It took a lot to piss off Nick.
He’d reached “a lot.” “Lindsay—shut up! Sara, you said you befriended her on the corner of Hollywood and Highland. Seriously, what do you know about her?”
Sara tipped her chin up. “She’s a human being. She’s hungry and cold, and has no one. What else do I need to know?”
“How about”—Lindsay deliriously raked in the pot of chips, which she’d just won—“the location of the nearest homeless shelter?”
“Good idea.” Jared flipped his cell phone open.
Sara reached out and swiped the phone from him. “Better ask if they have two beds available. If you kick her out, I go with.”
A long pause. Finally, Jared muttered, “You’re being ridiculous.” But he didn’t take his phone back from her.
Sara dealt the next round. She played five-card stud.
Nick took three cards, Eliot, two. Lindsay insisted that because she had an ace, she was entitled to four. Jared tapped his cards on the table, meaning he’d play the hand dealt him.
Sara, also playing her original five cards, softened a bit. “I’ll take full responsibility for her.”
“What does that mean?” Jared demanded.
“I’ll keep an eye on her. She can come to work with me, and here in the house, she can help me with the cooking, cleaning, weeding the garden—you know, the stuff you and Lindsay are too good to do.”
Jared didn’t have an answer.
They played the round of poker, Sara raising the bet three times before the foursome stopped challenging her.
Then Sara turned over her hand: full house.
“California is the calamity capital of the world.” Eliot, who’d never so much as mowed the lawn at home (being allergic to pollen, mites, and dust), found himself in the backyard late Saturday morning, on his knees, sharing gardening duty with Nick, Sara, and Naomi. Armed with something called a weeding trowel, he was trying to uproot a stubborn dandelion—and more important, yank his housemates’ heads out of the sand.
“Between floods, fires, earthquakes, mudslides, and riots, more disasters have happened here than any other place,” he told them.
“At least there are no hurricanes,” chirped Sara. She was planting seedlings, determined to clean up the backyard, and pretty it up, too, with a new garden.
“The rains sometimes lead to massive floods, which can become landslides. I don’t have to tell you that homes like this one”—Eliot paused to nod at theirs—“are at big risk for that.”
Three sets of eyes stared at him: vacant (Nick), wary (Naomi), and the worst, indulgent (Sara, humoring him). Gamely, he plowed on. “I know you think I’m being paranoid, but—”
“You? Paranoid?” Nick, working an edging spade in the ground, quipped. “Why would we think that? Just ’cause you’re wearing a gas mask and gloves to weed the yard?”
“It’s not a gas mask!” Eliot pulled the surgical mask down to his chin. “It’s for my allergies, but you all should be wearing them. Who knows what kind of poison might be in the ground? I don’t want to breathe it in. And you all should be wearing gloves.”
Sara said soothingly, “We’re not making fun of you, Eliot.”
Naomi, who’d tried to settle in as unobtrusively as possible, giggled.
He blurted, “We’re all in imminent danger!”
“Danger, Will Robinson! Danger, Will Robinson!” Nick cupped his hands around his mouth like a megaphone and did his best Lost in Space voice.
Sara squealed with delight.
That wasn’t even remotely funny. Eliot scowled at them.
Nick poked him in the ribs with his edging spade. “Okay, we are making fun of you. But the alarmist thing is wearing thin, dude.”
“I’m being a realist. This is science.”
“My bad, man—I forgot that course you’re taking at UCLA. What’s it called, Disasters-R-Us?”
Again, Sara giggled. But when she looked up at Eliot’s serious mug, she stopped. “Eliot, sweetie, come on. Nothing bad has happened here in a long time.”
He could not help it. “Well, only if you consider nineteen ninety-four a long time ago—one of the worst earthquakes hit just a few miles from here. Fifty-five people were killed.”
That’s when Eliot noticed a flash of something—fear? memory?—scud across Naomi’s heart-shaped face. He was moved to ask, “Are you from California, Naomi? Were you here when that quake hit?”
She paused, and shook her head. “We traveled all over the country, so I’m not exactly from anywhere.”
Eliot totally didn’t believe her. Nor did he challenge her.
