Calamity Jayne Heads West (21 page)

“The last time we went anywhere together alone you took off and left me in the girls’ restroom at the city park. I think I was in kindergarten at the time,” Taylor observed.

I winced. “As I remember it, I was protecting you from a neighborhood bully at the time,” I told her, re-calling my version of events. Actually, Little Peter Pat-terson had snatched my baseball glove from a picnic bench and I’d taken off in hot pursuit after the brazen little thug. Even at eight I had spunk. Gotta give me that.

“But you never came back to get me,” Taylor re-sponded, providing her own recollection of the inci-dent. “I waited in that park bathroom for three hours! No telling what would have happened if the ding-a- ling man hadn’t come by.”

Whoa, folks! Don’t go getting any strange notions here. The ding-a-ling man was our name for the ice-cream truck driver who drove through the streets of Grandville during the hot summer months ringing a bell to announce the sale of cool dairy treats. My Un-cle Frank, who was the ding-a-ling man’s competitor, had a similar, not-so-nice name for him.

Anyway, by the time I caught up to Pee-pee Peter and thumped him a couple times with my ball glove, I’d drawn enough of a crowd that we decided to play a couple innings and I totally forgot about my sister left standing in the stinky bathroom at the park. Hey, I was eight! And it was baseball season!

“But if you’ll also recall, I was grounded for a month and couldn’t ride all that time, horse shows included, so I figure I paid for it in spades,” I reminded my sis-ter. “Not that I was able to ride for several days after the incident due to gluteus maximal soreness.” It was one of the only times I could recall my laid-back, quiet father spanking me.

“And you’re serious about this little outing to the IMAX?” she asked again.

“To the max!” I said, with a
cross my heart and hope not
to die young
pledge.

She gave me that look again and slowly nodded.

“Okay. Sure. Why not? In the interest of ‘familialbonding’ and ‘sisterly sharing,’ ” Taylor said. She looked at me. “You do plan to do something with your hair, right?” she added. I nodded.

“You drive and I’ll braid it on the way,” I told her, tossing her Sophie’s car keys.

“Shouldn’t we ask Sophie if she wants to come, or at the very least get permission to use her car?” Taylor asked. I shook my head.

“No time!” I snapped. “Uh, what I mean is . . . not this time. We don’t want to ask her along this time or we won’t have our one-on-one time, and if we ask her to borrow the car, we’re kind of obligated to invite her to come along,” I explained. “Besides, we won’t be gone all that long. You know, basically just in and out.”

I watched Taylor deliberate: Should I or shouldn’t I? I’m more of a spur of the moment kind of gal and rarely do this evaluative process myself, so it’s fascinat-ing to observe.

She expelled a long gust of air. “I suppose it couldn’t hurt,” she said.

“It won’t hurt a bit!” I told Taylor. “Not one bit.”

Taylor shook her head. “I’ll just leave Sophie an-other little note and let her know where we are so she won’t worry,” Taylor said, writing a quick note and tap-ing it to the mirror.

“Let’s go!” I said, grabbing Taylor’s arm. “Come on! I want to catch the next show!” I pulled Taylor out of the hotel and down to where I’d parked the car.

Taylor got behind the wheel, buckled up, and started the engine.

“Tell me there won’t be any unexpected sisterly sur-prises on our little sibling sojourn,” Taylor said. “I’m not much for surprises.”

“You really need to loosen up a little, sis,” I told Tay-lor. “Surprises keep life interesting. Spice things up.”

“So you say,” she said. “As for me, I’m content with-out constant scintillation and drama,” she said. “It’s safer that way.”

I gave her an
oh brother, sister
look as she slowly backed out of the parking space, then stared at her.

“You’re not going to drive this pokey all the way there, are you?” I asked.

“I’m not going to take a chance with Sophie’s car,” she said. “So I’ll drive at the speed I’m comfortable with.”

I wanted to give my cheek a smack. I should’ve left the driving to me.

We got there less than five minutes before the next on-the-half-hour showing of the thirty-four minute Grand Canyon movie. I hauled Taylor out of the car and literally dragged her up the sidewalk and into the visitors center, and up to the ticket booth.

