On the desk, though, lay Mike’s phone. Not the one he used with his parents. The secret one he’d used with me. He wasn’t texting me anymore. So who was he texting now? The screen still glowed. He must’ve set it down seconds ago without locking it.
Careful not to make a sound, I grabbed it. He had his photos app pulled up, and it only took me a couple taps to get to his most recent image. A selfie taken by some boy about my age, maybe even younger, naked, in a bedroom. I swiped through the previous photos and found more of the same. A parade of naked boys, all of them in sharp focus and bright color, unlike the Hollywood starlets that decorated my wall. Many were tubby like me. Maybe that was his type. Had he gotten together with all these guys in real life? Or just chatted with them online? Or gotten the photos off the Internet?
I swiped again, and my image appeared, right there among all the others.
“Cody?”
I jumped about a foot in the air. The voice calling my name hadn’t come from the bathroom, though, but from the open office door. A kid I knew from church stood there. Ernest Kimball.
“I didn’t know you worked here,” he said.
A second ago I’d had my back to the door. Had Ernest spotted the image of me on the phone’s screen? I didn’t think so. I’d probably see it on his face right now if he had. I hoped Mike couldn’t hear him talking from the bathroom.
“Hey, have you seen that movie Samson yet?” Ernest asked. “I’ve watched it three times now, and—”
Locking the phone and dropping it back on Mike’s desk, I hurried past Ernest, past the snack counter, past the popcorn popper still going pop-pop-pop-pop-pop.
*
A few minutes later I’d run out to the little parking lot behind the theater and pitched to my hands and knees on the rough asphalt. Whenever a lady in a noir movie had her heart broken, she’d throw herself diagonally across her bed, and the tears would slide down her cheeks like shiny pearls, and she’d still look gorgeous. In my case, I couldn’t even bring myself to cry. I just wanted to puke.
I grabbed the paper hat off my head and crumpled it. Below me little shards of broken green and clear glass gleamed in the sunlight, like diamonds and emeralds. A little farther away, at the base of the theater’s rear brick wall, among the weeds pushing up through cracks in the asphalt, lay a little pile of rusty, sharp-looking nails.
I grabbed a handful, hauled myself to my feet, and walked over to Mike’s piece of junk car. Inside my body I imagined I could still feel little explosions going off, little hot kernels of rage bursting. Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop. I positioned a few of the nails under one of the tires. Then I went around to the other tires and did the same thing. I’d never tried this trick before, but my brother had gotten busted for it years ago. It was childish and stupid of me, and Mike would know exactly who’d done it and probably figure out a way to get back at me, but I didn’t care.
I’d just finished when a shadow fell over me. I whirled around, sure it must be Mike.
Instead I found Ernest Kimball standing there, watching me, his hands on his hips. “What do you think you’re doing?” he said, his gaze so sharp I swear I felt his eyes poke me in the chest.
“Um.”
I’d known Ernest since kindergarten. We were friends back then, because we were both girly and liked to play with Barbies, although whereas I was chunky, he was so thin I bet his clothes weighed more than he did. When we got older and the fag comments started to come, we drifted apart. We never talked about it, but both of us must’ve realized we’d be safer if we kept our distance. Over time Ernest got more and more into church, just like I got more and more into noir. These days we went to different high schools, but I saw him at service every Sunday, sitting in the third row with his back very straight and a yellow notepad in his lap so he could take notes on the sermon.
Ernest had the same pad with him now. It stuck out of a canvas bag he had slung over his shoulder. I wondered if he took notes on Samson, too. You might’ve heard of that movie. It was really big last year with the Christian nutjob demographic. It tells the Samson and Delilah story, which makes it sort of like Gladiator for Bible-thumpers. I snuck in to watch it once during my first week at the theater, and I thought it sucked, but on the plus side, the guy who played Samson was hot as hell and spent half the film shirtless.
“Never mind,” Ernest said. “I know what you were doing. Pulling a prank. Trying to ruin some poor person’s day. Shame on you, Cody.” He actually wagged his finger at me as he said it. “This isn’t very Christian of you. I could report you, you know. It just so happens I’m on my way to the police station right now. As president of the Teen Council for Moral Decency, I have a meeting there every Tuesday afternoon to discuss worrying issues in our community. I bet if I mentioned this incident to Officer Crane, she’d have a few choice words for you. For your parents, too.”
The mention of my parents jarred me into finding my voice again. “I wasn’t just playing some random prank, Ernest. I’m having a really bad day, okay? Someone treated me like dirt, and I’m having a really bad day.”
His expression softened. He turned his poky eyes on the car. “Who does this thing belong to?”
“A guy named Mike Moretti,” I admitted.
“And what did he do to you?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” With my free hand I tugged off the clip-on bow tie and undid the top button of my shirt. “He manages the movie theater,” I added. “He’s my boss.” I hoped Ernest might assume I’d gotten mad at Mike for something work related.
It seemed like he did. “Have some self-respect, Cody,” he said, but in a gentler tone. “Aren’t you better than this? You need to follow a higher example.”
That stopped me. I opened my fingers to reveal the leftover rusty nails nestled in my dirty palm. I glanced at the clip-on bow tie in my other hand and the crumpled paper hat lying on the ground where I’d dropped it. “You’re right,” I said. “I am. I do.”
Ernest looked pleased. He didn’t smile—I didn’t think I’d ever seen him smile—but he gave an eager nod. “I understand you’re mad, Cody, but you need to ask yourself what Jesus would do in this situation.”
But Jesus wasn’t the example I was thinking of. My head had filled with images of my film noir heroines. Rita Hayworth. Ann Savage. All of them. They wouldn’t have done something so trashy and unimaginative and shortsighted as pop the tires of the guy who’d wronged them. They would’ve gotten back at him, but they would’ve thought about it first. They would’ve come up with a plan.
I needed to do the same thing. The only question was: Could I be ruthless? Did I have the guts?
I turned around and gathered up the nails from behind the tire next to me. “I’m sorry, Ernest. I was just being stupid.”