Even Greater Mistakes by Charlie Jane Anders

Author:Charlie Jane Anders
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Titan Books

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Ricky Artesian came up to me in the cafeteria early on in eleventh grade. He’d gotten so he could loom over and around everybody. I was eating with Sally, Raine, and a few other film geeks, and Ricky told me to come with him. My first thought was, whatever truce we’d made over my arm bone was over and gone and I was going to be fragments of me. But Ricky just wanted to talk in the boys’ room. Everyone else cleared out, so it was just the two of us and the wet TP clinging to the tiles. The air was sour. “Your movies, they’re cool,” he said. I started to explain they were also Sally’s, but he hand-slashed. “My people.” He gestured at the red bandana. “We’re going to take it all down. They’ve lied to us, you know. It’s all fucked, and we’re taking it down.” I nodded, not so much in agreement but because I’d heard it before. “We want you to make some movies for us. Explaining what we’re about.”

I told him I’d have to ask Sally, and he whatevered and didn’t want to listen to how she was the brains, even though anyone looking at both of us could tell she was the brains. Ricky said if I helped him, he’d help me. We were both almost draft age, and I would be a morning snack to the military exoskeletons. I’d seen No Time for Sergeants—seventeen times—so I figured I knew all about basic training, but Ricky said I’d be toast. Holman had been telling me the same thing, when he wasn’t trying to beat me up. So Ricky offered to get me disqualified from the army, or get me under some Protection during training.

When I told Sally about Ricky’s offer, the first thing she did was ask Raine what he thought. Raine wasn’t a robot that day, which caught me off guard. He was just a sandy-haired flag-eared skinny guy, a year or so older than us. We sat in a seaside gazebo/pagoda where Sally thought she could film some explosions. Raine said propaganda was bad, but also could Ricky get him out of the army as well as me? I didn’t know. Sally didn’t want me to die, but artistic integrity, you know.

The propaganda versus artistic integrity thing, I wasn’t sure about. How was making a movie for Ricky worse than pandering to our fans on Yourstuff and Yangar? And look, my dad fed and housed Holman and me by arranging tragic accidents for cable TV movies where people nursed each other back to health and fell in love. Was my dad a propagandist because he fed people sponge cake when the whole world was flying apart?

Sally said fine, shut up, we’ll do it if you just stop lecturing us. I asked Ricky and he said yes, neither Raine nor I would have to die if we made him a movie.

This was the first time we ever shot more footage than we used.

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