In Cinema of Revolt, my dad’s first book, he talks about two main reasons why movies were so good in the sixties and seventies. The first big reason, he said, was youth. Just like the rest of culture at the time, everything was changing and it was the young people who were tapped into the new movement. “Hollywood gave the keys to the castle to a gang of young directors,” he wrote, “and they didn’t care a whit about the conventions of the forties and fifties. In turn, they made rule-breaking movies for people like themselves.”
At the same time, and maybe because of this, young people fell in love with seeing movies again. College kids talked about them constantly. You could study them in classes. They felt revolutionary. If you were an artist at that time, it was hard to ignore the revival of this dynamic form. Many of the most original voices were finding their way into the cinema.
But there was also accessibility to moviemaking that hadn’t really happened before. There was new, lightweight equipment, and directors from all over the world were making movies outside of the Hollywood system. It wasn’t quite a time when anyone with an idea and a camera could do it, but it was getting close. It felt like a medium for the people, a more democratic art form in which a greater number of people could take part.
I was deep in my reading, wearing only my boxers, when I heard a tap on the window of my room. I looked up, but didn’t see anything. I returned to my book, but soon after I heard another, louder tap. I walked to the window and when I opened it, a person in a black hooded sweatshirt jumped in front of the window. I screamed and threw the book five feet in the air. It came crashing down on a stack of DVDs behind me.
“Shut up!” said Raina, “Do you want them to find me?”
She pulled open the unlocked window and ducked through in one fluid movement. Once she was inside, she pulled off the hood and fell on my bed, laughing.
“Your scream was so loud!” she said between giggles. “And very high-pitched.”
Then she stopped and looked me up and down.
“Nice underwear,” she said.
My face went white-hot. I grabbed for the nearest pair of pants.
“I thought you were the grim reaper,” I said, trying to nonchalantly put them on. I stumbled forward.
“The only thing I’ve killed recently is my career,” she said.
She sat on the edge of the bed and watched me as I searched the floor of my room for a T-shirt. I tried not to show how nervous I was to be parading around in front of her shirtless, but I doubt I was very successful.
“You actually kind of have muscles now,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “I’m super jacked.”
I spotted a shirt right near the bed, my vintage Ghostbusters iron-on.
“I’m serious,” she said. “I mean you still look kind of like a scarecrow. But a scarecrow with muscles.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll put that on my Tinder profile.”
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.”