Chicken Legs and Cherry Lips

My god damn friends have always called me Chicken Legs. I play football, I lift at the gym six days a week, but they focus on my stick legs and thin ankles. My legs are actually covered in black hair and kind of disappear into my socks, so I see their point, but I hate the nickname. I'm seventeen and never had a touchdown with a girl, and if I told those bastards on Monday that I got Cherry Lips to take her pants off, I'd be king. At least King Chicken Legs.

My first mistake happened after dinner, at the Cinema Royale, the only movie theater in our small town. The movie theater is gothic, a place where vampires would totally set up shop if they happened to want to invade Streaterville. The seats are so old they are actual red leather, and the floor has decades of popcorn and pop gunk and my sneakers usually stick like I'm walking on some high gravity planet or something. But that's not what gives the Cinema Royale character. It's Goiter Lady. She ancient, like 60 years old, and she's got a big brown mole in the middle of her right cheek, and a huge, huge cantaloupe lump sticking out of the left side of her neck. She wears low-cut sweaters, and smokes in the ticket booth. Red lipstick on her cigarettes.

"Goiter?" I said. "I don't even know her."

Cherry Lips didn't laugh at this joke after I'd payed for the tickets and led her by the arm to the line for the popcorn. Cherry Lips didn't even crack a smile.

Cherry Lips has alabaster skin and orange boingy-boing curls. I'd like to boingy-boing her in my Ford after the movie. Actually, well, I'd never tell my friends this, but Cherry Lips is kind of a mystery to me. She's beautiful, quiet, but clever. I'd be happy sitting next to her while we looked at the stars. I could never read her face, and the only reason I was able to overcome my nervousness and ask her to the movie was that last week in math class she let her guard down and flashed me a smile when the math teacher said something funny without meaning to.

It was a horror movie. The kind where the really hot blonde chick decides she needs some time to herself, to think about her relationship with her equally hot boyfriend, so she goes to her grandmother's summer cabin by the lake way up in the woods. It's fall, though, so no one else is around, and she's reading a book on the porch and the autumn leaves are falling and of course a hideous hottie-eating killer is watching her from the bushes. A perfect movie for Cherry Lips to get scared and hold my hand, or bury her curls in my shoulder. Chicken Legs don't matter in a movie theater.

Hot Blonde Chick stripped to her bra and panties, and walked through the tiny cabin, turning off all the lights. The camera meandered down to the lake shore, where the evil dude was crouched in the moonlight, inspecting something. The moonlight was bright in the movie, and Cherry Lips and I leaned forward, both at the same time. Cherry Lips reached for my hand, and leaned in to me, poised to find refuge in my chest should she need to hide her eyes. The silver glow from the movie moon revealed a strange object on the ground.

Bird feet. No. Chicken legs.

The camera panned out to show a neat line of headless chickens and ducks, alternating. Duck, chicken, duck, chicken. The deranged guy was licking blood off his knife.

To my horror, the glare from the screen set the hairs on my legs in stark relief, and I saw Cherry Lips looking down at my ankles, the spindly joints which at that very moment were being dwarfed and devoured by my socks. I saw Cherry Lips recoil slightly. I had to save the moment, I had to do something to break her gaze, to save my chances.

"Let me take a quack at this," I leaned over and whispered. "The killer was the ugly duckling in school, and his fowl actions are his way of telling the world to cluck off."

Time ticked slower as each new horrible bird reference came out of my mouth. I was watching from above, unable to stop myself. Cherry Lips moved progressively farther and farther away from me until she was almost hugging the empty seat next to her. Her nose crinkled at the top and she stared at me, transfixed, as if she were wondering how I functioned in society at all. I was wondering that myself. No other seventeen year old guy in the history of the world has ever crashed and burned so spectacularly.

Then Cherry Lips did something I have never seen her do, in my whole time of staring at her from kindergarten all the way through junior year in high school. She locked her eyes on mine, and laughed. I saw her creamy teeth and red tongue and dimples in her cheeks. Actual dimples.

No King Chicken Legs for me, of course. Not even a silent sweet moment under the stars. When I tried to kiss her good night after the movie, she swiveled her head and I tasted a cold earring and not those lips I'd looked forward to. But she shook my hand, and told me we should hang out more often.

I think I have a shot.