Page 28 of Man On

I feel like I'm probably going to make myself look like more of a loser than I already am, but I honestly don't know. We didn’t watch movies when I lived with my grandfather and I haven't watched enough of them in the past four years to have a good enough grasp on what kind of movies I like.

"What's your favorite?"

"You wouldn't like it."

"What's your favorite that isn't porn?"

He laughs in a way that is contagious, and it makes me feel good to be the cause of it, even if it was just something dumb that I said.

"You wouldn't like it," he says in a sing-song voice.

"Try me," I sing back, throwing a piece of tomato at him. He swats it and sends it right back in my direction. I catch it with my mouth and he high fives me. It’s all so normal it hurts.

"My favorite movie of all time is The Rocky Horror Picture Show."

"Is it scary?"

"It might be to you," he says, chuckling.

"Does it have demonic stuff in it or something?"

"Much, much worse than that," he says, rolling his lips to keep from laughing. "How open-minded can you be?"

"How open-minded do I need to be?"

"It's an old campy musical from the seventies about a transvestite mad scientist from space."

My mouth turns down as I process all of those words and try to imagine what this film would be like. "Transvestite?"

"It's an old movie, and not exactly PC, but pretty woke for its time."

I don't think I know what that word means, either.

Noah grabs the phone from my hand before I can open a browser. "No phones. It's a movie night rule."

"What if something happens that I don't understand?"

"Then you ask me," he says with a shrug.

Well, it's not demonic, and it's not porn. How bad could it really be?

"I don't know how I feel about musicals, but the mad scientist from space sounds pretty cool."

Noah looks like he wants to jump up and down on the couch. “This is going to be epic."

He spends the entire movie watching me. I eat more pizza than I normally would just to have something to do with my face and hands, because I'm acutely aware of his eyes on me. But eventually there's no more pizza, and there's so much happening on the screen, I have to tune Noah out to focus on it. The main character is pretty out there. He's wearing women's lingerie and makeup, but weirdly, I kind of think he pulls it off.

I surprisingly like the music. More than that, I like the way Noah dances around in his seat, singing all the words to himself. I'm pretty sure he mouths most of the words to the movie, which is a little uncomfortable when Dr. Frank-N-Furter is singing about making the nearly naked, greased up, muscly dude into a man and touching him suggestively. I'm trying to hide my discomfort, if only to prove how open-minded I'm being.

My eyes cut over to Noah when Dr. Frank-N-Furter goes into a bedroom and seduces one of the girl characters.

"I thought he was gay?" I ask, proud of myself for how casually I ask the question.

"Wait for it…" Noah says. Then Frank goes into the bedroom of the other character, the girl's fiancé, and seduces him, too.

"What is even happening here?"

Noah chuckles and continues watching me try to process the movie as it steadily gets more ridiculous. He laughs at my expressions through the rest of it, especially when the castle dislodges from the ground and flies off into space.

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