***
I stood on the sidewalk beneath the theatre’s marquee, reading the words mounted between the rows of tiny, flashing light bulbs.
“Why the heck didn’t they post the rating for this show?” I asked Crystal, running my locket up and down its long, silver chain. “How can they be allowed to show a movie without a rating?”
She looked up to read the blinking marquee with me. “Maybe ancient movies like this one never had ratings in the first place,” she suggested. “Just come on, Mack. It’s a super old show from when our parents were kids. How bad can it be?”
“Night of the Living Dead,” I read the title out loud to myself. The city’s downtown movie theatre was showing revivals of vintage horror movies all weekend in the advent of Halloween. I’d been hoping to see one of those really old and campy films like the original Frankenstein, or maybe the silent movie version of Nosferatu. He was my kind of vampire – bald and ratty, not handsome and romantic – just creepy and parasitic. But neither of those films was showing until after Jeff was scheduled to take me back home to the monster-free safety of Upton, later that night.
“I’m sure it’ll be okay. They probably show scarier stuff than this movie right on television nowadays,” Crystal assured me.
I shivered on the sidewalk in the dark, autumn night. It had been cold and windy ever since the sun had set. We needed to make up our minds to go inside or move along to somewhere warmer. Crystal was probably right about the movie. “Okay then. I’m trusting you,” I warned her.
Maybe Crystal felt the weight of my trust and that’s why she paused in front of the ticket window to question the cashier. “This movie’s not really scary or gross or whatever – is it?”
From behind the glass of her ticket booth, the cashier laughed at us. “Maybe it was scary back in the 60s. No, it’s all filmed in black and white. And they say all the blood in it is really just chocolate milk syrup, if that makes you feel any better.” The cashier saw me peeking around Crystal and bent her head to call out to me. “You’re not scared of some spilt chocolate syrup, are you honey?”
“Maybe a little,” I admitted. But I stepped up and paid the admission anyway.
The cashier smiled at me in an almost motherly way as she handed me my ticket. “They don’t even say the word ‘zombie’ anywhere in the whole show,” she crooned.
Inside the theatre, the lobby was decorated with cottony, fake spider webs and rubber dungeon animals like rats, bats, and giant, hairy insects. The usher who tore our tickets wore a wrinkly satin cape, a scarlet cummerbund, and clenched a set of plastic fangs between his jaws. “Enthoy da thow,” he tried to tell us.
Even in the dimness I could see that Crystal and I were the only females in the entire theatre. I should have recognized it as a bad omen. We sat in the very best lit spot – near the wall, under a funky plastic lighting sconce that had probably been hanging there since Night of the Living Dead was originally released.
“Aw man,” I said, bobbing back and forth on the crushed, orange velvet of my chair. “Can you trade seats with me, Crystal? I can’t see anything from here but the back of that guy’s head.” I gestured at the person sitting two rows ahead of us.
Crystal squinted through the low lights. “I know the back of that head,” she said. “Hey,” she whisper-yelled. “Move your massive heads!”
“Crystal!” I chided her as the heads whipped around to face us. But I wasn’t embarrassed for long. I should have known the heads belonged to Darren and Wayne.
I could see the white of Wayne’s teeth as he turned, grinning, and said, “We’re not moving.”
“Come sit up here,” Darren offered. “You won’t have to try to see through us if you’re sitting beside us.”
Crystal rolled her eyes but we stood up and moved down the aisle to join the boys anyway. Frankly, I was glad for the safety of our growing numbers.
There was a scuffle as we arranged ourselves.
“Get off my foot.”
“Well, get out of the way.”
“I’m as out of the way as I can get.”
“Stand up like a gentleman then.”
“Like a what now?”
I ended up in the seat between Crystal and Darren.
“Can you see the screen?” he asked me.
“Yeah,” I answered. “I hope I don’t regret it.”
Darren smirked. “I’ve gotta say, I really didn’t expect to see you two here.”
Crystal leaned forward to talk to him around me. “Why? Because we’re delicate little girls?” she raved. “Don’t be so sexist.”
Darren leaned forward on the other side of me. “Have you ever seen this movie before?” he asked her. I couldn’t tell if he was purposely trying to sound ominous – but he did.
