Semi-Charmed Life

February

"This place is fucking dead, bro."

Dustin sighed and looked over at where Lucas was making popcorn.

"Like why am I even making all this damn popcorn when I know nobody's gonna buy it," he continued.

Dustin shrugged as he leaned against the counter. "We only got hired because they were doing renovation on the AMC at the mall."

Lucas snorted. "Charles needs to renovate this . It looks like it was built in the 70s and never got updated."

"Probably because it was built in the 70s and never got updated."

Charles was their manager, a stout old man who had owned the Hawk Theater since forever. Dustin had gotten his job there because he knew Steve Harrington, the other manager, and Lucas had started working because Charles was desperate for more employees when customers had started coming back to the Hawk in droves after the AMC at the mall closed. Unfortunately the AMC was back in business as of the end of January, so the Hawk had returned to the slow trickle of customers it had before.

"When's Steve coming in?" Asked Lucas, now leaning against the popcorn maker.

"Three, I think," Dustin replied. "He said something about having to babysit some cousin or other later today."

"Eh, well."

That summed it up pretty nicely; their job was pretty much eh, well. Nothing of interest ever happened at the Hawk, not like El's horror stories from Walmart or Max's from McDonald's. To be fair, there were whole internet pages devoted to that rare breed of strange Walmart customers, so Dustin was never really that shocked by the tales El came away with.

The two of them chilled between the registers and the concessions area for another twenty minutes, serving a surprising amount of three customers, and Dustin was considering actually going to the break room for his backpack to get either his homework or his deck of cards (probably the cards, but even homework was looking more appealing than staring at the ugly brown walls of the Hawk's lobby for one more second) when a gust of frigid February wind blew through the door. Accompanying the cold air were two people, bundled up in winter coats with scarves up to their eyes. For a second Dustin thought it was Mike and El until he remembered El was working too and Mike was babysitting some neighbours again. Only when the figures approached the counter and pulled their scarves down did he recognize them.

"Hi, Dustin," said Rachel. Her little sister Stefani, coincidentally much taller, waved quickly.

"Hey! Hi! Can I get you anything?" He answered, his voice cracking at the end. Dustin could hear Lucas snickering quietly behind him and cleared his throat.

He and Rachel had been on a few dates after their first at semi, but finals, the holidays, and college stuff had taken up a lot of their spare time and they hadn't seen much of each other in the past few weeks. It didn't help that Dustin had been planning to ask her if she wanted to be official the next time they went out (maybe Valentine's Day, hopefully) because now she was here smiling at him and it had him a little tongue-tied.

Rachel's cheeks and nose were pink from the cold, her dark eyes sparkling and her hair spilling in waves out from under her hat, like a silky black ribbon, or a glassy sea reflecting the night sky-

"Uh, yeah!" She replied. "You guys are playing Fantastic Beasts still, right?"

"Yeah, it's kinda the only reason anyone still comes here after the mall theater opened again," interjected Lucas.

Rachel almost seemed startled to see him there, but then he started talking to Stefani about popcorn and Rachel turned back to Dustin.

"Can I get two tickets for that then?"