Hancock Park

by Isabel Kaplan

  I leaned in to kiss him before he could ask if I felt the same way.

  For a fleeting moment, I found myself feeling nervous about Aaron’s proclamation of love, but that feeling quickly went away. The idea that someone loved me—liked me, even—was overwhelming. Even my parents, who I knew loved me, sometimes got so busy that they didn’t call to check in or show up for dinner. Not Aaron. Aaron called when he said he would and texted me daily. And I called and texted back. He made me feel special.

  The night after he told me he loved me, Aaron opened our phone conversation by saying, “So, I’m on Facebook right now, and you know the thing where you say who you’re in a relationship with? I don’t know, but I was just updating my profile, and…”

  “Put me down!” I tried to sound casual and not too eager, but my heart was racing. Saying he loved me was one thing, but changing a Facebook relationship status meant that this relationship was really official. That Aaron was proud of me and wanted me to be listed at the top of his profile page.

  “Okay, cool.”

  “So, see you Friday?” I stretched my legs out in front of me.

  “Can’t wait.”

  “Me either,” I half whispered before ending the call and picking up my book.

  When my parents told me they were getting divorced, I was convinced that I would never be happy again.

  But all of a sudden, I wasn’t sad anymore. Some of that might have been my new medications—I’d even stopped realphabetizing my books every day—but I thought that most of it had to do with Aaron. I certainly wasn’t happy because of my parents, since they were just as crazy as ever. And my newfound popularity was definitely great, but it only increased my anxieties. I had started spending an extra half hour in the morning getting ready, worried that if my uniform wasn’t just right, if my hair was frizzy, or if a zit was showing, the Trinity would remember that I, Becky Miller, wasn’t actually cool. No, it had to be Aaron. Because whenever I thought about Aaron, my stomach fluttered, and I realized that I must be cool enough because cooler-than-cool Aaron Winters liked me—had chosen me.

  And then, because nobody was there to tell me that I was being immature, I tossed Heart of Darkness aside for a moment, stood up on my floral-print sheets, and jumped up and down, the coils squeaking and my head almost touching the ceiling, until I finally fell back on the pillows, smiling with exhaustion and, dare I say it, happiness.

  193

  When It Rains, It Pours

  It is a myth that it never rains in Los Angeles, because it does.

  But it wasn’t supposed to rain inside.

  Mom had an HWPC meeting one Sunday morning, and as all the women gathered in the living room, talking over one another in attempts to get a word in edgewise, I pulled the blankets over my head, hoping to get another hour or two of sleep. I might have gone out to the living room to listen in on the meeting, except that it was only nine in the morning and I really couldn’t get my mind around the idea of getting out of bed, much less putting on clothes.

  It was hard to get back to sleep, though. The women talked loudly. I overheard Laura Turner introducing my mom to someone, and throughout the course of the conversation, I realized that the “someone” was Courtney’s stepmother, Marisa, who had come along to the meeting with Laura and was “so excited to meet Becky’s mother!” But Courtney didn’t really like Marisa, so I felt no need to hop out of bed, put on my game face, and go say hello. Instead I tucked a pillow over my head and tried to get some sleep.

  Two hours later, I was standing on the balcony, staring through the glass door at my bedroom, my hands on my Mickey Mouse pajama–clad hips. I had woken up when a drop of water landed on my forehead. Sitting straight up in my twin bed, I’d stared at the ceiling. Suddenly, water had plopped onto the pillow to my left, leaving a dark, circular mark. Then there had been another drop, right on top of my head. “Mom! It’s…raining,” I’d called out, still sitting upright and unnerved in bed.

  I’d had no idea what time it was, but I’d figured that the HWPC meeting must have been over because the apartment was quiet.

  “No it’s not; don’t be silly. Look, it’s a beautiful day out!” Mom had responded from the living room.

  And then, as if on cue, a steady splash of water had come streaming down from the ceiling onto my bright white carpet and trickled along the wall closest to my bathroom. “Mom! I think you should come see this.”

