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.”