Sudden Impact

So much for suburban schools being considered stellar learning factories ....

There is some sort of simmering feud going on, started last year over a girl. The details remain as hazy as the events that follow. They stare at each other, the two groups of young men, and the stares give way to smack-talk over a recent basketball game between the two schools, Fred's Quail Valley and Roderick's Lake Olympia. Friends on each side escalate the argument in front of the theater.

"His friends was like, I had been waitin' for this and all this and I was about to get beat up and stuff," says Roderick, an eighth-grader whose body fits somewhere between the awkwardness of later boyhood and the sturdiness of the pro athlete he hopes to become. "And I was like, this is why, who's gonna come beat me up and then he was bumpin' and then the security guard came around the corner."

The boys get the message: If this thing is going to happen, it can't happen here. They walk off into the night, still yelling at each other, meeting up in the back parking lot of the nearby Methodist hospital.

An AMC spokesman would later say that the private security guard saw no signs of "hostility," which was why he made no attempt to intervene.

"One of his friends was like, man, y'all gonna do this or what?" says Roderick. "And then I asked my friend, I was like, man, should I fight this dude? And he was like, man, I don't know. That's up to you."

The story also confirms my belief in attending the "grown up theaters" of Alamo and Landmark. Occassionally, outtings will require the AMC or Cinemark route, but I can save those for less attended evenings, at least.