non friction by Parker Morgan

Author:Parker, Morgan [Parker, Morgan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: QuoteStork Media, Inc.
Published: 2013-11-21T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Three

Since it was my weekend with Evelyn and I had a little extra money left over from this month’s pathetic royalty check, I bought movie tickets for a matinee at the cheap theater and slept through the second act of some silly cartoon about birds that were somehow funny enough to kids, but entirely annoying to us adults.

Being an author meant a lot of late nights messing around on online networks and socializing with my audience, not to mention Skyping with Emma while her husband was out doing whatever and whomever. Occasionally, I might write a few paragraphs, but it seemed the networking demands of my new career had become more and more time consuming.

So it made sense why I needed a brief 1-hour powernap during the movie: I was exhausted.

When I woke up, I noticed that Evelyn had gotten up and wasn’t beside me where she was supposed to be; where I had left her before shutting my eyes. In that instant, I sort of threw up in my mouth and the panic woke me up real fucking fast.

“Evelyn,” I called through the theater.

Because it was a matinee and the movie was about to get released on DVD, there weren’t too many people in the theater but luckily for me, there was a family of four (aka witnesses) in the row ahead of mine.

“Hey,” I whispered to them. I had to repeat myself a couple of times before the mother finally acknowledged me, squinting like she needed to see my face in order to hear my question. “Did you see a little girl come by?”

The mother pointed toward the front of the theater where nobody was sitting. “Try down there.”

“Thanks,” I said. I felt like an asshole all of a sudden because it occurred to me that maybe the mother had been squinting due to blindness because, once again, there was nobody down there. Even a mildly blind mother could have seen that, so this one must have been really blind.

But then I saw something. A little head bobbed up from the seats, somewhere in the middle of the row, then disappeared again. The closer I got to that fourth or fifth row from the screen, the clearer it became. And inside my head, I groaned – no.

When I reached the row, I whispered (firmly, of course): “Evelyn! What are you doing!?”

The look of guilt on her face was priceless. Busted.

“Jeez, Evelyn, you’re going to get sick.”

Her cheeks were full, so I forced her to spit out the popcorn, uneaten candy and whatever other edible delights she had picked up off the floor and stuffed into her little mouth. What was she thinking?

“I wanted popcorn,” she said as we climbed back to our seats. “I only ate the popcorn.”

Right, because that made it all better.

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