  “Mommy, what’s going on?” Jack’s voice had rung out.

  I had curled into a ball at the top of my bed. The carpet was soaking up the water that had fallen from above, but then there was more, trickling down the pale yellow corner walls of my bedroom and falling in steady “plinks” into a growing puddle in the center of the room.

  “Mom! I’m sitting on the toilet and I’m scared to get up! And since when does it rain inside? Is this water? It’s all over the bathroom, Mom!” a frantic Jack shouted. Then, “Shit, Mom! It’s raining pee!”

  I heard Mom’s heels clicking as she passed my bedroom and stopped at the entrance to her bathroom suite. “Oh, great,” Mom sighed. “Becky, if you thought that it was raining in your room, you should check this out. Jack, come out of there! I have to call the super to get him to turn the water off!”

  The espadrilles that I had worn the previous day were sitting by my bed, so even though they weren’t very practical, I had put them on and ventured toward the hallway. Mom was right; her bathroom was completely flooded; the carpets were soggy, paint was coming off the molding, and there was water dripping down in several different places.

  “Jack, come out of the bathroom. It’s not that scary. And it’s not pee. The building manager should be here any second.”

  Jack had showed up behind me wearing boxer shorts, a T-shirt, and a look of disbelief.

  “It’s not wet in the living room, so why don’t you two go sit in there while we wait for the manager to come and turn off the water valve. I’ll go try to find some buckets to put down.”

  Ten minutes later, the doorbell rang. As Mom went to answer it, she’d turned to Jack and me and said, “This is when you’re glad you live in a full-service building.”

  Yes, unless you happened to be standing there looking like a complete fool in flannel pajamas and espadrilles.

  A man dressed in a gray suit was standing at the front door.

  “Ms. Miller, I think that we have identified the problem,” the man said, holding a walkie-talkie to his ear. We believe that a pipe has burst in the bathroom of the apartment above yours.”

  “Bathroom?” Jack squealed, jumping up. “Mom, I told you!”

  “It’s just water…right?”

  “Just water, yes.”

  “So how do we get it to stop? Is there a water valve or something?”

  The building manager secured the walkie-talkie at his hip using the clip. “Unfortunately, Ms. Miller, only our super knows where the water control valve is, and…he’s not in right now.”

  Doheny Park prided itself on having a twenty-four-hour live-in super. Who, I guess, just wasn’t living-in at the moment.

  For the next few hours, several more employees entered our apartment, and a building-wide search for the water valve ensued. It was a futile search, and the whole time, water continued to drip into our apartment, where we hoped it was landing only in the buckets and mixing bowls that had been placed on the floor. By the time the super got back (he claimed he’d been visiting his sick mother and had forgotten to turn on his cell) and the water was shut off, plenty of damage had been done. Walls and floors were wet, soggy carpets needed to be torn up, and wires were hanging everywhere—the apartment looked like a disaster zone.

  Mom sent us to Dad’s house that night. She said that by the time we came back to her, everything would be figured out. I didn’t want to leave her. In its current state, the apartment was not somewhere that one would want to live in, especially alone. But Mom insisted, claiming that her bedroom hadn’t really been harmed, so she
should be fine for a day or two. She could use the bathroom in the building’s gym, she assured us.

  I lay in my bed at my dad’s house that night, unable to get to sleep. I had to sleep; I had school the next day. But I couldn’t close my eyes for long enough to give in to the powers of REM. I got out of bed and reorganized my books by page count, thickest to thinnest, trying to ignore the feeling that this had happened because things had been going well for me, that after my several-week high, this was the inevitable fall.

  Home Sweet Home (Take Two)

  I was in math when Mrs. Donnelly’s assistant interrupted the class. “Excuse me, I have a note for Becky Miller,” she said. She handed me a folded piece of Whitbread stationery.

  “What’s the note about?” Alissa leaned over and whispered.

  I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders. I smiled nervously up at the teacher and unfolded the sheet of paper.

