Free Cold Fury by T. M. Goeglein

of the theater room would be canceled. All I could think of was how bad it would reflect on my well-roundedness if I couldn’t successfully organize a club where all someone had to do was sit in a dark room, stare at a screen, and eat snacks. Finally, facing the inevitable, I trudged past the office, glanced at the sign-up sheet—and there it was.
    max kissberg , printed in red ink.
    At first, the name didn’t ring a bell.
    After all, it had been three years since Gina’s thirteenth birthday party, when he told me not to pay attention to world-class knuckleheads.
    And then, rolling the name around in my mind, I vaguely recalled a tiny kid with monster braces who had moved to the suburbs. If he hadn’t spoken to me at Gina’s birthday party, I wouldn’t have remembered him at all, except for an extra blip of memory that came out of nowhere. We were even younger than at the party, maybe nine or ten, and there had been a school talent show where Max played a part in a scene with some other kids. I remembered his little body swallowed up in a huge pinstripe suit, his hair slicked back, and a little mustache drawn in black pencil under his nose. He was onstage, and I remembered that I knew his lines as he uttered them—they were from a movie I had watched with my parents countless times, with my dad’s running commentary of what, in the film, seemed “legit” and what was “phony.” Max had been playing Vito Corleone from The Godfather ; he displayed a sly sense of danger that hushed the audience. As I stared at Max’s name on the sign-up sheet, I recited his lines from memory—
    “I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse,” I murmured.
    “What kind of offer?” a voice said.
    I turned and looked up at a face smiling down at me that I found a little familiar and very attractive, and then looked closer at the curly hair and imagined thick glasses covering the warm brown eyes. What threw me off was how tall he was—at least half a foot taller than me—but there was no denying it was him.
    “Max?” I said.
    “Sara Jane, right? I remember you.”
    “I remember you, too,” I said, my throat going dry.
    I was suddenly hyperaware of how I looked (or didn’t look), wearing distressed (in a real way, not in a fashionable way) jeans, one of my dad’s beat-up Cubs T-shirts, and a pair of ratty Chuck Taylors. I couldn’t for the life of me remember when I’d last brushed my hair, and I licked my glossless lips trying to think of something cool to say. Max, on the other hand, looked like he could star on a TV show as the hot new guy in school—tan, just muscular enough not to be annoying, wearing a vintage motorcycle T-shirt and jeans that were not distressed, faded, or ripped, but normal and blue. It wasn’t exactly love at first sight since I’d seen him before. Maybe it was love at second look, since we were both older now and I was seeing a different Max, a Max who wasn’t a little boy anymore but with the same confident smile. Finally I said the stupidest, most obvious thing that popped into my brain. “Um, well . . . you grew.”
    Max laughed a little. “You too.”
    “You had glasses,” I said, realizing that I was examining his face as if it were a fascinating work of art. “And braces . . .”
    “Contacts,” he said, overblinking, and then tapped an index finger on his teeth. “My braces came off last year, finally. It feels like my teeth got out of prison.”
    “I’m so jealous,” I said, squeezing my lips over my mouth, hiding my supposedly-but-not-really-invisible braces. “I feel like I was born with these things.”
    “It sucks but it’s worth it,” he said, and then I felt him inspecting my face, traveling from my mouth to my nose (how could he miss it?) to my eyes, where he paused and smiled, nodding at the sign-up sheet. “So are you in this thing?”
    “The Classic Movie Club? Yeah, well . . . I guess so.”
    “It’s a cool idea,” he said.
    “It was my