“HOW ABOUT IN-N-OUT?”
Richard had asked the question casually, but when Elizabeth paused to consider her answer, he felt like a fallen gladiator waiting to see which way the emperor’s thumb would point. She might be a strident vegetarian, or a disciple of the gluten-free regime (when had that become a thing? and why?). Maybe she ate only locally sourced organic foods (blegh), or considered fast food beneath her (bigger blegh). There were a million different reasons, he knew, to deny oneself the simple joy of a burger.
It was Saturday night, one week after their coffee. “Date night!” as he had tweeted (#DecentProposal was trending—among his followers, at least). They were at the Universal CityWalk, an outdoor mall adjacent to the Universal Studios theme park, pint-sized cousin to Times Square and the Vegas Strip, a wide promenade cut off from traffic by parking garages named after Universal brands like Woody Woodpecker and Jurassic Park. Even now, at 7 p.m., there were enough children there to constitute a swarm—limbs flailing, fingers sticky from a day’s worth of churros and cotton candy. Every storefront seemed to be shouting (T-SHIRTS SOLD HERE!! BEST MILKSHAKE IN L.A.!!); every light flashed; every color dazzled; it was as though each square foot of the place had its own set of jazz hands. Richard had suggested the CityWalk partly because it was just over the hill from a club in Hollywood where he’d be meeting up with friends afterward, and partly as a joke. If Elizabeth had balked he would have willingly gone elsewhere, but she had agreed without comment, and he was beginning to wonder why, the longer she stood there dithering over In-N-Out versus . . . what? Bubba Gump Shrimp? Panda Express? If she really was a foodie, she was screwed.
“Let’s do it!”
Her enthusiasm was overcompensating. In-N-Out was Elizabeth’s Friday night ritual, an end-of-the-week treat she devoured in her car, and while she liked to think she couldn’t get enough of it, two nights in a row felt a little gluttonous to her. But if she told him, then they’d have to go somewhere else, and In-N-Out was by far their best option in this menagerie of horrors. Why had he chosen this awful place? It was the ideal spot for a couple half their age. Maybe that’s the point, she told herself. It wasn’t a real date. She was the one who had insisted on acknowledging they were only going through the motions. The motions were what she had wanted; the motions were supposed to be instructional. Well, here was lesson number one, then: the motions were exhausting. Earlier in the week she’d decided all her nice clothes were daytime-specific, and had squandered several billable hours finding a somewhat slinky, glossy “evening” skirt to wear. The better part of this afternoon had been spent fussing over her hair and nails. She’d endured an hour and fifteen minutes’ worth of traffic—the 10 to the 405 to the 101—in getting here. How did people do this night after night, year after year, and maintain the goodwill necessary to search with an open heart for a connection they knew very well they might never find? Maybe it wasn’t as difficult for other people. Maybe there was something wrong with her, something essential she lacked, the absence of which made the process of dating such drudgery for her and her alone. Or maybe everybody was miserable.
Stop it, she scolded herself. The venue notwithstanding, she had to admit he’d made an effort too. It was true he was still wearing jeans, but they were different jeans: clean(er), with no visible rips. His shirt had an actual collar, and when he held the restaurant door open for her she caught a whiff of something nice—nicer, anyway, than the Axe body spray and Drakkar Noir-ish stuff that clogged the hallways of her firm. The scent vanished a moment later, replaced by fried beef and deeper-fried potatoes—a greasy aroma that greeted her like an old flame she couldn’t quit no matter how many times she tried. Elizabeth’s spirits lifted. Was it really so bad to be “forced” to eat In-N-Out two nights in a row? True, it had been hellish getting here, but she was out now—out, on a Saturday night—and though she was considerably overdressed for fast food on a tray, he didn’t seem to care, so why should she be embarrassed? The whole thing was ridiculous, but the only rational response was to throw up her hands (lavender nail polish included) and relax, to attempt to have some version of what other people called fun.
In-N-Out had a fifties aesthetic, all clean lines and hard plastic edges, with a two-toned color scheme of bright red and blinding white, so simple it would have been stark if the place weren’t always bursting with people. At the moment a dozen smiling servers were racing behind the counter like natives cheerfully fleeing a volcano. Richard knew from experience his eyes would adjust eventually, as if to the dark, discerning a frenetic sort of assembly line underpinning the chaos. This was the way it had been done at In-N-Out for nearly seventy years, starting with a single burger stand just outside L.A. He loved the chain as much for its association with Southern California as for its mouthwatering cuisine, and hated that in the past decade it had begun expanding eastward, inching across the continent like a pioneer in reverse. For now it was confined to the western United States, but if ever there came a day when those little red palm trees appeared on the awning of some gray New York City block, Richard knew a little part of him would die.
