The Weight of a Projector’s Beam
The bait shop smelled like cork and WD-40 and the particular mustiness of things that had been wet once and would never be wet again. Theo was behind the counter, restocking a spinner rack with the kind of slow, deliberate movements that meant he wasn't thinking about the spinners at all. The bell above the door chimed when I came in, and he looked up like he'd been expecting someone else.
"You're back," he said.
"I'm back."
He didn't ask where I'd been. That was the thing about Theo—he'd always known when to let a silence sit. When we were kids, he'd sit with me on the end of the dock for hours without saying a word, just watching the water hold the sky. I'd forgotten that about him. I'd spent so long remembering the things I'd done that I'd let the things he was go blurry at the edges.
I set the third ledger on the counter between us. Danny's handwriting was cramped and angry, the letters pressed into the paper like they'd been carved. Theo looked at it for a long moment, then picked it up. He didn't open it. He just held it, both hands, like it was something that might shatter.
"He wrote this before the accident," I said. "He knew. He knew about the boat, about the steering. He knew someone was going to try to stop him."
Theo's jaw tightened. "He never told me."
"He was trying to protect you."
"From what? The truth?" He set the ledger down, not gently. "Danny spent his whole life trying to protect me from things I should've known. From Dad's drinking. From the way the shop was bleeding money. From the fact that the lake was dying and nobody was doing anything about it." He ran a hand through his hair, and I saw the tremor in his fingers. "And I let him. I let him carry all of it, and then I let you put him away."
I didn't flinch. I'd earned that. "I know."
"No." He looked at me, and his eyes were wet but his voice was steady. "You don't. You can't know what it's like to sit in that visiting room every month and watch your brother get older and smaller and more certain that he deserved it. He never blamed you, Wren. Not once. He blamed himself. He said if he'd been smarter, if he'd checked the boat, if he'd just told someone sooner—"
"He was the one who was sabotaged, Theo. He didn't do anything wrong."
"Tell him that." Theo's laugh was hollow. "I've been telling him that for three years. He doesn't believe me. He thinks he was being punished for trying to do the right thing. And maybe he was." He picked up the ledger again, thumbed the edge of the pages. "Maybe that's exactly what this is."
I wanted to say something that would make it better. I didn't have those words. I'd never had those words. So I said the only true thing I had: "We can make it right. All of it. But we have to do it now, before Cole figures out what we have."
Theo was quiet for a long moment. The shop's ceiling fan clicked overhead, stirring the heat without cutting it. Outside, the sun was already bleaching the street white. Another day of a hundred and three degrees, another day of the lake bed cracking a little wider.
"What do you have in mind?" he asked.
I told him.
The Founder's Day festival was the one day Calder's Landing pretended it was still alive. Every year, the town council strung up bunting along Main Street, hauled the old bandstand out of storage, and grilled hot dogs in the parking lot of the volunteer fire department. There was a pie-eating contest, a fishing contest that had become a joke since the lake dried up, and a speech from the mayor about resilience and heritage and the "bright future ahead." Nobody believed it. But they showed up anyway, because showing up was what you did when you had nowhere else to go.
The old drive-in theater sat at the edge of town, half a mile past the last gas station. It had been closed since I was nine. The screen was still standing, a great white rectangle of rust-streaked metal, and the gravel lot was still there, though the weeds had pushed through in patches. The projection booth was a squat concrete block at the back, its windows boarded over, its door padlocked with a chain that had gone orange with rust.
I'd thought about it for two days. The ledgers were paper. The contracts were paper. But paper could be burned, could be lost, could be dismissed as forgery. What the town needed was to see it. To have it thrown up in front of them, bigger than their doubts, brighter than the mayor's smile.
"We project it on the screen," I said. "Every page. Every name. Every date. The whole town's already there. They can't ignore it."
Theo had listened without interrupting, which was more than I deserved. When I finished, he leaned against the counter and crossed his arms. "You know Cole's going to have people watching the booth."
"Probably."
"And the mayor will have the power cut the second he figures out what's happening."
