Rayne & Delilah's Midnite Matinee(21)
“I know what they are.”
“Sorry. You have to pick a new favorite food.”
“I can’t just pick a new favorite.”
“Brown flour Frisbees with cow grease and sugar sludge.”
Lawson claps his hands over his ears. “No! I can’t listen to you ruin pancakes for me. You don’t hate pancakes.”
“No, I don’t. They’re my eleventh favorite food, which is where they should be for a normal person.”
“I can’t believe you called butter ‘cow grease.’ I’m gonna need a minute to recover.”
“That went too far. I’m not proud.”
Lawson looks up as he opens the door of Five Guys for me. “Now that’s a Friday-night sky.”
This turn for the poetic catches me off guard. Unless this is some weird joke. He does love pancakes and have a gross air freshener and listen to crappy music. “Do what now?” I ask.
“A Friday-night sky. You ever notice that you only see some kinds of skies on certain nights? That’s a Friday-night sky.”
I stop, look up, and study the sky for a moment. “Looks like a normal sky to me.”
“Friday-night skies feel…more hopeful. They always smell good too.”
“You’re smelling french fries.”
“I swear. You never noticed Friday-night skies?”
“No.” This is not entirely true. As he’s been carrying on about them, I realize that I’ve noticed Friday-night skies too. But it’s not a terrific idea to agree with a dude too much at first, in my opinion. Better to see sooner than later how they handle your thinking differently than they do. Not that I’m envisioning a bunch of other dates with this guy. But habit’s habit.
We order cheeseburgers and approximately a laundry basket’s worth of fries and sit. I brace myself for awkward conversation. At times like this I try to imagine I’m the host of my own talk show and I have to interview awful celebrities and seem really engaged and make it entertaining for my public. Good practice for my TV career someday.
“All right. Come clean,” I say. “You left with my dog costume on purpose.”
He laughs nervously. “What? No!”
“Mmmmmmmmm-hmmm.”
“No, for real.”
“Mmmmmmmmm-hmmm.”
“I genuinely left on accident with the costume and got out to my truck and then I remembered.”
“But you didn’t turn around and walk a hundred feet back to the building.”
“I figured your camera guy probably locked it.”
Arliss probably did. “You couldn’t have just left it by the back door?”
“It might’ve gotten stolen.”
I fold my arms. “Stolen.”
He shrugs.
“Because that is definitely a thing that happens in our society: dog costume theft. It’s reached epidemic levels.”
“You never know.”
“You legitimately sometimes know. You really do occasionally know.”
“People will sell anything to buy drugs.”
“That is a true statement that still makes you zero percent less ridiculous.”
He grins the grin of the busted. “I don’t get to eat like this much,” he says, holding up a fry appreciatively like a fine cigar.
“Because of training or whatever?”
“Yeah, my life is sorta one chicken breast and protein shake after another.”
“You hate joy.”
“Makes me a better fighter. That brings me joy.”
“Mr. Dedication up in here.”
“Speaking of dedication, I wanted to ask you at the studio, but I didn’t get a chance. How’d you end up doing a TV show?”
I finish a big bite of cheeseburger. “Delia and I have this mutual friend from school, Jesmyn. Actually, she moved to Nashville, but anyway. Delia was friends with her first. So I was in one of our school’s musicals with Jesmyn, and we started talking, and I told her I wanted to go into TV someday.”
“Acting or—”
“I wanna be like Mindy Kaling and write and be on my own show.”
“How long have you wanted to do that?”
“Like, my whole life. I can’t remember when I didn’t. I used to make movies when I was little on my mom’s digital camera.”
“I interrupted, sorry. You were saying about you and Delia?” Lawson says.
“So Delia grew up watching shows like ours with her dad. And she’d mentioned to Jesmyn that she wanted to start doing a horror show on public access, but she needed someone to do it with because she was scared to do it alone. She originally asked Jesmyn, but she’s more of a musician, so Jesmyn sent Delia my way.”
“Obviously it worked out.”
“In the beginning, I was just doing it to be on TV. Honestly, it surprised me what good friends we became. We didn’t have tons in common at first other than the show. But now we’ve influenced each other in a bunch of ways.”
“How so?”
“Mmm…for one thing, I would never have gotten into cheesy horror movies if it weren’t for her. I always liked horror movies, but not the kind we show. And I guess she’s picked up my sense of humor.”