Page 69 of The End of the World As We Know It

This went on for about a week, until the boys rolled up to Moonrise Video right at the stroke of six to find Bill sitting in the parking lot waiting for them.

“Can I ask you something?” asked Bill as he walked the stacks with the boys, eyeing the ten thousand or so videos Gil had accrued over the years.

“Sure,” said Derek. “What do you wanna know?”

“Why movies?”

“Why movies, what?” asked Derek, confused.

“You boys could have been doing anything all this time. Playing video games, going to the bar, driving to Austin for concerts, hell, woodworking. Why movies?”

Derek and Alan exchanged baffled looks. They liked movies. Hell,they loved movies. The why of it hadn’t really crossed Derek’s mind. But it had crossed Alan’s.

“You know,” said Alan, “I read somewhere that humans invented beer about ten thousand years ago, give or take.”

“Really?” asked Bill.

“Yeah. Wasn’t exactly the same as it is now, but same concept. I learned about it when I started looking into home brewing.”

“Brewing your own beer?”

“Yeah. It’s a thing. There’s a shop in Fredericksburg that sells everything you need. I thought it might be fun and, you know, cheaper, to make my own. Makes more sense now, what with there only being so much beer left in the local stores. Anyhow, for ten thousand years, man has made beer. And every day, after a long day of hunting or gathering or farming, man would sit down with his friends around a campfire and tell stories.”

“Yeah, I get that,” said Bill.

“Well. It ain’t a campfire, but I reckon sitting around a glowing box with friends and letting it tell us stories is about the same. ’Cept of course, this way we don’t hear the same story about that time Derek got drunk with Sissy Heiser from over in Flatsbury and she let him do butt stuff.”

“She did,” said Derek. “Ain’t no lie.”

“Didn’t say there was. Just that I’ve heard that story about eighty times and I’d like something new every now and again.”

“Can’t all be butt stuff,” said Bill, agreeing.

“Exactly,” said Alan. “So, for us, videos is our campfire.”

“And we’re happy to have you join us around it,” said Derek.

Bill walked in silence with them for a moment, before breaking it once again. “Can I be real honest with you guys?”

“Shoot,” said Derek.

“I mean nothin’ by this, but I used to think y’all were two weird little assholes. It turns out y’all are just good, decent folk.”

Derek and Alan shared a strained look with one another beforebursting into laughter. “Well, truth is,” said Derek through both chuckles and guffaws, “we are weird little assholes.”

Then Alan piped in, “But we reckon being that and good folk ain’t exactly mutually exclusive.”

Bill laughed. Then he nodded, asking, “So what are we watching tonight?”

The three returned to the boys’ place shortly thereafter withFriday the 13th 3D, A Nightmare on Elm Street, andThe Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The boys reckoned it was about time Bill got a proper education in horror and that meant starting with the heavyweights—the all-time best slasher killers ever to grace the screen. It was Friday after all and no one exactly had work in the morning, so a triple feature was in due order.

“Wait, wait, wait,” said Bill, mid-discussion. “So the hockey mask guy—”

“Jason,” the boys said together.

“Yeah, him. You mean he ain’t even in the first movie?”

“No, his mom is the killer in that one,” said Derek. “I mean he kinda shows up at the end, but that is like a dream or something.”