Her mother, visible faintly through the kitchen window, took a deep, slow bite out of the wax avocado and, not looking back at her daughter, began with difficulty to chew.

10

“I’m going to the movies,” Diane called at Josh’s door, not stopping to wait for a response.

At first, when she started doing this, he would say, “Have fun” or “I’m just going to stay home,” because he could only hang out with his mother every so often, not every other night.

“I’m going to the movies,” Diane called out for the fifth or sixth time in two weeks, and Josh began to resent her for going out so much without him. This resentment was not conscious. He just thought it was idiotic she was going to the movies so often. Who does she think she is? Josh thought.

Who are any of us, really? the house thought.

Josh stopped answering, and Diane stopped expecting an answer. She would simply go.

It was 8:00 P.M. The movie that evening was John Frankenheimer’s 1973 adaptation of The Iceman Cometh again. Diane, like most people, had seen the film dozens of times in her life—there were nightly screenings of it by Night Vale city ordinance. She didn’t love the movie as a movie, but she appreciated it as a familiar comfort.

She would often cry, particularly when the character Larry Slade said, “As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything.” It is not a sad or emotional scene. In fact it is quite a didactic one, but hers were tears of nostalgia. She would mouth the line “It’s irrelevant and immaterial” along with Larry.

Anyway, she wasn’t there because of the movie.

Diane bought a ticket from the sentient patch of haze working in the box office. Her name was Stacy, and Diane had developed a sort of friendship with her, or at least the comfortable familiarity of recognizing each other without making a big deal of it.

Each time she went she would look for Troy while trying not to make it obvious that this was what she was doing. She sometimes was successful at keeping this even from herself, thinking as she looked around that she was just curious about new releases that had made it past the Night Vale Top Secret Censorship Board (which consisted only of a guy named Luis, who refused to watch any of the movies he judged on the risk he would see a forbidden idea or gesture) or the current price of a tub of popcorn (which Night Vale Cinemas kept strictly linked to the coal futures market for reasons no one in town understood). But really she was looking for Troy and she was not seeing him.

She waited for a night no one else was in line and no one else was in the box office with Stacy.

“Do you know a guy who works here named Troy?”