"Maybe."
"So how do we get it up there before they can stop us?"
I pulled the projector out of my bag. It was an old Bell & Howell, the kind my grandmother had used to show home movies when I was a kid. It weighed about fifteen pounds and ran on a reel-to-reel system that had to be threaded by hand. I'd found it in her attic, buried under a stack of photo albums, still in its original case.
"The screen's wired to a generator in the booth," I said. "The town uses it for the fireworks show every year. If we get there early, we can hook this up to the same line. Once it's running, it's running. They'd have to physically pull the plug."
Theo looked at the projector, then at me. "You've been thinking about this."
"I've been thinking about nothing else."
He nodded slowly. "When?"
"Founder's Day. Three days from now."
"That's not a lot of time."
"It's all we've got." I set the projector down on the counter. "Cole's already suspicious. He's been watching the shop. He had someone follow me to the library yesterday. If we wait any longer, he's going to find the copies and burn them."
Theo was quiet. The fan clicked. The heat pressed against the windows like something alive.
"You know what this means," he said finally. "If we do this, there's no going back. My mom works at town hall. She's going to lose her job. The shop—" He gestured at the walls, at the racks of lures and the faded fishing posters. "This place is already hanging by a thread. If the council decides to make an example of us, we're done."
"I know."
"And Danny—" His voice cracked on the name. "If we put this out there, everyone's going to know what happened to him. Everyone's going to know he was trying to expose them. And they're going to know you testified against him."
I felt the words land like stones in my chest. "I know."
"So why are you doing this?"
I thought about my grandmother's handwriting in the margins of the ledger. *They will call me a liar. I have the proof. I have the water.* I thought about my sister's laugh, the way it used to skip across the lake like a stone. I thought about the fissure under the dock, the cold pulse of water that shouldn't exist anymore, and the way it had felt like a heartbeat.
"Because I'm tired of being afraid," I said. "I've been afraid since the night of the accident. Afraid of what people would think. Afraid of what would happen if I told the truth. Afraid of coming back here. Afraid of you." I met his eyes. "And I'm done. I'd rather lose everything than spend the rest of my life wondering what would've happened if I'd just been brave enough to do the right thing."
Theo held my gaze for a long moment. Then he reached across the counter and took my hand. His palm was rough, callused from years of tying lures and hauling nets. It was the first time he'd touched me since I'd come back.
"Okay," he said. "Let's do it."
The drive-in was worse than I remembered. The gravel lot had been taken over by weeds and broken glass, and the screen had a hole in the upper left corner where a storm had torn through the metal. But the booth was still standing, and when Theo pried the padlock off with a crowbar, the door swung open on rusted hinges to reveal the generator—a squat, oil-stained machine that hummed when he kicked it.
"Still works," he said, wiping his hands on his jeans. "The town must've kept it maintained for the fireworks."
I set the projector down on a dusty shelf and looked around. The booth was small and dark, lit only by the light spilling through the open door. Cobwebs hung from the ceiling. A dead wasp lay on the windowsill. It smelled like gasoline and old dust.
"We'll need to run the cord through the window," I said, pointing to the small opening that faced the screen. "If we angle it right, the beam should hit the center."
Theo climbed onto a crate and peered through the window. "The screen's about a hundred feet out. This projector's old. You sure it's got the throw?"
"It's got the throw." I'd checked the specs online at the library. "It was built for this. My grandmother used to run it for the summer movie nights when I was a kid."
Theo hopped down. "So we just need to get here early enough to set up without anyone noticing."
"Founder's Day starts at noon. The fireworks are at nine. If we come at dusk, everyone'll be at the barbecue. We can slip in through the back."
He nodded. "And the ledgers?"
"I'll make copies. Two sets. One for the projector, one to hand out if things go wrong."
"Things are going to go wrong."
"Probably."
He almost smiled. "You always did have a way of making plans that were ninety percent hope and ten percent luck."
"Seventy percent hope," I said. "Twenty percent spite."
"That's more like it."
