This Is Where We Live - By Janelle Brown Page 0,29
and swiped at the dust on her face, leaving long finger marks that revealed dark crescents of exhaustion ringing her eyes. “This whole thing has taken a lot out of me. I think I need a nap. Maybe you do too.”
Jeremy wondered if there was an intimation in this statement, but the prickly expression on her face suggested a desert without an oasis. “No,” he said, cranky. “I’m going to watch TV.”
She disappeared into the bedroom. Jeremy sat down on the couch, translucent plastic sheeting crinkling under his rear. He picked up the remote and turned on the television set, not even bothering to remove the plastic, and watched the watery images that swam through with halfhearted interest. Inside him, fury and guilt engaged in a heated skirmish, one side hating Claudia for popping his bubble and the other reminding him of his old promise to take care of her. Was her proposal really so awful? Yes; one side brandished its bayonets. You’ll survive, parried the other.
After a minute, he snapped the set off. He picked up his guitar, played a few chords, then put it down again. Finally, he tiptoed to the door of the bedroom and stood there, staring at Claudia. She had taken her work clothes off and was asleep, facedown on top of the bedspread, wearing a T-shirt and a faded pair of his boxer shorts. A small puddle of drool darkened the pillow.
Jeremy closed the door and went back to the living room, where he opened his laptop. The computer whirred drowsily; the desktop photograph of a chubby five-year-old Claudia sparked up and spread across the screen. She stared at him curiously from across the years, skeptical of the person looking back, unconcerned about the melted orange popsicle smeared across her face.
It took only a few seconds to locate the e-mail where he’d saved it, in a folder marked PERSONAL. AOKI, he typed quickly:
Good to hear from you. I’d love to see you. When do you get to town?
He clicked SEND before he had a chance to think better of it and then sat and watched as the software churned, sent its feelers across the Internet, and catapulted his message out into the cooling summer night.
Claudia
TO GET TO ENNIS GATES ACADEMY, CLAUDIA HAD TO DRIVE WEST: down the hill, then west over the industrial flats of Glassell Park, across concrete-choked Los Angeles River and through the dismally misnamed Elysian Park. Turning up onto Beverly Boulevard, she continued through lower Hollywood, past the panaderias and pet stores with their hand-painted signs and rotting birdcages in the windows, and, to the south, the glassed-in high-rises of Koreatown. Here, she hit the first early morning traffic. Trapped between badly timed lights, the cars gunned forward en masse and then jerked to a stop, swapping lanes in a futile and dangerous dance. In this manner, she inched her way past the grand Spanish villas and SLOW CHILDREN AT PLAY signs of Hancock Park, and through the Fairfax district, where Russian Hasadim in furry flying-saucer hats stalked past designer boutiques. Finally, after almost an hour, she arrived in Beverly Hills. Here sat Ennis Gates Academy, on the end of an otherwise residential street where the mansions girded themselves with high gates and the lollipop palms swayed over empty sidewalks.
Claudia parked her aging Jetta in the half-full teacher’s lot. She was an hour early for first bell, and the campus was still quiet. She had half expected a welcoming committee, there to greet her on her first official day as an Ennis Gates Academy teacher, but the front entry was vacant save for an elderly registrar who sat at the receptionist desk reading a romance novel, a bowl of sugar-free hard candies placed before her. The registrar raised her head and looked quizzically at Claudia, noted the book bag, and smiled, apparently deciding that Claudia belonged there after all. She licked her thumb and turned a page in her novel, uninterested.
Claudia pushed onward, through the double doors and out into a small courtyard, where a smattering of early students were gathered in clusters around a fountain, comparing summer vacation photographs on each other’s iPhones. There, Claudia hesitated, trying to remember her way. The campus of Ennis Gates was mazelike, a quirky scattering of neo-Modern boxes crosshatched with industrial steel beams and painted in creativity-stimulating hues of purple and emerald and turquoise, rising up along the base of a hill. She’d visited the campus four times in the last three weeks, and