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  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC • New York

  Copyright © 2019 by Peter Bognanni.

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  Ebook ISBN 9780735228092

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For Sal Bognanni

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Ethan’s Glossary of Film Terms: Entry #1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2Ethan’s Glossary of Film Terms: Entry #33

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4Ethan’s Glossary of Film Terms: Entry #76

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6Ethan’s Glossary of Film Terms: Entry #3

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8Ethan’s Glossary of Film Terms: Entry #79

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10Ethan’s Glossary of Film Terms: Entry #119

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12Ethan’s Glossary of Film Terms: Entry #99

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14Ethan’s Glossary of Film Terms: Entry #83

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16Ethan’s Glossary of Film Terms: Entry #27

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18Ethan’s Glossary of Film Terms: Entry #175

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20Ethan’s Glossary of Film Terms: Entry #286

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22Ethan’s Glossary of Film Terms: Entry #306

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24Ethan’s Glossary of Film Terms: Entry #14

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26Ethan’s Glossary of Film Terms: Entry 229#

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28Ethan’s Glossary of Film Terms: Entry #488

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30Ethan’s Glossary of Film Terms: Entry #47

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32Ethan’s Glossary of Film Terms: Entry #65

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34Ethan’s Glossary of Film Terms: Entry #354

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36Ethan’s Glossary of Film Terms: Entry #130

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38Ethan’s Glossary of Film Terms: Entry #152

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40Ethan’s Glossary of Film Terms: Entry #96

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42Ethan’s Glossary of Film Terms: Entry #999

  After the Credits

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ETHAN’S GLOSSARY OF FILM TERMS

  ENTRY #1

  FADE IN:

  A completely black screen. Then, slowly, an image becomes visible.

  You’ve seen it a thousand times. First darkness. Then the light.

  Sound next. A face maybe. A landscape.

  A world born before your eyes. One minute you’re sitting there in the dim theater with a room full of strangers, and the next you are somewhere else.

  It only takes a second, but it feels like magic every time.

  A Fade In says: Welcome.

  It says: Shhhhhh

  A story is about to start.

  1

  When I was fourteen, I started watching a movie a day.

  No exceptions.

  It wasn’t always easy to fit them in.

  There was life to contend with. Homework. Job. School. Sustenance. The occasional human interaction. But I tried my best to do it no matter what. No matter how tired I might be. Saturdays were my binge days when I left reality behind for hours, cocooned in my vintage Star Wars bedspread with only a box of cereal and a warm Dr Pepper to get me through the day. Sundays I rested, like the Lord.

  Then I watched a movie.

  I’m seventeen now, so if you do the math, that’s three years at 365 days a year. Which is 1,095 total days. With an average run time of about 90 minutes a movie, that’s at least 1,642 hours. Or, if you prefer: 68 days.

  Sixty-eight days of movie time. Sixty-eight days of being someone else.

  For a person who spends most of his life indoors, I’ve done some fairly epic things during those hours. For example: I’ve stormed a castle with some samurai in feudal Japan, which I totally recommend. I’ve done heroin in Scotland and watched a zombie baby crawl on the ceiling (don’t recommend). I’ve been a piano prodigy, a submarine captain, and a prison inmate, not necessarily in that order. I have whispered my secrets into a tree, pulled a human heart from a toilet, and walked a tightrope across the New York skyline in a pair of revealing tights.

  And whenever my mother or anyone else well-meaning asks me why I spend so much time in a darkened room, staring at a glowing screen, I answer with a question of my own: Why do you live one life? As in: Why be content with one life when you could live one thousand and ninety-five? A few of them are bound to be more interesting than your own. Or in my case: most of them.

  Aside from a few movies by this Japanese director, Ozu, and long sections of The Hobbit, which should have been called The Desolation of My Attention Span, it doesn’t take much to beat the movie of my life these days.

  For one thing, I work at a dying movie theater. That should come as no surprise. The movie part, anyway. It pays almost nothing, but it makes my daily quota a little easier to meet. Though I should clarify right off the bat that by “work at,” I mean “am the boss of.” I used to be just another humble employee of the Green Street Cinema in Minneapolis, Minnesota, but then the owner, Randy, had a personal crisis, skipped town, and left me in charge during his absence. He never came back.

  I have two theories about why he chose me.

  The first is that I am the longest-standing employee of the Green Street aside from Sweet Lou, our organ player, who is maybe two hundred years old.

