Summer Days and Summer Nights by Stephanie Perkins Page B

her incisors like fangs. “He’s probably home roasting children in his oven.”
    Dave shrugged and double dipped in the nacho cheese sauce. “Just more grist for the Scratsche rumor mill.”
    For several decades, Mr. Scratsche had been Deadwood, Texas’s, favorite urban legend. He’d moved to town in 1963, when the nation was still mourning its beautiful promise of a president, and promptly bought Deadwood’s run-down 1920s movie palace, the Cinemore Theater. Within a year, he’d turned it into a horror movie palace nicknamed “the Cinegore,” due to its bloody slate of films. The Cinegore featured state-of-the-art details like Smell-O-Vision, Tingler shocker seats, skeletons that zoomed above the audience’s heads on an invisible wire, and the only screen outfitted for 3-D in a forty-mile radius. People used to come from as far away as Abilene to see a first run. Personally, I can’t imagine why anybody would want to build anything in Deadwood, Texas, which is true to its name. Leaving Deadwood is pretty much the best option out there. If you’re somebody who has options.
    Anyway.
    No one had seen old Scratsche in years, not even us. When the Cinegore staff was hired, we’d each had to fill out a short, weird questionnaire about our hopes, dreams, and fears. Afterward, I’d gotten a brief note in the mail, written in very formal script, that said, Congratulations. You are a good fit for the Cinegore, Mr. Grant. Sincerely, Mr. Nicholas Scratsche.
    His reclusiveness fed the appetite for speculation: He was from Transylvania. He was from a circus town in Florida. He was tall. He was short. He was a defrocked priest specializing in off-book exorcisms. He’d killed the son of a nobleman back in the old country and was hiding out here. There were dozens of rumors but only three pieces of tangible evidence that Mr. Scratsche had ever existed at all. One was the Cinegore. Two was his signature on our paychecks. And three was a framed black-and-white photo that hung on the badly lit wall of the staircase leading up to the projection room, a photo of Scratsche cutting the ribbon at the opening of the Cinegore, October 31, 1964.
    I’d never much liked that picture. In it, Mr. Scratsche has on this shiny, sharkskin suit, the kind of thing that looked like it would go up with one match. But it wasn’t Scratsche’s questionable fashion choices that gave me the creeps; it was his eyes. They were dead-of-night black. You could look into them and see nothing but yourself staring back. Every time I passed that picture, those eyes found me, judged me. They made the hair on the back of my neck whisper dread to my insides. They made me look .
    Overhead, the Gothic chandelier bulbs flickered and dimmed—a power surge, one of the Cinegore’s infamous quirks. A few seconds later, they blazed back up to full wattage. We let out a collective exhale.
    â€œDodged that one,” Dani said and high-fived me.
    I enjoyed the momentary feel of her skin against mine, even if it was just some palm-to-palm action. Fact: When most of your nights are spent threading old horror movies through an artifact of a projector, any human contact is exciting. Which sounds kind of pathetic. That’s probably because I am a little pathetic. In life as in film, find your niche and work it.
    John-O, our resident freshman, signaled urgently from outside that he was ready to release the velvet rope barrier keeping the ticket holders in line. John-O was a short spark plug of a kid with a learner’s permit and a habit of telling us the plot of every movie we’d still like to see. In an act of petty revenge for this, Dave, Dani, and I all pretended not to understand his wild gestures. We added some of our own, turning it into a dance, until finally, in frustration, John-O opened the door and yelled in, “Uh, you guys? I’m gonna let people in now, okay?”
    â€œDo it,