THE BURN welled a pink face and throbbed. They stood back from the ticket booth and the front doors at the movie theater. Terry clenched a fist, yanked his sleeve down from the elbow. John Michael paced the curb, and took quick drags from a long cigarette. Neither one had money. They waited for a big enough group to get in with.

Terry passed the town’s one theater often walking the town, sometimes wanted bad to go inside and watch, but he did not. Last fall he got two books of pale green grocery store stamps from his father to cash in for a ticket, but the clerk shook his head and passed them back under the window; he spoke to a long necked microphone, told him the Magic Hat Cinema of Issaqueena, South Carolina, as a strict rule, did not accept grocery stamps as legal movie tender.

He saw Alice Washington in the floodlight, close to the front of the line, by herself. She took off a pair of black plastic eyeglasses and fogged breath on the lenses and wiped them with the bottom of her shirt. She counted change and put it down to the cashier tray John Michael went on telling him about the movie.

They build a time machine. Out of a car. A fucking DeLorean.

What’s a DeLorean?

The fastest car in the world. It has doors that open up over the ceiling, like wings.

Terry picked up two torn stubs on the ground near the trash and gave one to him. A few minutes they got back of four old people, kept their faces down and went inside. He thought one usher might be wise to them. They stopped, though, for a moment at the glass counter with the candy The machine on wheels, what looked a wheelbarrow to him, gurgled popcorn like a burst water main. Terry pulled John Michael at the jacket sleeve.

Come on, he said.

The candy here is amazing, John Michael said. They have all of it here. All of it. Fucking Sno-Caps.

She was two rows from the front. They sat a few back from her and put their feet on the chairs. John Michael got two soda cans from his jacket. Terry yanked the pull tab and tilted it. He drank half, and then he looked at Alice Washington. He looked at her some more, the back of her head, bare neck when she twisted her hair a cord, pulled it to one side and stuffed it past the neckline on her sweater. He spoke but didn’t turn.

You know her? he said.

Who?

That girl two rows ahead.

John Michael crunched his eyes and poked his neck forward some, got a look at her and then settled back to the seat.

She’s retarded, I think, he said.

Like the ones in the gym.

Not like those. But retarded, yes.

That’s not right.

It is.

I don’t believe you.

She ate like a hundred bobby pins once too. They had to pump her stomach. One Easter her class made these rabbits from construction paper, like baskets, I guess, and they put cotton balls on the outside, like the rabbit fur, you know, and that green plastic grass inside of it, and then all this candy, jellybeans, eggs, those puffy colored baby chickens, and by the end of the movie they watch she’s got cotton and glue on her face, like some of that grass hanging out of her mouth. She ate all the candy, then the cotton, then the grass, then the construction paper. They had to pump her stomach that time as well, but that was before the bobby pins.

The lights dimmed. The red side curtains began to part. Terry took short pecks from the can, sipped it as he would a hot drink; white burns on the dark screen, crackle of film run through the hobbling projector.

He got up and went down beside her and held out the can. She looked at him and squinted her eyes. She shook her head, turned to the screen, and the curtain went on its high move and the dim lights. He wished to put his hand beneath her sweater and touch her bare shoulder, and then he wanted to touch her bottom lip, and then her earlobe. He did not understand these things. He leaned down and put the soda near her feet and left it.

A scientist knocked over a large sealed metal tub, and it broke open, steamed, green fluid run on the floor. The tub was top secret, controlled by a group of industrialists, and headed for the military Terry waited for the DeLorean. One zombie with padlocks for earrings crawled from the tub and went at chewing the scientist’s brain, and the scientist screamed, bewildered, and another zombie with a purple mohawk ate off his face.

Goddammit John Michael.

This isn’t the one. There’s been a mix-up.

Terry got his feet off the chair and leaned up, forearms at his knees.

What he thought was, where is that fucking DeLorean? The movie felt an awful, sad vision, a ridiculous thing, and worthless; the world felt less somehow, with a thing such as this movie floating around inside.

What is this shit, man?

It’s just a different movie. I read the paper wrong.

An old man screamed and a group of zombies went eating on him.

I shouldn’t be here, Terry said.

His body jumped.

Gross, John Michael said.

I have to leave. I can’t watch this.

He looked at the back of her head two rows up.

Hang on, John Michael said.

Nah.

It was fluid.

Terry put a hand on the armrest and pushed up, turned fast, and split the aisle, the front lobby, the red guard rope, the parking lot, blacktop studded loose flagstone. The high voice of the usher, run after him like skinny dogs set loose.