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Mira: First of all, I would never draw conclusions about your soft city boyness. Because then you’d draw conclusions about my sheltered small-town girlness. Second, that makes me sad. Camping is the best. We go all the time. Or we used to. Now Ian’s too busy hanging out with his friends every weekend, and the one time we tried with Mom a couple summers ago, she got super disoriented when she woke up in her tent in the middle of the night. I think it scared the shit out of her.
Cole: Mira?
Mira: Yes Cole?
Cole: Would you like to go camping with me?
Mira: I would love to.
Cole: Ok. I’ll be right over to pick you up after I get some marshmallows.
Mira: I’ll be waiting.
Cole: If only.
Mira: If only.
May 26,10:42am
Mira: Hi Cole
Cole: Hi Mira
Mira: What are you doing?
Cole: Just put Ruby down for her morning nap. You?
Mira: Chilling for a minute between the breakfast and the lunch rush. Did you have a nice night?
Cole: It was actually kind of funny. Becks and I were hanging out after Ruby fell asleep, and she decided she wanted to watch a movie from back in our day. We started searching, and it was alarming how many of the movies we grew up on, movies I loved once, absolutely did not hold up.
Mira: It is sooo bad. What was wrong with us?
Cole: Seriously. I’m not sure we’ve ever fully examined the collective existential crisis of an entire generation looking back on the films that defined us and thinking, oh dear god no. The Toy? Soul Man? Turning trailblazing sandwich-artist Ally Sheedy into conformity Barbie in The Breakfast Club? And I’m pretty sure Long Duk Dong earned all of us a perpetual sitting in the corner to think about what we’ve done.
Mira: I tried to watch Revenge of the Nerds with Ian last year. We did not have a good time.
Cole: Yikes!
Mira: Banged my knee on the coffee table so hard lunging for the remote to turn it off I limped for three days.
Cole: Sacrificing your body to protect your kid. That’s just good parenting.
Mira: Did you and Becks end up finding anything that wasn’t a dumpster fire?
Cole: We did, actually. Say Anything. She’d never seen it before.
Mira: Ugh, that movie. So good.
Cole: I’d forgotten how much it affected me when I was younger. The first time I saw it, that moment when he shouts “I want to get hurt!” I felt understood in a way I’d never experienced before.
Mira: Lloyd Dobler. Heartthrob to End All Heartthrobs.
Cole: John Cusack in that movie finally convinced me I was bi.
Mira: Really? How old were you?
Cole: Seventeen, I think. We’d just started the band, I was dating Nancy, completely obsessed with Madigan, and getting off to Lloyd Dobler. And I was like, huh, maybe I’m not straight. Still took me a minute to say it out loud.
