This Book Is Not Yet Rated

by Peter Bognanni

  I reached down for the T-shirt, but Raina got to it first. I stepped toward her to grab it, and she pulled it away

  “Hey,” she said. “I’m trying to give you a compliment.”

  She held up the shirt and looked at the old logo. I’d found it at a thrift store and some of the decal was peeling off.

  “I’m sure my scarecrow muscles are nothing compared to your seaweed-eating LA boyfriends,” I said.

  She reached out and handed me the shirt.

  “Actually, I didn’t really date in LA,” she said.

  “What!” I said. “Why not? You’re a new star! That’s the one time in your life when you can go way out of your league, right?”

  I was laughing now, but when I looked at Raina, she had totally shut down. She was looking down at her knees. I pulled my shirt on and sat down next to her. Neither of us moved for a second. I was confused, but clearly something had gone very wrong.

  “Hey, sorry,” I said. “I was just teasing. I didn’t mean . . .”

  Her hands disappeared inside her sleeves.

  “It’s okay, I just . . .”

  “What?”

  She looked back toward the window where she’d come in.

  “When the movie first came out,” she said, “I tried not to read stuff about myself online, but I had never been in the news before, so it was pretty hard to ignore. Also, most of the early reviews were good. People thought I was decent in the role. The magazine profiles were nice.”

  “You were better than decent,” I said.

  She ignored this.

  “But one day, I got an e-mail from one of the other girls in the movie. She’d been an actor since she was five. There was just a quick message saying ‘Isn’t this hilarious?’ and then a link below.”

  I was clenching my hands.

  “What was it?”

  “It was a countdown to when I turned eighteen.”

  She paused to let the implications sink in.

  “There was this clock running on the homepage and then a bunch of photos of me with close-ups of my boobs when I wore a low-cut dress to the premiere. Then there were some other tabloid photos. One from my pool at home. Someone must have looked over the fence, or taken it from another house.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. It gets worse.”

  She looked over at me.

  “I started searching. There was one site that Photoshopped my face on the body of a porn star. There were whole galleries of pictures. Somebody had taken hours, maybe days, just to make them, and they were out there for anyone to see. My parents. My friends. Anyone could find them.”

  I sighed.

  “That’s really terrible,” I said, trying in vain to find better words.

  She was expressionless.

  “Everybody told me not to worry about it. It just meant I was actually famous. But how fucked up is that? You want to be an actor and do this thing you love and perverted pictures are just part of the deal? That’s the proof? After that, every guy that came up to me at a party, I couldn’t help wondering if he’d seen me on those sites.”

  I tried to imagine it. I had been embarrassed when Raina saw me just now. What would it be like for everyone to see my body like that or to see fake naked pictures of me on the Internet? It was a sickening feeling.

  “Anyway, it’s been a long time since I looked for myself in the news, but it wasn’t hard to find this one today.”

  She pulled out a phone and handed it to me. I looked down at it. There was a tabloid article up with a picture of Raina in handcuffs. I had been cropped out, but you could still see my skinny legs in the corner of the frame. Above her, the headline read:

  COLD CASE: RAINA ALLEN GETS ARRESTED IN MINNESOTA AFTER HER ICE-CREAM MELTDOWN IN LA

  I started to scroll through the article.

  “It’s not worth reading,” she said. “They don’t have any information. Just the picture.”

  “Man,” I said. “The puns . . .”

  “I know,” she said. “Those people must have doctorates in punning.”

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  She stood up and walked around the room.

  “Well,” she said, “that’s the question, isn’t it?”

  Usually, I didn’t care about the cleanliness of my room, but for once I wished I had picked up a little. There were dirty socks strewn across the carpet. A couple of musty towels were coiled on the side of my bed. I rarely opened a window in here, so it couldn’t have smelled terrific.

  “Usually, I would just make a statement right away and wait for it all to blow over,” she said. “That’s what my manager would tell me to do. But there’s also an opportunity here. You know that, right, Ethan?”

  “How so?” I asked.

  She walked back over to me.

  “Well, people still care what I have to say right now. I don’t know why exactly, but that’s how it is. So, if we can come up with something. Something new in the next few days, I can probably make a statement.”

  “About the Green Street?”

  She looked at me, incredulous.

  “Of course,” she said. “What else?”

  We met eyes and I didn’t want to be the first person to look away. Her eyes were a little bloodshot, but she looked better than the first time I’d seen her at her old house. Her skin looked healthier. I looked up at her.

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked.

  For a moment it looked like she was going to give me another sharp answer, but she must have seen something in my face.

  “Because I wasn’t a great friend to you,” she said. “And you deserved better. You deserve better.”

  “If it’s just out of pity,” I said, “I’m not sure I’m interested in help.”

  She held out her phone again, the blurry picture of her near my face.

  “Am I really in any position to pity someone right now?” she asked.

  By her feet was the book I had tossed when she came in. I reached down and picked it up. Then I found my place in the text again and handed it to Raina. Her hand brushed against mine when she took it.

