Adverbs Read Free Page B

of embarrassing. I held it up for the guy. “Let’s get to work, check it out. We can go in there and see if it’s on the floor. See if you dropped it.”
    “Yeah,” he said, smiled again, my chivalrous compadre. “Thanks.”
    Lila was looking at me with some gorgeous indecisive loveliness, like she couldn’t decide if I was cool because I could talk to this guy, like we were two cool guys standing near her, or if I’d just dragged him down and we were two lame guys who weren’t Keith and that was all we had to offer. “There’s people in there,” she said. “The movie is playing.”
    “We won’t bother them,” I said. “We won’t bother the movie patrons.” I said a bullshit word like patrons so the guy wouldknow that I didn’t think those people would stop us for a second. “This guy lost his keys,” I said. “It’s more important than a movie. We’ll be quiet.”
    “Thanks,” the guy said, nodding at me.
    “Okay?” I said to Lila, and I watched her consult. She consulted the same imagination that bought that lipstick, and made her face a sexy promise for anyone who happened to have at least one working eye in their yearning little head. What principles from the life of Sir Gawain do you see practiced in your own life? asks Ms. Wylie’s essay question which is due on Monday, and I watched Lila consult her imagination. I might be the guy practicing chivalry, I hope I hope she was thinking. “Okay?” I said. “Okay?”
    “Whatever,” she said. “Be careful out there.”
    By this time the threesome had cornered the main suspect, but it was so early in the movie you knew he couldn’t be the right guy, even if you didn’t actually see that the real mastermind had created a false digital trail by utilizing the satellite time he exchanged for rubies in the shadowy scene they filmed in a hurry. “Your training is over,” the famous guy tells the slightly hotter of the two women after she kicks in the door before he can, and we opened the swinging doors at the back of the theater and cast a fine yellow slice of light, all laid out as a triangle on the carpet like a big piece of pie. Some heads swiveled and swiveled back to the sputtering wrong suspect, who they made a sissy for comic relief.
    “Where were you?” I said. “Where was your seat?”
    “She wanted to be toward the back,” he said and his jacketshrugged in the closing light of the door. “She said it was going to be loud.”
    He led the way. “But there are like fifteen speakers all over the walls,” I said. “You can’t escape a movie loud like this.”
    “Don’t I know it,” he said grimly.
    “Shut up,” said someone who got himself an aisle seat so as to show the world, Hey, I got boots . The guy glared and for a minute I thought that Kickass might start playing on one more screen, if you know what I mean. Wicked boot man didn’t want any real-life audio to interfere with the famous guy saying, “Of course! It’s a false digital trail,” but my guy was all set with the chivalry secret weapon.
    “I’m very sorry, sir,” and in the light of the next morning in front of police headquarters I was so fucking proud of him. Chivalrous chivalrous with the “I’m very sorry” and the “sir,” and without a sword being drawn my man Gawain made the guy embarrassed and wearing boots. “I heard about your shenanigans last night,” the Chief said all grumpy on the screen, but I knew my guy was shenanigan-free.
    He stopped in the aisle. “Here I think,” he said, and it was pretty empty. He moved my flashlight slightly and we saw some couple making out and a few bored alone men. “Or a row up or down, or two rows, I don’t know.”
    “We’ll find it,” I said. “We’ll look.”
    “I hope so,” the guy said. “I got a girl outside and she’s not that happy at me about it.”
    “Outside?” I said. It was cold outside, what else is new in this part of the world.
    “Smoking,” he said. “She’s a