super psycho future killers Page 2

  I like how she has a lilt in her voice. Reminds me of the sound of citrus fruit tearing apart, sweet, bright, every word she utters. Stings in the good way.

  “Thanks, here’s your change. Have a great day.”

  I like to smile as I stand at the front podium, tear your overpriced ticket and tell you to enjoy your show. I genuinely mean it, with every customer. I say, Hi, and, How are you doing today? I tear the ticket, hand your half back, and then I like to say, Enjoy your show!

  You know how when you smile so much, your eyes check out and the top half of your face goes dead?

  Celeste asks me, “What’re you dreaming about?” My chin on the box office counter, my eyes lost in the night sky, I spill a crooked smile from the side of my face and say, “Promotion. Paid vacation to Hawaii. Dream house on the beach.”

  She squints at me. “How much do you make again?”

  Her hair has such personality, twisted up, stabbed with chopsticks. I love how it’s constantly chaotic, constantly in order. Also, she’s got a great smile. Not the fake kind you use with customers.

  I ask, “Do you ever feel trapped? Like every day is the same day, the same routine, every day of your life? Like you couldn’t change a thing about it even if you tried?”

  She laughs. Fuck, I love her laugh. “Yeah. And you do silly things, like drive home a different way. Something to break the monotony. But even then, your little detours become predictable.” She shrugs at me. “That’s just life, Harper.”

  Ever feel like Time’s got you at gunpoint, every day of your life?

  I tell Celeste the worst part about my job is going home, because I’m so happy when I’m here at the theater. I’m surrounded by people I like, I’m helping customers, I’m serving popcorn and my arms are sticky with soda. I like having the evidence of a workday all over me. I like the metallic smell of my hands after handling keys and coin, even though I have to wash them six or seven times to get rid of it. I’m so happy here.

  She says, “Your happy looks like hell, Harper.”

  Too polite to laugh at me, she just covers her pretty wintry lips.

  “Well,” I tell her, “I’d better go and, um, reorganize some posters or count a stack of popcorn bags. I’m sure Ms. Plein could use the help.”

  “Stay and talk to me.”

  “Okay.” I didn’t really want to leave anyway.

  “Have you ever dreamed of, like, repeating yourself again?” she asks with a stapler in her hands, opening it, clicking it shut, opening it. “From day one, just do your whole life again? We do it with books, we read them over and over again, ones we liked. Try to recapture that feeling we had when it was all new. We rewatch movies too. This one dude, I sold him a ticket to the same movie twenty different times, like, over a week.” She looks at me, squints. “Why can’t we relive life?”

  I smile. I smile because suddenly I miss being seven years old.

  She asks, “Do you know what I secretly wish I was?”

  “What’s that?”

  “What I’m about to say is going to kill you,” she warns me. “Kill you dead.”

  “Well, I could die today,” I assure her, “just so long as I survive it.”

  The night sky stretched across our view like a blank movie screen, Celeste leans up close to me, the stool she’s seated in creaking, scandalous close, she whispers, “I want to be a killer.”

  My face wrinkles up.

  “No, for real,” she says. “A mad, bloodthirsty, feral, straight-up killer.”

  “Have I, ah, done something to anger you lately?”

  “Murderer,” she whispers with gooey eyes.

  Celeste Kay, if she were a character in a movie, she’d be that actress in the background that keeps upstaging the less-interesting lead. She’s the one you spend the whole movie saying, why isn’t she the main character? You try so hard to pay attention to everything else, but your eye keeps going back to Celeste. She utters a single line and you’re all smiles. You like her for no reason at all.

  “I don’t actually, like, want to kill anyone,” she explains helpfully. “I’m talking about, like, just the thrill of being free. Free from consequence, free from rules, free from routine. Totally liberated from this every-day’s-the-same life. Isn’t that a nice thought?”

  Free from Time’s gunpoint. Free from the monotony. A permanent vacation to nowhere. To anywhere.

