Have you ever been to a juvenile detention center?
It took me until my last official year as a juvenile, but I made it.
They sat Raina and me in a sad institutional lobby to check us in. There were a few desks in the room, and a dour man with a bad mustache was working on our paperwork. A nearby television with the volume off was playing a commercial for a taco with a shell made of fried chicken. Raina sat across from me in a fake leather chair. Against the drab leather, she looked more childish than revolutionary. She grabbed the back of her blond hair and twisted it into a short ponytail.
“I’m trying to feel good about this,” she said, “but I just feel like I failed you, Ethan.”
I watched a man take a bite of taco-chicken.
“What do you mean?” I said. “That was the most badass thing I’ve ever seen. Those cops didn’t know what to do with you.”
She looked around the juvie home.
“Obviously they did,” she said.
Then she looked back at me.
“A year ago, I could have just paid off the debt.”
She chewed on a fingernail
“I wasn’t about to ask you for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” I said.
“What else am I supposed to do with the money?”
I had to think about this for a minute. It never occurred to me what I would do with a bunch of money other than help the Green Street.
“I don’t know,” I said. “What did you do with it?”
She bit a nail.
“Bought my mom a house we can’t really afford.”
“The one in LA?”
“It has gardeners,” she said, “And a pool boy. Well, he’s older than me, but you get the idea. It has this crazy studio for my mom with huge skylights.”
I looked back at the guy doing our paperwork to see if he was listening. Hard to tell.
“I thought it would make her happier,” she said. “But I don’t think it did. She likes to show it off to people, but she hardly ever makes art anymore. Most days, she just sits by the pool eating seaweed salad. I think she was happier when she was unhappy. What kind of sense does that make?”
“Maybe you should just sell it,” I said.
“It’s not in my name.”
“Oh,” I said. “Right.”
I looked back at the TV and did a double take.
“No way,” I said.
Raina looked, too.
“Oh my God. It’s official,” she said. “We’re in hell.”
She was on the screen, her face splashed across the Detention Center TV. The shot was in close-up from the hallway of a dark compound. Lights flickered as Raina crept toward a mysterious blue glow.
“What are the fucking odds?” I said.
“Well,” she said, staring at herself, “they sold the rights to a channel that shows it like fifteen times a month, so . . .”
She sat up in her chair, and then yelled over her shoulder.
“Can we change the channel, please?!”
The mustachioed man looked up from his work for a second.
“No,” he said.
On the screen, Raina walked into the blue room and up to a time machine with a pulsing light. Then, right when she was about to touch it, a tiger sprang out from behind the machine and glared down at her.
“Whoa,” I said. “That had to be CGI, right?”
She nodded and then looked over at me. I kept watching the screen, waiting to see if she’d get caught, even though I knew she wouldn’t until later.
“I never asked you if you saw it,” she said.
She looked genuinely curious.
“Time Zap? You think there’s a chance I didn’t see it?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “You were mad at me.”
I sighed.
“Not only did I see it,” I said, “I broke a solemn vow.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“I swore I would never go to one of those big multiplexes in the suburbs unless it was to burn it down. I broke that rule only once.”
“For me?”
“For you.”
“Did you see it in 3-D?” she asked.
“Of course,” I said. “On opening night. I drove out there all alone and waited in line with your new fans. It took like two hours just to get in. Then I found a seat in the back with a bunch of parents whose kids were in the front row. I was paranoid somebody from the Green Street might see me, but of course nobody was there. Just in case, I slumped down in my seat and put on my 3-D glasses. I held my breath all through the previews, and then when it started and you first showed up on the screen . . .”
My voice trailed off. I looked down at the gray carpet beneath me.
“What?” she said.
I could still see her entrance in my mind. She had dyed purple hair and black glasses, and she was lit from a porch light above her. She looked like a real movie star. Whatever it is they have, she had it, and because I saw the movie in 3-D, she looked like she was right in front of me. It was the closest we had been in years.
“What?!” she repeated.
“I cried,” I said.
Raina started to laugh, but then she saw I wasn’t joking.
“Oh my God. Why?” she said.
“Because it was amazing to see you like that,” I said.
I took a breath.
“It was also kind of hard. . . .”
“Why was it hard?”
“Well part of the reason I watch movies is to escape, you know? I mean, they make me think, but sometimes I just want to get away from reality and live in a different one. I was trying to forget about you after you left, but there you were, in the one place I thought I could go to get away from you.”
Finally, the man at the desk got up and came over to where we were sitting. He walked briskly with a sheaf of papers tucked against his side. His shoes made a slight squeaking sound, audible in the now silent room.
“Well,” he said, “we’ve called your parents, and they’re on their way, but until then we’re going to have to hold you in a cell.”
He took a step toward us when there was a sudden pounding against the glass window of the lobby. We all turned to see a man with a camera taking shape behind the window. He put his hand on the shutter and the camera took about a thousand pictures in two seconds.
“What the hell was that?” said mustache guy.
The door opened and a security guard stepped in.
“There’s a whole bunch of them out there,” he said. “I can’t get them to leave.”
“Who?” asked the bearded guy.
“Paparazzi, I think,” the guy said.
I felt my phone go off in my pocket. I pulled it out and just managed to read a message from Lucas before it was promptly confiscated by my captor.
It read: You’re all over the Internet!!!!
Then our guard happened to glance at the television in front of us. Raina was fighting a tiger on top of a time machine. Lightning was flashing outside the window. It was pretty cool.
“Hold on,” he said, staring at her wide-eyed. “Is that you?”
“It used to be,” she said.
He looked at me.
“We’re all over the Internet,” I said.
Then the paparazzi burst inside and started taking pictures.