“No,” she answered.
He didn’t say anything more. He just sat back and folded his arms, smugly shaking his head.
When the lights went down and the cliché of the high, orchestral chorus of the opening credits started, I felt a little better. Nothing truly horrifying ever happened on grainy black and white film stock – right?
The first few zombies to stumble out of the projector beam didn’t bother me too much. It was clear they were just shuffling character actors in dirty clothes. I wasn’t comfortable enough to chuckle at them with the rest of the male audience. But I wasn’t slumped against the wall, glassy-eyed and helplessly twisting my hair like the heroine on the screen either.
At the sight of the first pool of fake blood, I poked Darren in the arm, “It’s just chocolate syrup, you know,” I reassured both of us before Wayne shushed me.
Twenty minutes into the film, everything was still going fairly well. But then a pair of zombie arms darted soundlessly through a gap in a window, snatching blindly at the hero. It happened so quickly and unexpectedly, I shrieked out loud in the theatre. My voice sounded louder and richer than usual and I realized it was because Crystal was screaming too.
We jumped and grabbed at each other’s arms in the dark. A few of the men in the audience cheered as if our high, girl voices were special new additions to the movie’s soundtrack deliberately designed just to improve their cinematic experience. Of course, Darren and Wayne were openly laughing at us. And I realized how relieved I was to have made my terrified jump in Crystal’s direction and not toward the boys.
Crystal and I let go of each other and fell back into our seats, laughing at ourselves now.
“This is totally horrible,” I groaned.
“Maybe it’ll get better,” she ventured.
“Look at the time. We’re nowhere near the climax,” I reasoned. “It can only get worse from here. Right Darren?”
“Definitely. They haven’t even introduced the cannibalism plotline yet.”
“What?!”
“Stop talking, you guys,” Wayne hissed from the end of the row.
“Crystal, I gotta go,” I said. “Darren, for heck’s sake, move your feet.”
“You’re leaving?” Wayne asked as I crammed myself past his knees. “As if. The movie’s so much more enjoyable with screaming girls around.”
“Yeah, well you’re welcome to do the rest of the screaming yourself. See you later,” I said. I didn’t look back as I marched up the slope of the theatre aisle. Behind me, the zombie moaning was getting louder. As I reached the exit, I saw Crystal’s smooth, brown hand pressing against the long bar of the door handle alongside my own hand.
“That was so cool,” she said as we moved past the velvet ropes and phony spider webs in the lobby.
“What? That awful movie?”
“No, getting up and walking out of it,” Crystal beamed. “I’ve never done that before.”
I shook my head. “I don’t have to do it very often. But sometimes...” I finished with a shudder.
“I mean, I feel so powerful,” she continued. “Why have I sat through so many terrible movies in my
life? I totally have the right to leave when I don’t like something, right?”
“We don’t just have a right to leave,” I explained. “We have a responsibility to leave.”
“Oh, I get it,” she nodded. “This was a Mormon thing, wasn’t it?”
“It was a ‘me’ thing,” I corrected her. “Sure, the Church backs me up when I act like this. But the decision I made to get out of there – that was truly what I wanted to do.”
“Me too,” she said. “I’d way rather sit in the Upton Cemetery talking about your resurrection than sit through – that.” She turned and waved her arm back toward the dark corridor leading into the theatre.
I glanced back too. That was when I saw Wayne and Darren coming out of the darkness themselves. “Well, you ruined it for us,” Wayne grinned.
“We’ve already seen that movie anyway,” Darren added. “We just came tonight because we had nothing else to do.”
“And nothing in that film can compare to those awesome screams we heard out of you two,” Wayne continued. “I haven’t heard Crystal shriek like that since elementary school.”
Crystal punched her brother in the bicep. I folded my arms and leaned back. “Glad to hear we amused you so much,” I said as he tried to dodge his sister’s punch.
“Sure,” Wayne replied, stepping forward to hold open the glass doors at the entrance to the building. “We’ll pay you back by walking with you all the way to the house. It’s really dark outside now and it seems like you’re both kind of spooked.”
Crystal and I said it together this time: “Don’t be so sexist.”