They left their sleeping bags and shuffled to the back of the theater again. It was no less humiliating the second time around.

“You’re definitely getting a nickname,” Gabe said when she sat down again.

Elena crawled into her sleeping bag, feeling more unbelievably tired than unbelievably uncomfortable, like maybe she’d be able to get some sleep for real now.

“I was born at the wrong time,” she said. “And in the wrong climate. It should be 1983, and I should be sitting outside Mann’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, California.”

“They’re camping outside the Chinese Theatre tonight,” Gabe said. “Troy says we’re all one line.”

“I’m probably last in that one, too,” Elena said.

She rolled away from Gabe and fell asleep.

WEDNESDAY

16 DECEMBER 2015

“The Force awakens!” Troy shouted.

Elena pulled her hat down over her eyes.

“Come on, Elena,” Troy said. “We’re hoping you’ll get coffee again.”

“Because I’m a woman?”

“No. Because you probably have to pee,” Gabe said.

Elena did. “Fine, tell me what you want.”

Twenty minutes later she was staring at herself in the Starbucks mirror. She was starting to look like someone who slept on the street and washed up in Starbucks bathrooms.

There’d been an actual homeless person sitting outside the Starbucks when Elena walked in, and it made her feel like a big creep to think she was doing this for fun. (It wasn’t even fun!)

She told the barista their names were “Tarkin”, “Veers” and “Ozzel”.

“Feeling your dark side today, huh?” Troy said when she handed him his cup.

“Pretty much,” Elena said, dropping to the ground. “Fear, anger, hate, suffering . . .”

“T-minus one!” Troy said. “One more day. One more day! I can’t believe we’ve waited ten years for this, though honestly I never thought it would come. Real sequels . . .”

“What’s your favorite Star Wars movie?” Gabe asked. Uncharacteristically. Elena looked over at him.

“You might as well ask me who my favorite child is,” Troy said.

“Do you have children?” Elena asked him.

“I meant hypothetically,” Troy said. He exhaled hard. “This is tough, this is really tough. I’m going to have to go with The Empire Strikes Back.”

The next half-hour was taken up by Troy justifying his choice. At several points he considered changing his answer, but he kept landing back on Hoth.

“What about you, Elena?” Gabe finally asked.

She frowned at him. Suspicious. “Empire,” she said. “For all the reasons Troy just said. Plus the kissing. What’s yours?”

“Episode Six,” Gabe said.

“Jedi?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Solid choice,” Troy said. “Very solid.”

Gabe didn’t expound; instead he turned back to Elena. “So, what’s your least favorite?”

“Why do I have to go first?”

“You don’t have to,” he said.

She held her coffee cup in both hands. “No, it’s fine. Jedi. I still love it. But yeah.”

Troy acted like he’d been shot. “Jedi?”

Gabe was shocked, too. “You think Episode Six is worse than Episode Two? Worse than Anakin and Padmé frolicking among the shaaks?”

“The shaaks!” Troy said. “Geonosis!”

Those sounded like nonsense words to Elena. She didn’t want to be found out. She bit her lip. “I wasn’t really considering the prequels. You said least favorite, not worst.”

“Ahhhh,” Troy said, “you did say that.”

“True,” Gabe said.

They moved on to Troy’s least favorite (III— “the violence just struck me as mindless”) and then to Gabe’s (II—“love on the fields of Naboo”).

And then Troy had to take a call from his girlfriend.

“So,” Gabe said to Elena, “who’s your favorite character?”

“What are you doing?” Elena said.

“Talking about Star Wars.”

“Why?”

“I thought this was what you wanted.”

“So now you’re trying to give me what I want?”

Gabe sighed. “Not exactly. Just . . . maybe you were right.”

“When?” she asked.

“When you said that the point of being in this line was to be excited about Star Wars with other people who love Star Wars.”

“Of course I was right,” Elena said. “That’s obviously why people camp out like this. Nobody leaves their house to sit outside a theater for a week just so they can ignore other fans.”

“So I was getting in my own way,” Gabe admitted. “OK?”

“OK,” Elena said carefully.

“So, who’s your favorite character?” he asked again.

“You’ll probably think it’s basic.”

“I’m not a jerk,” he said.

“People who are jerks don’t get to decide whether they’re jerks. It’s left up to a jury of their peers.”

“I disagree. I do not identify as a jerk, so I’m not going to act like one.”

“Fine,” Elena said. “Princess Leia.”

“Great choice,” he said.

She was still suspicious. “What about you?”

The thing about Gabe being nice to Elena for unknown, suspicious reasons was . . . he was still being nice to her. And interesting. And funny. And good company.

She kept forgetting that it was all an act and possibly a ruse—and just enjoyed herself.

They were all enjoying themselves.

“Excuse me,” someone said, interrupting a lively discussion about whom they’d each buy a drink for in the cantina.

The whole line looked up. There were two women standing on the sidewalk with bakery boxes. One of them cleared her throat. “We heard that people were camping out for Star Wars . . .”

“That’s us!” Troy said, only slightly less enthusiastically than he’d said it yesterday.

“Where’s everybody else?” she asked. “Are they around the back? Do you do this in shifts?”