Eli was hosting movie-night Thursday, just like every other Thursday the four friends, Eli, Chris, Eric, and Molly, had spent for the last two years. Tonight it was Chris's pick, another bloody horror fest, his favorite. When Chris picked a movie, everyone knew they were going to go home sick. He picked these cult classics, gross-out exploitative flicks that might as well have been snuff films. But they all agreed to watch each others' choices, no questions asked. And Chris was generally good enough to spring for the chips and dip as recompense.
Eli, on the other hand, tended to pick political thrillers. His parents were Israeli ex-pats, his father a foreign-relations officer at the D.C. Consulate and his mother a human rights activist. The extent of his parents' intellectual heritage was Eli's interest in conspiracy genre movies. Otherwise the apple had fallen far from the tree. Eric was a closeted lover of romantic-comedy: he kept up his ruse of casual indifference by attaching belabored excuses to his movies: the one I wanted wasn't in so I grabbed this off the newest release shelf; I wanted to make the girl at the counter think I'm sensitive so maybe she'll date me, so I got the sappiest one I could; this one was actually misfiled under 'action.' But everyone knew better.
Molly, the only girl, was totally unpredictable. She liked foreign films one week, anime the next. High-art thinkers, low-cult stinkers. You never could tell. But she always came armed with reams of internet-culled movie reviews and debates about each of her picks. She'd always say she was bored last night and couldn't fall asleep, so she looked them up for fun, but in reality she'd been planning her choice for a month, waiting till just the right season or mood or real-life context. It was uncanny, like she had some built-in cinematic consciousness.
It was kind of like how she worked at the office where they all made their living: methodical. They were all mechanical engineers, they'd all been hired at the same time, and some of them—Eric, Chris, and Molly—even when to college together. Eli went to MIT, but did rather poorly and so ended up here, in this department where they all worked, working on the same tedious projects: the microchip for rear-window washer-fluid activation, things like that. They liked to give Eli a hard time about his years a MIT, wasted playing Everquest or doing live-action roleplaying.
They carpooled, at lunch together, hung out most weekends, and even invited each other for holidays at their parents' if someone was going to be alone. They'd joke that they'd become some kind of collective hive-brain, ceasing to be individuals and operating with creepy synchronicity. These kinds of jokes never got old around the office. Eric and Chris were particularly avid pranksters: they would come into the office having prepared a script where each would individually address another member, Molly or Eli, in exactly the same language, using the same body language, about some seemingly spontaneous thing—the color of someone's shirt, the project manager's lunch, anything. Guffaws all around. They lived life with rather low expectations.
Tonight's horror movie was pushing the limits of everyone's taste, though, and they were growing mutinous, a rare thing. Chris kept trying to point out how the movie was 'really an interesting critique of' this or that, or that it was 'using blood and gore as a metaphor for': the whole thing, he tried to explain, was done ironically. No one was buying it. The last straw was the scene where the in-bred mountain family of murderers was taking turns sodomizing the slain young girls they'd captured on the back road after their car broke down and after a number of brutal chase and torture scenes involving power tools.
Chris finally turned it off. 'Hey let's play Resident Evil instead.'
'I'm sick of that game,' Eric complained. Eli seconded. 'I've never really liked video games,' said Molly. 'They're totally geared for the lowest common denominator.'
'You mean, like me,' said Chris.
'Well, sure!' said Molly.
'Nice.'
She beamed at him sweetly. Molly almost never flirted with them. In fact, she often wondered if it would come as a surprise to them that she possessed different parts. True she wasn't exactly a model. She had what she'd call bad skin with some acne scars on her face that she took almost no pains to cover up with concealer; she wasn't fat, but she had the start of a little role around her tummy and her butt made her look a little bigger than she was. She had some attractive qualities, but these she hid, either intentionally or not, by wearing hardly any make-up, dressing more or less like a boy, and always wearing her long brown unsculpted hair in a pony tail. For example, if Chris, Eric, or Eli had given it some consideration, they'd notice what a nice pair she had. Or they'd see that despite some rough patches her face had a pretty oval shape and that her lips were full and soft, like her eyes. She had an earthy pretty, a down-home attraction, one that would leave little impression on these boys, their sexuality shaped by the disposable porn babes they jerked off to daily on their favorite free internet sites.
Molly, for her part, did less than nothing to encourage them. When she first started working at the firm she thought Eli was cute—curly hair, slim build, dark, Jewish features. But back then he spent all his free time (and some of his paid time) haunting online adventure worlds. Anyway, now he was twenty pounds heavier and sort of meaty in the face. Eric and Chris were typical college nerds. They weren't badly socialized, just more comfortable in the safe confines of math and physics. They dressed badly, as nerds are wont to do, and if they'd ever had sex Molly would be surprised. So might everyone else. She thought both were probably good-looking somewhere beneath the years of learned self-consciousness reflected in their slouching posture and lack of any other identifiably self-confident body language. She'd therefore had to look elsewhere for her romantic interests.
'Well, all I've got is porn, but we all agreed no porn,' said Chris.
'You're supposed to have two choices for this very contingency,' replied Eli.
'We never use the contingency movie. We never have. I haven't rented two movies for movie-night in over a year. It's a waste of money.'
'A contingency plan is for contingencies, my friend. It doesn't matter that we've never used the contingency movie. We hate your movie and you're responsible.'
'Though I did find it strangely titillating there at the end…' Eric ventured.
'Gross,' said Molly. 'It'd be just like you to enjoy sexist scenes of female brutality.'
'Aw, come on, those hillbillies were cute!' chimed in Chris. Molly rolled her eyes.
'I guess I could go rent another,' he said, reluctantly.
'Forget it,' said Eric. 'I'm sort of tired anyway.'
'Dude,' said Eli, 'It's not even nine o'clock. Does your mother know where you are?'
At that moment, Chris came out of the kitchen with two bottles of wine. 'I have these, and we have chips. What do you say?'
'Sounds good,' said Molly. 'We can pretend we're adults.'
'We are adults,' said Chris.
'By age, perhaps, but not in any more significant sense,' she replied.
Half an hour later they'd cashed one bottle and were scraping the bottom of the bowl for chips sizable enough to dunk in the salsa.
'What sort of porn do you have,' inquired Eric.
'Man, it's awesome,' said Chris, excitedly. 'This guy at the store sold me this pirated collection of video-tapes of people doing it in public. Some of them are hilarious. There's this one where this clerk guy is fucking this girl behind the counter of a 7-Eleven. When someone walks in she ducks down behind the counter and you can totally tell she's blowing…' he trailed off, suddenly conscious that Molly was in the room.
'Don't stop on my account, perv-boy,' she said. 'I wouldn't want to ruin what's clearly the best thing that's happened to you in a month.'
'Well, anyway,' he continued, clearly uncomfortable. 'It's pretty cool.'
'How much porn do you losers look at?' she asked.
They were all mumbles, except for Eli: 'I look at porn at work all the time. I figured out a way to get around the mainframe protocol and set up my PC's internet profile to mirror someone else's on the network.'
'Whose?' Molly asked.
'Eric's.'
'How do you know he isn't looking at porn?' Asked Chris.
