"You're blushing again."

"Stop that, face!"

"You say that, but you won't tell me what's making you blush so I can help you avoid those situations or anything productive like that," observes Beila.

"I tell my face to stop that when I'm thinking things I don't want anybody to know about," he explains, rubbing his face again. "Telling you what they are so you can avoid them isn't going to help."

"I don't suppose you could tell me what's prompting all these displeasing thoughts."

"It's not all the same things! I have a lot of displeasing thoughts," he says.

"That sounds difficult."

"Yep."

She pats his shoulder. "Well, doesn't look like the situation is set up to let me help, so I will just be over here benefiting from how cute it is when you blush," she says.

They were going to talk about the movie, weren't they. "The music was pretty good," Beila says, spotting a trash can and taking his empty slush cup out of his hand so she can waft both of the two into it neatly. "I think the same composer did Moon Spirit's Lament, which is not really similar at all, I guess she's versatile. Have you seen that one?"

He shakes his head. "No, I haven't! What was it about?"

"It was one of those surreal poems-in-movie-form that was only in the loosest possible sense about anything. Ranyi - that's my mom - took me to see it, she likes that kind of thing. Lots of disjointed visual imagery of the moon and fish and water and North Polar scenery. It was sort of soothing - and the music was good - but it didn't have a sensible plot."

"Any panda carp?" he inquires brightly.

"I don't remember if there were panda carp specifically, this was a couple years ago," Beila laughs.

He giggles.

"Did you like the movie? I keep issuing opinions about it and you're riffing on them but I don't know what you walked out of the theater thinking."

"I liked the movie!"

"Yeah, but, what about it? 'I liked that' 'yeah me too' is not that much of a conversation," laughs Beila.

"I don't know," he says. "I guess I don't have interesting detailed opinions like you do."

"Oh well." They're still sort of loitering in the theater lobby; she heads for the door. "If you don't know why you like things, how do you ever figure out what other things you'd enjoy?"

"Well... it's not that I can't tell what I liked about it," he says, "it's just that I'm not sure how to turn it into a conversation. Things like 'the way that one guy screamed that one time was really well done' and stuff."

"It was, though, the camerawork was good," Beila says, nodding. "Fit very nicely into the movie's visual language."

"Sounded good, too."