We spent the next hour cleaning out the booth. Theo swept the cobwebs and the dead wasps while I tested the projector, threading a strip of old film through the gate to make sure the mechanism still worked. The bulb flickered when I turned it on, then steadied into a warm, yellow beam that cut through the dust in the air.
"Look at that," Theo said, standing in the doorway. "Still got some light in it."
I turned off the projector and packed it back into its case. "We should go. Someone might've seen the door open."
Theo locked the booth behind us, replacing the padlock with a new one he'd bought at the hardware store. The old one went into his pocket. "We'll come back Friday," he said. "Dusk. I'll bring the copies."
"I'll bring the ledgers."
We stood there for a moment, the dead screen looming over us, the heat pressing down like a hand. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked. The sound carried flat and thin across the dry fields.
"Wren," Theo said. "If this doesn't work—"
"It'll work."
"Listen to me." He stepped closer. "If this doesn't work, I want you to know that I'm glad you came back. Even if everything else falls apart. Even if we lose the shop and the town and everything we've been trying to save. I'm glad you came back."
I didn't know what to say. The words felt too big for my mouth. So I just nodded, and he nodded back, and we walked to our separate cars without saying anything else.
The sun was setting by the time I got back to my grandmother's house. The porch light was on, though I hadn't turned it on. I stood in the driveway for a moment, looking at the house—the peeling paint, the sagging gutters, the frog-shaped stone by the front step where I'd found the key two weeks ago.
I went inside and climbed the stairs to the attic. The ledgers were spread out on the table where I'd left them, three generations of secrets in my grandmother's careful handwriting and Danny's cramped, angry scrawl. I sat down and started copying.
The first page was dated forty years ago. My great-grandfather's name was at the top, followed by a list of water rights and a note in the margin: *"The lake gives what we take. We take what we need."*
I copied it. Then the next page. Then the next.
The hours passed. The heat didn't break. My hand cramped around the pen. But I kept going, because that was the only thing I knew how to do anymore. I kept going, and I thought about the projector's beam cutting through the dark, and the screen lighting up with everything we'd buried, and the town finally seeing what I'd seen.
The water was always yours. Don't waste it.
I wasn't going to waste it. I was going to throw it at them like a stone.
"You're back," he said.
"I'm back."
He didn't ask where I'd been. That was the thing about Theo—he'd always known when to let a silence sit. When we were kids, he'd sit with me on the end of the dock for hours without saying a word, just watching the water hold the sky. I'd forgotten that about him. I'd spent so long remembering the things I'd done that I'd let the things he was go blurry at the edges.
I set the third ledger on the counter between us. Danny's handwriting was cramped and angry, the letters pressed into the paper like they'd been carved. Theo looked at it for a long moment, then picked it up. He didn't open it. He just held it, both hands, like it was something that might shatter.
"He wrote this before the accident," I said. "He knew. He knew about the boat, about the steering. He knew someone was going to try to stop him."
Theo's jaw tightened. "He never told me."
"He was trying to protect you."
"From what? The truth?" He set the ledger down, not gently. "Danny spent his whole life trying to protect me from things I should've known. From Dad's drinking. From the way the shop was bleeding money. From the fact that the lake was dying and nobody was doing anything about it." He ran a hand through his hair, and I saw the tremor in his fingers. "And I let him. I let him carry all of it, and then I let you put him away."
I didn't flinch. I'd earned that. "I know."
"No." He looked at me, and his eyes were wet but his voice was steady. "You don't. You can't know what it's like to sit in that visiting room every month and watch your brother get older and smaller and more certain that he deserved it. He never blamed you, Wren. Not once. He blamed himself. He said if he'd been smarter, if he'd checked the boat, if he'd just told someone sooner—"
"He was the one who was sabotaged, Theo. He didn't do anything wrong."
"Tell him that." Theo's laugh was hollow. "I've been telling him that for three years. He doesn't believe me. He thinks he was being punished for trying to do the right thing. And maybe he was." He picked up the ledger again, thumbed the edge of the pages. "Maybe that's exactly what this is."