“Two, please!” I wheezed.

“That will be twenty-five fifty-six,” the woman in the booth said.

“Twenty-five bucks?” I said. “Are you kidding? For a thirty-minute movie?”

She stared at me. “Excuse me? This is the highest grossing IMAX film of all time,” she said, and I nodded.

“At these prices, I can believe it,” I said, rummaging around in my backpack for my billfold.

“Here you go.” I looked up to see Taylor place a twenty and a ten on the counter.

“Thank you.” The ticket lady nodded to Taylor, giv-ing me short shrift. “I’m sure you’ll find the film well worth the ticket price,” she said.

At forty cents a minute, at the very least I expected to see a half-clothed Orlando Bloom white-water raft-ing down the Colorado River. Or Hugh Jackman lead-ing a nature hike along the canyon trails au naturelle.

“Isn’t there a law against price gouging?” I asked,grabbing a couple visitors center brochures and hur-rying Taylor along to the theater doors.

“Price gouging is inflating the price of necessary goods in a time of disaster or extreme need,” Taylor said.

“My point exactly!” I said, pulling her over to the ticket taker and into the theater. Still early in the vaca-tion season, the theater was only a quarter full at best.

I looked at my watch. Three minutes ’til showtime. I pulled out my notepad and tried to read my hand-written version of the clue before the houselights went down:

“Onesies,” I said. “Two ones.”

“Tressa, are you okay?” Taylor asked, nudging my elbow.

I closed the notepad. “Absolutely. Lovin’ every minute with my little sis,” I said, staring around the sizable auditorium as the last few filmgoers straggled in. “Good times. Good times.”

I looked at the three sections of seating. Okay. If “snake eyes” referred to the theater seating, then I probably needed to check out the first seat in the firstrow. I frowned. The way the auditorium was set up there were four different seats that could conceivably be the seat in question. Somehow I had to check out each one.

I pinpointed each seat. Two were unoccupied. One was occupied but the seat next to it was unoccupied, and the last was part of a group of elementary school-aged kids. I’d check out the unoccupied seats first and hope I struck pay dirt. If not, then I’d worry about how to check out the ones that were a bit more challenging.

“Would you excuse me for just a second?” I said to Taylor. “I’m going to check out a couple of the other seats to see if the view is better,” I said. “BRB.”

I slid to the end of the row before Taylor could ob-ject and did an X-Y axis number to make sure I’d tar-geted the correct seats. I hurried to the first seat and conducted a thorough examination, thankful that the lights had gone down and the film had started so I could do it without attracting a lot of attention—or shushes.

I crossed off that possibility and proceeded to the next one.

I scooted in beside a middle-aged couple.

“Excuse me. So sorry,” I said as I bumped into the legs of the man sitting in seat two. “Pardon me.” I fi-nally made it to the seat next to him and dropped into it. I felt under the armrests and down into the cushion areas to see if I could find anything. I shoved a hand under my seat and ran it across the bottom of the chair. Unable to examine the entire seat while sitting in it, I moved to the seat behind it, thankfully unoccu-pied, and got down on my hands and knees on the narrow floor of the theater and stuck my head under the seat, sliding a hand over the entire bottom of the chair, feeling for the outline of an envelope.

“Did you lose something?” The woman who occu-pied seat three in the row ahead of me turned and di-rected the question to the fleshy portion of my anatomy pointing in her direction.

“I dropped my Juju Fruits,” I said, bringing my head out from under the seat.

She gave me a stern look. “You’re not supposed to bring food in the theater,” she pointed out. “And cer-tainly not sticky, messy candies,” she scolded.

“Maybe they’re Sweetarts, then,” I said. “Those aren’t sticky or messy. Unless you get ’em wet and then they’re a real bummer to clean up ’cause the colors have a tendency to run,” I said.

I made one final sweep of the seat to make sure I hadn’t missed anything and stood up to move back to the aisle.

“Excuse me. So sorry. My apologies,” I said as I yanked the couple’s chair backs in my direction when I hauled myself to my feet and moved back into the aisle. I put my hands up, palms out. “And look! No mess! M & M’s melt in your mouth! Not in your hands!” I exclaimed and grinned.

