caramel. “Special Edition Director’s Cut, with five extended scenes.”
“Five?” he asks, turning to me with eyes wide. “The on-demand version only has two extra scenes.”
I chuckle. “You should try renting a DVD now and then, Josh. They’ve got lots of stuff you can’t find on HitFlix. Director’s commentaries, theatrical trailers, reviews, interviews. Some of them are better than the movie itself…”
He nods, engrossed in the scary movie playing out on the screen. We watch the werewolf dispatch the vampire – and then a dozen more – before I turn back to him, admiring the masculine curve of his clenched jaw.
“You like these?” I ask skeptically. He always seemed like a sports movie kind of guy to me.
He turns back to me, looking vaguely disappointed. “Your Dad’s the one who turned me onto the first three, and I’ve seen the last two in the theaters.”
“Impressive,” I say, leaning back against the wall behind the counter and looking him up and down. “I took you more for a Princess Confessional 2 kind of dude.”
“Very funny.”
We watch for a little while longer but it’s on mute so that customers can hear the spooky playlist I have oozing from the tiny speakers on either side of the TV. Monster Mash. Spooky. Evil Woman. Thriller, that kind of thing. Not that there have been any customers in the last few hours, except for Mr. Folgers and Josh, that is.
He looks around, studying the miles of dollar store cobwebs and buckets of fake blood splattered everywhere. “You really went all out this year, huh Haley?”
I shrug. It’s grown a little darker out now and the strings of blinking orange lights strung all through the store are starting to be more noticeable… and charming. I watch them reflect in his deep brown eyes and admit, “Yeah, well, I was hoping it might draw in a little more business tonight.”
I pause, snort and add, “Who am I kidding: I thought it might draw in any business tonight, period.”
“Things that bad?” he asks, reaching for another caramel. Leave it to Josh to hog the only good candy in the trick or treat pumpkin.
“Things are a little better ever since I sold the house,” I admit, reaching for one of those gooey peanut butter blobs in the waxy orange wrapper. “At least now I don’t have to pay down the mortgage every month.”
“Where are you living?” he asks, as if he already knows.
I nod past him to the back room, hidden behind a closed door plastered with cheesy yellow crime scene taped marked “Do Not Enter”.
“You’re looking at it.”
He smiles. “Something funny?” I huff, a little too defensively.
He holds his hands up in surrender. “No, no, it’s just… you know how I said I came home for the holiday break?”
“I do.”
“Yeah, well… I don’t know if you know this or not, but… there’s not really any such thing as a Halloween break from college.”
I smile. “I do kind of know that,” I admit. “I might not have gone away to college, but I know that much.”
“Yeah, well…” He pauses, digs his hands deep in his pockets, then pulls them back out, then digs them back in. “I, uh, kind of dropped out.”
He pauses before blurting, “Well, I dropped out before they could kick me out, I guess, is the more accurate term.”
“You?” I ask, genuinely and sincerely perplexed. “Mr. academic scholarship, brown nose goody two shoes teacher’s pet kiss up?”
He sighs, then laughs at the irony. “Yeah, well… I guess I wasn’t smart enough to stay out of trouble my first semester away at school. I haven’t been going to classes, I’ve been partying too hard, my advisor told me last week I had two choices: drop out or get my Dad to start paying my tuition.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah, well… I knew my Dad wasn’t going to fork over 60 grand for four years of college, not after being so proud about my scholarship anyway, so… I dropped out.”
I smile at him. He was always so cocky in school. Work came so easily for him, that’s why he always had so much time to goof off in class. Now he looks humbled, and ten times as dreamy.
“I hadn’t really thought it all the way through,” he adds. “I mean, I figured I could just hang out in my room for the rest of the semester, until I figured out what to do over Christmas break.”
“Not an option?” I ask.
“No,” he admits. “They kicked me out the minute my paperwork went through. So I had to come home and, to keep my folks off my back, cooked up this ‘holiday weekend’ story.”
“They bought it?”
He waves the question away. “Dad’s so busy at the bank, and Mom’s been on a hot streak at her realtor’s office, they barely know I’m home.”