  “I need you to read something,” I said. “I think I have an idea.”

  22

  Griffin was a no-show the next day at work.

  In fact, nobody had seen him since the protest. We tried his phone number on the employee contact sheet and got a disconnected number. Lucas even made the rounds of all his favorite burrito spots, but there wasn’t a trace. The closest thing we had to a clue was the nub of a joint I found out behind the Dumpsters. But this time, where there was smoke there was no fire. Just Dumpster juice.

  “Maybe he went back to his home planet,” Lucas said.

  “Maybe he’s lost in a paper bag,” said Sweet Lou.

  She was wearing a sling on her arm, a pack of cigarettes tucked firmly in the fabric. Thankfully it wasn’t the arm she needed for her cane. The three of us were sitting in the back of the theater, all watching the screen as Anjo made some adjustments to Vicky, the house projector.

  She was using an old print of the schlocky seventies horror movie, The Refrigerator, and every so often the film would kick into gear and we’d watch a possessed household appliance swallow a drunk person amid screams and spatters of ketchup-red blood.

  “Well,” I said, “if he doesn’t turn up soon, we’ll talk to the police. In the meantime, this is the team.”

  Lucas and Lou looked at each other, then at me.

  “It wasn’t so sad until you used the word team,” said Lou.

  “I agree,” said Lucas. “What the hell is this team supposed to win?”

  The screen came to life suddenly and a man in a small baseball cap ran through an apartment, chased by an old-fashioned fridge. He lunged out of the way of its open jaws, red light a
nd fog pouring from the depths of the crisper. The sound of his screams was deafening.

  “The focus is still off!” said Lucas, barely disturbed by the terrifying interruption.

  Sweet Lou stared at the screen.

  “If anything was going to eat me in my house, I think it would be the dishwasher. Damn thing turns on in the middle of the night for no reason. I think it’s possessed by the ghost of my husband.”

  “Listen, guys,” I said. “I need to talk to you about something important.”

  Lucas and Lou swiveled their heads toward me, annoyed, even though I had called them in here specifically for a meeting. I heard Anjo’s footsteps shuffling above us. Her head peeked through the window to the theater below.

  “We all know you’re famous in the tabloids now, Wendy,” said Lucas. “Do you have anything else to report?”

  “As a matter of fact I do.”

  I got up and walked toward the screen. I turned and looked around the theater, empty except for my two seated employees, and a third hiding near the rafters. I studied the frayed seat backs in mismatched colors of dark orange and gray, the long curtains on either side of the screen, and the dust drifting like snow flurries in the dim light. It still looked to me like the perfect place to spend an afternoon. It was hard to imagine that feeling ever passing.

  “Look,” I said. “I know the protest didn’t really go as planned, but I’m not going to stand here and say it was a complete failure.”

  “I am!” shouted Lou. “My wrist hurts like hell.”

  “Okay. I know. That was a blow. But the whole thing wasn’t a disaster. It brought us some attention.”

  “It brought Raina Allen some attention!” said Lucas.

  “Just let me finish,” I said.

  They clammed up for a moment, looking at me impatiently.

  “I get it, okay? Things didn’t go right. Lou got hurt. I’m sorry about that Lou. Lucas doesn’t want to get deported. I have a misdemeanor charge, and Griffin is on the lam. We suffered a lot of setbacks, but I’ve been thinking, and it’s possible it’s our own fault as much as it is the police and everyone else. We jumped the gun a little bit. I jumped the gun.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Lucas.

  “Well, I tried to have a protest before anyone would want to join. It wasn’t really a cause yet; it was just something that we were all angry about. And while our anger is totally valid, nobody really understands it. They don’t know why they should care about all this.”

  “It’s not our fault they’re idiots,” said Lucas.

  “But what if it is our fault?” I said.

  I was met with befuddled stares.

  “I mean, what have we really done to try to make other people care about this place? We kind of just show the same things over and over, the things we want to see. And we don’t really care if anyone complains. And when newbies show up, we’re usually dicks to them.”

  “That’s our brand!” said Lucas.

  Lou took out her cigarettes and smacked them against the palm of her good hand.

  “So what’s the answer?” she said, “We start showing superhero movies? Maybe we should replace my organ with a laser light show.”

  “That’s not what I want to do,” I said.

  I heard a voice from above me suddenly.

  “What exactly do you want to do, Ethan?” it said.

  Lucas and Lou looked up, a mild note of shock in their roving eyes. I’m not sure how long it had been since Anjo spoke to them, but they looked as if they had heard the voice of God.

  “Thank you, Anjo. I’ll tell you,” I said. “I want to plan a festival.”

  “A festival?” said Lou. “Where are we going to get the money for that?”

  “Well . . .” I said.

  But I wasn’t able to finish. The doors to the theater opened at the back and two figures walked down the carpeted aisle. One wore a familiar crisp polo and a bad beard, and the other looked like one of the Hazmat guys from E.T. He wore a pair of plastic coveralls, a respirator mask, and a pair of bright green gloves.

  “What the hell is this?” said Lou.

