It didn’t take long for the paparazzi to find Raina again. By the second night at my house, there they were: parked outside, smoking and watching. Their numbers had dwindled a little bit, but there were still a few paunchy dudes waiting shamelessly for her to come out of the house. Raina seemed resigned to the problem, but my mom was not. She called the police three times. Unfortunately, there wasn’t really much they could do as long as the photographers stayed off our property.
It wasn’t a big deal for the moment. We weren’t going anywhere. And there was more strategizing to do.
We had been dealt another small blow that afternoon. After meeting with Anjo, I had gone to the university’s Film Studies department to see if I could get access to their archive of prints. I was hoping to rely on my dad’s name to get me in, but they had recently hired a new chair who never knew him. He didn’t seem impressed by the copy of Dad’s book I brandished, or any of my impassioned pleas about the theater.
“A lot of those prints are really valuable,” he said, looking past me out on to the quad. “They have to be handled with the utmost care.”
I left his office and searched the halls a while, hunting for a familiar face, some old colleague of Dad’s I might recognize. But it was summer and most of the offices were empty. My last stop was Dad’s old office at the end of the hall. The name on the door was another one I’d never seen, and where Dad’s portrait of Stanley Kubrick used to hang was now a hockey pennant. I sat down on the floor in front of his door for a moment and rested my head against the hard wood. Then a janitor asked me politely to leave.
Hours later, I sat on the floor of my room in a similar position, staring at the blank screen of my television. I had disappeared from the dinner table half an hour earlier, claiming I needed to fill my daily quota of movie time. But when I got to the couch, for the first time in recent weeks, I felt no urge to turn something on.
It was the strangest feeling in the world. Usually, I could watch a film no matter my mood. That was the brilliant thing about cinema: you could calibrate a movie to virtually any state of mind. Feeling no hope in the world: Apocalypse Now! Feeling jaded about love: Blue Valentine. Feeling like watching a group of vegetarian goblins try to change people into plants so they can devour them: Troll 2 is your movie!
But for the life of me I couldn’t think of a movie that would speak to my current life circumstances. Why hadn’t anyone made a movie about a seventeen-year-old guy from Minnesota who is maybe in love with his best friend, mourning his dead father, in charge of many dysfunctional humans, including a foul-mouthed octogenarian falsely accused of robbing a Costco, unsure what to do with the rest of his life, and pouring his remaining energies into saving a movie theater nobody cares about?
Where is that movie?
Something moved in the corner of my screen, and I realized someone had opened the door. I turned around and there was Raina, wearing one of my old T-shirts and a pair of baggy shorts. The T-shirt had a picture of Godzilla on it, under the words “I’m Big in Japan.” My dad had gotten it for me for my twelfth birthday, and even though it was an extra-large and black, I had worn it nearly every day of that summer.
It occurred to me suddenly that if I ever wanted to get over my father’s death, I was probably going to have to throw out all of my T-shirts. That or give them away. Raina certainly looked better in this one than I did.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” I said.
She sat down on the floor, across from me, drinking a juice box.
“Where did you get that?” I asked.
“Brought a couple from home,” she said. “I never leave home without juice. It’s an unpredictable world.”
I tried a smile, but my lips hardly budged.
“Mopey Moperson,” she said.
“What?”
“That’s you. Mopey Von Mope Mope.”
She took a drink from her straw.
I continued to sulk. I wanted to stop, but it was like someone had activated my sulk mode. I was incapable of doing anything else.
“Maybe this is all for the best,” I said. “I mean . . .”
“I loved you, too,” said Raina.
The words came fast, and my brain was on a short delay.
“What was that?” I asked.
“You heard me,” she said.
She looked right at me.
“You’re right. I heard you,” I said. “But . . . why did you say it?”
“Because it’s true. And I should have told you before.”
I felt an odd lump in my throat and heat radiating from my ears.
“Also,” she said, “I’m not sure we mean it in the same way. But that doesn’t stop it from being true.”
I swallowed. Part of me wanted to halt this conversation in its tracks before it went any further, but I was too curious.
“How do you mean it?” I asked.
She sighed.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s hard to explain.”
“Can you try?”
She brushed her hair off her neck and shuffled it over her shoulder.