I wanted to say something that would make it better. I didn't have those words. I'd never had those words. So I said the only true thing I had: "We can make it right. All of it. But we have to do it now, before Cole figures out what we have."
Theo was quiet for a long moment. The shop's ceiling fan clicked overhead, stirring the heat without cutting it. Outside, the sun was already bleaching the street white. Another day of a hundred and three degrees, another day of the lake bed cracking a little wider.
"What do you have in mind?" he asked.
I told him.
The Founder's Day festival was the one day Calder's Landing pretended it was still alive. Every year, the town council strung up bunting along Main Street, hauled the old bandstand out of storage, and grilled hot dogs in the parking lot of the volunteer fire department. There was a pie-eating contest, a fishing contest that had become a joke since the lake dried up, and a speech from the mayor about resilience and heritage and the "bright future ahead." Nobody believed it. But they showed up anyway, because showing up was what you did when you had nowhere else to go.
The old drive-in theater sat at the edge of town, half a mile past the last gas station. It had been closed since I was nine. The screen was still standing, a great white rectangle of rust-streaked metal, and the gravel lot was still there, though the weeds had pushed through in patches. The projection booth was a squat concrete block at the back, its windows boarded over, its door padlocked with a chain that had gone orange with rust.
I'd thought about it for two days. The ledgers were paper. The contracts were paper. But paper could be burned, could be lost, could be dismissed as forgery. What the town needed was to see it. To have it thrown up in front of them, bigger than their doubts, brighter than the mayor's smile.
"We project it on the screen," I said. "Every page. Every name. Every date. The whole town's already there. They can't ignore it."
Theo had listened without interrupting, which was more than I deserved. When I finished, he leaned against the counter and crossed his arms. "You know Cole's going to have people watching the booth."
"Probably."
"And the mayor will have the power cut the second he figures out what's happening."
"Maybe."
"So how do we get it up there before they can stop us?"
I pulled the projector out of my bag. It was an old Bell & Howell, the kind my grandmother had used to show home movies when I was a kid. It weighed about fifteen pounds and ran on a reel-to-reel system that had to be threaded by hand. I'd found it in her attic, buried under a stack of photo albums, still in its original case.
"The screen's wired to a generator in the booth," I said. "The town uses it for the fireworks show every year. If we get there early, we can hook this up to the same line. Once it's running, it's running. They'd have to physically pull the plug."
Theo looked at the projector, then at me. "You've been thinking about this."
"I've been thinking about nothing else."
He nodded slowly. "When?"
"Founder's Day. Three days from now."
"That's not a lot of time."
"It's all we've got." I set the projector down on the counter. "Cole's already suspicious. He's been watching the shop. He had someone follow me to the library yesterday. If we wait any longer, he's going to find the copies and burn them."
Theo was quiet. The fan clicked. The heat pressed against the windows like something alive.
"You know what this means," he said finally. "If we do this, there's no going back. My mom works at town hall. She's going to lose her job. The shop—" He gestured at the walls, at the racks of lures and the faded fishing posters. "This place is already hanging by a thread. If the council decides to make an example of us, we're done."
"I know."
"And Danny—" His voice cracked on the name. "If we put this out there, everyone's going to know what happened to him. Everyone's going to know he was trying to expose them. And they're going to know you testified against him."
I felt the words land like stones in my chest. "I know."
"So why are you doing this?"
I thought about my grandmother's handwriting in the margins of the ledger. *They will call me a liar. I have the proof. I have the water.* I thought about my sister's laugh, the way it used to skip across the lake like a stone. I thought about the fissure under the dock, the cold pulse of water that shouldn't exist anymore, and the way it had felt like a heartbeat.
"Because I'm tired of being afraid," I said. "I've been afraid since the night of the accident. Afraid of what people would think. Afraid of what would happen if I told the truth. Afraid of coming back here. Afraid of you." I met his eyes. "And I'm done. I'd rather lose everything than spend the rest of my life wondering what would've happened if I'd just been brave enough to do the right thing."
