When I emerge, Mel is buttoning up a fresh flannel shirt. She offers me a very large joint. Says, “Dude. Relax. He’ll love it.” She wrinkles her nose, looks over my shoulder. “Guh. Gonna need an exorcist in there.”
She sweeps the carriage house floor and sets her pocket projector against a clean white sheet hung on the wall. She leans into the bathroom, watches me apply eyeliner. “Don’t be nervous,” she says. “It’s our first audience, and it’s a good one. A smart one. They’ll have good things to say.”
They arrive, a burst of noise and cold from the outside—the boys, stamping snow from their boots, Teddy’s icy face pressed into mine. We eat, we drink. Finally, Mel ushers us over to the sitting area. Her laptop is ready to go.
Teddy’s arm is slung around my shoulder. I feel good, loose. Excited. It’s been a long time since Mel and I have had something new. I want Teddy to see it—to see how good Mel and I can be. I’m in my customary place, nestled into the angle under his arm, leg bent atop his. I can hear his breathing, feel the rise and fall, the echo in his chest when he speaks or laughs. He rubs my shoulder. “I’m excited about this,” he says. “Really curious to see what you all have been holed up working on.”
“I’m excited for you to see it, too,” I say. “I know I haven’t filled you in on much of it.”
“You’re a tough one to figure out, Kisses.”
“Okay,” Mel says. “We’re ready. Go easy on us.” She hits the lights. The projector glows. In the neon letters we favor: The List.
“Working title,” Mel says.
The scene starts in my parents’ living room. There is a storm rumbling outside, the faint sound of sirens tipping off. Me in front of the television, the glow illuminating my body against the dark. No internal monologue. These are the Faulkner scenes, childhood-mined. The colors are soft and whitewashed; it is dreamlike, lingering on single images, echoing sound. A this-is-the-space-your-brain-cannot-decode sort of work.
When the ottoman shatters the glass, the screen purples. Everything speeds up, becomes dark and fleet. The sound, fighting tracks we saved from the Kotex commercial, babbles.
There are laughs where we want laughs. There is silence when we want silence. Mel and I trade looks: That was the way to go. Let’s cut that. Let’s adjust the color at the end. We can’t part with it now. We are completely in its service.
The next scene: the shift to summer. Teddy and I bounce on a trampoline, mouths open, eyes wide. A motor churns in the distance. Then a lingering shot we worked particularly hard to set: a decrepit silver van creeping up a mountainside, the sky shot with pink and brown veins.
I feel Teddy inhale. His hand, wandering through my hair, freezes.
Onscreen, the door to the Caudill house opens. We step inside. The door shuts.
I feel Teddy take his arm back from behind my head and drape it neutrally over the sofa. I look to him. He’s staring at the screen. I see a muscle in his jaw work.
“Are you okay?”
He does not look at me. “Mmm hmm.”
“You sure?”
“Mmm.”
Onscreen, the trunk seems to pan out for miles and miles. It is a coffin, then a chocolate bar, then an enormous brick. It swells, looms over us. When Teddy’s hand reaches up to unlock it, he has to strain, rising on his toes.
Later on, this will become a driving image for our movie, an encouragement of confrontation, of taking control of what haunts you, stealing its power: Open your trunk. It is an affirmation of why we made it, why we were so compelled to keep pressing forward. Repeated dozens of times in the comments sections of the clips on YouTube: Open Your Trunk.
But I will never be able to watch that scene without feeling Teddy’s chest against my face, rising and falling and then, when he watches his younger self unlatch the trunk, seize, as if he’s been hit with something hard.
It finally ends.
Mel will tell me later that this first screening was when she knew the project was going to work. “You could feel it in there after the file had stopped playing,” she said. “It was in the air. You could smell it. I practically went to sleep next to it that night.”
But I don’t notice any of this. I am too distracted by Teddy thrumming next to me, jaw clenched. By the time we reach the scene in which I take the Polaroids from his outstretched hand, images of the girls facing down, he is gripping his knees, breathing rapidly.
“That was awesome,” Ryan says.
“Yeah,” Tatum agrees. “It’s gonna be even better than Nashville Combat.”
“I need to talk to you,” Teddy says to me.
“Is everything okay?” I ask him.
“Outside. Now. Please.”
“What do you need to talk to her about?” Mel says.
“I need to talk to Sharon privately, Mel, thank you.”
“Is it about the movie? Because if it’s about the movie, you can talk to the both of us.”