by Jen Larsen
So we are playing hooky, as my grandmother would call it, on a Friday morning. We’re driving fast and furiously up the coast, taking the long way to San Francisco. I don’t think I’ve ever deliberately made the choice to reject all the things I’m supposed to be doing, leaving behind the should and barreling directly into the want. It must be what Laura feels like all the time.
Laura is in the passenger seat next to me, her head bumping against my shoulder and her feet, both of them, out the window. Her long, graceful toes look like they should be dragging across the cliffs that loom up on our right, scraping across the tops of the pine trees that crowd us up against the bluffs, dropping straight down into the sea. Black water, white froth, a wide-shouldered blue sky, it’s everything, rushing right through us so it’s everything we feel. Jolene is curled up at the back door, both arms crossed on the window ledge. Her eyes are closed and her face is turned up to the sun. Her hair is just as gold and white as the clouds and it is whipping around her head, streaming along the side of the car like a torch. I can feel my hair in a nest around my face, a cloud of salt smell and tangles, and I laugh.
We’ve been quiet for a hundred miles, the wind scouring us clean and everything strewn behind us, left to scatter in the wind, melt in the seawater and dissolve in the sun. I drop my foot harder on the pedal, take the series of curves ahead of us in long, languid loops. Jolene smiles but doesn’t open her eyes.
Home is hours away and the ocean is so close I could run my fingers through the waves and I am almost convinced that we will be all right.
I thought about calling Hector—this is the kind of thing he is best at, this driving-too-fast kind of freedom, and that is when I like him the most. When he grins at me and his face is exactly like a thrown-open window and there is nothing but pure happiness in him. It opens something in me, too. Just for a little while. But he still hasn’t called. It feels like he should know everything that’s happened, but he’s too far away to talk to. He’ll come find me when he is ready. At least, I think he will. I’m not sure how else to handle it. We’ve never had an argument before.
I have only been to San Francisco with my grandmother, for her conferences. I don’t know the city well, and there’s a frisson in my chest that feels a tiny bit like fear. We’re plunging right into the middle of a place I don’t know, crowds of people I’ll never see again. Laura’s father gives her his platinum credit card and sends her there for every holiday and birthday because he’s too busy to shop and her stepmom is somewhere tropical. Laura knows the city almost as well as she knows San Ansia, which seems like an overwhelming amount of information to me. And Jolene does not seem nervous at all. I keep glancing in the side-view mirror at her peaceful face, which is the best part of the trip so far.
We’re supposed to be in the Tenderloin, somewhere in the middle of the city, but I automatically take the exit to the Great Highway, which runs up the side of San Francisco like a hand on a thigh. It’s getting dark earlier; the sun is casting a redder gold, bright on the sides of our faces. I squint against it, glancing over at the ocean, all tumbling sparks of silver.
“We’re here,” I say, and nudge Laura, who’s slipped into a nap with her head against the window, her mouth slightly slack and her sunglasses sliding down the bridge of her nose.
“What? No,” she says, peering past me and out at the ocean. “Oh,” she says. “We’re supposed to be downtown. Are we late? I think we’re running late, the show is at six and I knew we weren’t going to make it if you took the One, shit.” She’s lifting her butt off the seat, digging through her pockets to find her phone.
“We’re not late,” Jolene says, sitting up and yawning. “We’re really early, aren’t we?” But Laura is texting rapidly, biting her lip and squinting at the screen as we swoosh by the Beach Chalet’s long row of glinting windows and swing a right at the rickety windmill. “I wanted to go to the Camera Obscura,” Jolene says wistfully, looking behind us like she could see the beach behind us over the trees.
“Maybe on the way back?” I say.
“We’re not going to have time to see it,” Laura says, still texting. She’s frowning at the phone now.
“Maybe we can drive up again soon,” I tell Jolene.
“The shorter way, maybe,” she suggests, and I snort.