  She tells me, “I’d be an animal in the wild.” Her eyes mist over. “It’s like how a lion hunts down another lion and just—rawr—and the lion’s killed dead, you know? Except I’d be a lioness.”

  Her hand is placed on the faux-marble counter between us, positioned, ready for me to casually touch it, take it, do something to it. I’m looking at it when I tell her, “Lions don’t hunt other lions.”

  “Yeah they do. I see it on Discovery channel all the time, I think.”

  “No.”

  “Yeah, yeah they really do.”

  “No.”

  “Anyway,” she goes on, “I think the first person I’d kill would be our boss. You wouldn’t mind, right? And then my ex would be next to go, probably. And then I’d travel back in time and kill my high school science teacher. He was such a prick.” Her smile tightens. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you.”

  I love her voice. I love it so much I’d listen to her read instruction manuals.

  “I probably shouldn’t joke about my teacher,” she says, an afterthought. “He actually did die. Few years after I graduated.”

  I’m staring at the curve of her neck and starting to feel a little brave. I place an unprofessional hand on her shoulder, my heart giving a jump, and I say, “But, I hope you realize, even as a murderer,” and I take a moment to swallow, my mouth dry, my nerves tight, “you still wouldn’t be free from every law.”

  She doesn’t look at me, but she smiles and asks, “Why’s that?”

  “Because all things,” I say, my hand still enjoying her shoulder, “are still dominated by a higher law, a much higher law.”

  “What, like God?”

  “No, higher even than that.”

  She frowns. “What higher law, then?—gravity?”

  “Even higher,” I assure her, my grip tightening.

  “Guilty conscience?” she whispers.

  “Higher.”

  She finally looks my way. So what is it, she asks me.

  And I just smile.

  By the way, how you tell a fake smile is you look at the eyes. Real smiles use the eyes. Fake ones, the top half of your face is uninvited to the party. Totally uncommitted, nose-up. Dead.

  Celeste’s smiles, every time, they are unapologetically alive.

  “I like your watch,” I breathe, reaching out to touch it. “Is it new?”

  She smirks, says nothing. My unprofessional right hand on her shoulder, the unprofessional finger of my left hand runs itself across the smooth face of her watch. She doesn’t pull away. I like that a lot, how she doesn’t even flinch, how she’s totally comfortable with unprofessional smiles-too-much me.

  The finger I’m reaching with and the ring finger next to it, they have a few unsightly knobs on them, evidence of their being broken a long time ago, badly. Shattered and healed over, but healed incorrectly, crooked now, crooked forever.

  “You and your obsession with time,” she says, smiling. “You need to get out more. You’re turning into one of those kinds of people.”

  Her watch feels so smooth under my finger. My heart jumps, and I can’t help but grin. It’s these little moments, this is why I wake up and drive to work. This is why I’m still here.

  “I don’t think we turn into anything.” I’m humored at the idea of my life actually changing, ever. “We don’t change. We’re just always a little bit older than we just were, the same person, forever, just older and older, until we’re dead or hit by a car.”

  She laughs heartily. I guess she finds that funny.

  I chuckle too, just to join in.

  She says, “Harper, that’s why they make sidewalks and traffic lights.”

  My obsession with timepieces. Your obsession with freedom. Celeste, we should’ve seen all this coming.

  “Harper, I think I see him.”

  My unprofessional hand drops from her shoulder at once. In the half-lit parking lot, I see the rigid figure approach the building. He carries a little suitcase at his side that almost looks like a purse. He doesn’t walk, not exactly. He saunters. His eyes don’t look at things, not exactly. They survey, like little security cameras. Right now, they’re surveying the cement he walks so daintily across, the cement he saunters so daintily across, and we hear the little click-click-click of his mirror-polished shoes even from so far away.

  “I thought boss man would never make it in,” I murmur dumbly.

  Celeste checks her computer screen. “It’s, like, an hour and a half after your meeting was scheduled.”

