The door closed behind him with a soft click and nobody turned.
Reese stood against the back wall and watched.
On screen, the yellow bus was still rolling. The family inside it wasn't quite yet they were quiet.
A man with a moustache was staring out the window.
A little girl in glasses was drawing in a notebook.
A teenage boy was writing something on his hand.
Reese didn't know who any of these people were.
But he felt like he knew them anyway.
The warehouse was large yet it was at the moment empty other then the Five folding chairs in a loose row. A projector humming on a cart behind them.
The air conditioning unit in the corner working harder than it needed to. Coffee cups on the floor. Somebody's jacket over the back of a chair and a few men seated on the chair smoking a cigarret.
Nobody had looked at him yet.
Li floated silently at his shoulder as it silently observed Reese.
On screen the bus pulled into a gas station and the family got out.
The man with the moustache walked away from everyone and sat on a bench by himself. The little girl followed him after a minute and sat down beside him without saying anything.
Reese watched her sit there.
He thought, without meaning to, about the time Dewey had climbed onto the roof when he was seven and refused to come down, and Hal had climbed up after him and sat beside him for forty minutes not saying anything, and then they had both come down together and nobody had ever explained what that had been about.
Reese frowned.
He didn't like thinking about stuff like that.
On screen, the movie kept going.
A motel room. An argument. Grandpa yelling at somebody.
The teenage boy writing I hate everyone on a notepad and holding it up.
A long silence in a hospital hallway that Reese didn't fully track because he was still thinking about Dewey on the roof.
Then there was a scene on a road at night.
Then a stage.
A pageant stage, lit up like a cake, with little girls in sequins and hairspray lined up in the wings. And the little girl with glasses, Olive, was standing at the front of the stage in a red sequined dress, and the music started, and it was Super Freak.
Reese's eyebrows went up.
She started dancing.
It was not a good dance.
It was not a child pageant dance.
It was a dance somebody had taught her that was meant for adults, and she was doing it completely seriously, with her small face set in total concentration, and the audience in the film was going quiet in the way audiences go quiet when something is going wrong.
And then the man with the moustache, her father, the one who had been sitting on the bench, stood up in the audience.
He walked to the stage.
He climbed onto it.
And he started dancing with her.
Badly.
Then the teenage boy got up, and climbed onto the stage, and started dancing.
Then the uncle. Then the mother. The whole family, on the stage, dancing with the weird kid in the red dress, while the pageant judges stood up in outrage and the audience didn't know where to look.
Reese didn't move.
Something in his chest was doing a thing he didn't have a word for.
On his shoulder, Li had gone very still.
Li was watching Reese, not the screen.
On screen, the family kept dancing. Olive was laughing now. The father was laughing. The teenage boy who had been writing I hate everyone on his hand was dancing with his little sister on a pageant stage in California and he was laughing too.
Reese's eyes were wet.
He noticed this and was immediately annoyed about it.
He rubbed his face with the back of his hand, hard, and sniffed once, and put his hands in his pockets.
The scene played out. The family got dragged off stage. They ran for the bus. They all piled in, laughing, the bus pulled away, and the screen cut to black and the credits started to come up.
Somebody in the folding chairs hit pause.
The room was quiet.
For a moment nobody said anything.
Then the man in the middle chair, who had a coffee and a notepad, let out a long breath and began speaking.
"Okay. So."
"No," said the woman next to him.
"I didn't even say anything yet."
"You were going to say cut it like a comedy again and I'm going to stop you before you do."
"I wasn't—"
"You were." The women said staring at him as she took a long drag of her cigarrete.
The man on the end, holding a pen, said, "The comedy cut tests well."
"The comedy cut lies," the woman said. "They'll show up expecting Meet the Parents and they'll get this and they'll hate us for it."
"They'll show up," the man with the pen said. "That's the point. They'll show up in week one. Word of mouth does whatever word of mouth does."
"Word of mouth kills us if we lie in the trailer."
"Word of mouth is a myth, Karen."
"Oh my god!"
The man in the middle, the coffee one, pinched the bridge of his nose.
"Let's not do this again," he said.
"We have to do it again because you haven't made a decision."
"I'm making a decision."
"You're stalling. You've been stalling for three weeks."
"Because both cuts are wrong," the coffee man said, and his voice had the flat quality of something that had been said many times. "The comedy cut is a lie. The honest cut is a funeral. I don't have a third option."
"Then we go with the comedy cut."
"We go with the honest one."
"It's a funeral, Karen."
"It's the movie."
"Nobody's paying ten dollars to watch a funeral."
"They'll pay ten dollars to—"
"To what."
"To—"
She stopped.
She didn't have the rest of the sentence. She knew she didn't. Everybody in the room knew she didn't. The room went quiet in a way that meant it had gone quiet like this before, several times, over several days, and nobody had ever filled the silence.
The coffee man rubbed his face.
Reese was silent as he watched them bickering, finally he opened his mouth from the back wall, he said, "The bus."