Read Online Last Night at the Circle Cinema by Emily Franklin - Free Book Online

way.
    â€œOf course I remember,” Bertucci said, and I hoped he was telling the truth.
    The first words Bertucci ever said to me were “Nice flamingo.” He was walking by my house—I never asked him why—and despite the flamingo’s perch between the rhododendron and the porch, Bertucci noticed. My mother hated the thing and had, on more than one occasion, put it in the green recycling bin. Only each time she did this, she’d leave the beak sticking out as though my plastic, tacky pink souvenir lawn ornament needed to breathe.
    â€œI actually thanked you,” I told Bertucci, “when you complimented my flamingo.” Before I’d known what was happening, we were chucking a Frisbee across the yard, trading obscure movie lines, and ogling the bikini-clad bodies of the Benson twins, whose yard was easily visible from mine. “If I hadn’t said anything back to you that day, would everything have been different? Would we still have been friends you think?”
    Bertucci considered my questions.
    â€œWho knows?” I asked, my hands wet on the fire escape. “And I’m still in semi-shock that you wound up hooking up with one of the Benson twins. You know, to be honest, I still can’t tell them apart.”
    Bertucci wouldn’t tell me much about any of those encounters except to say they were “flamingo-worthy.”
    The smokers finished and went into whatever bar was across Chestnut Avenue. I tried to dry my hands on my jeans while cradling the quiet plastic skull, wishing the weather were warmer, the way it had been in May. Then I thought about May and opened my mouth to tell Bertucci something, but he shook me off, staring out at the night like he was memorizing it, studying it.
    â€œAre you cold?” I asked, which wasn’t what I wanted to say, just what came out. He didn’t answer. He just looked at me with this blank gaze he had sometimes, which truthfully wasn’t blank, just sort of creepy. He reached for the door and I opened it for him. He slipped by me, back inside the theater, but I didn’t follow him.
    I thought about the night Olivia and I kissed. If he’d somehow known. What would have happened if we’d told him? If we’d talked about it then. The day after the night Olivia and I kissed in Bertucci’s hallway, the flamingo disappeared. You’d think I wouldn’t notice, but I take the same route in and out of my house, skipping the third porch stair, every day. Sometimes the flamingo would tilt over and look pathetic, beak-down in the bushes, and on those days I’d prop it back up. But there was no burst of pink plastic in the rhododendrons, no small black eyes fixing on me from the recycling bin.
    â€œWhere’d you put him?” I’d gone right back inside and asked my mother. She gave me a look that suggested I was being ridiculous, which of course I was, but I wouldn’t stop looking. Olivia came over and used a moldy Wiffle ball bat to swat the brush, but we found nothing. At the mall that weekend, we had kung pao tofu in the food court while Bertucci was on break. I always ordered one side of fried rice and wound up wanting another.
    â€œGet me a Fanta when you go back?” Bertucci asked and threw a balled up five dollar bill at me. At the counter, I ordered my second round of rice and started to say, “Small Fanta, please,” when I noticed the employee of the month photos. October was Linda Ruelle, she of pasty skin and hair net; November showed Brian Moreland and his perfect skin and wonky teeth; and in December was my flamingo with a paper cap on its head.
    â€œWhat the fuck is that?” I demanded.
    The server—Linda Ruelle from the look of her—recoiled.
    â€œThat’s my flamingo.” Even as I said it, I was caught between laughter and annoyance. “No, really!” I waved Bertucci and Olivia over but they stayed rooted to the sticky orange