A female form emerged at last, a chestnut brown ponytail wriggling across firm shoulders nestled beneath a clingy red Chillerz Cinema T-shirt. She looked oddly familiar, eyes searching in the dim theater light as the movie continued to spill out on the screen at her back.

“Hello?” The voice was oddly tentative and firm at the same time.

Meanwhile, Tori was still in full-on I’m going to need to speak to your manager mode. “Yeah, I’m ... watching here, actually.”

The female figure stopped, broom in one hand, trash bag in the other, peering up six empty rows to find Tori squirming impatiently, hands outstretched to indicate the flickering screen in front of her. “Umm ... can you maybe turn the lights off, please?”

The woman cocked her head, ponytail whispering across her shoulder once more. “Tori?”

“Yeah, what of it?” Tori wasn’t surprised some lowly theater worker knew of her. After all, she was home on winter break and bound to run into someone she knew from Landry High, even if it was in an empty movie theater after midnight.

The face in the theater doorway softened, smiling so that merry dimples danced beneath wide, green eyes, a fresh, ripe face to match the bangin’ body clad in a cheesy Chillerz Cinema uniform. “It’s Ryder, Tori. Ryder Cassidy.”

“Bullshit it is!” Tori huffed, calling to mind the only Ryder Cassidy she’d ever known: indiscreet and anonymous, dowdy and doughy, cloaked in layers of flannel and black cotton, rotating the same faded ball caps and thick, florid paperbacks as if hiding behind a shield of armor as she slunk through the high school hallways slowly, as if trudging through mud.

Fake Ryder inched closer, waving her broom menacingly even as she wore a curiously sexy smile. “Why ... why on earth would I lie about something like that?”

“You’re clearly deranged,” Tori huffed, only half-joking. “Turning on the lights in the middle of the best movie of the year, why wouldn’t you lie about your secret identity?”

Fake Ryder snorted, an almost familiar sound. Could it be? Tori marveled, taking in the sleek, sexy form, the small, ripe breasts and long, tapering legs of the comely cinema worker with the frustratingly bad timing. She laid the broom against the fuzzy, felt theater wall and pretended to reach for her back pocket.

“Would you like to see my ID?” she asked in that curious, almost taunting tone.

“I’d like to see the end of this motion picture masterpiece!” Tori blurted, although she had to admit, looking at Fake Ryder was way sexier than goofy, frilly, fuzzy little innocent 1980s Amy up on the big screen, with her insensitive boyfriend and flickering flashlight. “Is what I’d like to see.”

Possibly Real Ryder inched closer, abandoning her cleaning supplies and rubbing her hands together as if wiping them clean. Nodding at the wacky eighties antics still happening on the flickering screen, she asked, “You like this kind of stuff?”

Tori sat back slightly, the voice gradually sending her straight back through time. She’d never been friendly with Ryder growing up, no one had, really, but she’d heard her voice enough times in class, whether it was through an oral report or one of her long-winded screeds about speed metal or slasher flicks in detention. “I mean, ‘like’ is a strong word but I was finally starting to relax, so ... yeah, I like it well enough.”

“So ... why didn’t you buy a ticket then?” Ryder was cocky now, arms crossed over those small, seductive breasts and leaning one sexy hip against the felt covered theater wall at the end of Tori’s row.

“Who says I didn’t?” Tori bluffed, the daughter of a self-avowed shopaholic who knew her way around a toaster return or two at Grady’s Goods, the local department store.

“Got your ticket stub?” Ryder didn’t seem overly concerned about the matinee misdemeanor. Instead, she wore a curious smile to go with her sexy, self-assured posture.

“Who keeps those?”

“I mean, people who actually pay for their tickets usually do, just in case some hapless theater employee walks in halfway through Alien Babysitter Massacre from Mars, that is.”