  It read:

  I’ve been fighting with the insurance company about where we’re moving to. Talked with Laura, and we’ve got it settled. Get what you want from the apartment and meet me at the Four Seasons after school.

  I assumed she meant Laura Turner, who was well known as a vicious attorney.

  “I think,” I whispered to Alissa, “I might be moving into the Four Seasons.”

  I waited to gauge her response. “Cool,” she said. “Caroline Parkman’s living there right now, too. What did you get for number 27?” She spoke as if living in the Four Seasons was the most normal thing in the world.

  Perfectly normal chaos.

  Jack, I realized when I got back to Doheny Park that day, hadn’t received a note from Mom; I guess I was responsible for giving him the news. “Why should I believe you? As far as I know, you’re just randomly saying that we’re going to move out of our apartment and into the fucking Four Seasons?” he asked, sliding his finger around his iPod dial to pump up the volume. But he did believe me, it seemed, because he grabbed a suitcase from the hall closet and began to stuff it with hats and video games.

  Walking into my bedroom, or what remained of it, I couldn’t figure out what to pack. Was I moving to the Four Seasons? Was this a vacation? We had two big suitcases stored on the top shelf of the hall closet, and these might have been plenty for both of us, except that when I tried to add books and Jack tried to stuff in his Xbox 360, we ran out of room. So, cramming whatever wouldn’t fit in the suitcases into tote bags and backpacks, we created a pile in the front hall, right behind the huge industrial vacuums that had been brought in as part of the failed cleanup process.

  An hour later, I felt fairly confident in saying that walking into the Beverly Hills Four Seasons in my school uniform, carrying backpacks and duffel bags and dragging along a Game Boy–playing little brother, was not one of my classiest moments.

  Oh, yeah, and while I was explaining who I was to the concierge, Jack, who was wearing a sweatshirt with “J-Zizzy” emblazoned across the front—a step up from his Halloween costume—was chatting it up with Jay-Z, who was standing behind us in line. “Dude, I like your sweatshirt,” I heard Jay-Z say.

  I told the woman standing at the desk that I was there to check in, and no, I wasn’t Kathy Miller, but I was her daughter, and she would be there later.

  “Ah, yes, your mother’s assistant called earlier today and said that you would be coming. If you would just give Horatio your bags, he’ll bring them up to your rooms for you. Eliza will show you the way.”

  The two-bedroom suite overlooked the hotel’s circular entranceway and Doheny Drive. Sitting on top of the coffee table were bowls of M&M’S and champagne. There was a master bedroom with a king-sized bed and heavy drapes. and connected to that was a living room that had a pullout sofa, a refrigerator, a small dining table, and a coffee table. The room next door had two twin beds and a marble-top desk with a large television armoire to the right. Jack and I had to share a room? We hadn’t done that since, well, never.

  Mom came home that afternoon carrying a tote bag full of clothes on one shoulder and a cream-colored suit over the other. She was talking on a cell phone propped up only by her shoulder. “My apartment is currently an unacceptable living situation, and you are required to provide me and my children with comparable arrangements. Yes, I have already moved out. Well, there are other families from my children’s schools currently living at the Beverly Hills Hotel because of mold, so I have made the decision, based on legal counsel, to move to a hotel that is of a comparable living situation to Doheny Park. I’ve moved to the Four Seasons.” Mom took a breath and sat down on the couch, smiling hello. “So you’ll pay for our living and food expenses until the apartment becomes inhabitable. Thank you. Good-bye.” She clicked the phone shut.

  “Did they agree?” I asked Mom, sitting down next to her on the couch.

  “I certainly hope so.”

  They did agree, in the end. They, the insurance agency, would pay for our exorbitantly expensive two-bedroom suite and for every meal, no matter what or how much we ordered.

