TWENTY MINUTES LATER, we were in Toby’s spectacularly dinged, hand-me-down burgundy minivan (known fondly as the “Fail Whale”), trying to coax the broken antenna to pick up an FM frequency as we cruised up Eastwood Boulevard.
“Tonight’s going to be fun,” Toby promised. “You’ll see.”
And I guess it might have been, if I wasn’t still lugging around the memory of my earlier douche-baggage. Because the more that I thought about Cassidy on the swing set in her bare feet, smiling at me as she promised that we’d escape the panopticon together, the more I wished I hadn’t wrecked everything.
“Yeah, fun,” I muttered, watching a tumbleweed blow through the crosswalk and latch itself to a yield sign in the center divider.
According to Toby, the floating movie theater was something of a closely guarded legend in nerd circles, and my being invited was a pretty big deal. The history went back to our Cub Scout days, when an enterprising Eastwood High senior named Max Sheppard had stolen the janitor’s key ring and quietly made himself a copy. He used the keys to play a series of nasty pranks on the administration, successfully evading capture. On his sixteenth birthday, Luke Sheppard inherited the keys to the kingdom from his older brother, but chose to use them for good. And so began the Floating Movie Theater, a series of secret film screenings never held in the same place twice.
The campus was pretty deserted, and Toby double-parked his van, straddling the principal’s and vice principal’s spots.
“Grab the filters,” he told me.
“Remind me why I just spent five bucks on coffee filters?”
“Because you have five bucks and I don’t?” Toby grinned. “Naw, it’s just part of what we do. I mean, we don’t want to be caught—we want to be noticed. So we watched Dead Poets Society in Mr. Moreno’s room and left behind a ton of whiteboard markers. We watched the Princess Bride in the library and donated a box of books. And tonight, we’re screening Rushmore in the teachers’ lounge. Hence the coffee filters.”
Toby stopped walking, waiting for the sheer awesomeness of the Floating Movie Theater to wash over me.
Instead, this is what I said: “We’re breaking into the teachers’ lounge?”
“More like ‘letting ourselves in,’” Toby assured me. “Come on.”
I planted my feet firmly at the edge of the parking lot.
“You better be damned sure we won’t get caught,” I warned. “Because I can’t exactly run if the cops show up.”
Toby started laughing. “Funny story,” he said. “Max Sheppard? Why, just the other week, he let me off on a warning for my busted taillight. Now let’s go.”
THE MOVIE HAD just started. Toby and I grabbed seats on the side, and I tried to follow along, but mostly, what I wound up following was Cassidy’s expression.
I suppose she didn’t think anyone was looking and had let her guard down, the way you do in an empty room. The way I did when I closed the blinds and stared up at the ceiling fan above my bed, equally fascinated and horrified by the thoughts racing through my brain.
She seemed so sad, even though the movie was a comedy and everyone else was laughing, as though she wasn’t paying attention to the film at all, but was haunted by images of something else. I’d never seen her like that, and it made me wonder about what Toby had said, how she’d disappeared without warning, and how no one had known what to make of it.
A couple of people stood up when the movie ended, but Luke insisted that we had to watch the credits. Surprisingly, they sat back down, looking thoroughly chastised; I hadn’t realized Luke carried that sort of power, but it made an odd sort of sense. I’d heard him referred to as the “king of the nerds,” and I had never understood why, but I could see it easily then.
“So what did you think?” Toby asked as we deposited our coffee filters on a table with everyone else’s loot.
“About the movie?”
“Obviously the movie is a classic and Napoleon Dynamite is a pale imitation of this far superior film,” Toby said wryly, “but no. About this: secret screenings, coded invitations, positive vandalism.”
“It’s awesome,” I said. And I meant it. I hadn’t known that people did things like this, especially in Eastwood. It was strange, realizing that these sorts of clandestine activities happened at a school I used to think I ran, that there were other things going on besides my old friends’ parties. “Why don’t more people know about it?”
“Because Evan McMillan would turn this into some obnoxious drinking game,” Luke said, joining us.
“Yeah, probably,” I admitted. “Beer funneling through coffee filters.”
We stood there in silence for a bit, Luke with this knowing look on his face, as though he was glad I’d finally seen what he could do.
“So Luke,” I said, breaking the silence, “how about screening One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in the nurse’s office? I know it’d be a tight fit, but it would be sort of perfect.”
“Dude,” Toby said. “That would be epic.”
“I didn’t ask for your ideas, Faulkner,” Luke said coldly, drifting over to play host to a nearby group of juniors.
“He really doesn’t like me,” I noted.
“Nah, ’course he does,” Toby said unconvincingly. “You’re pals.”
I gave him a look.