“You’ve eaten here before, right?” he asked her, as they joined the back of the line.
Little did he know. “I grew up on it,” said Elizabeth.
“Oh, no way! So you grew up out here?”
She nodded.
“That’s so cool! I don’t know anyone who grew up in L.A.”
“That’s because you’re in entertainment.” It amazed Elizabeth that this idea—of no one being from L.A.—persisted in the zeitgeist. Everyone loved to talk about how “fake” L.A. was; they called it a “dream factory,” a place where people came to pretend to be someone else, to escape their pasts and start over, but to the extent that that was even true, it pertained to the entertainment industry only. For most people who lived here, L.A. was their past, and their future too. It was their home. There were literally millions of people who’d grown up in Los Angeles, whose families had lived here for generations. Many of them had nothing to do with film, television, or music. But they were as much a part of the city as the flashy transplants who sucked up all the attention. In fact, entertainment made up only a sliver of the city’s wealth—a sliver that was shrinking daily due to tax breaks in other states (New Mexico, Michigan, Georgia, New York) for locally sourced film and television productions. Did he know anything about this? Did he ever read a newspaper? Even just online?
“Fair enough,” he said. “So where’d you grow up exactly?”
“South Central.” Elizabeth watched these two little words go off like a hand grenade. (The man ahead of them glanced backward, as if she’d said something lewd or controversial.) Usually she was vague about where she grew up or, if pressed, became overly specific and said either Westmont (her immediate neighborhood) or South Los Angeles, which was what the area had been renamed in an attempt to wash away the stink of recent history. Upon learning she grew up in South Central, most people were tempted to make a success story out of her, a modern spin on the old Horatio Alger “rags to riches” trope, a pull-herself-up-by-her-bootstraps, Hallmark Hall of Fame narrative that began in the slums of L.A. and ended in the sparkling offices of Slate Drubble & Greer, Elizabeth stationed in her very own office with her very own assistant, business suit stretched modestly over her full Mexican figure: cue triumphant music.
Her story was nowhere near as tidy, but she had no interest in untangling it for strangers, or even for acquaintances. Fortunately most people didn’t really care what her story was, and a cursory answer almost always served the purpose. But what else were they going to talk about for 104 hours? (She stole a glance at her watch: 8:06. Make that 103.9 hours.) At the very least, they could talk about the riots a little. She knew from experience it took about three seconds for the riots to come up after referencing South Central. It was like a word association.
“Oh, wow,” he said. “So how old were you? During the . . .”
“Riots?”
He nodded.
“Twelve.”
She’d been in the sixth grade, immersed in a book report on The Diary of Anne Frank. It was embarrassing to remember, but she’d changed topics by the middle of the second day (school had been canceled), opting for a personal essay that likened her situation to Anne’s, holed up in her apartment like Anne in her annex. Except for not getting taken away in the end and murdered by the Nazis, she thought to herself now. Her English teacher had submitted the essay for a city-wide contest calling for responses to the riots, and she’d actually won. There had been a local news segment, a reading at the Rotary club, a signed letter from the mayor. It had all been pretty exciting.
“That must’ve been intense,” he said.
“It was,” she said solemnly.
“So do your parents still live out there?”
Elizabeth’s shoulders rose a fraction of an inch. She nodded stiffly. She didn’t want to talk about her parents. But it was her own fault. She’d opened the door.
“What do they do?”
“They manage a restaurant together.”
“That sounds nice!”
“It’s in Studio City,” she added, hoping this would dampen his curiosity. He probably didn’t get up to the Valley very often.
“Oh, cool, I eat up there a lot.” Knocking the Valley was about as wrongheaded and outdated as disparaging Brooklyn had become for New Yorkers. “Lots of great sushi up there.”
“Well, it’s not a sushi restaurant,” she said. “It’s Italian, and it’s pretty much a dump.”
Okay, he thought. Moving on. “Well, it must be nice to have them so close.”
There was a pause, inside of which Elizabeth scrambled for an answer while at the same time praying: please don’t ask it, please don’t ask it, please don’t—
“How often do you see them?”
