This Book Is Not Yet Rated

by Peter Bognanni

  “Friends,” she said. “That’s the story.”

  She didn’t look at me. That was her one tell.

  “Yeah,” I said softly. “Friends.”

  No one spoke for a moment. Raina immediately filled the silence.

  “Is that okay with you?” she said.

  Ron chuckled. It was the first time I had seen him smile since we showed up.

  “I didn’t win,” he said suddenly.

  “You didn’t?” I said.

  There was maybe a touch of sarcasm in my voice.

  “No,” he said. “I didn’t. I don’t know if the condo project is going to go through. Short-term building loans aren’t great right now and . . . well, I don’t know if the college is interested anymore. But, that’s not really even the point.”

  “What’s the point?” asked Raina.

  Her tone was an icy one.

  “The point is that my marriage is over. You guys don’t care about that, but it took me a long time to come to terms with it. The papers are signed and there’s nothing else to be done about it. It’s in the past. And I didn’t ask about you guys to be a creep, okay? You say that you’re friends and that’s a nice thing. I don’t need details. You care about each other. I can tell. You might even love each other. I just want to tell you that you’re lucky. Anyone who has some kind of love in their life is lucky.”

  Raina and I were quiet.

  “That’s all. It doesn’t always last. Sometimes it’s here and gone before you even know it. Sometimes it lasts for years. But you can’t take it for granted, okay. That’s not fair to people like me.”

  He got up off his chair and started riffling through a pile of clothes on the floor. I looked over at Raina. Her mouth was closed tight. We both watched him with no idea what to expect. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he pulled out a bottle of whiskey or even a gun. Luckily, it was neither. He finally found what he was looking for in the pocket of a pair of jeans.

  Keys.

  A ring with just a couple on it. He held them out to me. I opened my mouth but he spoke first.

  “I’ll need them back,” he said.

  I opened my palm and held it out.

  “It’s my night to sing. She probably won’t be there, but I’m not sure where else to go. You guys can set up your projector. I assume you don’t have a permit, so I don’t know how long it’s going to last, but go ahead and see your place off.”

  I took the keys.

  “Thank you, Ron,” I said.

  “Don’t thank me,” he said. “Your building was going to be torn down no matter what—I think that’s true—but I probably cost you a couple months. Maybe half a year.”

  His lips moved to a smile again.

  “Or . . .” he said, “I saved you from being inside when it collapsed.”

  I held the keys in my palm. I swallowed the rest of my soda and got up. Raina was behind me.

  “Good luck, you two,” he said.

  I’m pretty sure he wasn’t talking about the festival this time.

  ETHAN’S GLOSSARY OF FILM TERMS

  ENTRY #130

  INTERMISSION

  They don’t do these at movies anymore, but once upon a time there was often a break for the projectionist to switch reels.

  Everyone could go to the bathroom or get some more popcorn. Sometimes there was a medley of songs from the movie.

  I’ve only been to one movie with an intermission, and it was weird. That intrusion of reality takes you out of the dream you were in before. It allows all those things you weren’t thinking about to pour back in.

  Nobody really wants an intermission.

  Nobody wants time to think.

  37

  We had to wait until nightfall to really start everything. There were no houselights outside to turn down. Just the sun, and it had to turn itself down. We divided up the remaining tasks and split up. Griffin and Lucas went out scouring campus for stray folding chairs. Anjo set up the projector in Ron’s empty apartment. And Raina and I sat in the storage room, gathering the last of the untainted candy. Actually, she was in the corner on her phone, trying not to look at me, and I was unpacking the Junior Mints.

  We hadn’t really said much since we left Ron’s apartment. I didn’t know how to ask her if she cared about what he said. So, I just tossed rat-chewed boxes of Junior Mints into a giant garbage bag. I had been at it for twenty minutes at least when Raina broke the silence.

  “Well,” she said, “people are talking at least.”

  I looked up at her.

  “About the festival. It’s been retweeted a couple hundred times.”

  “That’s good,” I said. “Right?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “The comments aren’t necessarily encouraging, though. Here’s one that says, ‘Who wants to come watch Raina Allen have a nervous breakdown with me tonight?’ #brainzap.”

  I pulled a box of candy out that was totally empty. Not a single mint left, junior or otherwise. It had been drained like a corpse in a vampire movie.

  “And here’s another one . . .”

  She was about to read it then she stopped as her eyes moved over the screen of her phone. I crumpled the empty box and tossed it into the garbage.

  “What does it say?” I asked.

  Her eyes were a little wide.

  “It’s not important,” she said. “I can’t believe people have time to do this all day.”

  I didn’t break my stare. She must have felt it.

  “Fine,” she said. “It says Raina needs to ditch her loser hometown BF and get with this!”

  She turned the phone around to show a picture of a muscle-bound pasty dude in a backward baseball hat and Marines T-shirt.

  “Not exactly my type,” she said. “But I like his enthusiasm.”

  “Why are they calling me your boyfriend?” I asked.

  “Well,” she said, “this probably didn’t help.”

