Rayne & Delilah's Midnite Matinee(74)

Dad laughs. “Of what?”

“Don’t know yet. We also go thrifting and watch a lot of horror movies together.”

“You need a buddy to watch horror movies. Your mom was a good buddy for that.”

“Yeah.”

“You know that’s how we got together, right?”

“No. You didn’t tell me that when you were around, and you’re not Mom’s favorite topic of conversation now.”

“I guess not,” he murmurs. He takes a deep breath as he remembers. “Your mom and I met in sophomore year of high school. Became best friends overnight. Couple of weirdos who loved weird stuff. Your mom started making jewelry out of animal bones and discarded cicada shells in high school. Did you know that?”

I smile with one side of my mouth. “No. But I’m not surprised. That’s still pretty much her jewelry-making vibe.”

A look of nostalgia comes over Dad’s face. “It was the two of us against the world. We would go over to each other’s houses after school and watch MTV and smoke pot. Which you shouldn’t do.”

“(A) I don’t. But (B) you don’t really get to boss me anymore.”

He looks away in embarrassment. “Fair enough. Anyway. On Friday and Saturday nights, we’d drive to Videoville in my 1990 Ford Tempo and rent horror movies. The rule was neither of us could have even heard of it. Then we’d go sit on the couch at one of our houses and watch it. Well, that was the rule until we’d watched every horror movie Videoville had. The other rule was that we couldn’t make out during the movie. We had to pay attention. Afterward was fair game. Oh, and our favorite snack during the movies was melted cheese over Doritos. We were both sad and mad all the time when we weren’t together.” He speaks with the tone of someone delivering a eulogy. Maybe he is.

“So I’m sort of a genetic superhero.”

“You look like her.”

“I know.”

“People tell you that?”

“I have eyes.”

“Your mom would have loved the way you dress when she was in high school.”

“I’m wearing basically what I wear for the show. We went to the con in character, and I came right here. But how I dress normally isn’t super far off from this.”

“She’d have loved it. Me too. Am I telling you stuff you already know?”

“Like I said, Mom doesn’t ever talk about you and gets mad if I do, and when you were still around, I was a bit young to hear about you two getting high and dryhumping as wayward teens.”

“What about you? Boyfriend?”

“Nice segue.”

“Yeah.”

“I went out with a guy for a few months when I was a sophomore. He was a ferret guy.”

“Ferret guy?”

“He had like six ferrets and would hide them in his coat at school and feed them during class.”

“Ah. There was a ferret guy in my high school.”

“Of course there was. Anyway. After him, not really anyone. I’m tied up every Friday and Saturday night with the show, so I’m not big on dating.” I’m still not sure how much of my life I want to tell him about. It doesn’t feel like he’s earned it.

“What about your mom? She ever find anyone?” He says it with an odd sort of gingerliness, like it’s going to hurt him if he discovers she did.

It weirds me out, telling him about Mom, knowing how hard she’d freak. But…“When I was twelve, she dated a guy named Joey. He was nice. I guess maybe they were pretty serious. Seems like they were together until I was thirteen? Fourteen? I dunno. She’ll go on a date here and there, but nothing serious.”

“Where are you in school?”

“Do you really not know that?”

“I don’t know if you skipped a grade or something.”

“Nice save. Just graduated from high school.”

“Good job!”

“Well, barely, so don’t go nuts with praise. What’s with—” I motion at my chest, where the embroidered words are on his shirt, the way he did with my septum piercing.

“SynergInfo? They’re a data storage company. I’m a computer database administrator there.”

“That’s a new direction for you, from what I remember.”

“Yeah, I got my database administration certificate from University of Phoenix a few years back.”

“You turned into a real grown-up.”

He laughs hollowly.

I arrange my pizza crusts into a frown on my plate. “I remember you being a lot older. If you’d asked me as a kid how old I thought you were, I would’ve said forty-seven. Because you could drive a car. Which automatically made you forty-seven.”

“I was nineteen when we had you. Your mom got pregnant in the last few months of high school. We got married that fall.”

“So you’re not even forty yet.”

He shakes his head.

“Your summer’s almost over.”

He looks at me quizzically.

I toy with a scrap of pepperoni. “So, like, say humans live to be eighty. I always think about how you can divide human lives into the four seasons. From birth to twenty is spring, from twenty to forty is summer, from forty to sixty is fall, and from sixty to eighty is winter.”