Crap. She opened her mouth to tell the lie she’d told many times before—oh, every few weeks or so—when suddenly she thought: why bother? She could have worn a paper bag to this “date” and it wouldn’t have mattered, so why lie to him now? He wasn’t one of her bosses, who might think twice about making her a partner if he knew that on top of lacking a significant other, she and her parents were estranged. There was no reason to lie to him. He wasn’t going anywhere.
“I don’t,” she said, breathing out, her shoulders descending to their original position.
“You don’t see them? Ever?”
“Well, we have dinner on Christmas. And brunch at Easter. And they call me on my birthday. But that’s it.”
There was another pause, inside of which she watched, amused, while he churned through this information.
“But you live in the same city.”
She nodded.
“Why don’t you see them more, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“To be honest I do mind,” she said. “It’s complicated.”
“That’s cool,” he said, holding up his hands in surrender and taking a step backward. (He nearly collided with a red-aproned worker restocking the ketchup dispenser.) “You’re allowed to be mysterious.”
Mysterious? “Well, I’m not trying to be,” she said.
“If you were, you wouldn’t be very mysterious, would you?”
“Fair enough,” she said, with the ghost of a smile.
“What about siblings?”
“I have a brother. Two years younger.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Do you ever talk to him?”
She shook her head, no. He just stared at her.
“What about you?” she asked. “Siblings?”
“Only child,” he said. “Much to my chagrin.” If he had a little brother, he had no doubt they’d talk all the time.
Not a shocker, thought Elizabeth, while gesturing toward the bare-bones menu printed behind the counter: burgers, fries, fountain sodas, shakes. “What do you usually eat?” She was getting a little bored.
“Oh, just a burger,” he said. “Protein-style.”
As a supplement to its bare-bones menu, there was a “secret” menu at In-N-Out wherein almost any variation on the few items offered was possible, no matter how outlandish or disgusting, such as ordering four—or forty—patties of beef in a single burger, or umpteen slices of cheese. Protein-style meant the hamburger would be wrapped in lettuce instead of a bun.
“Protein-style?” Elizabeth wrinkled her nose. She’d tried protein-style once out of curiosity, and could still recall the way the cool, crisp lettuce contrasted with the hot gooey meat inside. It had reminded her of picking up after a college friend’s dog in winter—the soft warmth radiating nastily through the cold plastic bag. “Are you on a diet or something?” The manorexic lawyers at her firm all ordered their burgers protein-style.
“What? No!” he protested. “I just like it that way.” The truth was he had started ordering protein-style a few years back at Mike’s suggestion. But he was so used to it now, it had become his preferred mode.
It was their turn to order. When Elizabeth asked for a double-double (two burger patties and two slices of cheese), Richard whistled softly, but she pretended not to hear him. She insisted on splitting the bill in half, and he agreed immediately. Earlier that morning he’d accidentally glanced at one of his credit card statements, and the image was still burned in his mind like footage from a grisly auto accident or torture-porn horror movie.
“Y’know, we should probably get reimbursed for stuff like this anyway,” he said.
“Good point,” said Elizabeth.
“By the end of the year we could be out a pretty big chunk of change.”
“I’ll call the lawyer about it tomorrow.”
“Cool.”
ELIZABETH TOOK HER time at the beverage station, fussing over the perfect level of ice, squeezing more lemon wedges into her drink than she could possibly want (considering she was drinking lemonade). But as long as she stayed there, the pause in their conversation couldn’t turn awkward. She tried reminding herself that pauses—even awkward ones—were nothing to worry about. In the week that had passed since their coffee together, she had scrutinized the rules of the proposal more rigorously than before, and on Friday morning she’d even called Jonathan Hertzfeld to request clarification on the meaning of a “substantially conversational manner.” Were pauses allowed? Could they be counted toward the two hours? Yes, as long as their “intent to converse” was “sustained and consistent.” She knew she was in danger of violating this intent by standing apart from him now, but she desperately needed the break. While paying, she’d glanced at her watch again and had been horrified to see that it was only 8:17. She’d been sure at least a half hour had passed.
ELIZABETH REJOINED HIM on the bench. They were still waiting for their number to be called.
“Hey,” said Richard. “Check it out.”
He was holding his cup high in the air, pointing at something on the inside of the bottom lip. She didn’t even need to look, and began reciting from memory:
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
He stared at her. “I’m guessing that’s John 3:16?”
She nodded. “John 3:16” was printed on the bottom of every In-N-Out soda cup. Back in the eighties, one of the owners had printed the book, chapter, and verse of his favorite Bible passages as a means of tempting customers to consult the Good Book. He’d died years ago, but the biblical references remained. It was another “secret” to add to the mythos of the In-N-Out dining experience. Richard had never thought to look up the verse.