“Fifty-five people?” Nick was back on the earthquake subject. “That’s nothing compared to hurricane deaths, or tsunami devastation. I’ll take my chances at fifty-five.”
“You wouldn’t say that if one of those poor souls was someone you loved,” Sara pointed out. “But I believe in my heart we’ll be fine.”
Eliot kept on point. “A range of natural disasters, from brushfires to rockslides, collapsed bluffs, and earthquakes, have all hit L.A. at one time or another. The next time could be any time!”
Sara put down her watering can, folded her long shapely legs under her. “If we really are in imminent danger, do y’all think my momma would have allowed me to come out here?”
What Eliot thought: Her momma was a zealot waiting for her own life to begin when Sara got famous. What El said was, “I think we need to take this seriously, so we can be prepared if something does happen.”
“You cannot fix what you refuse to see,” Naomi mumbled, brushing her jaggedly cut jet-black hair out of her eyes. “I heard that somewhere.”
Eliot gave her props. “There! I couldn’t have said it better.”
“So what have they been saying in that class you’re taking?” Naomi, sitting on the crabgrass, pulled her knees in close to her body.
“The natural disasters we’re seeing—mudslides, brush fires, earthquakes—are gonna keep happening.”
“Oh, stop it,” Sara said. “You’re just tryin’ to scare the pants off us.” Catching Nick’s smile, she turned a deeper shade of red.
“What does your boyfriend back home say about your being here?” Eliot demanded. “Has he ever heard of the San Andreas fault line?”
Sara looked wounded; Eliot felt like a heel. “I’m not sure what Donald has heard of,” she said quietly. “He didn’t want me to come.”
“Hey, I’m sorry, that’s none of my business. I just …” Eliot reached out and took her hand.
“I understand. You’re worried something bad’s gonna happen. And even if we don’t agree, we’re friends, and we should listen.”
Nick stood up and peeled off his tank top. Eliot caught Sara’s reaction. Look up “lust” in the dictionary: That’d be her picture.
He stuttered, “The … the … thing about wildfires and floods is that you have some warning. Earthquakes can tear your life apart, without warning.”
Naomi suddenly bolted up, wordlessly, and headed inside the house.
Eliot continued, “Like I was saying, that earthquake in the San Fernando Valley was a six-point-seven magnitude. It would’ve been way worse if it had hit during the day, when people were at work, out shopping, in school, if more cars had been on the road. As it was, the tremor toppled chimneys and shattered windows all over Southern California. A dozen people were killed when an apartment building collapsed. An entire highway was destroyed; a freeway overpass collapsed in a busy intersection.”
“But if there’s no warning, what can anyone do?” Nick asked.
“Be ready. I’m putting together an earthquake preparedness kit—I bought a transistor radio, flashlights, gloves, gas masks, bike helmets, and a first-aid kit.”
“Transistor radio?” Sara asked.
“We’ll lose electricity in an earthquake—no TV, Internet, nothing. It’s the only way we’ll have of knowing what’s happening, when help is arriving.”
“Wha
t’s with the gloves? In case of snow?” Nick teased.
“Not snow: glass. It’ll shatter all around you. You don’t want it embedded in your hands when you’re trying to crawl out.”
“You bought all this stuff already? Where is it?” Sara asked.
Eliot smiled. “I’m putting it all in the kitchen cabinet by the microwave. One more thing: Nick, you gotta get Jared to show you where the main gas line in the house is. We’ll need to shut it off at the first tremor.”
He got them to agree to everything, except to practice drills like ducking under something sturdy, a heavy table or doorframe, and getting as far away from windows or anything made of glass. But Eliot was happy with the progress he’d made. At least they were listening. “It’s possible the next one will be, like, an eight on the Richter scale—that’s what they’re calling ‘the big one.’”
“Who’s got a big one?”
Lindsay, and her scathing wit, materialized. Leave it to her to make a crack that’d arouse and annoy them. Eliot shielded his eyes from the sun and looked up, hoping no one saw his face: the combination of lust and livid was embarrassing. Lindsay was luscious, bedecked in bangles, hoop earrings, toe rings, and ankle bracelets—and not much else. Her red string bikini was as tiny as a Kaballah bracelet. She’d come outside to sun herself, and deigned to stroll over to the garden.