  Ron Marsh cleared his throat and puffed up his chest like a self-inflating animal I saw on the Discovery Channel once.

  “Members of the Green Street staff,” he said in a serious voice, “I am here today because some new information has come to my attention about patron safety in your theater.”

  “Patron safety? What does that mean?” I said. “And who is he?”

  I pointed to the man in the space suit.

  “This is my associate, Jasper. He’s an exterminator who has been working with the restaurant next door, Noodles & More. They have had a rat problem for the past few months, and Jasper here has traced that problem to your establishment.”

  “Impossible,” I said. “We don’t have a rat problem. Where’s the proof?”

  Ron motioned to Jasper who reached behind his back and brandished a single caged rat. He held it high like a trophy and right away I recognized the captive. It was Brando! His tremendous girth gave him away. At first I was surprised he’d been nabbed, but maybe he had finally eaten too many Raisinets and he couldn’t dart around like he used to.

  “Jasper set up a camera and he actually saw them running into the restaurant from your building,” said Ron. “Pretty much all night long. And until this problem is solved, I’m ordering that this theater be shut down for health violations.”

  Brando’s eyes shifted back and forth with disinterest at this development.

  “You’re already shutting us down at the end of the month,” I said.

  “Well,” said Ron, “consider this an early start.”

  “My God. What an asshole,” said Lou.

  Ron’s face began to turn red.

  “Listen to me, lady,” he said. “I’ve had about enough of you calling . . .”

  This time Ron was the one interrupted. Vicky the projector kicked to life and the screen lit up in front of us. The man in the little hat was caught in the open maw of the hell-bent refrigerator. He scrambled to get out, screaming like a maniac, but to no avail. A geyser of blood shot up from inside the fridge and coated his face. The special effects were terrible—it was probably Campbell’s Tomato Soup—but that made it even more disturbing somehow. The screams echoed through the theater.

  Jasper, frozen in shock, dropped the rat cage.

  It slammed to the ground, rolling over, and landing upside down. The small door flew open upon final impact. Wasting no time, Brando took off in a speedy wobble making his way down the aisle, right past me and behind the screen into the guts of the theater. Then the screen went dark again, along with the houselights. And as I stood there in complete darkness, listening to Lucas laughing and Ron starting to panic, I wondered if the lights would ever be turned on again.

  ETHAN’S GLOSSARY OF FILM TERMS

  ENTRY #306

  EXTREME LONG SHOT

  Do you really want to hear about another camera shot? Probably you don’t.

  You can look this one up if you really want to know about it. There are some beautiful still images online for you to overanalyze.

  I’m more interested in the other meaning here.

  The fact that most things in my life seemed like an extreme long shot.

  23

  Next thing we knew, we were all in the alley, watching a man in a jumpsuit tape off the entrance to the Green Street like he was sealing off a murder scene. Jasper seemed to take great pleasure in his job, slowly unwinding the bright yellow tape and threading it through the door handles. Inside, I could barely make out the silhouette of Ron Marsh, strutting around, blabbing on his phone. Who knew what he was doing. Ordering an airstrike? Making another deal with the devil?

  Somewhere, Brando was already huddled in his nest behind the w
alls, hunkering down for the fight ahead. Once I had wanted him dead. Now I was kinda pulling for him. If Marsh was going to shut us down early, the least he could deal with was an uncatchable rat with an endless appetite for candy. With any luck, Brando would infect him and his cronies with a new version of the bubonic plague.

  “So, this is pretty much the worst,” said Lucas.

  We all nodded.

  I looked around at my staff clustered together. It was like looking at a group of nocturnal animals who had just been flushed from their cave. I’d seen some of them the day of the protest, but on that day they’d had some fire in their bellies. Now they seemed dazed and frightened.

  Anjo in particular seemed on shaky ground. I couldn’t remember ever seeing her outside during the day. Not even once. She squinted into the sun, putting a hand over her cat’s-eye glasses in a sad salute. Under her right arm, she held her poster of Steve McQueen, all rolled up into a tube. It was the only possession she had taken with her.

  “Anjo,” said Lucas in a hesitant voice, “are you okay?”

  She didn’t answer. She just kept watching the building, barely blinking.

  “I mean where are you going to go?” Lucas continued. “Weren’t you . . . ?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I don’t think there’s any secret about that at this point.”

  We were all quiet. A few seconds passed.

  “I have some friends I can crash with,” she said, but her tone sounded unsure.

  Sweet Lou reached out and touched her shoulder.

  “Why don’t you come stay with me, honey. I’ve got a whole house to myself since Alvin passed.”

  “I’ve got a futon!” said Lucas. “Griffin spilled bong water on it, but we sprayed it with Febreze. Now it just kind of smells like Febrezy bong water, but it’s soft.”

  He paused.

  “Actually, it’s not that soft.”

  Anjo closed her eyes, and let out a long breath.

  “I’m okay,” she said. “Or at least, I’ll be okay. But, thanks, guys.”

  Then she abruptly switched her poster to her other arm and started to walk away.