“Did you memorize that because of In-N-Out?” he asked.
“I learned it in CCD, actually.”
“CCD?”
“Catechism. Sort of like Sunday school, but for Catholics.”
Aha. So she was religious. Mike was religious too, so it wasn’t like there was anything wrong with it, but Richard had a secular Jew’s distrust for anything that smacked of fundamentalism, and memorizing Bible verses was right up there. Was she Latina, though? Religious fervor was less troubling coming from a minority. (See again: Mike.)
“So what are you exactly?”
Tired? she wanted to say. Wondering how we’re going to get through a year of this?
“I take it you’re asking me about my ethnicity?”
He nodded, flushing slightly. On a real date he would have fished for this information more artfully, of course.
“Both my parents are Mexican. From Mexico. But don’t worry, I was born here. I’m a U.S. citizen. I can bring in my birth certificate next time if you want.”
He tittered uneasily.
“One-four-three! Number one forty-three!”
Their order was ready. Richard collected the red tray from the counter while Elizabeth secured them a table. Between bites they exchanged vital statistics. He grew up in a suburb outside Boston (“Braintree: the ugliest compound word in the English language”). She went to Yale for undergrad and NYU for law—full ride for both, with a smorgasbord of grants, work-study programs, and student loans she’d managed to pay off in full several years ago. He went to Amherst, though he failed to mention that both his parents went there, or that the next best school he got into was BU, or that his parents were still paying off a hefty loan he had every intention of paying himself once his credit card debt had been wiped clean. He insisted on naming everyone he knew from both Yale and NYU, which was about a dozen people, but she wasn’t familiar with any of them. She couldn’t think of anyone she knew from Amherst. Whatever it was that connected them, it remained a mystery for now.
By this point it was 8:34.
“So how do you like L.A.?” she asked. “Coming from the East Coast?”
“I love it!” he said, tearing open a salt packet and sprinkling the grains over his fries like seeds across a field.
“Really? I’m surprised,” she said. “I know a lot of East Coasters who hate it out here. It’s easier to go the other way around, I think.”
“So you actually liked New Haven?”
“It’s not as bad as everyone says it is. But by senior year I was ready to move to New York.”
“I’m assuming you liked New York?”
“I loved it. I never wanted to leave. Especially not for here.”
“Oh, so you’re one of those.”
“Who?”
“The L.A. haters.”
They were everywhere, and Richard couldn’t disagree with them more. The summer after his freshman year he’d gone to L.A. for the first time, for a two-month Hollywood internship. It was like a riot of color punctuating his monochrome existence, the bloom atop a thorny stem. He was instantly hooked. For the rest of college he dreamed of whiling away the afternoon at business drinks on the beach, guzzling beer as bright yellow as the sand between his toes. He pictured himself reading scripts poolside in the courtyard of a Beverly Hills hotel. L.A. was everything Massachusetts wasn’t, and it was more than the surface attractions of sunny weather and proximity to celebrities that drew him here. For Richard, the fairer city represented an alternative to the workaday lifestyle of almost everybody who graduated from the East Coast’s elite institutions: all the lawyers, doctors, i-bankers, and consultants who endured wintry weather halfway through April and wasted their youth toiling away at jobs that didn’t excite them. The morning after graduation, he drove cross-country, fleeing like a refugee for a better existence. And after seven years in the promised land, he cherished even those aspects of the city other people hated: the traffic, the lack of a city center, the way some people thought they had to act like douche bags to get ahead in the entertainment business. These were all imperfections he was more than willing to brook. His love for L.A. was unconditional.
“I don’t hate L.A.,” said Elizabeth. “I just don’t love it. Like New York.”
“So why’d you move back? If you loved it so much out there?”
“They needed someone in my department. I got a really good offer.”
“An offer you couldn’t refuse?”
“Exactly.” She smiled.
“Did you have braces when you were younger?”
“No.” Had he forgotten about South Central already? Even if she had desperately needed them, her parents could never have afforded braces.
“Well, you have beautiful teeth. You’re lucky.”
“Thank you,” she said, before adding, “You have beautiful eyes.”
He looked up, surprised. He got this compliment all the time, but hadn’t expected it from her.
“Thanks!”
She waved her double-double dismissively, shedding a slimy onion chunk or two.
“No, no. You do have pretty eyes, I’m sure you’re well aware of that—”
He flushed crimson.