“We were talking about earthquakes.” Eliot’s voice squeaked.
“Not that you couldn’t cause a few quakes, looking like that,” Nick noted.
Delighted, Lindsay dropped anchor—her towel and her barely covered butt. “Is Eliot making everyone nervous?”
Not as much as you are, he thought … nervously. “I’m just explaining—”
She cut him off with a dismissive wave. “Native Californians don’t worry about that stuff. So-called experts have been going all alarmist, predicting massive death and destruction for decades. Chances are, hurricanes will destroy the Southeast before we get even another tremor. We just get all the press.”
Native Californians … Eliot thought about what she’d said. People like Jared and Lindsay thrived on calamity—drama queens and princes lived for life on the edge. To them, it’s like a disaster movie they’ve been cast in. They really did live in a dream world.
Lindsay interrupted his musing. “Anyway, if you’re so sure of impending disaster, why don’t you leave? What’s keeping you here?”
Another question he’d asked himself.
Nick answered for him. “El, leave?” He looked meaningfully from near-naked Lindsay to shapely Sara, and shook his head. “Snowball, meet hell. This place is as near to heaven as my boy is likely to get.”
Lindsay chuckled. Sara laughed nervously.
Eliot colored but didn’t dispute his friend. He got up and strode into the house for a cool drink. He knew the real reason he’d stay. It wasn’t about the hot babes living under the same roof. Eliot had no shot with Lindsay, no matter how much she flirted with him.
And despite Nick’s encouraging him to go after Sara, she was a real long shot, what with the boyfriend back home and the way she looked at Nick. Besides, she’d confided in him about some purity pledge she’d taken, had shown him a ring that symbolized her commitment to stay a virgin until marriage. So no, Eliot wasn’t staying in the hopes of getting lucky. What kept his feet glued to the shaky California terrain was Nick. Something wasn’t right with his friend.
“You okay?”
He spun around. Naomi was settled in the corner of the striped couch, with what looked like a screenplay splayed over her knees.
“Yeah, I just came in for a cold drink. Can I get you something?”
She shook her head and returned her attention to the script.
Out of curiosity he asked, “Are you trying to break into showbiz too?”
She didn’t look up.
Naomi: Fear and Fireworks on Independence Day
Crack! Boom! Pop!
The house rumbled beneath her. It sounded like the deep growl from the belly of a beast—or was that her own body? Naomi was quaking, shivering, despite the blanket she was snuggled under. She hugged her knees, squeezed herself farther into the corner of the sofa between the pillows. As if that could protect her.
She tried to focus on the dialogue of the script Sara had given her to read, hoping to blot out the loud commotion just outside the sliding doors. Why Sara insisted Naomi read it, she couldn’t figure out. It wasn’t a part Sara was up for; this was some random story about a policeman and a runaway. Sara probably thought Naomi related to the plot: That’s how little Sara, or anyone, knew.
The story wasn’t half bad, but the part of the runaway, Moxie, was not one she related to at all. Naomi had not run away.
She put her head back into the script, but it was no use. The blasting fireworks panicked her, brought up memories she’d worked hard to forget. As for the burbling buddies in the backyard hot tub, they just distracted her.
“Awesome!” She heard Nick reacting enthusiastically to the fierce display of a Fourth of July sky pageant. “Oh, man, that rocked!”
“Look at the stars, those colors!” Sara marveled.
“That’s what it’s like every time Jared and I hook up,” Lindsay teased Sara. “The earth moves, we see stars! You should try it.” Word had spread quickly through the share house about Sara’s moral convictions. Naturally, Lindsay took every opportunity to taunt her.
“Quit it, Linz,” Jared interjected. “Sara Calvin will be our first virgin movie star.”
Naomi knew Jared was still furious that Sara had brought her into their house. And since the high and mighty Jared was chief pooh-bah, it was a wonder Sara had prevailed. There were moments, like now, she wished Sara had not. It wasn’t for lack of gratefulness. She was plenty thankful to Sara. She just wished she didn’t have to be.
