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“Is this real?” she says.
Josh studies the back of his hand, humoring her. “Looks pretty real to me. Were you, uh—”
“At the movies?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know.”
But she desperately hopes so. She wants to think she’s not capable of doing in real life what she’d just done in her imagination.
“How can you not know?” Josh says.
“It was—”
Scary.
So scary and detailed and confusing. Enough that Charlie feels dizzy. Gray clouds float in and out of her vision. Riding with them is a skull-filling headache. She feels like Dorothy waking at the end ofThe Wizard of Oz, suddenly in a sepia-tinted world that had minutes earlier been dazzling color.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” she says.
And she truly doesn’t. She has no idea if she’s in reality or a movie or a memory. Maybe it’s all three, which is a perfect description of movies themselves. They’re a combination of life and fantasy and illusion that becomes a kind of shared dream. Charlie imagines this moment being projected onto a big screen, watched by all those beautiful people out there in the dark.
At this point, nothing would surprise her anymore.
The car is still stopped in the middle of the road. Through the windshield, Charlie sees trees on both sides of the car, their bare limbs skeleton-gray against the sky.
“We don’t need to stop driving,” Josh says, a tinge of hope in his voice. “We can keep going.”
“All the way to Ohio?”
“If that’s what you want, yeah.”
“Or,” Charlie says, “we could go to a movie.”
The suggestion makes Josh chuckle. “I wouldn’t mind that. Not one bit.”
“So you’re not going to try to kill me?”
“I can’t,” Josh says. “You already killed me.”
Charlie looks down at her hands. One grips a pair of handcuffs. The other is smeared with blood. On the other side of the car, Josh chokes out her name.
“Charlie.”
INT. GRAND AM—NIGHT
Charlie’s eyes open on their own. A willful snap.
In front of her, sprawled sideways in the driver’s seat, is Josh. His head is propped against the window, which has become fogged by his pained grunts. When he spasms, his hair makes a jellyfish pattern in the glass.
The knife remains in his side, poking out like a meat thermometer. Josh stares at it, wild-eyed and sweaty, the fingers of his left hand reaching for it.
“Charlie,” he grunts. “Help me.”
She stays frozen, save for her eyelids, which she rapidly blinks, hoping that doing so will jolt her out of this nightmarish movie in her mind. Because that’s all it is.
A movie.