Anomaly

Movie Night

I had never experienced the subtle change from fall to winter. Having lived in the Academy for most of my life, I was used to intense New Mexico heat. And my father’s assignment before that had taken us across the Southern United States. Growing up, I enjoyed not having to suffer through a frigid winter. But there was a quiet beauty in seeing the leaves fall from the trees, watching the grass dry up, observing nature’s slow death with the peaceful knowledge that it would be reborn come spring.

I spent a lot of time with Alora. It was strange that I had found someone who understood me better than anyone ever had when she didn’t even know my real name. We watched low-budget horror films, shared leftovers from Pizza Planet for lunch, and spent plenty of time in the meadow until it got too cold. But I didn’t skip school anymore, even when she did. Park and Ferris’s bribe had paid off.

By November, Alora and I had fallen into the habit of hanging out at my place every day after school that she wasn’t working. I would have preferred going to her place so I didn’t have to deal with Park and Ferris teasing me whenever she left, but she actually enjoyed spending time my fake parents. She and Park liked to gang up and make fun of me, and she could talk to Ferris for hours about new developments in science. They had warmed to her too, probably partly due to the clearly platonic nature of the relationship between us: we never held hands, never sat next to each other, and despite the number of times Park burst into our basement to check on us during our movie nights, we were never doing anything.

It was a Thursday night, which meant another movie night. Fridays would have been my choice because Alora could have stayed even later, but she always worked on Fridays. So Thursday it was.

The movie this week was about a zombie apocalypse, and it was the perfect level of dreadful and funny. I had made a bowl of popcorn hoping that Alora would have to sit closer to me, but she just got her own bowl, put some popcorn in, and sat on the other side of the couch, as usual. She said it helped maintain the boundaries we had agreed to keep, which I supposed was true, but also made me feel like I had an infectious disease.

We had gotten to a ridiculous, gory scene with horrible special effects. It looked as though they were using old mannequins and ketchup. I turned over to look at Alora, who had her hands over her face and was peeking through small gaps in her fingers.

She was such a pure soul once you got to know her. Even obviously fake violence bothered her. I wondered how she would react if she knew what I actually did for a living. She hated fighting and killing. But would she feel the same way if I was killing something that would kill her first?

“It’s obviously fake,” I teased her.

“It’s the principle,” she scoffed back. “That mannequin head is supposed to represent a real head.”

“They’re zombies, Al,” I replied. “Who cares if they lose a head?”

“They’re still people,” she fired back.

“They literally aren’t, though.”

“Yes, they literally are,” she insisted. “Also, why do people in these movies always turn to murder?”

“Yeah? And what is the diplomatic solution to the zombie apocalypse? Hold a meeting of zombie and human ambassadors and call for a truce?”

“I’m just saying,” she said, uncovering her eyes now that the gruesome scene was over, “there has to be a way to solve problems without always resorting to violence.”

I just smiled and nodded. I found her naiveté kind of adorable. It was easy to think that peacefulness was the solution to problems when you didn’t know the kind of evil out there. But I knew better. Peace wasn’t a tool, it was the goal. And sometimes, the only way to get to that goal was through violence.