  She tapped her phone a few times and handed it to me. The picture was blurry, but clear enough to see: Raina and I racing away in my car, both grinning like idiots. It was a pretty good action shot. We looked like Bonnie and Clyde, if Bonnie and Clyde were only seventeen and one of them wore a ratty blanket on her head.

  “I’m just your partner in crime,” I said. “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Keep scrolling down,” she said.

  I did.

  “Oh,” I said.

  There was another grainy picture of us face-to-face in my room. The shade had been pulled, but someone had gotten a shot through the crack between my blinds and the window. It was amazing, actually. If I hadn’t felt so exposed, I would have admired the man’s craft. We were talking, that’s all, but it looked like more.

  I was about to say as much when I noticed the headline of the article:

  “‘I CARE ABOUT HIM MORE THAN ANYONE ELSE. HE’S ALWAYS BEEN THERE FOR ME.’ RAINA ALLEN OPENS UP ABOUT THE MYSTERY BOY IN THE PHOTO.”

  I stopped what I was doing and read the short article. “He’s the only one I want to talk to when things got bad,” it said. “He’s the reason I came back.”

  “Did you actually say all this?” I asked.

  “I did,” she said. “They were gonna run the photo anyway, so I talked them into letting me say something about it. Who knows what they were going to write?”

  She stared down at it, unable to meet my eyes. I’m not sure how much time passed because the next thing I know, she was snapping me back to reality.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Can I have a Junior Mint?”

  I tossed her a box. She examined it to see if it was tainted. It didn’t seem to be, so she ripped it open, upturned the box, and poured a few directly in her mouth.

  “Is it true?” I asked
.

  “It’s true,” she said.

  I just sat there on a giant box of candy. My thinking place. Only there were a few too many thoughts going through my head at the moment to get a handle on. Like the fact that Raina had told the world how close she felt to me, but I was the last to know. And how this declaration should be enough, but I also couldn’t help feeling heartbroken.

  “I don’t think I would be finishing this film without you, Ethan.”

  I nodded.

  “Seriously,” she said. “You actually believe in me.”

  I opened my own box of candy and ate a handful of mints.

  “Can I just ask you a favor?”

  She looked at me skeptically.

  “Okay,” she said.

  I looked up at the water-damaged ceiling tiles.

  “I’m happy about what you told the paper. And I’m happy you meant it. It means a lot to me.”

  “Okay,” she said again.

  “But . . . can you just tell me right now if everything is over again when you leave? I mean, if we’re likely to see each other much after that? I think it would be easier if I just knew what was going to happen.”

  She had her eyes closed again. And I thought it was out of frustration with me, but when she opened them again, she wiped away a tear.

  “God . . .” she said. “Ethan.”

  She took a breath and composed herself.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “My mom hates it here. And barring any more meltdowns . . .”

  “LA is your home now,” I said.

  She walked over and sat next me on the box of candy. After a moment, she grabbed my hand and held it tight.

  “Okay,” I said. “Thanks for telling the truth.”

  It was warm in the closet and it smelled like chocolate and musty boxes. I was thinking that somehow, even after all the gut-wrenching emotional films I’d seen, movies hadn’t quite prepared me for the layers of actual heartbreak. Real-life emotions were weirder. Harder to pin down. I felt a little nauseous, but also hungry. Anxious and calm. I was really aware of my teeth for some reason.

  There was no music to tell me the precise moment I was supposed to realize this had all been temporary and it hadn’t ended the way I wanted it to.

  It was similar when my dad died. I didn’t cry when I first heard. Not in that moment. It wasn’t until I came back home from school that day and he wasn’t on the couch. And I turned on the TV and realized that I hadn’t chosen what to watch in months. Maybe years. He always had something on, or something he wanted to show me. And it sounds ridiculous, but I just held the remote and cried because I had no idea what to do with it. He wasn’t there anymore to tell me what was what.

  I was going to have to figure it out alone.

  For now, I was able to take a breath and just continue holding her hand. I reached out an arm to put around her. Only, on the way to her shoulders, my elbow hit another box and it toppled to the ground. And immediately, all of the sadness in the room turned to panic. Raina started screaming. Really loud. It took her a second to form the words that I knew were coming.

  “Rat!” she said. “Rat! Oh my God!”

  I winced, and looked at the shelf behind me. I didn’t see anything moving.

  “Dead!” she clarified. “Dead rat!”

  I looked down, and sure enough, there was a large dead rat on the ground, surrounded by candy. He had already found his own tomb in the box of Junior Mints, but now I had unearthed him. He was on the floor, curled up like he was sleeping. I nudged him with my shoe just to make sure he wasn’t. He didn’t move.

  “Oh no,” I said, and got down on my knees. “Brando.”

  38

  The sun was just starting to set behind the buildings, and we were gathered by the Dumpsters. Raina, Griffin, Lucas, Sweet Lou, and Anjo. They had their heads bowed at my request, and everyone was quiet for the most part. Lucas was typing something on his phone, but he at least had it set to vibrate.

