“I swear, this better just be floating and a movie and not one of those interactive deals where someone swims around with a shark fin on their back and yanks people off their rafts, or you and I are gonna have words,” Kit threatened.
“How cool would that be?" Rebel said as the water reachedmy knees while I propelled my inner tube in front of me.
“Zero out of ten,” Kit grumbled, and I had to agree.
There weren’t a lot of things that scared me, but sharks were at the top of the list. If this showing were taking place in the ocean instead of a shallow pond, I’d have bowed out and happily spent the rest of the evening raiding the concession stand. The water was nice, a bit warmer than I’d expected when Rebel finally reached the spot he desired, off to the left of the rest of the floaters, but close enough that we had a beautiful view of the screen.
“How’d you hear about this, anyway?" I asked as Rebel’s fingers tangled with mine as they dangled over the edge of the inner tube.
When I glanced over, I saw he’d done the same with Kit on the other side of him, connecting us so we couldn’t drift away from one another.
“You know how rest stops always have a huge rack of brochures?” he replied. “It was on the front of one, so I shoved it in my backpack, hoping I could convince the others to take a detour.”
“No dice, huh?” Kit said.
“Not a one.”
“Shocking with how much you guys like movies,” Kit said.
“That’s what I said, but they refused to be convinced. Ozzy said the inner tube rocking would make him seasick, Dash said he just knew one of us would prank him and give him a heart attack in the middle of the movie by flipping his inner tube, while Johnny claimed that sitting in the water that long would make his ass pruney.”
Kit immediately started laughing and kicking at the water with his feet. “As far as excuses go, that one is so Johnny, you can’t even fault him for it.”
“Okay, true, but still lame,” Rebel declared. “I guess I’ll forgive him though, since it means I get to do this with you guys.”
I squeezed his hand and tugged his inner tube until it bumped into mine, which swayed, then jolted when we collidedagain after Kit’s had bumped into Rebel's.
“In hindsight, a floating raft would have been preferable,” Rebel grumbled.
“Until someone decided to get X-rated on it,” I pointed out.
“It’s not our fault you don’t know how to behave,” Kit chimed in.
“And Kit wins another round,” Rebel declared, chuckling as the screen flickered to life.
A hush spread out across the lake as the infamous opening scene appeared, and I immediately got a sense of why Rebel had been so interested in this event. Despite knowing there was a screen between us and the shark, there was something more visceral and downright terrifying about being in the water while watching it happen. The screen lined up in a way that made it seem like our lake blended into the ocean, upping the level of realism even more. Rebel gripped my hand while the swimmer was being jerked back and forth and during every heart-pounding appearance of the shark after that.
As far as dates went, this one ranked at the top, for both uniqueness and the company I was with. We’d rapidly fallen into a routine where at each stop, we looked for something fun they could do, even if it was just for an hour, to give their brains a break from creating. Their studio date was creeping closer, and with shows and engagements leading all the way up to the three-week break they took before recording, a great deal of downtime was now devoted to polishing the new songs and redesigning setlists to include them.
The one rule for thesomething funwas that it couldn’t involve music, though that never stopped them from snapping pictures and jotting down words whenever inspiration hit. It seemed like there was no turning off the creative process for either of them. Sights, sounds, and sometimes the behaviors of random people were all subject to dissection and notes. They had a game they played, calledwhat if, where they bounced possibilities around and used what they came up with to shape the tone of the song.
Since the only time I spent with the band as a whole was when both bands were together during the once-a-week brunch they shared, I’d only seen it play out once, with band members chiming in to help get the mood just right.
The song, which had started with too light a vibe, according to Dash, had quickly taken a dark turn when someone suggested that the black rose the guy in the song was looking for wasn't to give his girl at the start of their date but to lay on her grave.
Macabre.
But the tonal shift brought with it a different mood and a change in the energy the band brought to the song. Instead of something playful and fun, they wound up with something gritty and haunting that was already getting some serious airtime.
I was beginning to understand why he needed nights like tonight. No one could be on 24/7, and no one deserved to feel trapped when their world was already far too small. Highways, hotels, campgrounds, stages, and radio stations, that's what their lives consisted of. A seemingly endless stream of them.
We lingered until after the movie was over and most of the crowd had thinned out before dragging our inner tubes out of the water and carrying them up the short beach to the racks.
“Now that was an experience,” Rebel declared as we headed back to the SUV. “Tell me it wasn’t way more terrifying watching it that way.”
“I can’t, it would be a lie,” I said. “A couple times there I forgot where I was. Then that fin broke the surface and I’d have dove off the innertube if you hadn’t been holding my hand.”
“I’ll be sure to remind you of how much fun it was when I wake up screaming in the middle of the night,” Kit threatened. “In fact, I’ll be sure to wake you up with every shark gif I can find, one after the other, in slow succession.”