“I chose ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’ ’ but really just used it to talk about how our generation is really different than his, and that it would be great if that song applied to us, but it doesn’t. We’re complacent.”
I’m not really sure what she’s talking about, so I just say, “I don’t think I know any of his songs.”
She doesn’t respond, and for a while we just eat. The silence starts getting to me. Not only do I not know a single Bob Dylan song, but I also have nothing interesting to say. She finishes her coffee and asks for another. I look around at the other tables, where people are talking and nodding their heads.
“I heard you got kicked out of your old school for making out with a girl in the bathroom,” I blurt.
Her eyebrows rise. She looks into her soup bowl, like it might tell her how to react if she concentrates hard enough. Then she starts to laugh.
“This school is so weird,” she says, shaking her head. She brushes a strand of hair away from her face. “I mean, really. And I’m still not over the fact that all the houses in this town are really just one design that was copied over and over and then painted alternating colors.” She spoons herself a green bean. “It’s no wonder most of the students at Vista are all clones of each other. Before we moved here, I had no idea that a place like this could exist so close to the city.”
Even though Los Cerros isn’t my favorite place in the world, I feel a little protective of it. “It isn’t all like that,” I say. “It has some good parts.”
“Well, let’s go, then,” Dylan says. “Show me.”
We split the bill, but Dylan leaves the tip because she ends up ordering a third cup of coffee to go.
As we walk out of the restaurant, Dylan says, “By the way, in case you were wondering—my dad got transferred. He can’t stand commuting, so we moved.”
We head away from the strip mall, past the identical, million-dollar houses, the chain restaurants, the new white, stucco city-hall building with its two skinny, sad palm trees on either side, and onto a narrow gravel street behind it all.
“So, this is it,” I say. “My favorite part of Los Cerros.” I sweep my arm up to the sky.
It’s an old movie theater, standing by itself on a shabby street where no one ever walks or drives. It’s hidden, it’s out of place, it’s run-down and forgotten and empty. But it towers above us, as real as the Starbucks and the Safeway. Most of its windows are boarded up and its paint has mostly peeled off, but someone once painted a mural on the side and you can still see traces of the colors it used to be: yellow and light blue and green. It’s falling apart, but I love it.
“The town’s going to tear it down,” I tell Dylan. The planning has been going on for years, but it’s still hard for me to believe that soon it will be gone forever.
Dylan squints against the sun to read the marquee with its missing letters: GO DBYE & tha K YOU.
I can’t tell what she sees—a broken-down, rotting old building with weeds waist-high around it, or a place that was clearly amazing before it was forgotten.
Dylan rocks back on her feet, sips her coffee, and heads toward the small circular windows on the four heavy doors. As I watch her peering in, guilt settles in my stomach. The only person I ever came here with was Ingrid. I want to travel back in time a few minutes and decide against leading Dylan here. At the same time I want to join her in her explorations. I want to push my face against the windows like Ingrid and I did a thousand times and stare at the darkened lobby with its empty concession stand.
I wonder if this is what betrayal feels like.
Dylan heads around the side of the theater, but I don’t follow her. I know what she’ll find: more weeds, a locked back door, a long rectangular window with a heavy curtain on the inside making it impossible to see through.
I sit against the ticket booth to wait for her. Trace my fingers along the edges of the tiled floor. Watch the tips of the weeds sway in the slight breeze. Listen to the traffic sounds from a distant street.
She emerges from the opposite side and leans against the booth.
“I wonder what the last movie that played here was,” she says. I smile up at her, feel another pang in my stomach. It’s something Ingrid and I used to wonder about all the time.
“I like it here,” Dylan says. It sounds simple, honest. “I’m glad I chose you to be friends with.”
She pries the plastic lid off her coffee cup and looks disappoint edly inside. Empty. I place my hand on my backpack. This is the first afternoon since I discovered it that I haven’t gone straight home to read Ingrid’s journal.
Without thinking, I say, “We used to sit here all the time.”
Facing out, across the street, she says, “Your friend died, didn’t she?”
I nod, even though I know she isn’t looking at me.
“That’s rough,” she says, and I’m so used to hearing people tell me things like that, but it’s the way that she says it—so calm and solemn—that makes me want to cry.
I don’t say anything back for a while. I’m thinking about how Ingrid always made huge elaborate plans for everything. One of them involved getting rich somehow and buying the theater and fixing it up and reopening it to show indie films. Instead of soda, we’d sell tea at the concession stand, and we might even have some photographs or books for sale. It would be more than a theater. It would be a place to escape to when people felt stifled by the chain stores and lonely in their massive houses. I can’t understand why she would make plans like that if she wasn’t planning on actually doing any of it.