Depth of Field by Chantel Guertin

Author:Chantel Guertin [Guertin, Chantel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781770905962
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2014-08-01T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

The rep theater is tucked away behind a strip of costume shops. “Good find, right?” David says. It’s late Friday afternoon and the sun is shining but the alley is cast in shadow. I snap a few photos of the graffitied walls and the marquee sign. There’s a Star Trek film playing in a little over an hour. For now, the theater still looks pretty dark. Instead of pulling open the doors, though, David snaps his fingers. “I’ll show you the way your dad and I used to sneak in.” He leads me back down the alley and into one of the costume shops, which reeks like sweat socks. David raises his eyebrows at me. I laugh. We walk through the racks of costumes—French maids and cowboys, Superman and orange inmate jumpsuits.

“Can I help you find anything?” an old guy calls from behind an old wooden desk.

I peer over, but David grabs my hands and pulls me behind him.

“No we’re great, thanks!” says David, and then we’re ducking behind a rack of clothes and he’s opening a metal door and we’re through it and into the theater.

The reek of sweat socks lingers, but now it’s mixed with buttery popcorn.

“How did you know how to do that?”

“It’s never locked,” David says. We’re in the lobby, to the left of the ticket booth by the entrance. “We were broke. Desperation is the mother of invention.”

There’s a guy sweeping the red carpet at the entrance, which seems like a pretty ineffectual act, though he’s intent on his job; he barely reacts when he notices that we’ve appeared inside the lobby, not through the main doors. “Movie doesn’t start for another hour. And there’s no previews,” the guy calls out, still focused on his broom.

“OK if we just sit in the theater for a few minutes? My … niece”—he points at me—“she’s doing a school project on buildings from the ’20s. We’ll leave before the film starts.”

He glances up, shrugs OK, and we head over to the concession stand. There’s a girl loading kernels into the popcorn machine, a six-inch layer of old popcorn lining the bottom. We order snacks—popcorn for David, Twizzlers for me, which makes me think of Dylan and for a split second I desperately want to text him, but instead I tell David I’ll also have a Coke, and he orders the same. The girl behind the counter fires the dark liquid from a soda fountain gun into waxed paper cups, then sets them on the counter and pushes them closer to us.

“Your dad and I would sneak in that way most times,” David says as we put lids on our cups. “Well, actually, your father would want to pay—he could be so straight-laced, but sometimes I’d convince him to be a bit wild, and we’d come through that way, which is when we’d actually get popcorn with the couple of bucks we’d saved, so technically the theater was still getting the same amount of money out of us, and then we’d go up here.

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