life.” My mother agrees. “It’s true. Oakwood Circle is not real life.”
I have dual citizenship, which makes me feel sophisticated. I travel alone to stay with Aunt Lilly in Vancouver at least once a year so I can experience her version of real life. She lives in a one-bedroom apartment in a tall, round building that looks out over the water. We walk the miles of seawall and eat at ethnic restaurants—it’s our thing. And she takes me to movies, because her job is online movie reviewer. And we always hit up the Roots store on Robson, this oh-so-Canadian athleisure-wear company, because I like to bring the Hive back Ts and sweaties from there. Represent.
Aunt Lill is fifteen years younger than my mother, and doesn’t have kids. We can talk for hours. About everything. Religion, meaning her disapproval of my Christian education. Boys, meaning Chase Mason. Love, meaning the heartbreak of the Frumkin girls.
Fee’s the only one of us, besides me, who’s been out of Calabasas, if you don’t count day trips, and resort vacays, or ski week in Mammoth—and you shouldn’t. Fee’s seen things. For two weeks each summer she’s dragged off to stay with her father’s family, her abuela and some uncles, in Cerritos, fifty or so miles away. She chills with her cousins and, like, runs through the sprinklers old-school, and hangs out at some sketch mall, and sleeps on a cot on a screened-in porch. She doesn’t talk about Cerritos all that much, except to complain that she has to babysit the younger kids all the time, and that her grandmother hates her because she doesn’t speak Spanish.
Well, Fee didn’t say much about Cerritos until recently…
Los Angeles has the highest population of homeless people in America and lots of them are undocumented or procits. Fee knows this. The world knows this. But the rest of the Hive doesn’t. I mean, they do, but they don’t. There are dozens of tent cities and homeless encampments, one of them just a few miles from us, but they might as well be another country, or planet. One time I suggested we could get some good community hours by going to help at one of the soup kitchens, but all the parents except Shelley put the kibosh on that idea because they believe the rumors about homeless people spreading necrotizing fasciitis.
My parents took me to sketch parts of Los Angeles to see the tent cities when I was young, and the stretch of dirt road where the hoboes beg, and they drove me down to the beach one starry August night to see the meteor shower. Instead of shooting stars, we ended up watching these little groups of vagrants sneaking past the guards to wash themselves in the sea.
We Millers served Thanksgiving meals to the homeless at City Hall every year too, until the crowds got too big and there was that riot. I was relieved when my mother told me the dinner was canceled and we were going to join the Sharpes for turkey and trimmings. To be honest, I was scared of the hoboes. Not gonna lie. Hungry and haunted, stinking of pee and cigarettes, coated with a fine layer of dust that blurred their edges like a filter app.
I’ve been to the homes of Sherman and Shelley’s clients, the crappy trailers with no running water, and tiny shacks with cockroaches and mice, and cabins with ten mattresses on the floor, and also some sweet little places, all done up and tidy, and a few super-nice places—people who’d been in America for a while and done well. Before we went in anywhere, my mother would warn me not to ask for anything but to eat a small amount of whatever was offered, and not to notice or make faces if the place smelled, and to sit if I was pointed to a chair, even if was dirty.
At one house they made me wait in the dusty yard with a wailing, tomato-faced baby in a playpen. The mother had instructed me in Spanish not to pick the baby up, before she went inside to talk business with my parents. The baby was one or two—I’m not good at baby ages—and had scabs on her little arms, dried banana in her wiry black hair, purple stains on her torn dress. This tragic baby was looking at me, crying hard with her arms outstretched, and I just couldn’t ignore her. I lifted her out of the playpen and put her on