Driver's Education by Grant Ginder Read Free Book Online Page A

and metal doors. At one point, he’d tried to reach out and run a finger along the gold engravings that adorned the doors’ frames, but the lobby manager—who stood guard in front of the theater before it officially opened—had slapped his hand away. So the boy went back to combing his hair with his fingers.
    â€œAnd he was alone?” someone asked.
    Completely alone—or maybe not completely alone? It was difficult to tell. There had been other boys around him, but they didn’t have his look. They’d appeared better fed, more filled out. They wore V-neck sweaters and wool caps and their skin was scrubbed clean. They’d stood at deliberate distances from him: the sort of preconceptualized space that boys imagine will prevent Them from turning into Him.
    Because this was the Avalon’s grand opening, there were vendors from the theater who stalked the crowd as we waited to get in. They wore striped caps and carried trays that wielded Coke and candy, popcorn with butter that clung to the evening’s fog, wormed its way into our noses. A man bought some for his wife and daughter and they ate it in greedy handfuls.
    The same woman who’d been speaking explained that the boy had bought some too—popcorn, that is. Or maybe it was a box of something else—chocolates, Flicks. He hadn’t eaten it, though, and that was the strange thing. He’d held it to his chest very piously, as if it were some sort of offering. As if he were paying his tithe before kneeling for communion.
    The woman said, “And then, suddenly, he was gone.”
    â€œGone?” someone else asked.
    â€œ Gone .” The woman nodded.
    A mother who was listening to the story tightened her coat across her chest, pulling each lapel to the opposite shoulder. “Where did he go?” she asked.
    The woman explained that it all happened so fast—or, not so fast, but at once —which is what the people standing in front of her had heard. The lobby manager (a man whose name we gleaned was Earl) had opened the doors at 7:30 with great pomp and aplomb, telling the crowd of hundreds that they were to be canonized as part of Sleepy Hollow lore, or Sleepy Hollow history, or the Annals of Cinema, or the Epics of Film, or all of the above, depending on whom in the crowd you asked.
    But then, right as Earl had finished his speech, a girl from the crowd, an almost-pretty young thing with cropped dark hair, gasped and pointed.
    She yelled, “What the—”
    The crowd gazed past Earl and into the lobby’s center, where the boy had suddenly materialized under the glows and shadows of the theater’s lights and pillars. He was still holding his popcorn, and he ate the kernels casually, nonchalantly, as he stared back at the crowd. He scuffed his heels against the red carpet as he leaned against a pillar as thick as a sycamore. The manager tugged at the tails of his coat; his eyes narrowed and he shouted to his staff, “Get that boy!”
    The two ushers stormed into the lobby and reached for the boy’s heels, his hips, his shoulders, his head, but whenever they caught hold of him he’d vanish at once (as it happens, on that evening everything was at once ). It was a tired and half-witted bout, and when it was over they’d be left with nothing more than locks of his greased hair.
    â€œBut how’d he get in there?” someone asked the woman.
    â€œNo one knows.”
    â€œAnd where is he now?” the mother asked.
    â€œIn there, somewhere,” she said, pointing past the heads milling in front of us to the theater’s entrance.
    A father whispered up to a son, who was sitting on his shoulders, “I bet he snuck in through the back door. Always sneak in through the back door.”
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    When the snow started, they let us in. They hadn’t found the boy, but Earl, the lobby manager, told us that in all likelihood