“I know,” I said, chastened.
He smiled at me in the old way I remembered, eyes crinkling. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said. “It’s going to be good, having you around.”
“Thanks,” I said, “but it’s only for a while, until I get on my feet.”
“No hurry,” CJ said.
“No, I understand that you bought this place so you could have some privacy,” I said.
He looked at me as if I’d said something incomprehensible, and said, “Not from you.”
I lived with CJ a month, long enough to find three part-time jobs-none of them particularly interesting or challenging, but the checks cashed fine. When I’d saved enough, I put down money on a tiny studio in town. CJ tried to talk me out of leaving, and I was reluctant, too, but I couldn’t have a life that was just an offshoot of his. And I wasn’t going far, just down into the city. So he yielded and helped me move.
I wouldn’t realize until later-when I had to leave-how much Los Angeles had gotten under my skin. Mostly I’d sat out the longstanding Love L.A./Hate L.A. debate. When I’d chosen to go there after leaving West Point, my decision had been fairly arbitrary. I didn’t have roots in Lompoc anymore. Julianne had moved away during my plebe year at West Point, and even the Mooneys, CJ’s parents, had done something quintessentially Californian: They’d sold their real estate at a profit and bought a bigger, cheaper place out of state, in Nevada’s Washoe Valley. But L.A. was the nearest big city to where I’d grown up. My feeling had been, I suppose if I’m from anywhere, I’m from here.
Later, if you’d asked me why I liked it there, I’d have given you everyone’s general paean to L.A.: the open streets and the palm trees and the laid-back vibe, et cetera cetera cetera. The truth was simpler: L.A. just felt like a place for people like me, young people raised on high-fructose corn syrup, long on energy and short on a sense of history.
I doubt I would have approved if I’d moved straight there after high school. I’d gone to West Point to test myself against hardship and privation, to see how little comfort and pleasure I could get by on. But I came home in a very different frame of mind. Then, I wanted what I called omnia gaudia vitae, all the pleasures of life, and L.A. was the place for that. Vietnamese iced coffee, British Columbian marijuana, Colombian cocaine, French film noir, Israeli krav maga training-you could get it all here, and if it was all imported, like the water supply and the workforce and even the iconic palm trees, who cared?
I told CJ when I moved into town that we’d still see each other all the time, and we did. He opened the doors to the West Hollywood clubs he was always waved into, and I spent many nights drinking and dancing, sometimes in his immediate company, other times only knowing that he was somewhere in the same vast and densely packed venue. I wasn’t ever lonely. CJ’s circle of friends, friendly acquaintances, and hangers-on was enormous, and they were always willing to share space at their tables, their drugs, even their bodies. I left footprints on the windows of a few Navigators and Escalades owned by guys I didn’t know very well.
Some mornings I dreamed of the clean citadel of West Point and woke up first disoriented, then unhappy. I chased that feeling away with strong coffee or a joint, or sometimes a hard workout.
I attained something of a reputation in CJ’s crowd as that mostly quiet girl with the birthmark and the occasional hair-trigger temper. From time to time CJ had to drag me away from a vending machine I was trying to bust up for taking my money or a bouncer twice my size I felt provoked by. Sometimes CJ had to wrap his arms around me from behind and negotiate over my shoulder, telling people that I was on mood-altering meds or just getting over a bad breakup.
Later, when I apologized to him, he always said, pleasantly, not to worry about it. Some of that was CJ being CJ, so mellow that one friend of his joked that his adrenal glands secreted some kind of cannabinoid substance instead of adrenaline. But I think CJ chalked most of it up to my washing out of West Point. It’s amazing the shit people will let you get away with if they think it’s coming from a place of anger and low self-respect.
Nonetheless, I always told him I was sorry-often too abjectly, because I was usually still drunk or high or stoned and therefore able to access my feelings in a way I couldn’t when sober. “I love you,” I’d tell him. “I’d kill anyone who’d try to hurt you.”
“Those are lovely sentiments; go sleep them off,” he’d say.
But underneath the fevered language, I meant it. The way I thought of it was, I had been born an only child, but in time, the gods took pity and gave me a brother and a sister.
three
The sister was Serena Delgadillo.
Technically, Serena and I went back to the seventh grade together. We’d both been chosen for an academic-achievement program called ReachUP, which singled out promising students in rural or disadvantaged schools in hopes of helping them compete with middle-class students at college admissions time. We’d also both played on the girls’ soccer team that year, alongside each other as forwards. No question, she was better than me. The daughter of migrant workers, she had learned soccer on the hard brown fields of California’s inland valleys from her four older brothers and other immigrant kids, all futbol fanatics.
We weren’t friends, but we were friendly. That had been a big step for both of us at the time. Like me, Serena was skinny then, with Kmart clothes and hair her mother cut in harsh black bangs directly across Serena’s forehead. It made her self-conscious except on the soccer field, where she lost her inhibitions, becoming speedy and fluid and exuberant.
Then, in eighth grade, something changed. Serena dropped out of ReachUP and grew distant. She began styling her hair in the high, lofty wall of bangs that hadn’t quite gone out of style among Latina girls back then, and I only saw her with other Mexicans in the hallways. We sat next to each other in study hall, but she only spoke to me once, to poke me in the shoulder and say, “What’s that?” She’d been looking at the Latin flashcards I was reviewing instead of doing my schoolwork.
“It’s Latin,” I’d said.
She’d flipped through a few cards. “Weird,” she’d said, shrugging, and had gone back to her homework.
The next year, Serena was gone. That was a common thing. Farmworker families are nomadic; the population of our school was always in flux.
I forgot her pretty quickly.
In my early days in L.A., after moving down from CJ’s place, I was broke. The one luxury I allowed myself was food from cheap ethnic places. That month, I’d discovered pho, the Vietnamese noodle soup made with oxtail and rare beef. Late one Saturday afternoon, I was waiting in line to get my fix, when I saw that I was being watched by a tall young Latina.
She was good-looking and slender, her cargo pants hanging off sharp hip bones, braless under a strappy tank shirt, her hoop earrings so large you could have worn them as bracelets. She had straight hair, not quite black, pulled back off her face, and almond-shaped eyes. When I caught her looking at me, she didn’t smile or say “Sorry” like a lot of people would have.
“I think I know you,” she said thoughtfully.
“Okay,” I said. She wasn’t familiar to me, but I’ve learned not to argue with people about that. When you’ve got a birthmark on your face, people can recognize you long after they’ve changed beyond identifiability for you.
“We played soccer together in junior high,” she said. “Remember?”
“Holy shit,” I said. “Serena?”
“Yeah,” she said, laughing. Then: “You’re at the front of the line.”