Driver's Education by Grant Ginder Read Free Book Online

forward, then backward. Lips sucked in, then pushed out; creases, then no creases, then creases again.
    I can tell that she’s taken a step toward me; her shadow eclipses the screens, I can smell the turkey, the mustard she ate for lunch. I can feel her hands resting slightly over the dome of my head, wanting to touch it, but not. Afraid she’ll break something.
    She just says: Finn .
    I scratch at the space between my eyes. I run the tapes again. What bothers Karen, what she can’t articulate, is this: at the moment of highest intensity, when you’d expect there to be a slap, or a kiss, or something wonderfully offensive, The Girl turns the other way. That’s it—she just turns the other way. I think that, too often, it’s the decency of people that always confuses us.
    Karen keeps talking. “Have you ever noticed how the people on the street, on Seventh Avenue, move faster than the clouds? Maybe it makes sense, but I don’t think it should. People moving faster than clouds. There’s just something that seems so wrong about that, you know? Just so disrespectful. They should have the decency to move at the same pace, at the very least.”
    â€œYou should air the footage backward,” I say, finally.
    â€œSorry?”
    â€œThat’s really all you have to do. Just—watch. Play the footage backward, and use that in the final cut.” I show her: The Girl turns toward The Boy; the creases in her forehead smooth themselves into clean flesh; her lips relax. They look at each other.
    She says, “I worry about you, sometimes.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œI worry that I’ve taught you too much.” Then, as she finally touches me. As she pokes me softly in the nose: “I worry that you’ve watched too much reality TV.”

WHAT I REMEMBER
    1956: The Avalon
    By Colin A. McPhee
    The Avalon Cinema was on Saw Mill Road, an eight-minute bike ride from the house in which I was raised. The night that it opened, the theater rented two spotlights from a company called Ducky Joe’s that was based in the Bronx—but those globes only spent twenty-five minutes tracing circles in the sky. For the rest of the eight hours they were on loan, they beamed straight into the theater’s lobby. Blinking, searching.
    â€œThere has been a break-in,” the lobby manager announced to the crowds who were huddled in frozen pockets outside the theater’s glass and gold doors. His voice trailed to the rear of the pack, and as it did it collected whispers of gossip from the other onlookers. This was a town with a population well under ten thousand people, and General Eisenhower was sailing easily into his second term as president; crimes were small and inconsequential and received disproportionate amounts of thrill and fanfare. People stood on their toes to get a better look. Fathers placed sons on their shoulders.
    It was a boy, a woman relayed to those surrounding her. At one moment he’d been standing near the front of the audience that had gathered near the glass doors ten minutes before they opened, his hands placed in his pockets as the excited and anonymous moviegoers enveloped thespace around him. No one had recognized him, though it’s questionable if anyone tried. He was ten, or maybe twelve, or maybe eight, but it was said that he already had the lean ropy look of a runner, a jumper. This was all easy to see, even though he wore a sweater that was one size two big (it was blue, but also it could’ve been yellow). He had half-weary eyes and skin crusted with film from the city.
    The boy hadn’t looked nervous, or maybe he had, as the crowd doubled, then tripled, and then quadrupled. He’d looked up at the silver and green neon sign—THE AVALON—that crowned the theater’s marquee, and he replaced strands of his stringed hair that fell in front of his face while regarding his reflection in the theater’s glass