  “Someone ancient once said that the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” I said. “By that rationale, Brando was a friend of the Green Street. He escaped capture at the hands of our foes. He held down the fort while we were barred from entering it. And, most importantly, he lived and died doing what he loved: eating small bits of corn syrup and chocolate in an enclosed space. We should all be so lucky.”

  I was holding Brando in a large popcorn bag, suspending him over the Dumpster.

  “Rats often get a bad rap. They’re kind of ugly. They’re blamed for the bubonic plague, and they ate people’s faces off in Rats: Night of Terror, a classic film by Bruno Mattei.”

  “Good movie,” said Lucas, looking up from his phone. “Totally didn’t see that rat man coming!”

  “I know, right?” said Griffin.

  “Shut up,” said Lou. “Have some respect.”

  They both clammed up.

  “But even though society shuns them,” I said, “they’re survivors. They have spread all over the world from subways to movie theater storage rooms and they never even dream of giving up! They are our brethren. And Brando . . .”

  I held the popcorn bag aloft.

  “Brando is our mascot tonight!”

  Part of me expected that I might incite some clapping and cheering with this line, but ultimately I was holding a dead rat in a popcorn bag, so nothing like that happened.

  My arm was drooping now under his considerable heft.

  “So, before we cast him off into the unknown, I would like everyone to drop a ceremonial Milk Dud in his vessel. Who knows what kind of candy they have in the rat afterlife. It’s probably not great.”

  Raina walked around with a box of Milk Duds, looking slightly grossed out. She handed one to each of the Green Street team and then came up and dropped one in the popcorn bag, looking away from the opening as she did so.

  “I hereby dedicate the first and last Green Street one-minute Film Festival to Brando the rat. Mascot. Rodent. A creature of appetites and courage.”

  Each of them slowly came up and deposited their Milk Dud. Then I closed my eyes, loosened my grip, and let the bag drop. Trash day was yesterday, so it had a ways to fall, but it landed soon enough with an echoing thud. All around us the sky was just beginning to turn pink. The streetlights weren’t on yet, but it wouldn’t be long. There was a row of off-kilter folding chairs, pillaged from a few unlocked classrooms on campus. The projector sat high in the window of Ron Marsh’s bachelor pad along with some speakers, pointed down to the alley below. There was an eerie silence, like the moment in a Western before the town baddies come around the corner for a shoot-out.

  We all looked around.

  Maybe this is it, I thought. Maybe this is how it ends.

  But then a pale man came around the corner and stood at the mouth of the alley. He was wearing the skinniest jeans I had ever seen, with a big bob of hair on his head. Most of his face was pierced, and it took me a moment to recognize him from Box Office Video. I had only ever seen him seated behind the counter. It was odd to see him with legs. He just looked at us for a minute, all surrounding an industrial-size Dumpster. Then he looked behind him to see if he was in the right place.

  “So,” he said. “Is this the festival thing?”

  No one spoke for a moment. Finally he met eyes with Raina. She looked as surprised as anyone.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  The clerk riffled in his pocket and pulled out a small green thing.

  A flash drive.

  “Okay, good,” he said. “I brought a movie.”

  ETHAN’S GLOSSARY OF FILM TERMS

  ENTRY #152

  DAY FOR NIGHT

  A trick directors use to film a nighttime scene in the day. It used to be hard to get enough light to shoot at night, so they faked it.

 
I’ve always liked the way it looks in old movies. Like the moonlight is enough to light up the whole world.

  Like a single night holds all the promise of a new day.

  39

  An hour later, the alley was starting to fill up. They showed up in clusters, sticking mostly to their own kind. Fans with film stills of Raina, hoping for autographs. Regulars from the Green Street. Fanboys and movie geeks. There was even someone who claimed to be a reporter from the Tribune. By the time it was dark, there were probably fifty people and about twenty total folding chairs. It was pitch-black in the alley except for the white glow of the projection on the brick wall. There were two hours until Raina left for the airport.

  Anjo was up in Ron’s apartment, prescreening the videos to make sure there was no porn. There were about fifteen movies total. When I looked up at her in the dimly lit window, she gave me a hesitant thumbs-up. Griffin was in the crowd, handing out free candy, and occasionally administering one of his drops. Lucas was standing in the crowd, transfixed by the spectacle. And Sweet Lou was our lookout. In case of the police, she was going to sound an air horn. She stood at the end of the alley like a sentry.

  It was finally dark enough to get a good picture on the makeshift wall screen, so I threaded my way to the front of the crowd and tried to announce the beginning of the festival. The noise from the crowd was loud though, and no one was really listening. I cleared my throat two different times and even let out a pretty loud whistle, but nobody paid any attention.

  Finally, I heard the racket die down all at once. Like someone had waved a wand. I looked to my right and found Raina standing beside me. All it took was her presence to bring everyone to silence. She looked at me expectantly, and I leaned over and whispered in her ear.

  “I think they came to see you,” I said. “You better say something first.”

  She nodded.

  “Hello, Minneapolis,” she said. “Hi, everybody.”

  A whole group of people at the back cheered like they were at a concert,

  “Wooooooooooooooo! Time Zap!” someone yelled.