Two down, two to go.

After my dealings with Nick Townsend, I decided to appeal to the mercenary, materialistic side of youth these days and offered the juvie in the next seat a fiver for the opportunity to search the area for an earring I’d lost. The entrepreneurial spirit of the group would’ve made The Donald proud as they negotiated the access fee to twenty bucks for a permit to search.

By the time I’d finished, I was aware I’d generated some attention—some of the curious kind, but mostly of the “Sit down and shaddup, Blondie” variety. I could feel their pain. At twelve bucks a pop, no one wants a distraction akin to a howling baby at the Cinema-Plex.

Before the theater-goers turned on me like a vigi-lante mob, I decided to take my seat and simply keep my own eagle eye glued to that final chair and take a peak underneath once the film was over and folks filed out.

“What in God’s name are you doing?” Taylor hissed as I sat down beside her. “You’ve been flitting all over the theater like Tinkerbell on meth,” she said. “What is going on?”

“I wanted to get the full effect from different van-tage points for the inflated price of my admission,” I told her.

“You mean
my
admission price,” Taylor said. “And while we’re talking about getting our money’s worth, what about
my
enjoyment of the exhilarating, not-to-be- missed experience I bought and paid for? It sure hasn’t been entertaining for me to sit here and watch you play musical chairs and rile the other patrons up into a frenzy.”

I winced. “Sorry, sis,” I said. “I promise I’ll be a per-fect patron from here on in. Now sit back and enjoy the show.”

Taylor looked at me, shook her head, and sat back in her seat, turning her attention to the megasized screen touted to be seven stories tall.

I shifted my attention between the screen, the snake-eyes seat I still needed to check out and the film-goers. I chuckled when the helicopter in the film took a sudden dive to the left and the audience followed suit. I hooted out loud during the white-water rafting portion of the film as people literally leaned from one side of their theater chairs to the other as they navi-gated their way along the treacherous, choppy waters of the Colorado River.

“Oh my gawd, this is so freaking cool!” I said, feel-ing my own body move back and forth and up anddown with the swells of the river. “What about you, Taylor? Sweet, huh?”

I turned to look at my sister. The first thing I noticed was the grayish green tinge to her normally healthy complexion. The second was her fingernails embed-ded in the padding of our shared arm rest.

“Taylor?” I placed a hand on hers. “You okay?”

She shook her head back and forth slowly, leaning over in my direction sharply before positioning her body to the other side of the chair like she was on a funky roller coaster.

“I’m getting sick!” she managed.

“Turn away!” I told her. “Shut your eyes!”

“I can’t!” she said. “It’s like a train wreck. You want to look away but you can’t! Oh, gawd, I’m going to throw up!”

“Shhh! Would you pipe down? You’ve been a con-stant distraction since you came in,” someone behind us hissed.

I grabbed the back of Taylor’s neck and stuck her head between her knees.

“Close your eyes and breathe. Breathe!” I ordered.

“Let go! I’m not hyperventilating! You’re making it worse!”

“Shhh! Hold it down up there!”

“Do you mind?”

“I paid good money to watch this film so shut the hell up!”

Yikes! The natives were getting restless.

I started to glance around to see where the most vocal contingent was located, and found my gaze caught by a late arrival making his way down the aisle to my right.

It was Raphael. And he didn’t look happy.

I made a headlong dive to the floor, praying he hadn’t spotted me.

“Dammit!” I swore, trying to think of my next move and knowing it had to take me to the last remaining unexamined seat. Making like the reptiles I loathed, I slithered my way down the row and across the far aisle. I rolled to my back and began to slide underneath the chairs, face up, making my way to the seat.

“Eeow! Gross!” I said, sickened by wad after wad of gum stuck to various parts of the theater seats. What? Theater-goers can’t wrap gum in tissue and use a waste receptacle like the rest of us?

I continued my backstroke and awkwardly made my way to the seat in question, avoiding the legs and feet of as many Canyon customers as possible. I finally found the top of my head even with the back of the second chair in the first row of the section. Slowly, slowly, I propelled myself upward—well, in the direc-tion of my head, anyway—until my head was com-pletely under the chair.