Fuck It

"Cherry, if I hear that foul language from your mouth one more time, you'll be going to the principal's office before you go anywhere with your friends! I'm tired of this." The woman shook her head disapprovingly in the corner. "You're in a school, not some ship with a bunch of sailors," the study hall monitor—no, I couldn't be bothered to remember her name—shouted upon hearing Cherry curse.

When I glanced at her, still as excited by my own proposition as ever, the redhead was fuming as she discreetly flipped the teacher off with her left hand at her side, too cowardly to suffer the immediate punishments.

"Miss," she instead said, and I knew there was about to be a classroom war, "I'll have you know that I'm already on a ship. It's for Ari and—"

I grabbed her by the collar as Zixin placed a hand over her mouth, gagging her to where she couldn't continue shooting herself in the foot.

*This idiot!*

"What my friend means to say is that she'll try better not to cause a ruckus." With a smile so sickeningly saccharine, my eyes nearly folded into sharp crescents as I passive-aggressively addressed the teacher further, "She's just a little antsy after her morning classes."

The lady with lazy green eyes and a messy brown bun sighed as she nodded, insinuating this was our last chance. There was no better way to ruin a plan than to stick detention on top of it.

As Zixin and I released our friend, he said, "Quiet down a little, Cherry. I know you're surprised." He pointed towards himself. "I am, too. Ari hasn't left her little cavern to have fun with us in at least a month or two."

Then, he leaned over to sarcastically whisper, though very intentionally within my earshot, to Cherry, "Maybe *she's* the one summoning spirits, or she's got a portal to Narnia we don't know about."

Although a genuine grin refused to waver from my face, I grunted. "Tough talk coming from you. Do you both wanna go or not? You can see I already have the tickets." I waved them around again. "I don't wanna waste the $20 or whatever. And you know I've been busy trying to figure out what to do about that novel. Cut me some slack."

I hoped my half-truths—or perhaps half-lies in the eyes of the deceived—worked for them as I faked a pout.

As if they spoke by telepathy and excluded me, Cherry and Zixin gave each other some odd looks.

"Yeah," Cherry eventually said while beaming, "we'll go, you weirdo. It's about time you got off your a—"

She stopped when she clearly felt the blazing glare of the monitor on her back.

"*Butt.*" She rolled her eyes. "This is why we need to do stuff outside of here more. I can't curse with that hag in the corner."

The teacher huffed but said nothing in response to the insult as she went back to slamming her keyboard, probably entering in grades for some unfortunate souls.

Zixin chuckled, muttering under the banter of other cliques, "You're about to get your ass beaten."

While laughing at the two of them as always and observing the beady eyes that treated us like zoo animals for their entertainment, I said, "Come on, guys. Let's sit down. The whole class is watching us."

***

"Wait… you bought tickets to *this* place?" Cherry asked as my GPS directed her towards the one theatre in the town with a grill and fresh meat simmering inside it. Sure, the food was still overpriced, but it at least was of high quality at this business.

I wasn't sure if my head tricked me as I watched the corners of Zixin's and Cherry's lips glimmer with droplets of drool, the former draping his arms over the backs of our chairs from the seats behind us.

"Would that have made you agree faster if I told you earlier?" I asked coyly while fully aware of what was coming next.

"Yes!" both of them shouted as Cherry booked it across the parking lot, her foot drilling into the gas pedal.

*We're going to get pulled over and be late if you don't slow down!*

And that was the exact reason I didn't want her to drive us and hadn't informed her where we were going until now.

As she parked her car more twistedly than a damn pretzel, she kicked the breaks and brought us to an abrupt stop near the edge of the pavement. This girl was going to cut several years off my life at this rate if Zixin didn't accidentally kill me first!

"Get the fuck out," Cherry said rather aggressively. "I want my quesadillas."

There was no reason to get between her and her meals. That was like stealing salmon from a bear, and only a fool would expect to be unscathed.

Before ushering us all out, she shifted the gear stick until the car was completely idle and threw the door open, making sure the clinking of keys with an unusual number of keychains accompanied her.

With two beeps from the janky metal hunk, our trio scrambled away and headed like darts towards the bullseye of the entrance belonging to the gray, boxy building. The autumn breeze tickled our arms, necks, and ankles, and Cherry slid her brown sunglasses into her purse, subsequently pulling out her wallet as we entered the building with the announcement of a regal gust of air-conditioned wind.

The indoors were slightly cool as we passed between automatic doors until we reached the food vendors at the front. Red and orange tiles clicked against our soft sneakers as we slid into a long line between what felt like black lines of caution tape that delineated where we needed to stand.

