The hard part wasn’t getting out of the basement.
It was getting out without being seen by the paparazzi.
We stacked a few folding chairs on top of the couch, and while the tower was a little wobbly, Raina was just able to pry the window open slowly enough that it didn’t make much noise. The problem was that the basement windows were all in the front of the house, facing the street, so any method of escape would put us in the sight lines of the vultures.
Clearly, there was only one solution.
I went upstairs and left the old-fashioned way, saying an innocent good-bye to Trinity and heading back outside. The photographers ignored me as usual as I made my way down the sidewalk toward their congregation. They had only looked up when the door opened, but they listened when I elbowed my way into their group and told them I had a story for them.
“Want to know what really happened at the mall in California?” I said. “I’ve got all the details.”
One of the guys looked up at me.
“Who are you?”
“Oh, nobody. Just her best friend since third grade.”
He looked me over, clearly skeptical that I would ever be in the same room as Raina. Which was totally fair.
“Okay then. Lay it on us,” he said.
“Fifty bucks,” I said.
“C’mon, kid,” said one of them. “Give me a break.”
“I know you’re going to sell it for more,” I said. “Fifty bucks and I’ll tell you everything.”
“Goddamnit,” said another guy behind me. “I might have it.”
“Wait a second,” said the guy I was talking to, “he told me first!”
They started digging out their wallets. And while they were fumbling, trying to come up with the cash, I started cawing like a bird.
“What the hell are you doing?” asked another guy with a close-cropped head of gray hair.
“Caw-caw!” I yelled.
Then, another guy in a denim shirt whipped around and pointed across the lawn.
“She’s on the move!” he said, trying to raise his camera to his eye.
The shutters were clicking even before they got their cameras in position, but Raina was already in my car, gunning the engine. She had an old afghan from the couch wrapped around her head. The car backed up at approximately fifty miles an hour and the paparazzi scattered like ants. I opened a back door and dove onto the bench seat. I probably could have just gotten in the regular way, but it felt pretty good to dive.
Raina let out a war whoop and peeled out, heading down her street, as her mom came running out on the lawn in her pajamas. Trinity didn’t scream or run after us the way I thought she might, though. She just watched, arms at her sides, the tie for her bathrobe brushing against the grass.
A half hour later Raina was finishing her ice cream on the freeway.
“Where are we going now?” I asked.
She held her DQ cup close to her mouth and scooped out the last of her Blizzard. Both of her hands were off the wheel for a second.
“You probably shouldn’t eat that while you drive,” I said.
She completely ignored me, taking another bite and even closing her eyes.
“Can you please not do that?” I asked.
“I know it’s not technically ice cream,” she said, “but this is the food of the gods. I can’t believe you didn’t want anything.”
“Eh,” I said. “It wasn’t a Brazier.”
Raina rolled her eyes, but I saw just a hint of a smile.
We were driving into the afternoon sun, and I could feel it scorching my right arm, which I’d propped out the window. A car passed alongside us with its stereo on blast; the bass rattling our dash.
“Box Office Video,” she said.
“No way!” I said. “What’s the occasion?”
Box Office Video was one of the last truly great video stores in the area. It was also one of the last video stores, period, in the area. Staffed by a disaffected skeleton crew of art school dropouts, dudes with face tattoos, and film nerds even more pretentious than Lucas, it was stocked with mostly rare and foreign films. I had been known to spend hours there, stalking the aisles looking for the perfect fix.
“I need to show you something,” she said.
She gunned it around a slow-moving Oldsmobile.
“Is it Last Tango in Paris?” I said. “Because I saw that once with my dad and the experience traumatized me deeply.”
“It’s not,” she said.
I watched her face to see if she was going to give me any other clues. I got nothing.
“Fair enough,” I said. “Proceed.”
When we got to the store, we walked past a clerk I recognized who seemed to have piercings in every visible part of his face. He was watching Repo Man, and as we walked through the door, we were just in time to watch a police officer look into the trunk of the car, only to get vaporized by a flash of blinding light and leave behind a smoking pair of boots. The clerk laughed, taking a sip from a two liter of Mountain Dew.