“Omar’s taking the bus,” Laura says, sitting back in her seat and dropping the phone in her lap. “I told him to wait, but he’s loaded up everything into a duffel bag or a rolling suitcase or something and he’s taking the bus from buttfuck nowhere and then walking.”
“You didn’t tell me we were going to give him a ride,” I say to Laura. We’re cresting the hill at the top of Golden Gate Park, and I just miss the yellow light.
The brick church at the opposite corner squats and scowls, and it looks like all the condos across from the park are for sale. I can’t picture Laura living in one of them with Omar, kimonos nailed over all the windows and streamers of photographs clothespinned to strings crisscrossing the ceiling and Omar cooking rice and vegan tortillas while Laura—I can’t imagine what Laura would be doing or why she’d want to live surrounded by bad photos and with someone who smokes all the time and never eats cheese. I’m not even sure she likes him. I secretly think he’s just a place far away when she needs to escape.
She met him on one of her shopping trips, at a coffee shop where he was chain-smoking American Spirits. Just two years older than us. She ended up staying overnight with him. “Nothing happened,” she told me breezily. She just slept really well on his roommate’s futon. I, on the other hand, couldn’t sleep that night, not knowing where she was. In the morning, she arrived at my house with lattes, still wearing her sunglasses. She went “Oof!” when I hugged her tight.
“No one ever notices when I’m missing.” She had laughed at me. “You know I’m always okay.” The elegant, dismissive flip of her fingers.
Now we shoot through the light as soon as it turns green. Laura says, “Well, I told you I had to help him set up. He’s bound to get lost or lose something.”
Jolene leans forward between the seats. “You are nice to him,” she says. “But I thought he had roommates or bandmates or something?”
Laura shrugs. “Maybe. But I promised to help and now he’s getting really sad at me and saying I don’t even have to come and the worst of it is that he isn’t being passive aggressive, he thinks I don’t want to go and it’s really okay with him even though it hurts his feelings.”
Jolene says, “That sounds like the definition of passive aggressive to me,” and I laugh.
Twisting around in her seat, Laura glares at Jolene and then at me. “It’s not,” she says. “I know him better than anyone. He’s got a really good heart. He’s sincere. He’s respectful.”
“He’s kind of helpless,” I say.
“Like a kitten,” Jolene says.
“Not super cute in a grown dude,” I say.
Laura flops back in her seat and crosses her arms over her chest. “Yeah,” she sighs. “At least he’s talented. Sort of.”
“He’s in a show,” Jolene says, all encouragement. “Doesn’t that prove something?”
“I don’t know,” Laura says. She’s gnawing on her thumbnail. “I don’t know how it works.”
“Guess you’ll find out,” I say.
She glances over at me sharply. “Yeah,” she says. “Guess I will.”
We hit the Tenderloin. I’ve always been shit at parallel parking but I manage to wedge us between a rusted-out scooter and a Smart car without knocking either of them over. The Smart car’s got its windows busted out. The smell of pee, which is the first thing that let us know we had definitely crossed over Van Ness and were in the heart of darkness, is even more violent out here. Jolene is gagging and Laura is texting and my fingers are tight around the steering wheel. There’s a man sitting on a folding chair in front of a bodega called Grand Liquors that fills half the block and he’s hunched over with a towel draped over him. He loo
ks like he’s breastfeeding under there but I know—and I cringe when I realize it—that’s really not what he’s doing. Laura would laugh at me if I pointed it out. I don’t like how lost I feel out here.
I don’t want Jolene to notice him, or the white woman next to him wearing flip-flops. Her feet are black all the way to the ankles, and then she is the palest blue-white I’ve ever seen, with eyes as watery as skim milk. She’s staring at us. I turn around to make sure the car is locked but I catch sight of the glass littering the street and sidewalk around the Smart car, and realize it doesn’t matter out here on this stretch of block where everything is gray and greasy and shimmering with a kind of sadness and stink.