Theo held my gaze for a long moment. Then he reached across the counter and took my hand. His palm was rough, callused from years of tying lures and hauling nets. It was the first time he'd touched me since I'd come back.
"Okay," he said. "Let's do it."
The drive-in was worse than I remembered. The gravel lot had been taken over by weeds and broken glass, and the screen had a hole in the upper left corner where a storm had torn through the metal. But the booth was still standing, and when Theo pried the padlock off with a crowbar, the door swung open on rusted hinges to reveal the generator—a squat, oil-stained machine that hummed when he kicked it.
"Still works," he said, wiping his hands on his jeans. "The town must've kept it maintained for the fireworks."
I set the projector down on a dusty shelf and looked around. The booth was small and dark, lit only by the light spilling through the open door. Cobwebs hung from the ceiling. A dead wasp lay on the windowsill. It smelled like gasoline and old dust.
"We'll need to run the cord through the window," I said, pointing to the small opening that faced the screen. "If we angle it right, the beam should hit the center."
Theo climbed onto a crate and peered through the window. "The screen's about a hundred feet out. This projector's old. You sure it's got the throw?"
"It's got the throw." I'd checked the specs online at the library. "It was built for this. My grandmother used to run it for the summer movie nights when I was a kid."
Theo hopped down. "So we just need to get here early enough to set up without anyone noticing."
"Founder's Day starts at noon. The fireworks are at nine. If we come at dusk, everyone'll be at the barbecue. We can slip in through the back."
He nodded. "And the ledgers?"
"I'll make copies. Two sets. One for the projector, one to hand out if things go wrong."
"Things are going to go wrong."
"Probably."
He almost smiled. "You always did have a way of making plans that were ninety percent hope and ten percent luck."
"Seventy percent hope," I said. "Twenty percent spite."
"That's more like it."
We spent the next hour cleaning out the booth. Theo swept the cobwebs and the dead wasps while I tested the projector, threading a strip of old film through the gate to make sure the mechanism still worked. The bulb flickered when I turned it on, then steadied into a warm, yellow beam that cut through the dust in the air.
"Look at that," Theo said, standing in the doorway. "Still got some light in it."
I turned off the projector and packed it back into its case. "We should go. Someone might've seen the door open."
Theo locked the booth behind us, replacing the padlock with a new one he'd bought at the hardware store. The old one went into his pocket. "We'll come back Friday," he said. "Dusk. I'll bring the copies."
"I'll bring the ledgers."
We stood there for a moment, the dead screen looming over us, the heat pressing down like a hand. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked. The sound carried flat and thin across the dry fields.
"Wren," Theo said. "If this doesn't work—"
"It'll work."
"Listen to me." He stepped closer. "If this doesn't work, I want you to know that I'm glad you came back. Even if everything else falls apart. Even if we lose the shop and the town and everything we've been trying to save. I'm glad you came back."
I didn't know what to say. The words felt too big for my mouth. So I just nodded, and he nodded back, and we walked to our separate cars without saying anything else.
The sun was setting by the time I got back to my grandmother's house. The porch light was on, though I hadn't turned it on. I stood in the driveway for a moment, looking at the house—the peeling paint, the sagging gutters, the frog-shaped stone by the front step where I'd found the key two weeks ago.
I went inside and climbed the stairs to the attic. The ledgers were spread out on the table where I'd left them, three generations of secrets in my grandmother's careful handwriting and Danny's cramped, angry scrawl. I sat down and started copying.
The first page was dated forty years ago. My great-grandfather's name was at the top, followed by a list of water rights and a note in the margin: *"The lake gives what we take. We take what we need."*
I copied it. Then the next page. Then the next.
The hours passed. The heat didn't break. My hand cramped around the pen. But I kept going, because that was the only thing I knew how to do anymore. I kept going, and I thought about the projector's beam cutting through the dark, and the screen lighting up with everything we'd buried, and the town finally seeing what I'd seen.
The water was always yours. Don't waste it.
I wasn't going to waste it. I was going to throw it at them like a stone.