  My boss is close now, and he isn’t alone. One of our security officers, Bowman, he’s walking at his side like a bodyguard. My boss in his perfectly pressed pinstripe pants and fitted shirt, he passes by the box office without so much as a glance in our direction, like we’re just ghosts behind glass, imaginary, unseen.

  Celeste shoots me a look. “Boss man doesn’t look cheery.”

  I smile weakly. “He, um, he hates coming in at night.”

  “Is that the reason for the security?”

  My finger slips off her watch, which I didn’t notice was still there.

  7:40 PM.

  Celeste leans into the window. “Ooh, Harper, look! It’s about to rain! I love night showers.”

  The walkie clipped to my belt squawks for the first time all night: Harper, I need you in the office.

  I turn and look at Celeste. Her
eyes go big like mine. The voice is my boss’s, smooth and lazy and regal as a silk scarf in the breeze.

  “Do you think it’s time for your good news??” Celeste jeers at me, her voice nearly cracking with excitement.

  The walkie squawks: And bring little miss Celeste with you too, will you?

  Celeste and I share a quizzical look. We both just stare at the walkie, and I think we share the same thought. I press the walkie to my lips, saying, “That’s clear.”

  “What does he want me for?” she asks.

  I ask the usher on duty, Derek, to cover the box office for a moment. Before selling his next ticket, he grips me by the shoulders and says, “Hey, I have a friend. Her name’s Elizabeth, like the queen. I think she’d be a great asset to the box office. Should I call her up?—like, now?”

  I smile, pry his fingers off my shoulder and say, “We have to go up to the office. Tell her to turn in an application, alright?”

  “Can’t keep the boss waiting,” Derek says, nodding. “Yeah, I get it.”

  A moment later, Celeste and I are headed down the hall and through the heavy metal door that leads up a short flight of stairs to the office. Somewhere in my mind, I’m not thinking about why my boss wants to see us both. Instead, I’m thinking that Celeste doesn’t know how I feel about her. I’m thinking, I’ve never been honest with her. When I started developing these feelings, it was after I’d already been promoted to management. Now there’s a rule in a manual somewhere that says a relationship between us is forbidden. Every thought I have about her is now riddled with guilt and fear. Even just touching her watch, I feel like I’m betraying someone. Myself? My boss? Her?

  Halfway up the stairs, I’ve decided I can’t let her know how I feel. Too many things could happen, bad things, that could result in either of us losing our jobs, or losing the friendship we have, or worse. I like things the way they are. I like the fact that she’s the only reason I enjoy coming to work. I can’t stand the thought of her not being here when I park my car and clock in for my shift.

  Celeste’s got this crooked smile on her face that won’t wipe away, the kind I love watching from the side, probably dreaming about a raise she might be getting once we reach the office. I have this sudden urge to put my hand on her back as we ascend the last few steps, but I don’t.

  I like things the way they are: Just out of reach.

  She gives me this quick glance as we reach the door to my boss’s personal office, her eyes quivering with excitement, her lips pulled back with that contagious glee of hers, unapologetically alive.

  I open the door.

  The atmosphere changes instantly. Standing in the corner of the office is Officer Bowman, our regular weekend security guard who we saw walking in with boss man. Next to him is Ms. Worth, who I didn’t realize was still here. I guess she got the call and stayed. She’s poised like a mannequin with arms folded tightly and a huge purse dangling from the shoulder of her perfectly ironed white summer blouse. Seated at the desk is the boss man, mister pretty himself. He could be thirty years old or fifty—you just can’t tell—and his lazy blue eyes are fixed on his desk where he’s quietly writing something with a little pink pen.

  Ms. Worth nudges him and makes a quiet remark she doesn’t think we hear, They’re both here, Celeste and Harper, then straightens up and watches us stonily.

  “Please,” mister pretty murmurs, almost too quiet to hear, “have a seat.”

  I look at Celeste, but her eyes are on the stoic officer as she reluctantly lowers herself into a chair. There is a thick moment of silence where no one seems to exist—the only sound in the room is the modest scratching and tapping of the boss’s little pink pen.

  I realize I’m holding my breath and have to remind myself to breathe.

