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

he’d disappeared—crawled back to wherever it was he’d come from.
    The picture shown at the Avalon that night was The Tender Trap, with Frank Sinatra and Debbie Reynolds; it was the first picture ever shown at the Avalon, and also the first picture I had ever seen. People shifted uncomfortably at first, afraid of where the boy lurked, of what intruder stalked beneath their seats. I sat still, though. I was nestled between my parents, my knees pulled to my chest, as the projection flickered and filled the screen. I held my breath as Edward R. Murrow introduced the prologue, a short science fiction piece called From the Earth to the Moon . I kept it held through the footage of the rocket blasting away from earth, through the prologue’s conclusion and the film’s actual beginning, Sinatra cycling through Lola Albright, Carolyn Jones, Jarma Lewis.
    â€œBreathe, Colin,” my mother pressed her lips to my ear and whispered.
    But I couldn’t—or, I must have, but nothing more than quick gasps, and only when I absolutely had to. I was afraid that if I made any larger action—my chest rising as my lungs filled with air, or falling as I exhaled—something awful would happen. The screen would tear down its center and the lights would suddenly turn on. I had the vague sense that I was witnessing some sort of magic—or not magic, but some kind of wonderful trickery—and I had the churning fear that if I made any sudden movement the veil would be yanked away and I’d see how the parts were put together, how the gears turned into themselves. How it was made.
    â€œReally, sweetheart,” she said again. “You’re going to pass out.”
    I didn’t, though. I wheezed my way through it. Conscious. And when the curtain fell and Earl the Lobby Manager stepped onstage to thank us, the first audience, I looked away from the screen and into my mother’s lap.
    As my family and the audience filed out of the theater, I saw the boy—though, to this day, I’m absolutely positive that I was the only one who did. Somehow he’d succeeded at hiding, undetected, in the second-to-last row of seats in the orchestra section. His hair wasn’t long, or greasy, but cropped short, hugging the space around his ears. His cheeks were darkened, freckled with dirt like the woman said, but he still wore the V-neck sweater that was standard in the town. He was my age—eight—and he looked at me curiously as I paused, his eyebrows arching as feet shuffled past him.
    I almost said something then, a standard greeting: Hello, how goes it, were you able to breathe? But my father pressed a hand to the small of my back. He took my wrist and told me to keep walking. I watched the boy as he shrank away between two seats and my mother kissed me on the top of my head.
    As we drove home that evening, I sat in our Buick’s backseat and recreated each of the film’s scenes in my mind. Charlie meeting Julie Gillis at that fateful audition. Joe pouring out his love for Sylvia. I didn’t realize the permanence of the thing, I gather now. I thought the trickery was a one-time deal: that once an ending was happy, once the good guy had won, once we’d all gotten up and left, the trickery would dissipate swiftly. A picture wasn’t a picture, but instead something more fragile: a sand castle caught in a wave’s backwash. So as we wove through Westchester’s empty streets I schemed: I found ways to burn those images into my mind, to file them away in slots where they could be archived, retrieved, relived.
    â€œWell I loved it,” my mother said. But then, she would’ve—she’d never met a movie she didn’t like.
    â€œI mostly did,” my father answered. I can still picture him saying it—the way the streetlamps cut through the fog and bounced off the sly tilt of his smile.
    â€œWhat wasn’t to like?”
    â€œHow about the