As the night was still young with the sun having just descended upon our arrival, there weren't as many moviegoers crowding the lobby as I would have expected, but getting to the front would still take forever!

We were fortunate to have come here thirty minutes before the showtime as, at the bare minimum, we would need that time to procure dinners that weren't solely mounds of popcorn and chocolates, though the endless advertisements and previews would make for an adequate buffer period if needed.

Zixin was silent, but he had the posture of a businessman walking along with his suitcase and impatiently staring at his watch as if that would change the flow of time. On the other hand, Cherry was tapping her foot fervently, almost exhaling on the back of the woman in front of us.

And me?

Why, I simply watched them as we sat in a comfortable bubble of silence with sizzling dishes and exploding kernels filling our ears further away, permeating the air around us with a savory smell. I daydreamed in line enough times that Zixin had to keep pulling me forward like a tattered blanket, almost entirely detached and disinterested when it came to my surroundings.

I had to live in my fantasies!

After all, somehow, our little trifecta didn't feel complete as the minutes dragged on, and I longed to reach for Melina's hands in this chilled space, letting the warmth from her palms flow into me and give me the strength to stay awake on this dreary Friday afternoon. The heat from my friends' words was not enough to satiate my selfish being when they playfully argued in line.

And even though Melina warned me against doing this, I couldn't help but defy her for just a little bit despite desperately missing her presence and lamenting the fact I didn't know how to bring her with me.

I would explain to her I was doing this to stretch my legs and brain a little. If she grew concerned, then, in that case, it would be for my mental health. The excuses were a bottomless pit in which I would allow myself to sink. She would never get to its true depths.

I told myself, though I wouldn't directly say it to her, I was doing this all to help her…

*Sorry, Zixin and Cherry. I don't mean to fool you two, but the real reason I'm here isn't for—*

There was a large crash that cut off my thoughts before Zixin's hand could, and a chorus of shrieks followed as if in a Lacrimosa. The events didn't quite process in my mind, even as a herd of visitors to the establishment nearly plowed over my friend group as they sped away from the counter. It was like we were caught in a stampede yet too shell-shocked to avoid our perilous fates amidst the warm, heavy bodies.

It took Cherry and Zixin backing into me for me to begin deducing what had happened.

Apparently, I thought as I looked around, there was some malfunctioning or tampering of sorts. A machine that gushed butter for clownish popcorn buckets of impossible sizes was knocked from its perch on the counter. It landed face-first and in its anguish, cried boiling tears and bolts of scorching butter, hitting the unfortunate people in its vicinity.

That was the booming noise, however…

As its cables snapped from the wall, I was sure a fire would burst from its electric body and ruin the building with its orange veil. By then, I was at the front of a crowd of onlookers with Cherry and Zixin, all enthused by the morbid fascination brought about by tragedy.

Inexplicably, while I closed my eyes and predicted the worst was to come with me at the forefront, no such incident occurred as droves of janitors rushed in to clean the now cooling oil on the floor. One was clever enough to unplug the remaining cables from the ticking bomb as it drained itself of butter and now laid almost like a corpse, writhing as its blood finished gushing out with metal boards peeling from its frame.

As, of course, it was Zixin's casualty today.

I recalled the absurdity of times out in the town with him and Cherry, the nostalgia filling me as we nervously laughed at how ludicrous our current situation was and how narrowly we avoided annihilation by a fucking *butter churner*. What a story for some mourning parents and the evening news as they cried over the fatal burns from the most overlooked piece of machinery.

Yet it was odd how much everything resembled the debacle of the ripped posters and broken tiles last time my friends and I came to this cursed place...

Nonetheless, the sincerity between our group didn't feel forced in the face of peril, and I wondered if this was the bond I needed to focus on while writing Molly and Nico's characters. For all the days filled with catastrophes, such sweetness was what must have gotten them through every horrific, difficult incident they faced at the bloody hands of others.

With a smile, I came to the realization that I was already learning exactly what I needed to from my friends, and I secretly thanked them for tagging along for observation. Arrogant and haughty, I gave some credit to myself as well for devising this plan of what was essentially method acting in the first place.

And to top it all off, a lady from the counter beckoned to us, saying, "We don't have all day. Move the line up. What would the three of you like today? You may be able to tell, but we can't serve you any buttered popcorn for a few hours." She paused. "Or days. Just gotta fix a few screws."

Had we just skipped ahead of the whole line… like *that*?

The three of us gaped at each other with bulging eyes covering just a little too much space on the surfaces of our faces.

We knew then: Zixin's capricious luck struck again like the gold rush!