  Finally, he looks up and focuses his little eyes on her. “Do you know why you’re here?”

  Celeste’s gaze flicks from him, to Worth, to the officer, back to him. “No, sir.”

  He doesn’t smile. Even with the gentle, almost kind way he speaks, his lips express nothing, and the effect this has on the room is chilling.

  He says, “Are you sure?”

  Her eyes float nervously again. “No, sir. I don’t know why I’m here.”

  “Tell you what,” he murmurs softly, and everyone has to lean in to catch every word. “I’m going to give you an opportunity to come clean. If you fail to do so, then this situation is going to be out of my hands, I’m afraid, and the uniformed gentleman here will take over.”

  Situation? Come clean?

  Celeste’s expression turns desperate, her eyes beseeching everything they look at—the Garden Cinema 8 poster on the wall, Worth’s huge purse, a paper weight on the desk—and then she stares at the officer, pleading silently at first, then whispering, “Officer Bowman?”

  He is well aware of who she is and has worked many, many weekends over the past few years as our security guard. The two of them have bitched about each other’s weeks. They’ve exchanged birthday presents for each other’s kids. But today, he regards her with just a silent stare, as though they might as well have never met.

  Mister pretty calmly presses on. “This is your opportunity to come clean, Celeste. I don’t suspect it’s in your best interest to waste it.”

  “But sir, I have no idea what this—what all this is about.”

  “Last chance.”

  The room hangs in mute anticipation for what she may or may not say. Worth, her cold snow globe eyes locked heavily on Celeste, my star ticket seller, my closest friend here. The officer, a uniformed statue of silence. I’m just poised anxiously at the doorway like a bomb could drop from my ass any second.

  “Do you even like your job?” my boss says, his voice nothing more than a disquieting moan. Celeste says something that, even in the silence of the room, I can’t make out. “Need a little help,” the boss asks without asking, then slaps some pink form in front of her, “perhaps this may jog your memory.”

  Celeste looks over the form, her head shaking side to side, then she erupts with, “This is obviously a mistake, or a—?”

  “A fireable offense,” he agrees, but that’s not what she was going to say. “The cameras don’t show anyone but you, I’m afraid. Call it a mistake, call it an error in judgment, call it divine inter-whatever, this still lands on your bony little shoulders, dear.”

  Celeste clutches her left shoulder like he meant it literally.

  He goes on. “Two hundred and twenty dollars is a lot of money.” He lifts a mug of caramel macchiato from the desk to his puckered lips, takes a sip, sets it back down. “I wonder what someone could fetch themselves with two hundred and twenty big ones.”

  The five of us in this room, the air cold as ice, and I’m trying to picture her pocketing that much money from her register. I’m staring at the back of her mess-of-hair head, trying to imagine it, over and over and over.

  I’ve seen so much, working at this theater. I’ve seen bright, smiling faces steal candy from the concession counter without a second thought. I’ve seen twenties pocketed by teens who just want to save up for a video game. An usher who stole hundreds of dollars from various lost wallets, just to buy his prom date a corsage. But Celeste? I mean, you really start to wonder, maybe you can go two or three years and never really know your closest friend. Maybe I’ve spent too much time staring at her and not enough time listening.

  “You can leave your uniform on my desk,” the boss explains lazily. “Leave your uniform and your—Is that our nametag or yours?—Never mind, just leave the uniform.”

  “Listen,” she says, and her voice has more volume now than any of their exchanges so far. “I did not take anything, I would never take anything. I’m not a thief. Please, please, sir, I need this job.”

  Mister pretty sighs softly. “We run reports,” he explains carefully, like he’s telling a primate how the copier works, “and with this big of a shortage, someone’s head has to roll. It is not in my hands. There is no decision left to make, because it has already been made.”

  Her eyes well up, her bottom lip quivering. The sight crushes me, but our pretty boss says, “No, don’t do the crying thing. It doesn’t really work on me, see, because both my parents are dead.”

  “But sir,” she whimpers.