  I had never really considered the possibility of living in a hotel. After all, why would I? Hotels weren’t places that people lived, normally. Well, except for Eloise, who I had definitely enjoyed reading about when I was younger. And Caroline Parkman, too, apparently. But Caroline Parkman was a too-cool-for-school senior who I barely knew. And Eloise was six. She lived in the Plaza, and the book never showed how she might have to remember to order her breakfast the night before or put away her books and papers because otherwise the maid would hide them somewhere.

  MUN Is M-I-N-E

  Everything in MUN was going great. I had chosen my committee for the conference at Berkeley as well as the club’s cause for the year. I knew Taylor would be a better teammate, but I chose Courtney as my partner. She seemed genuinely pleased. And best of all, we had begun fundraising to build a school for AIDS orphans in Uganda.

  At the next club meeting, girls split up into their pairs, with each pair researching Uganda’s stance on the topics of its committee. Mine was AIDS in Africa. I was thrilled that all the research I had done regarding the AIDS orphan school could be put to use in my committee sessions. Courtney was sitting in the desk across from mine; we had rearranged the desks into pairs. She was researching AIDS awareness education and how Uganda felt about it.

  When my cell phone vibrated against my leg telling me I had a new text message, I reached discreetly into the pocket of my skirt. Cell phone use wasn’t exactly allowed during school hours. The message was from Joey: I got South Africa!

  Joey was so sweet that I couldn’t help but smile. He knew that I had Uganda, so he probably assumed we could sign on to some resolutions together.

  Stratfield was coming to the conference, too, and everyone wanted to arrange a dinner for our teams, mainly because their team had boys on it. Mr. Elwright and I had convinced everyone to research first, talk about dinner later.

  I text messaged Joey back, asking who his partner was. I received an almost immediate response.

  Your boyfriend.

  My fingers started shaking. Aaron wasn’t in MUN. Had he joined just because of me? What was going on?

  “What’s up?” Courtney asked me.

  “Nothing.” I dropped the phone back into my pocket and opened up my three-ring binder. “So, have you found any statistics?”

  “Becky,” Mr. E. called from his desk, “do you want to give everyone an update on the school?”

  “Um, sure.” I stood up and walked to the front of the room. “Hey,” I called out, and the room went silent apart from the shuffling of papers. All eyes were on me. “So, yesterday, I received a letter back from Namaya Hellen, my new pen pal in Uganda.” I had memorized what she’d said to me. The words had stuck out, every sentence piercing me. “Both of Namaya’s parents died of AIDS, and she is the sole caretaker for her three younger siblings. Namaya is only fourteen, younger than most of us. I told her about how we were raising money to help build a school for her to go to, and this i
s what she wrote in response: ‘I am so happy you are giving us a school for orphans. Now we can learn and be like the other children.’ We are making a difference, child by child.”

  Girls started clapping.

  “We’re so cool,” Courtney said, daring to speak up in the full room.

  That evening, I plopped down on my new bed in my new bedroom and dialed Aaron. “Hey. So I found out from Joey that you do MUN. Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked, trying to hide the hurt I was feeling.

  “Yeah, I sort of do MUN sometimes. It’s not really a big deal, though.”

  Not a big deal? “You know how important MUN is to me,” I told him.

  “Yeah, but it’s just a game.”

  I shoved my hand into a pillow. “It’s not a game to me.”

  “I get it, I get it. Don’t get worked up about it.” I heard rustling on the other end of the line. “I have to finish my homework.”

  “Oh, okay,” I said.

  What I wanted to say was, “What the hell?”

  Control

  “You’re jumpy,” June told me one Thursday afternoon. I’d been stressing about the MUN conference in Berkeley, which was only a couple weeks away. Plus, living at the Four Seasons was weird. And Dad had been spending more time with Darcy while Mom was spending more time yelling at the insurance company.

  “No kidding,” I said, my leg shaking.

  I tilted my head up. Her eyes were waiting.

  “I have a boyfriend,” I said. I averted my eyes. This was my first time mentioning Aaron to June. I didn’t quite understand why I had been so secretive.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Aaron.”

  “Where does he go to school?”

  “Stratfield.”

  “How long have you been going out?”