, the girl who thinks she’s Jackson’s girlfriend. And she’s heading for the projection booth.

Elissa—who also thinks she’s Jackson’s girlfriend—is now coming up the other aisle, the aisle on my side. Which means she’s close enough for me to do something. Distract her. Warn her, even. I reach out my arm as she passes and my fingertips graze something—her elbow, I think. But whatever it was I’ll never know because what my fingers catch is air.

Elissa goes to the door on her side of the projection booth and knocks. In the other aisle, Bella walks to the door on her side. But she doesn’t knock, she just goes on in.

“It’s happening,” Taylor whispers to me like I can’t see with my own two eyes.

Sitting on the other side of Taylor, Austin actually has his hands over his eyes like we’re watching a horror movie.

And what do I feel, while Elissa knocks again on the door and is about to go in, while Bella’s in there already, while the movie rolls and the audience takes it in, while on-screen Rita Hayworth isn’t the Rita Hayworth I thought I knew?

I feel nothing at first. Like I’m separate from all of it. Like it’s nothing to do with me—Jackson and Bella and Elissa—it’s to do with them.

Then again, it’s because of me that Bella knows about the Midnight Movie. So I’m not as separate as I’d like to think.

Elissa stops knocking but doesn’t go away. She opens the door and walks in.

Voices can be heard, voices that have nothing to do with the movie. I can’t even pay attention to Rita Hayworth. I turn around.

It’s hard to make out what they’re saying. I want to follow Austin’s lead and cover my ears. I want to crawl under the seat and disappear.

Suddenly the picture freezes. The speakers squeak to a halt. There are protests from the audience, people turning around in their seats to see what’s up.

Now would be a good time to slip out of the theater and go back home before my mom knows I snuck out.

Taylor and I meet eyes. Before this week, I would have said we’re definitely not friends anymore, definitely. I would have said we’re practically strangers. A whole school year has gone by, which is like fifty years when you’re in junior high. Only thing is, I’m looking into her eyes and I know exactly what she’s thinking. Just as you would if you were looking at your best friend.

She’s thinking we need to get out of here. Like, now.

And I bet she knows what I’m thinking too. She knows how awful I feel. She knows I think this is my fault.

She looks at me and her eyes say it’s not my fault, not entirely. But, either way, her eyes say,
We really need to go
.

My eyes say,
Okay
.

Her eyes say,
Then move!

I’m the one closest to an aisle, and the exit. I head for the door, but just before I reach it the house lights come on. Austin’s at the switch, turning on the lights so everyone can see. Next I hear someone yelling. At me.

“You!” I hear. She’s all up in my face before I even get out into the lobby.

Hey, everyone, meet Nichole. My dad’s marrying her mom, so we’re almost related.

“You little brat,” she says.

I don’t say anything back. There’s something about Nichole that makes my tongue go limp, makes me forget I even have one and wonder if I’ve gone and swallowed it. She just brings out the tongue-swallowing tendencies in me.

Nichole has her hands on her hips, elbows up and out. Her straightened blond hair whips all around her like a sharp, pointed sandstorm.

“You think this is funny, don’t you?” she blasts at me. She means the big scene in the projection booth. The one everyone in the theater couldn’t help but witness.

“No,” I squeak in protest.

“You told us to come here,” Nichole says. “You totally set this up.”

“No,” I protest again—though I did, didn’t I? I set this all up.

“Oh and,
by the way
, I told my mom what you said about her. Your dad freaked.” She gives an evil grin.

Elissa peeks out of the projection booth. I’m standing just beside it, inches away. She’s heard everything. “You set this up?” she asks me quietly.

My eyes say all.

“You knew and you didn’t tell me?” she says, her voice cracking.

Someone could come to my defense here. Someone like Taylor, though she’s still down in the aisle, and I guess it’s not exactly fair of me to expect her to speak up for me. To use her only when I need her, like I guess I’ve done before.

“I tried,” I tell Elissa. “Remember?”

“Oh,” she says, remembering when I chased her in the rain, “that.” She looks horribly sad. Or embarrassed. I can’t tell the difference.

It’s okay—Elissa knows I had her back, she’s got to—but then someone has to ruin it. “She really was going to tell you,” Austin says. Now he’s standing up near the projection booth too. “She was going to show you the picture.”

I widen my eyes like stop signs:
Shut it! Do not mention the picture!

“There really is a picture?” Elissa says in a low voice.

“You took a
picture
?” Bella says. I guess she’s here to confront me too.

Nichole just says, “You little brat.” It’s become, like, her nickname for me.

Jackson has no words—he’s just standing in the booth staring me down.

Actually everyone’s staring me down—I can see the audience
looking up the aisle at me, like I’m the movie people came out to see.

Finally Jackson speaks. “D,” he says, “I knew you were at the playground that night, no matter what Austin said. So you got a picture. Let’s see it.”

“I want to see it,” Elissa says, not too convincingly, and then Bella adds, “Yeah, show it,” and even Nichole, who has nothing whatsoever to do with this and should really just stay out of it, adds, “Yeah.”

So I reach into my pocket to dig out my cell phone and show them the incriminating picture at the seesaws. My phone isn’t there, so I try the pocket on the other side of my pants. I try my back pocket. I stop trying—I’ve run out of pockets.

Then, of course, I remember. “I don’t have my phone,” I say. “I’m grounded and my mom took it.”

“Then what are you doing here,” Nichole says, “if you’re grounded?”

She has no right to act like a big sister, and I’m about to call her on it, except she sort of has a point. “I guess I can’t show anyone the picture,” I say.

Jackson doesn’t respond.

“Never mind,” Elissa says. “It doesn’t matter. I think we
should break up.” She’s looking down at the floor when she says it, but we all know who she’s talking to.

“Yeah, Jackson, we’re done,” Bella shoots out. With all the panic going on, all the stopping of movies and ruining Rita Hayworth’s big scene, I hadn’t even really thought of the fact that the lights are now on, and I can see Bella. The femme fatale is standing right here in front of me. In full color. For the first time.

The only images I had of her before were pieces:

A pair of legs in polka-dot tights.

A silhouette on the seesaws.

Two feet in a photo online.

The outline of her face in the dark.

An eclipse sneaking up the aisle.

Now that I can see her, she’s pretty, sure. What did you expect? And yet… if she’s supposed to be the femme fatale, I don’t see it. She looks like some girl in high school. Some girl who seems really upset.