“—but it’s the Arab response whenever anyone gives you a compliment. My roommate in college was from Yemen, and whenever anyone said anything nice to her she’d tell them they have beautiful eyes. The idea is whatever beauty you see is actually coming from you rather than the thing itself. Like the beauty is in the perception, not the thing.”
She wondered if he’d get it.
“That’s really nice,” he said, getting it perfectly, his embarrassment washed away by the pleasure of learning something new.
“It is nice, isn’t it?” she said. “Best way to throw back a compliment I ever heard. I adopted it for myself, but it sounds weird in English.”
“Huh, yeah, but I’m gonna use it now too. So does your roommate still live in New York?”
They fell into a conversational rhythm, like a tennis rally in which the force of the ball going one way could be used to shoot it back over the net. Elizabeth told him about working at Slate Drubble’s New York branch for the first six years out of law school, before being transferred to Los Angeles. Richard told her about his early days at Green Trolley, the production company where he and Keith got their start. She described her college and law school friends to him, all of whom still lived in and around New York, and most of whom were either married or in serious relationships. She hadn’t seen a single one of them since moving to L.A. two years earlier. But they’d always have e-mail. He told her about Mike:
“Short for Michaela, which no one ever calls her. She’s my best friend hands down. We’re basically the same person. I’d say she was my soul mate if there was a way to say that without sounding like a tool.” It was refreshing to be open about Mike. He never would have revealed so much on a real first date. Every girl had seen When Harry Met Sally.
“You’re sure you’re just friends?” Elizabeth asked, shoving a bloody fry—her last—into her mouth.
So predictable, he thought, while admitting aloud: “We did go out in college. But that was different. We’re just friends now.”
She’s probably still in love with him, thought Elizabeth, sneaking a peek at her watch. 9:02. Seriously? Well, at least they were more than halfway through. A hundred and three hours and counting . . .
“So what do you do in your spare time?” he asked, finishing off the last of his hamburger.
“I read a lot,” she said. “Fiction mainly. Novels. Anything from Austen to Fitzgerald. And the beach’s only a few blocks away. I surf and roller-skate on the weekends.”
Did anyone really roller-skate on the Boardwalk anymore? It struck him as a slightly eccentric thing to do. And what about friends? Richard knew plenty of people who professed to be “loners.” The profession itself was a fairly reliable indicator that they were full of crap. But he was beginning to suspect Elizabeth Santiago was the real thing.
“You surf?” he asked, sucking a mixture of ketchup and “spread” (In-N-Out’s special sauce) off his fingers.
“What, you’ve never seen a Latina surf before?”
He snorted. “I guess not.”
“Haven’t you seen Blue Crush? Michelle Rodriguez was one of the blond girl’s best friends, I think.” She slurped the last of her lemonade.
Blue Crush? Jesus. She was better off pretending she didn’t watch movies either. “So what’re your favorite books?”
“Jane Eyre, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Howards End, To the Lighthouse, and Pride and Prejudice.” She rattled them off without hesitating.
He lifted his eyebrows. “You were ready for that one.”
“I read them every year, no matter what.”
“I don’t think I’ve read any of them, except Jane Eyre, and that was in high school.” Ever since college, Richard had pretended there was a choice to be made, books or movies, and he had made his, no turning back, unless he were reading a book that might be turned into a movie, of course.
Elizabeth shrugged her shoulders. She didn’t feign superiority about reading. She did it because she liked it, for the same reason others played poker, or softball.
“How ’bout movies?” he asked. “Other than Blue Crush?”
She hesitated. “I guess I like the old sixties musicals the best. The Sound of Music. West Side Story. Oh, and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. That’s a fun one.”
Richard was pretty sure Seven Brides for Seven Brothers was one of his mother’s favorite films. Yikes.
“And you? Movies?” Her eyes flicked almost involuntarily to her watch: 9:04. God help me.
“Some Like It Hot, Alien, The Usual Suspects, Driving Miss Daisy, Harold and Maude, and Chinatown.”
“Sounds like you were ready for that one too.”
“I guess. You get asked it a lot in Hollywood, though. You see any of those?” he ventured.
“I’ve seen Harold and Maude. None of the others. That one’s neat,” she added conciliatorily.
They stared at each other. The rally was over. It could not be resurrected. They suffered through a long and painful silence, at the end of which Elizabeth stood up.
“I’m getting a milk shake,” she announced. “Do you want anything?”
He shook his head.