We kept walking through the store until we reached the enormous foreign section at the back. It was organized by country.
“Iran, Ireland . . . Italy,” said Raina, walking past a long row of cases.
“Just tell me what movie it is,” I said. “I’ve seen everything in this section.”
“Ohhhhh,” she said. “Well then, Mr. Fancy, you must be so bored right now.”
She finally settled on a tape, and plucked it off the shelf before I could see what it was. There were a lot of DVDs in the store, but they also had an impressive collection of VHS tapes, and even a VCR you could rent if, like most people, you’d sold yours years ago. Raina brought her selection up to the counter and the clerk started to scan the barcode.
“Um,” she said. “I don’t really want to rent this; I just want to see this one part.”
The pierced guy looked at her.
“Can you put it in and fast forward please? I’ll tell you when to stop.”
His expression had still not changed. He paused his own movie and looked at both of us. His eyes, I realized now, were bright yellow. He had contacts the color of a biohazard suit.
“Do you guys know how video stores work?” he asked.
“Yep. I totally do,” said Raina. “But these are dire circumstances. I can’t really go home right now and I have this really amazing idea for a plan I need to show my friend here. It works better with a visual aide. I’d be happy to pay you for the rental, or if you want me to sign something in the store . . .”
The clerk’s expression went from sort of pissed to confused and sort of pissed. He searched Raina’s face.
“These guys don’t watch Hollywood movies,” I said. “They probably don’t know . . .”
“Oh my God!” said the pierced guy in a very different childlike voice. “Wait a second. Are you Raina Allen?”
Raina just nodded.
“Holy shit! I’ve seen Time Zap like fifteen times. Every time it’s on, I can’t turn it off. I love that scene with the giant ball of twine. Was that real?”
She gave him a patient smile.
“It was. We had a special effects guy build it. It weighed nine tons. The giant cat mansion was a green screen, though.”
“I figured,” he said.
There was a moment of awkward silence. Then he seemed to remember he was holding a tape.
“Oh wait,” he said. “You wanted something. Sorry, I totally forgot.”
He looked at the tape. Then he ejected Repo Man and shoved the new tape into the VCR. He stuck his finger on the fast-forward button, and I waited while the old F.B.I. Warning about copying movies flashed onto the screen, bathing the store in blue light.
“When I first left,” said Raina to me, “you recommended this movie. You said it was the most beautiful movie about working at a theater. So I watched it one afternoon in my trailer.”
I looked up at the screen and saw the opening credits of Cinema Paradiso, a movie my dad showed me as a child. It’s about a director’s childhood in Sicily, and his obsession with the local cinema. As soon as I saw it now in Box Office Video I knew which scene Raina wanted to show me. But I didn’t say anything because I wanted to see it again. So, I waited while the movie went by at super speed, thinking of what my dad said about it when I first watched it.
“Sure,” he said. “It’s a little sappy, but it’s a love letter to movies. It’s gonna be nostalgic. And you can’t help but get swept up in it.”
Raina stopped the tape at the moment of chaos in the small Sicilian town. It is the last night the Cinema Paradiso is showing a popular movie. There’s a crowd waiting in the town square, devastated that they can’t see it. Our hero, a young child at the time, is up in the booth with the projectionist, watching the mob below.
Just when it looks like there’s going to be a riot, the projectionist takes action. He angles the glass plate that protects the projection in such a way that the picture starts to move. Slowly it dances across the room until the picture reaches the open window. Then it’s gone.
Our hero goes to the window and watches in wonder as the movie appears on the side of a building in the town square. The crowd roars with approval. And late at night in this tiny village, the town gathers to watch the film in the square, huddled against one another, the movie world combined with the real one.
“Damn,” said the pierced clerk. “This scene gets me every time.”
Raina looked at me as the film played on the building.
“We don’t need it,” I said.
She nodded. I spoke again.
“We don’t need the theater.”
“At least not the inside,” she said.
I watched the scene play out, the tape creating wavy lines across the screen.
“The festival isn’t dead, Ethan,” she said. “It just needs to be reimagined.”
Then Raina walked back through the store toward the door, and I followed. We left the clerk staring, his bright yellow eyes filling with tears.