“Until Monday rolls around,” I remind him.
He looks like I’ve just stepped on his pinky toe. “Until Monday,” he sighs, grabbing another piece of candy. I chuckle and join him. Suddenly, sleeping in the back room of a failing video store in some rundown strip mall doesn’t seem quite so bad.
“So what are you going to do?” I ask.
He shrugs. “I’ll have to fess up sometime,” he sighs. “Dad’ll be pissed, Mom will be okay, but… I just feel so stupid, you know?”
I nod and look past his shoulder at the blinking orange lights strung around the New Releases section. “At least you had a chance to get away,” I say. “With Dad so sick my senior year, I never even applied anywhere.”
He shakes his head, pocketing his fifth empty caramel wrapper. “I never even knew, Haley,” he says, reaching across the table to cover my hand with his. It’s big, and soft, and warm. I haven’t felt anything so good in… months. “I mean, he never let on, all those afternoons we spent in here combing through the Horror section…”
“The chemo was pretty mild at first,” I lie, recalling all those weekends spent listening to Dad hurl in the bathroom the minute we got home from the Oncologist’s office. “He was okay until just before graduation, then they just kind of stopped working. He went… he went pretty fast after that and… well, he tried to work as long as he could. I’m glad… I’m glad you had that time with him, Josh. I’m sure it meant a lot to him, a fellow horror movie buff.”
“I wish I’d known,” he says, softly, hand still covering mine. “I would have… I would have hung around a little longer each day. Listened to him a little more closely. Asked him more questions. Watched a movie or two with him, maybe.”
I shrug. I’ve been telling myself that for the last five months. His hand is still on mine, soft and warm and lingering. Our eyes meet and he smiles, lips full and soft and looking sweet from the caramel. The thought of how they might taste, warm and sticky, suddenly overtakes me and I look down at my shoes.
Suddenly the bell over the door rings and, instinctively, like two kids caught hooking up on the living room couch, we pull away from each other.
“Josh?”
A pretty girl stands in the doorway, young and tight in leopard print yoga pants and a matching jacket a size too small. The jacket is open and inside is an orange baby doll T-shirt with bling rhinestones in the shape of a jack o’ lantern.
“Mia!” he says, nervously, bouncing around and reaching for the Princess Confessional DVDs I’ve been giving him so much grief about all night. “Hey, what… I told you I’d pick these up for you. You didn’t have to come all this way.”
Her scowl makes her look mean. Still just as beautiful, but slightly… pissy. Like you’d never want to get her order wrong if you were waiting on her table. “Yeah,” she huffs, staring daggers. “That was like… an hour ago.”
He looks at me and I look back at him with eyes that say, “Really?”
“Sorry, babe, I didn’t… hey, do you remember Haley Tyson?”
The chick looks over at me, nostrils already wrinkling and huffs, “No, why would I?”
He flicks his eyes at me, apologetically, then back to her, beseechingly. “Well, Haley and I graduated togethe
r so I thought…”
“You were like, two years ahead of me, Josh,” she snaps. And that’s that. So much for small talk.
She looks vaguely familiar, but who knows. She also looks like every other entitled twat I see strutting all over town these days. She’s hot, no doubt, and knows it. So does Josh.
“Come on,” she whines, literally biting her lower lip and stomping her feet like a child having a tantrum. “Grab the DVDs already. The popcorn’s getting cold…”
“Oh yeah, sure,” he babbles, reaching for the DVDs with one hand and his wallet with the other.
I wave a hand and tell him, “On the house.”
He pauses, even with Mia doing the two step by the front door. “Really?”
I shrug, the traces of his fingertips still fresh on the top of my hand. “Sure, no worries. Happy Halloween, Josh.”
“Thanks,” he says, before Mia snags them from his hand.
“Yeah, thanks,” she says, ignoring me. To Josh she says, “I don’t even know why you came here. I have these in my queue at home, you know?”
I bite my lip to keep from chuckling before pointing out, “Well, you can listen to the Director’s commentary on these, and there are a