Elizabeth joined the back of the line. She wasn’t proud of herself. There was no question she was violating the intent to converse now. But she couldn’t help it; she simply didn’t have the knack for banter (hair appointments were always an ordeal for her), and each second she sat across from him in silence felt like fresh evidence of her inadequacy. She imagined for a moment what his conversations must be like with this Mike character, his “soul mate.” How in God’s name was she ever going to get any better at this whole dating thing? The worst aspect of tonight was that this was the easy session, where they had all the introductory stuff like biographical details to fall back on. How were they going to sustain a conversation the next time? And the time after that? And that? And that? What had she gotten herself into?
Richard watched her advance slowly up the line, which was considerably longer than the one they’d waited in before. Well, she certainly wasn’t a food snob. If anything, he wished she were a little snobbier, especially when it came to movies. Had she really called Harold and Maude “neat”? Harold and Maude was many things—inspired, epic, tragic, subversive, even cheesy—but “neat” was not one of them. What would he have said if she had asked him about Jane Eyre, though? Would he have had anything meaningful to articulate? He might have said it was “neat” too.
And then, a brilliant idea hit him.
ELIZABETH RETURNED TO the table at 9:28 p.m. with a Neapolitan shake (another item off the secret menu: chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry swirled together). Richard’s leg was shaking harder than ever—a habit of his that was already beginning to annoy her.
“Hey!” he said, smiling broadly. “So I have an idea. How ’bout we use our time every week as a sort of book and movie club? Like, we have a certain book we read on our own, in our own time, and then we use our two hours to talk about it? Or we watch a movie and then talk about it for two hours? Your favorite books, my favorite movies. It’ll be a fun way to pass the time, and I don’t think we’ll be violating our contract, s’long we don’t use the two hours to read or watch the movie?”
Relief washed over Elizabeth—no, it was more like submerging herself in a bath of warm, fragrant water. She thought about the structure this would bring their dates. It was perfect. This she could handle. Maybe. Why hadn’t she thought of it?
“Deal!” she said, flashing her perfect teeth. And before she had a chance to think too hard about it, she closed her eyes and counted on one hand to five. She’d never done this in front of another person before, and when she opened her eyes he was staring at her.
“What was that about?” he asked, more amused than curious.
She told him about her habit of taking time out to appreciate the good in an otherwise bad situation.
“So the good thing is my idea, and the bad thing is that we have to see each other every week?”
“I didn’t mean it like that—”
“It’s okay,” he said, chuckling. “I get it.”
They spent the next twenty minutes debating the best book and movie to kick off the club. In the end they decided to make it easy on themselves and start with what they knew—Jane Eyre and Harold and Maude. At 9:52, they emerged from In-N-Out into the cool evening air. Even though the temperature had hit 80 during the day, it hovered somewhere around 60 now, the habitually dry Los Angeles air incapable of retaining much heat once the sun went down. At the center of the CityWalk lay a sprawling multiplex playing the blockbuster hits of the day. Richard paused to check out the movies listed on the marquee. He felt an urge for popcorn, which he felt every time he was in the vicinity of a movie theater.
“Man, I’d love some popcorn right now.”
“Why don’t you go get some?” asked Elizabeth, with the simplicity of a child who wonders why adults don’t just make themselves happy.
“Nah, not without a ticket. How’d I get in?”
“Just explain and I’m sure they’ll let you. They make all their money off concessions anyway.” (And it’ll kill a few more minutes, she thought. It was 9:54. They were so close!)
She was right. Richard ran into the theater, getting in easily and emerging five minutes later with a big bucket of salty, buttery popcorn. He’d never done this before, gotten a tub of movie popcorn without seeing a movie. It was kind of a revelation.
He walked closer to her, angling the bucket her way. He figured that after a burger, fries, lemonade, and a milk shake she wouldn’t want any, but she grabbed a handful and popped it in her mouth.
She saw him watching her, and parted her lips without hesitating, the golden-brown chunks marring her beautiful teeth. She smiled wider, owning it.
“So good, isn’t it?” he mumbled through his own mouthful.
She nodded, swallowing. “I’ll ask Jonathan Hertzfeld if we can add the books and movies to our expenses when I talk to him tomorrow.”
“Ooh, good thinking.” And then, after a pause: “I wonder if this is what our mysterious benefactor had in mind when he thought this whole thing up.”
“Who cares?” said Elizabeth. “He—or she—is obviously insane.”
He laughed, and they ambled toward their cars. Before they parted, Elizabeth checked her watch one last time: 10:01. They’d done it.
The first two hours had passed.