“I’m going to have dinnerwith my sisters tonight,” I tell Carter, and he nods, giving me a half smile.
“That’s good. You mind if we make a stop on the way home?”
“Uh—” I say, thrown off a little. “Sure, that’s fine.”
“Even if it’s kind of a long stop?”
I shake my head. “Why…would it be a long stop?” I pause. “Wait. Another best friend thing?”
He glances at me and winks. “You’ll see.”
“Carter, you’ve already done too much.” But I can’t help grinning and wiggling in my seat a little. “You’ll spoil me.”
This time, he grins. “Maybe I like the idea of spoiling you. You ever think about that?”
Somehow I’m able to smile even wider as I try to figure out where we’re headed.
It takes us about ten minutes before we’re pulling into the Cranberry Vintage Cinema. I guess back in the seventies, this used to be the big, fancy place people would go to see movies, but now we have a couple of theaters that outshine it by far. So CVC now shows old movies for a serious discount—I’m talking five dollars and under—making all their real money on overpriced snacks.
I gasp when I see what it’s showing today. “The Matrix?”
He nods, beaming when he sees my own smile.
“The originalMatrix? The one Abuelo Gene took us to? Not one of the weird sequels that didn’t make any sense to me?”
“Yes, Teal. It’s the one we saw.” He nudges his head toward the theater. “So what do you say? Is this okay for some best friend shenanigans?”
“Yes!” I fling open my car door and about jump out, till I remember one of my ankles isn’t working. “Shit.”
“Here, here.” Carter rushes around and helps me up, one big hand under my arm, along my rib cage, the other at my waist. When he lifts me up, I wrap my arms around his neck, and before my brain can notice, I hug him, hard.
“This is awesome,” I whisper.
He laughs into my shoulder, running his hand around my back in a circle. “Baby, you haven’t even seen the snacks I brought yet.”
“Snacks?”
“Yes, snacks. But we gotta sneak them in your purse, okay?”
Ten minutes later, Carter and I are the only people seated to watchThe Matrixin this year of our Lord, at two in the afternoon. I pull out the chili-dusted dry mango and the bar of cookies-and-cream chocolate, and meanwhile Carter’s already munchingon the extra-extra large and extra-extra buttered popcorn he’d insisted on dropping twenty-five dollars on.
“Man, I always wanted popcorn when we went to the theater, but no one could afford it,” he says, shoving handfuls into his mouth.
“Don’t eat it all!” I say, reaching over for my own share. I close my eyes when I first taste it. “God, I haven’t had popcorn in so long. Johnny never let me get it.” I snap my mouth shut when I realize the dumb words that have come out of my mouth.
“Why?” Carter asks, which is a perfectly reasonable question.
I shrug. “He was always scared I was going to get fat.”
“You?” Carter looks me up and down. “Look, there’s nothing wrong with fat. You’d look hot no matter what. But, Teal, you’ve got more abs than I do! Your body has always been—” He coughs a little. “You’ve always been thin and cut, you know?”
“I know. But he was—” I shake my head, unwrapping the package of mangoes carefully, so the chile doesn’t fly out all over us. I take a deep sigh and say some things that have been on my mind for a while now. “It was like he lived to antagonize me. His whole purpose for existing was to critique any word I said, any move I made. If I wanted popcorn, I better not because I might get fat. If I spent too long on a gym workout, I better stop before I got too muscular. If I wanted to put my hair up, no, he wanted it down because it made me look more feminine, and if it was down, he wanted it up, because it wasn’t silky enough to let it loose.” I sigh and close my eyes, letting waves of emotion run over me. They’re not intense emotions—so I don’t have to worry about a lightning storm cutting off the power or something—but they’re still visceral. This looming sense of sadness and grief over the years I gave to a man who would never be pleased with anything he had, including me.
For a long time after Johnny, I was numb, because that was what I had to make myself in order to survive that relationship. And it one hundred percent was survival. I’ve had a few of our former asshole mutual friends come up and say—or strongly imply—that if it was as bad as I made it sound, then why wouldn’t I leave?
If you thought leaving a man meant he might murder you…wouldn’t that give you a goddamn pause?
But no, because beloved, loud Johnny would never be like that. He never shoved me around, never slapped me, never demanded that I have sex with him if I knew what was good for me. Johnny was just sonice.
