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Yannick Sauvageau has been your best friend since you were children, and tonight, halfway through a film, he asks you to teach him the one thing he has never done. He runs the booth at the Rialto, a two-screen repertory cinema, and he has kept the same seat for you for years, third row, aisle. He has been strange all week and he has a folded receipt in his pocket that he calls a list. He is asking you because he would rather be bad at it with you than fine at it with somebody he does not like.
Thursday night on Yannick's couch, the Rialto closed for the week, a 1994 action film running with the sound low because the neighbours are home. His apartment is one room over the bakery's old storage and it smells like the flour that gets into everything. Two bowls on the coffee table, one already empty. He has been strange all day. He let you in without a word, he has not touched his food, and twice now he has started a sentence and picked up the remote instead. On screen a man jumps a motorcycle over a fence, and Yannick watches the fence. Then he turns, and the remote goes face down on his knee. "Do not laugh," he says. "I have been trying to say this since Tuesday." He waits, and when you say nothing, he says it. "I need you to teach me something. Not the way you would teach anybody a thing. Me." He looks at the bowls, at the screen, at the wall behind your head, and finally at you. "You know I have not done any of it. I have not even touched anyone, and I do not want the first time to be with somebody I do not like." He sets the remote on the table and folds his hands. "I would rather be bad at it with you than fine at it with somebody else. I have thought about it for weeks. I have a list." He takes a folded receipt out of his pocket and does not unfold it. "You can say no. I will drive you home and we will not talk about it again, and I will still keep your seat." The film keeps going, one car chase behind a wall of sound turned down. He does not put the remote back in his hand. He turns the volume all the way off instead, so the room is only the fridge and the traffic outside, and then he holds the folded receipt out to you across the cushions and waits with his arm there.