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In the dark sanctuary of the hall, Danny mutters beside me, “Just once I want him not to tease me. Just once I want him to actually…” He sticks his finger in his mouth and clamps down hard, gnawing on it. “Ngggh.”
I laugh at his dramatics. “I mean, if it’s that bad, we can go back to our rooms. I can put on an accent and a blond wig and say disparaging shit while riding you and calling you a freak?”
Danny whips his head around. “Hahaha,” he says without any humor, looking thoroughly mortified. “Jesus, Jessa,shut up.” If we weren’t sitting in darkness, I’d comfortably bet that right now Danny’s face is like a brilliant red tomato.
With a snort, I tell him, “Youshut up. Stop tying yourself into stupid knots.”
The screen lights up with trailers. Some action movie with lots of fireballs explodes onto the screen, all cringey one-liners and screeching tires.
“I’m glad you’re my best friend,” Danny’s voice murmurs in the dark. “I’m glad I can tell you things and you won’t judge.”
“You think I’m not judging?” I ask, and Danny shoots me a glare. I smile at him, touched by this moment of drunken sincerity. “Yeah,” I say, truthfully this time. “You’re not my least-liked person.”
“Cheers,” he drawls, and sounds so much like Rory that I laugh.
The screen flashes black to signify another trailer, followed by the close-up of a rust-colored planet and tense piano music. A camera tilts up the half-zipped leather catsuit of a busty woman. She has scarlet lipstick, long flowing red hair and her fingers grip twin ray guns. She gives a lascivious leer at the camera as an asteroid smashes into the planet behind her, and she coos, “Hello, boys.” The ray guns shoot beams of light in an obviously phallic manner, and everything goes black before the titleWEIRDO IN A WEIRD WORLDflashes up on the screen.
“What. The. Fuck?”
“Was that—?”
“My favorite book series in the whole world being utterly destroyed on screen? Yes. Yes, it was.” Danny looks distraught. “What have they done?”
“That’s not how Miranda’s described. That’s not howanyof it’s described. Just — what?”
“She’s meant to be a smart woman. A feminist space pirate who takes no shit! She doesn’t swan around in slinky catsuits! She wears combats and has an eye-patch and deals with intergalactic wars!” Danny seems on the verge of hyperventilation. “Oh my God, I feel sick.”
“Why’s she saying ‘hello, boys’? Women have read these books, too.” I feel like I ought to have received some kind of official acknowledgment for my ability to plow through all eight-hundred pages of the first one in the series.
I feel sorry for Danny, who’s loved these books from the moment I became friends with him. He’d offered me his battered copy, and it’d distracted me when I’d been at a low point as a new Lochkelvin arrival. This new world of escapism had given me something to focus on when my reality had been endlessly bleak. I remember Danny in the hotel room, cradling the statue with the author’s autograph, how he’d cherished so completely being in the same creative space as his favorite writer. And this is how Hollywood repays his loyalty.
With an utterly bastardized version of a sci-fi classic.
“Maybe it’s from the bit at the end, where she’s captured and turned into a slave,” Danny mutters, trying to rationalize it to himself. “But that’s only one scene in the books, and she outwits them in the end, so why would they market the whole movie like that? It doesn’t make any sense.”
Before he begins to rock back and forth in his seat, I toss popcorn at his head. “Sexism,” I answer breezily. “Sexism everywhere.”
“This is an omen!” Danny declares, suppressing a hiccup. I get the impression he’d love to have a bottle of rum in his hand, if only to have a prop to swing around dramatically and make a more emphatic point. “It’s the fuck-off cherry on top of the cake of shit that is St. Camford.”
I stare at him. “What, you’re not going to apply?”
“God knows. I sure don’t. Probably will, just ‘cause it’sexpected.” He sneers the last word, his hand diving in irritation into the box of popcorn between us. “But I don’t wanna. Nope! I want to be out there, doing something, learning something useful… not inhere, cooped up with a bunch of freaksville snobs.”
“We go to Lochkelvin,” I remind him.
“Aye, so it must be something extra special that these snobs are on a whole other plane of existence.” He sighs, cramming a handful of popcorn into his mouth. “I don’t know what I’ll do,” he says, his voice all muffled. “Divinity, theology, art school…? Maybe I’ll be sensible and study science, medicine…” He hiccups for a moment then continues in the same rambling manner, “Last week I got marked down in chemistry because I kept calling Van der Waals forces Van der Woodsens.” Without stopping to take a breath, he adds, “Y’know, I can’tbelievethat’s what they’ve done to Miranda. That some big-wig read the books — did they even? — and thought, nah, fuck it, geeks like hot babes so screw the plot and shove her in a catsuit. It’s so bloodypatronizing.”
At last, the trailers end and the prescreener forGreaseloads, and I breathe a small sigh of relief.
“I can’t see myself studying here. I don’twantto study here… Strathvale Polytechnic, maybe. More my vibe.”
I sit in the dark, struggling with Danny’s words. I don’t know if he’s lucid enough to know what he’s saying. But this is the last year of us as students together, and more than anything I want to continue this journey with all of them. Fate, it seems, has other ideas, and that worries me. I don’t want us to fracture. I don’t want us to be apart.
We only have a small window of time to spend together.Months.
And so under the cover of darkness I take Danny’s hand in mine, and together we sit back and watchGrease.
