This Is Where We Live - By Janelle Brown Page 0,35

all in time. She laid out a three-month curriculum for each of three different classes, and distributed a small forest’s worth of handouts. She played the opening sequence from Dr. Strangelove, led a slightly halting class discussion on political films, and played the climactic sewer hunt scene of The Third Man and lectured on noir lighting techniques. She had each student write a brief in-class essay on the subject “The Best Movie I Saw This Summer” and was surprised, when she flipped through them afterward, how bright these kids really were. Sure, a few offered insights like “Yeah, the action sequences in Batman rocked” or “I really liked the lesbian pool scene,” but others cited films like 9½ Weeks and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and His Girl Friday, and if they did pick a blockbuster Hollywood flick, they cited it for “cutting-edge animation technique” or “an interesting twist on the genre of comic book adaptation.” Perhaps they were just trying to impress her, but as she read the essays, she could see the semester unfolding in a much more promising way than she’d ever imagined. The students were attentive, eager, and intellectually curious, and only tiny details revealed the fact that many of their parents resided in an entirely different tax bracket than Claudia: a $2,000 Chloe purse here, rare Japanese skate shoes there, the widespread use of MacBooks rather than spiral-bound notebooks.

But of all the students she met that day, only one really stuck in her head when she got home that night: Penelope Evanovich.

The girl was in her afternoon senior seminar, and she recognized her right away: In the game of genetic roulette, Penelope had lost her spin, inheriting none of her mother’s symmetrical beauty-pageant features. Instead, she had acquired her father’s hyperthyroidism—her eyes protruded in a permanently goggle-eyed expression of vague panic—and his hirsutism—wiry black curls erupted from her head. She had even inherited her father’s paunch, which probably wasn’t helped by the bag of Cheetos she was eating.

If Penelope hated seeing her furry pop-eyed form reflected in the gazes of her Master-Cleanse-slimmed, vacation-tanned, and professionally highlighted Beverly Hills peers, she hid it well. Instead, she appeared to embrace her own nonconformity. Her legs were housed in defiantly shredded purple tights, her backpack was regulation army surplus, and a faded black T-shirt that read (from what Claudia could see) RST CLASS BITC peeped out from under a button-front shirt. A streak of inartfully applied green hair dye looped through her ponytail before fading out in a bleached end. From her left lobe hung an earring that appeared to be a diamond-studded skull. Claudia could only imagine how the former Miss Arizona felt about all that. She smiled at Penelope as the girl plopped herself into a front-row seat. An encouraging sign.

Claudia began that class with a group viewing of The Graduate. Standing on the stage, she guided the students through the magnificent seduction scene between Mrs. Robinson and Benjamin Braddock, thinking to herself as she did that her new job was almost too fun to be real. Just as she was pointing out how the director had used a black-and-white color palette to delineate the character’s moral dilemma, Penelope’s hand popped up. Cheered—not even ten minutes in and she’s already excited about the class!—Claudia barely had a chance to acknowledge the hand before the girl abruptly began talking.

“Um, my dad executive-produced The Graduate?”

The students in the room sat up to ogle Penelope, who was surrounded by a moat of empty seats. Penelope twisted the green curl of hair around a thumb and tugged it straight.

“Oh, really?” Claudia wasn’t quite sure of the proper response to this statement. Of course he had, she thought. She should have realized that sooner. “That’s wonderful.”

“Yeah, and he told me the only reason they used that color palette was because the production budget was cut in half, they had to use the costume designer’s house as a set, and that was just the way it looked. So it wasn’t actually intentional.”

For a moment, Claudia was completely flummoxed. She could feel the eyes of the other students sliding from Penelope to Claudia and back again, eagerly anticipating conflict. “Well,” she said, finally, “in this class one of the skills we’ll be learning is critical interpretation, which is subjective, depending on the perception of the viewer.”

Penelope’s eyes grew even rounder—whether from surprise, or skepticism, or stimulus, Claudia wasn’t quite sure. “Personally, I think it’s pointless to make stuff up that isn’t really