  And second: Randy was once pretty chummy with my dad, who used to be the chair of the Film Studies Department at the university down the street. For these reasons, I am currently the captain of this sinking ship.

  Ahoy there, movie nerds. All aboard.

  * * *

  • • •

  Call me Wendy.

  That’s not my name. My name is Ethan, but Wendy is what everyone here calls me since I became de facto manager. If you haven’t guessed already—and why would you?— it’s a Peter Pan reference, and not a very clever one at that. I’m not sure how it got started, but one day I came in with the new schedules for the week and everyone was saying it with the same smirk on their faces.

  I guess that makes my crew of bare
ly employable movie geeks the Lost Boys. They aren’t all boys, but they are definitely lost anywhere other than this theater.

  So Wendy it is.

  I’ve learned to live with it. Just like I’ve learned to live with the smell of curdled butter, the perpetually clogged toilet in the employee bathroom, and the fact that I never see the projectionist leave the premises. But before I get too caught up in the details, I should let you know why any of this matters.

  * * *

  • • •

  It all got started on a day when I thought my only problem was going to be the rats.

  Rats, you say?

  We had many. They enjoyed eating candy. Specifically the candy we stored to serve at our concession stand. But this was the first day a rat-chewed candy box had been served to a customer. Which is how my only break of the day was disturbed.

  I was standing outside the theater, when Griffin, the stoned ticket taker, walked up behind me and cleared his throat.

  “Um. Wendy?” he said.

  I knew Griffin was stoned because Griffin is always stoned. If he came to work sober, planets would drift out of alignment. The tides would reverse. Or . . . he might just do his job competently. His favorite director is Terry Gilliam, and at last count, he had seen Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas fifty-four times. He tried to re-enact it once, but he didn’t have a car, and he only made it to the city limits on his ten-speed before he got distracted by the extensive beef jerky selection at SuperAmerica.

  “Remember what I said about bothering me on break?” I asked Griffin.

  Griffin scratched the back of his neck. He pushed his enormous black glasses up his nose. His mop of dark hair obscured the top third of the lenses.

  “You said not to do it.”

  “That is correct,” I said.

  Longest pause ever.

  “The rats ate most of the Dots,” he said.

  “I know,” I said. “I saw the mess this morning.”

  “Right,” he said. “So, I gave a lady a box that I thought was fine, but turned out to be kinda compromised, rat-wise, and she left saying she was going to sue all of us. Like personally. Everyone who works here.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “Well,” he said, “I’ve been thinking it over, and I’m just not sure my finances can take that kind of hit right now.”

  I took a glance at the cloudless sky above me. There was an airplane inching its way through the blue, leaving a breathy white trail behind it. I imagined myself in an aisle seat, sipping a ginger ale and laughing at a movie I would never pay to watch. I had about five seconds to enjoy this fantasy before I walked to the entrance of the Green Street, shoved open the glass doors, and smelled the stale popcorn and musty carpeting.

  “Yo, Wendy!” said Lucas, an international student from the U who worked concessions. “The rats got into the candy again! Your traps aren’t working, my man.”

  I passed him without comment, trying to remember if he’d ever actually been hired, or if he’d just walked behind the counter one day in his Bill Murray T-shirt and never left. His mom was American, but he grew up with his dad in Lebanon, watching pirated tapes from the States. He had seen more movies than any of us combined, and he rarely let us forget it.

  “He knows, dude,” said Griffin, “And he knows about the lawsuit. Wendy has a lot on his mind right now.”

  I left them behind to discuss my mind. Meanwhile, I walked down the main hallway to the storage room where there was probably some kind of massive rat orgy taking place at that very moment. I did this because, even though I am underage and technically too young to be a manager, I am somehow a manager. And even though I haven’t been able to “manage” many things in my own life, I still felt like trying at the Green Street. It was maybe the last place I felt like trying.

  Because, if I’m honest, things had been a little rough of recent.

  And by “of recent,” I mean the three years since my dad died.

  He died just before I turned fourteen, and it’s still hard for me to say it or even write about it without getting depressed and angry and then depressed again. For now I’ll just say: It was quick and surprising. And afterward, I kind of took a hall pass from life. My grades went south. Things with my mom got weird. And to make matters worse, my best friend moved away. In the years that followed, I kinda stopped thinking about college. And basically the only thing I didn’t give up on entirely was watching movies and doing my job at the Green Street. Which, come to think of it, is probably why Randy made me temporary manager.

