“It should warm you up. I think I have a dry sweatshirt, actually, if you want to put that on. You look a little . . . damp.” He grabs a backpack, pulls a black EVmU sweatshirt out of it, and tosses it to me. Somehow, I catch it without spilling whiskey all over the counter.

“You go to EVmU?” I peel off my wet coat and pull the sweatshirt over my head. It’s soft and warm and smells like boy, in a good way. I have a flickering hope that maybe he’ll let me keep it, and I push the thought away before it can fully take root. I’m being ridiculous.

“I do,” he says. “Junior. Film theory.” He motions to the rows of movies behind him. “That’s why I work in this fine temple of the arts.”

I laugh, taking another hesitant sip of my whiskey. It still burns my throat, but a fluttery feeling is forming in my stomach.

“Seriously,” he says, grabbing a DVD off the nearest shelf. “This right here is a relic of the past.” He lays it down on the counter in front of me and taps its case with his index finger. “We’re in a museum of the obsolete. We’re about to fall away to time. Just by being here, you’re a part of history.”

“Aren’t I always a part of history?” I ask. “I mean, everything we do becomes part of the past the second we’ve done it.”

He grins. “Touché.” Then he clinks his glass against mine and swallows the last of his drink. When he sets the empty glass down on the counter, he rests his chin in his hands and leans toward me conspiratorially, like he wants to share a secret.

“Did you know that in the first movie theater, the first time anyone saw a film on-screen—it was this clip of a train pulling into a station, and the audience had never seen anything like it. They freaked out—ran screaming, panicking, out of the theater, because they thought the train was real; thought they were about to get run over, flattened, by this train. That was only a little over a hundred years ago. And now here we are: IMAX, 3-D, virtual reality, and these little guys are another part of film history. Like that train.” A lock of brown hair falls across his forehead, and I resist the urge to reach out and smooth it away.

“You really love this place,” I say.

“Sarah quit last week because she got hired at the Bagelry on campus. Said there’d be better tips there, which is probably true. We get a coffee rush in the morning, but it’s not great.” He shrugs. “You have to really love this place to work here. You have to really love movies. Sarah didn’t have the passion.” He lowers his voice to a theatrical whisper. “She was a bio major.”