Last Night at the Circle Cinema by Emily Franklin Read Free Book Online Page A

other side of Main over to where Codman lived a few doors down from his therapist.
    I could see that she minded the way I was driving, minded that Codman’s attentions might be focused elsewhere, minded that her parents were away and minded that no matter what happened, you were stuck in your own skin in your own town, in your own life. But she did not put her hand on mine again.
    â€œIt doesn’t matter, Livvy,” I told her. “What matters is the three of us. And escalators. And eating food in alphabetical order. That’s what matters.”
    For a second, Livvy looked worried, her mouth pulled down at the edges. Sometimes I think I scared her. Other times I think she liked being a little scared, that it pulled her from her comfortable house and her predictable existence. Then she puffed again and exhaled onto the window. Where she’d written “Lissa” showed up again, and she clapped her hands. “Yes. Friday night! Escalators! Codman. Us!”
    In order to be successful in the game, planning must always be done with the existing characteristics of your position. You can’t plan with what might be available. Only what you have. Harry Golombek had taught me that in his Encyclopedia of Chess . “It is most difficult ... when the position is evenly balanced,” he wrote, “and easiest when there is only one plan to satisfy the demands of the position.”
    (Did I already have some of the plan in place then? Had it crystallized that fast?)
    â€œI love that you have a plan, Bertucci,” Livvy said as we parked at Codman’s house. We walked up the street, discussing how amusing it would be to pretend to be patients in the waiting room and then surprise Codman when he came out of the office.
    â€œI love that you love that I have a plan, Livvy.” I was pretty sure right then that Livvy and I as a couple would never satisfy the demands of any position we were likely to find ourselves in. But Livvy and Codman—and yet Codman wasn’t with her either. Neither of them knew where the keys were to the car, as it were. I walked along the sidewalk with Livvy to fetch Codman, to stitch the three of us back together again. I felt the cold creeping into my bones, the blank night spreading out around us.

10
    Livvy
    â€œI am just a girl walking down a dark hallway on a stormy night in a closed-up theater being stupid and probably dangerous and obviously making a colossal mistake,” I said once I’d gone away from the gallery of tragically bad art and from Codman. He was probably singing to himself, old French punk songs he and Bertucci memorized. Bertucci was the one who’d had me listen to “Girls Talk,” that Elvis Costello song he had on vinyl. That one line asking if it was really murder or were they just pretending. In the Circle’s dead air, the line ripped through me, giving me chills.
    â€œHow do you spell manipulative ?” I asked aloud. “B-E-R-T-U ... I’m not kidding, Bertucci. That’s what this is. In case you think this is clever or funny. Well, forget it. No more. We’re not playing for a mention in the fucking school paper.”
    I didn’t write for the school paper any longer—the last issue was published two weeks before, with Bertucci headlining—and besides, our actions would attract real legal consequences now. As it was, we were still invisible to the school.
    â€œYou think your mother would have approved?” I said aloud, but softly this time.
    Bertucci’s mother would have approved. She thought everything her son did was great, even the pranks that became school scandals. And he pranked her right up to the end too. I was over there every afternoon and a bunch of mornings with Bee, making sure she drank the protein shake Bertucci blended up for her—she was losing weight so fast, shrinking away into nothing. And I’d washed her a little, which Bertucci couldn’t do,