Homewrecker

29 - 𝓼𝓽𝓪𝓻𝓫𝓻𝓲𝓰𝓱𝓽

"Want to take a break?" Ethan eventually asked about forty minutes later, after we went back to the first screen to direct cars appearing for the showings of the second movies to their respective screens and parking spaces for the first screen closest to us.

It had been quieter then than it was a couple of hours earlier, and most of the cars for the first showings had driven out of the lot after the first movie ended. Spaces were long gapes between vehicles, only the poles with reflective strips against the paint in between them, and Ethan said it didn't really matter anymore if people took up the vacant spaces with lawn chairs and blankets. Anyone who was going to be there already would be at almost midnight.

For the past fifteen minutes, we had just been wandering around, quietly, but nothing was really happening. There were no headlights beaming at the lower half of the screen, no one filming, no one smoking. That was when Ethan suddenly turned on his Segway and asked me this, just as we were about to pass screen three for the second time.

I shrugged, although the answer was actually yes, I really did want to take a break. The soles of my feet were starting to throb, and I was getting bored, walking uneventfully around the same screens over and over again.

My mind also kept wandering back to what Ryan said, and what I realized because of it. I felt heavy and tired, and maybe that was because it was after midnight. Or maybe it was because it was like I was losing everything about who I used to be, becoming someone totally different and unrecognizable to me. Someone who vacationed in a lake town, who appeared on television and talked about the family she never had before, who had a job at a drive-in movie theater and was brutally honest instead of just honest. Hurtful, instead of just hurting.

I wanted to go back to my bunk bed, stare at the ceiling so close to me until I fell into another unfeeling sleep.

But clocking out for a lunch break would probably have to work instead.

It wasn't until we had gone back to the concession stand that I caught my first glimpse of Andi since we had arrived to Starbright around six hours earlier, when she was sitting in the booth with Taylor-Elise and the girl from the beach. Now she was behind the counter, leaning beside the somewhat full popcorn machine on her phone, laughing at something Taylor-Elise had said as she cleaned the crusty tops of the reusable ketchup bottles with a wet wipe.

"No," Taylor-Elise scolded when she glanced up and saw us coming through the front doors that were still left propped open with wooden wedges, pointing the crumpled wipe at us. I thought she meant me, me being there with them, until I realized she was actually pointing at Ethan's Segway. "No. That thing gets scuff marks all over the floor. Walk, like a normal person."

Ethan spun circles around the tables, looking over his shoulder. "I don't see anything."

"It's when you stop, it gets marks everywhere and you never mop the floor when it does."

The spinning continued, moving around the same tables repeatedly, intentionally. "I'm outside personnel. You don't mop the outside."

"Then get back outside," she countered.

I stood there awkwardly for a moment, realizing that Ethan wasn't leading me to the office to tell me how to use the computer to clock out for my break anymore, and glanced over at Andi near the popcorn machine. She was smiling, really it was just a slight tilt of the corner of her lips as she observed their conversation, and completely ignoring that I was there.

Then the girl from the beach emerged from the room I assumed was the kitchen, judging by the glints of silver steel I noticed through the doorframe, and she started to scold them as Ethan retorted, "I'm coming in for my break."