“I just don’t like this rule that says love has to be one thing,” she said. “Like, why is that all we get? Either you love someone romantically and you want to have sex with them and marry them and have all of their babies forever, or you get nothing?”
The first option didn’t sound so bad to me, but I didn’t want to say that.
“Well,” I said, “there is the love you feel for . . . your family.”
“But that’s boring love!” she said. “It’s barely a choice. You almost have to feel that. I’m still talking about love that’s a choice. Where you pick someone.”
She pulled her legs up to her chest. I watched her, unsure what to say or do.
“Okay,” I said. “I see what you’re saying but . . .”
“It’s okay if you don’t,” she said. “I don’t know if I see what I’m saying. These last couple years have been really weird. I feel like I’m figuring this stuff out all over again. I just wanted to tell you that you weren’t . . . alone.”
My room was easily five hundred degrees now. Someone had switched it on like an oven. I got up and cracked a window. The sounds of the night came humming in, distant traffic and cicadas. I walked back to my spot on the floor in slow motion, and when I sat down, my body felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. I wasn’t sure if I would ever be able to get up again.
“Past tense,” I said.
She didn’t speak for a moment.
“You said it in past tense, too,” she said.
I got up and walked to the other side of my room, and pointed to a patch of wall beside the window.
“You see this spot here where the paint doesn’t match?”
“I see it,” she said.
“The first color is called Bold Potato. But when I went to buy new paint, all they had was Citrus Mist. So, now there’s potatoes and citrus, which kind of seems wrong. It would make a terrible soup anyway.”
Raina looked at the wall and then back at me. Her face was scrunched in a confounded stare.
“This is where I wrote your name in Magic Marker,” I said.
She looked at it again.
“You wrote my name on your wall?”
Then she got up and walked over to where I was standing. She looked at the lighter part of the wall, that parallelogram of citrus.
“Yeah,” I said.
She looked at me.
“Why didn’t I ever see it?”
“You never came over to my house,” I said. “Remember?”
She let this sink in.
“So why did you paint over it?”
“I was sure you were never coming back,” I said. “And to make things a little easier. I didn’t need to look at that every day.”
She moved closer to me.
“But I came back.”
“You did.”
I could smell the shampoo in her hair now, and a trace of her mom’s cigarette smoke. Looking up at that patch of wall, my room didn’t really feel like mine anymore. The person who had lived here was somebody different.
“Ethan,” she said, “I just don’t . . .”
“It’s okay,” I said quickly, less to reassure her than to cut off whatever was coming next.
She was quiet.
“You don’t owe me anything,” I said.
“I know that,” she said.
“No, I just mean all that stuff you said about not being a good friend to me. It’s okay. I understand now. You’ve been absolved.”
I waved my hand over her head.
She smiled.
“Thanks, your holiness,” she said.
Neither of us moved. I wanted very badly to cry, but I held it back this time. I’m not sure why. Raina probably wouldn’t have cared. I just wanted to be convincing in my appearance that everything was fine. That I really could be her friend when she needed one. I’m pretty sure I didn’t breathe until she spoke again.
“I’m pretty tired, Ethan,” she said.
Suddenly, it was okay to move again. So, I walked toward the door. I wanted to just walk out without saying anything, to keep my voice from cracking. I wanted to go to the couch and breathe.
“Everything,” she said, “is just so different from one day to the next.”
Raina got in my bed and stared up at the ceiling.
“It’s okay,” I said. “You don’t have to explain anything else. I understand.”
She wasn’t looking at me anymore.
“If it’s okay,” she said, “then why do I feel so bad right now?”
I stood in the doorway, not quite in, not quite out. This time when I spoke, my voice wavered a little.
“What do you want me to do, Raina?”
“Can you just sit here for a minute?”
She pointed to the bed.
“Why?” I asked.
It took her a moment to speak, and when she did, the words came slowly.
“I’ve been having trouble sleeping. And it helps just to have someone in the room sometimes.”
I took a breath. This was something I could understand. When my father was gone, I had to sleep with the door open for months. Just hearing the other sounds in the house was reassuring. Having a feeling that not everything would be gone when I woke up.
“I can do that,” I said.