  That and someone had to deal with the rats.

  I opened the door now to the storage room and things were eerily quiet. If my life were a movie, there would have been some slightly out-of-tune violins starting in the background. Maybe a close-up of a single bead of sweat on my forehead. Inside the closet there were boxes of candy that had been knocked from the shelves. Raisinets. Twizzlers. Mike and Ikes. An all-you-can-eat buffet.

  On top of the pile was a single rat the size of a small raccoon. I only slightly exaggerate his size. He was the rodent king of candy hill. Lord of the Junior Mints. Master of Milk Dud Mountain. His two bottom teeth looked sharpened to kill, and I’m pretty sure he was in a diabetic coma.

  “Begone, Brando!” I said.

  I had decided to name him Brando (after late career Marlon Brando).

  No reaction. I looked at the traps I bought last week:

  Empty.

  I picked up a nearby broom, and I was about to take a swing at him when I received another tap on the shoulder. Which caused me to jump and scream louder and higher than I have ever screamed maybe in my life. Griffin dropped his glasses.

  “Whoa,” he said. “Sorry, man.”

  “Jesus, Griffin!” I yelled when I turned around. “I thought you were a rat.”

  He stared at me wide-eyed. He seemed a little frightened at this possibility.

  “I’m not,” he said.

  I looked over at Brando, but he was long gone.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. “What could possibly be so important that you need to interrupt me in the middle of an attempted murder?”

  Griffin took his signature pause, reaching down to pick up his glasses.

  “There’s a man here with some papers. He says we’re being evicted.”

  2

  Once upon a time, when I was younger, Dad and I used to go to the movies.

  Like once a week at least when my mom worked Saturdays. It was our day, and we had a ritual. We always got to the theater early enough to see all the previews. We always got one big popcorn to share and two individual boxes of Nerds (our mascot). We always went to the bathroom right before the movie to avoid mid-film emergencies. And when we got inside the theater, we connected straws together so that they could go from the sodas on the floor all the way up to our mouths—that way we would never have to look away. Afterward, we each had to answer two questions.

  What was the image from the film that we just couldn’t shake?

  And:

  How was the last line?

  And the Green Street Cinema is where we went the most.

  Dad didn’t like the multiplexes. He thought they were soulless and bland. Besides, the Green Street was right down the street from the university where he taught, and everyone knew him there. The concession guys gave him extra butter. And most Saturdays I got in free. “If that kid can sit through Das Boot,” the cashier once said, “it’s on the house.” I started volunteering there before I was old enough to work, and even before that, I hung around while Dad did his college film screenings.

  I would watch him from the back row as he gesticulated in front of the screen, saying outrageous things in his lecture about Rear Window, like, “Clearly Hitchcock is taking on impotence here! Right? Look at that phallic cast on Jefferies! But he c
an’t do anything!” and ignoring the chuckles that followed. His hair was curly and he didn’t get it cut often enough. Mom used to say he looked like the professor from central casting, but it wasn’t quite that bad. He was surprisingly athletic. He played pickup basketball, and once when I went to the college gym, I saw him sink a jump hook from the free-throw line over the outstretched arm of a winded biology professor. It was a thing of beauty.

  But still, he never seemed more at home than at the Green Street. It was his home away from home, and especially after he died, it became mine, too. These days I usually came in at eight a.m. only to leave at six or seven that night after every smooshed Milk Dud had been scraped from the floor. I still changed each letter on the antique marquee by hand. And I could feel it in my soul when a spring popped loose on our duct-taped seats.

  Which is why my heart nearly stopped when I first held the papers that said we were done. The man holding the papers was from the university’s real estate office, which owned our building. He had a thin beard and a crisp university polo shirt tucked in tight to his slim cut jeans. His eyes were squinty behind a pair of frameless glasses. I looked at the paper on top of the pile, which said:

  EVICTION NOTICE

  It was written in the largest font I have ever seen. People could probably see it from space.

  “What’s this all about?” I asked.

  The man looked down at the gigantic words EVICTION NOTICE. Then he looked back at me. Then he told me what this was all about.

  The theater was in debt, in excess of $145,000.

  Randy had mismanaged the budget very badly over the last five years and had missed a lot of grant deadlines that might have kept us afloat.