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To say you lived at the cinema was an exaggeration, but not a terrible one.
You prided yourself on being your personal film critic — you kept a small journal of your reviews of each and every movie that you watched; a rating out of 17 (you called it the Y/N scale), accompanied by a five sentence review and a some memento of the movie, whether it be a cut out picture or ticket pasted to the notebook page.
You rarely gave a movie under a 5 rating (akin to a one star) but sometimes you were forced into the single digits when the cinematography was shoddy or if the plot took you multiple views to comprehend.
The only reason you had access to all these showings was simple: you worked at a movie theater. Yes, it wasn’t ideal. No, it wasn’t a career. Handing out popcorn to tired parents, reminding teenagers that no, sneaking in food is illegal despite whatever they read online, and cleaning up sticky bathroom floors was not what you imagined yourself doing. In fact, it horrified your parents (though that just motivated you to stay at the cinema), and your college advisor probably expected a job a little . . . higher up in the industry.
Though, you couldn’t say you hated it here. There was a certain magic to the cinema; people came here to forget their lives for two hours and get transported into a high-stakes robbery, a superhero utopia, a dysfunctional yet charmingly rebellious society. People could live new lives, and there was a silent agreement that the theater was a place where your outside troubles couldn’t touch you. So even if this wasn’t your typical job, and though you didn’t plan on staying, you were morbidly content behind the flickering “ALL-RIGHT CINEMA” sign, that had a considerable amount of bird shat, outside the building.
When you heard that All-Right was hiring and offered free movie passes to employees, you jumped at the opportunity. Fresh out of college with a “useless” degree, you had been grasping at straws for any kind of money (most of your cash was quite literally ‘dirty money’—maybe picking up stray pounds off the side of the road was pathetic, but you were kind of pathetic, so as long as the shoe fits). Often, people force you to reflect on your life choices when you tell them of your education so far. To them, moving across an ocean to go to college in London was a poor choice, so when you gave them a blank smile and say, “I don’t regret it at all,” they are painfully confused. You understood it, why push aside a steady career for a major in Film Studies? You had virtually no job prospects, and there was no clear-cut path on how your future would turn out.
Well, it was because you loved it.
You loved it so much you earned a scholarship at a small school in London, and you loved it even enough to push aside your homesickness and get on a horribly rated airline to get to the jolly ol’ city.
People still made fun of your accent (“Oh look honey, that ones from the States!”) and you were baffled by theirs (“I’m sorry, could you repeat that?”) but honestly you wouldn’t have it any other way.
So, that’s how you found yourself in the back of Theater 8 at All-Right on a Monday night preparing to watch “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem”, notebook out and pencil at the ready. That’s how you found yourself meeting Marc Spector, for the very first time.