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Peter Bognanni is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His debut novel, The House of Tomorrow, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for first fiction and the ALA Alex Award and has been adapted into a feature film. He teaches creative writing at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

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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 barely 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...