The phone rang. Jill was closer. "Hello ... oh, hi, Jack ... no, nothing really tonight. Did you get another movie? Okay, I'll ask her. Dot, you busy tonight?"
Dot looked up. "Nope."
She brought the receiver back to her ear. "Nope. Yeah, we'll be there. I'll see you at nine. Grover head, right. Bye." Jill stopped pretending she was studying and flipped the book shut. "Do you know what 'They Live' is about?"
"Rowdy Roddy Piper puts on these sunglasses and half the world turns into ugly bug aliens. So he kills them all with a shotgun. Not exactly Fellini. Jill?"
"Yeah?"
"Didn't you, like, just spontaneously hook up with Jack last week?"
"Yeah."
"So he's following that first performance up with a bad sci-fi movie, and he's inviting a third wheel along?"
"Fourth wheel. Charlie's also watching it."
"What, she's not coming over?" Charlie paused his Quake game to shovel Hi-Hos in his mouth.
"No, she's coming over. Soon. But nothing's happening. I can sense it."
"But you guys hooked up last week, right?" Charlie wiped his hand on his pant leg.
"Yeah, and I thought I'd be doing it again this week! I got all happy. But, like an idiot, I started thinking about it all, and what she means to me. There was something there with her, something mental.
"All of my other girlfriends just sort of happened. Nothing was planned, we just hooked up once or twice, went to a couple movies, and ended up hanging out. Even when I was with the girls, it wasn't really love, just like a sort of hassle, a waste of effort to put so much work into relationships when I didn't get that much out of it. But now I know what people are supposed to get out of relationships, and unless I play my cards right, I'm not going to get squat."
"Aw, now I'm feeling bad that I got 'They Live.' If I knew you were trying for something, I would've rented something without professional wrestlers."
"It's okay, next week we'll get something with Meg Ryan. But for now, I've got to be careful with what I say and do. Nothing that could get me screwed. Well, you know what I mean.
I've got to be unthreatening. Then, I can coast for a bit with the relationship, if it is one, and see where I stand with her. So I'm Johnny Nice-Guy-Who-Never-Gets-Laid for the night."
"You're always Johhny Nice-Guy-Who-Never-Gets-Laid."
He pressed his head against Charlie's screen. "Ooh, she's here. Charlie, don't take this the wrong way, but get your ass in the chair and don't go near the bed."
Echoes came from the stairway. Charlie shut off the computer and walked to Jack's room. "Stop bringing that up. I didn't know."
Jill and Dot reached the second floor. jack said something to them for a few minutes, but for the life of him couldn't remember it.
Dot and Jill took their seats on the bed, Charlie in the chair. Something was working out.
Jack hit play on the VCR, and then nonchalantly backed up, parking himself right on the empty space on the bed. He hoped Jill was the type to scream at everything and grab Jack's arm.
Jill was, but she grabbed Dot's arm every time the aliens jumped out. Charlie, with a big stupid grin on his face the whole movie, kept saying that the movie was a paranoid thriller in the tradition of Hitchcock, but Jack thought it was just bug head aliens getting killed.
As soon as the movie was over, Charlie hit on the lights and rewound it. "Okay, I gotta put that bubble gum thing as my phone mail name."
Dot looked at him. "'I have come here to chew bubble gum and to kick ass. And I'm all out of bubble gum.' What did that have to do with anything in the movie?"
"You can't look too deep into this stuff. It's just there, and you have to enjoy it." Charlie picked up the phone and started dialing.
"Oh!" Charlie screamed. "This is going to sound like crap with the TV humming like this. I can just download the sound from the Internet, and get a cleaner version."
Dot got up from the bed. "Do they have that sound on the Internet?"
"What, are you kidding? If it's hokey '80s cinema, it is the Internet. There're probably 300 sites for 'They Live,' plus links to Rowdy Roddy Piper's other film appearances."
"Who said the Internet's not educational?" Dot left the room with Charlie,who gave a big thumbs up as he left. Jack prayed Jill didn't notice it.
The door was still open, but the bed's position gave a little privacy. Jack leaned a little against the wall. So did Jill.
"So, uh, awful movie, huh?"
"Yeah. I don't know why he had that huge fight with his friend over putting on the glasses. That lasted 10 minutes."
"Yep. Pretty bad movie, huh?"
"Yeah."
Jack needed something to talk about. "So, uh, the manure smell around the student center's dying down, huh?"
"Yeah. It was pretty bad when we first moved in. Like an outhouse."
Jack raked his mind. He had to think of something to say. Either that, or kiss her. But it was a hell of a lot harder to kiss someone he knew than it was to kiss a stranger.
He sighed and got up from the bed. "Hey, see if there's a KoKo B. Ware page," he said as he went into Charlie's room. Johnny Nice-Guy-Who-Never-Gets-Laid strikes again.
"Nope. He talked about manure for a bit, and then looked at wrestling home pages."
"Is this going to be the norm? We watch a movie, you maybe hook up, and I get Charlie?"
"I don't know. Well, probably. You know what it's like? My Foundations of Math seat."
"You'll elaborate, I trust."
"The first class, I didn't recognize anyone, and I was a little late. So I just sat down at the back, against the wall, and everyone around me was scary and the chalk holder under the blackboard poked into my neck. I figured I'd pick a better seat next class. But next class, I sat in the same spot. Same chalk holder, same weirdos. I didn't like where I was sitting, but I just instinctively did what I did before.
"The status quo sets in before you realize, and you're stuck in a seat or a relationship that you never intended to be in for the whole semester."
"But you kissed Jack last week."
"But that's sort of the exception to the rule. I could feel the status quo descending on us the first time we met. I knew I liked him, but figured I was going to be in some situation where I could never really act on it. Like he'd have a girlfriend or I'd have a boyfriend. Well, Kevin doesn't count. But there's some reason why we could never get together. Some sucky status quo.
"But when we kissed last week, it was like it was something we shouldn't be doing. Maybe it's the senior-freshman thing. We broke it before it had a chance to form. But it formed anyway, and now we're stuck in it."
"Bummer."
"I'm going to spend the whole semester seeing bad movies and not hooking up."
"Could be worse. You could be listening to Charlie."