Pop! Pop! Crack!
Another chorus of fireworks exploded, louder. Naomi jumped. Whoever was launching these was close to the house. Too jittery to sit in one place, the formerly homeless girl sprang off the couch and strode over to the sliding doors, where she could now see, as well as hear, the show going on outside.
It was after nightfall on July Fourth. The five housemates had squeezed into the hot tub. She could almost see the fireworks reflected in their shiny, happy faces, their unscarred eyes. From this rarefied perch high in the Hollywood Hills, they did have an amazing view of spectacular light shows, above and below them.
There was room for her in the hot tub. Sara had offered her a bathing suit.
No way. The idea of hanging out with this bunch freaked her out.
The feeling was mutual.
They tolerated her. It’d been a little over a week and she hadn’t assaulted anyone, stolen anything, smoked or snorted any illegal substances, nor snuck any lowlifes into their house. Moreover, she helped Sara with the chores. Didn’t mean she was now welcome.
It was easy to know what Jared thought of her. Garbage. Trash. Human debris. Not that McSmoothy said as much to her face. His act was neutral, but he wasn’t much of an actor. Jared still wanted her out. Lindsay wanted what Jared wanted, and gave him all he asked for—and judging by the frequent noise from his bedroom, they were making each other very happy.
Jared and Lindsay, too impressed with themselves for words, were glued at the hip in the Jacuzzi, lasciviously feeding each other bits of sushi. Lots of tongue action, putting on a show for everyone to see.
Eliot was mooning after Sara, who was lusting after Nick, whose dark eyes were focused only on the spectacle in the sky. Naomi chuckled. The pious girl was havin’ all sorts of trouble with that temptation law, or commandment, or whatever it was. Every night, during her prayers before bed, she kept praying that she wouldn’t fall into temptation.
Naomi didn’t think He was listening. Not that she believed much in God, or in any higher power. Maybe she had once, a long, long time ago. But that belief had long ruptured, had gotten buried beneath the rubble of what was once
her life.
Compared to what she’d been through, the little domestic dramas playing out here were laughable. These five had no idea how lucky they all were. Naomi checked herself: She’d been pretty lucky too, that Sara had come into her life when she did.
The good-hearted country girl was the real deal, a rare deal, a true believer. Doing the humanitarian thing, befriending Naomi instead of what most people did: avert their eyes and walk by the beggar girl, or toss a few coins in her cup and continue walking. Worse were those who wanted something from her.
Sara didn’t want anything. She wasn’t trying to proselytize, pimp, or procure her services in any way. Sara never pressed her to find out what had happened to Naomi, why she was on the streets. The tall girl with the wavy blond hair was naive enough to just want to help.
Still, no way would Naomi have come home with her. But the day she finally said yes was the day the street had gotten too dangerous: Some low-life skinheads had threatened her, and she’d been terrified.
And despite the roommates’ resistance, things were okay so far.
During the day, she went to work with Sara on that Caught in the Act TV show. No one asked her who she was or why she was there. They just took her for another lowly intern and piled drone stuff on her—Xeroxing, filing, fetching coffee, taking notes. She was too smart to get comfortable, though.
Her “pay” for working on the TV show with Sara and helping around the house? Food, clothing, shelter. Naomi had her own room of sorts: the basement of the share house. The most important compensation, however, was safety. For now, Naomi was safe. And now was all she, or any of them, really had.
Naomi put the script down and wandered back into the kitchen, where a sink full of dirty dishes awaited. She didn’t really have to, but she needed to keep her shaking hands busy, so she began to scrub and dry each glass, spoon, fork, dish, and coffee mug.
Her eyes wandered out the window over the sink to the backyard. Nick was slurping down a Bud Lite from the bottle, leaning against the back of the hot tub, eyes closed. He had that model pose down. He was harmless, she thought, sweet, dumb, and meaty. He’d been friendly from the start, and now regarded her as a mere curiosity. He didn’t ask a lot of questions or stare at her relentlessly like his roommate.
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