“Are you sure this is it?” Jolene says. She seems calm. Happy, even. “I mean, did Omar tell you the right address?” She’s shrugging into her cardigan. I realize that I forgot my sweatshirt, and I can see the goose bumps on Laura’s shoulders.
Laura looks up. “He didn’t have an address, he said. He said to ‘come find it off Turk and Taylor.’”
I point up at the street signs on the corner. “There you go,” I say. I am jittery, and trying not to look back at the people on the street. I can feel them staring at us and I wish I could assure them that I know exactly how much I don’t belong here.
“No, there he is,” Jolene says. We turn to see Omar huffing down the block toward us, his head hunched over and his lank black hair flopping in his face. He’s hurrying with his arms wrapped around a pile of frames and a duffel bag bouncing on his back. He is scrawny and his little legs look hilarious, pistoning down the street. I cover my mouth so I don’t start giggling hysterically.
Laura takes off, her sandals slapping against the pavement, and I hope she doesn’t step in anything.
We start after her, not wanting to be left behind. She pulls the bag out of Omar’s arms and scolds him for not listening to her when she said to wait for us. He’s nodding with his head down, and then points at the busted grate they’re standing in front of. Everyone on the block can hear her say, “Seriously?” even from all the way back here.
Two boarded-over windows are barricaded by metalwork. The gate in front of the door is hanging from its hinges and the entranceway seems to just be covered by a few more boards. It is dark in there. I have never seen anything like it in real life—maybe in gritty movies, or cop shows with a lot of angry people yelling. I didn’t think places like the entire Tenderloin existed in real life, really. But Jolene is grinning.
“Guerilla art,” Omar is telling Laura earnestly. He sets everything down on the sidewalk and starts to drag the limping gate open and I cringe because I would give up my hand-sanitizer-is-killing-the-planet stance in favor of drowning everything that has touched this sidewalk and that gate in gallons of the stuff about now.
I had planned to revel in the gritty realness of a life that is so far removed from our precious, tiny little town, but now I am wondering if I am not as resilient as I thought I was. The sky is still blue, I remind myself. The buildings are settled against the exact same clouds and the ocean is just twenty minutes away. This is the same planet and I am the same person and we are probably not going to catch any diseases . . . if we’re careful.
Jolene pats my arm. “We’re not going to catch any diseases from the sidewalk,” she whispers, and I wonder if I had said that aloud or if my twitching is that easy to read. Jolene pats my arm again soothingly like she is trying to settle down all the words that are bubbling up looking for a way out of my mouth. “Lots of people don’t get diseases here,” she says.
“Statistically speaking that is really unlikely.” My voice is very grim.
She’s still grinning. I’m disconcerted.
A woman in red shorts and a tube top stops next to us, snatches up a cigarette butt from the stained pavement, and pops the end in her mouth. I shriek, “You have got to be kidding me!” She stops short and looks at me hard with one eye screwed shut.
“I didn’t mean to get upset,” I say to her. She grunts and walks away and I put my hands over my face and Jolene is giggling at me. “Oh god,” I say.
When I pull my hands away from my face Jolene is grinning at me. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen—you don’t like this place very much, huh?” she says.
My fingers are twitching around the car keys in my pocket. “I want to go,” I tell Jolene.
“You’re fine,” she says, looking very reassuring. “It’s okay. We’re all here together and it’s not like—” She pauses and frowns. “Nope. I don’t have anything worse to compare it to right off the top of my head.”
I choke on the unexpected laugh, and cough, and then I’m breathing normally again. She pats me again, a little more firmly, and picks an armful off the pile of Omar’s stuff on the sidewalk.
“I’ll wait out here with the stuff,” I call, but then I scoop everything that’s left and bolt inside behind her.
By eight, the dirty, windowless store with the torn-down interior walls is packed. There are Christmas lights attached to a chugging generator that drowns out the yelling on the street and the traffic noise and the random cop-siren whoop-whoops. There are bunches of candles stuck on folding chairs, with sticks of incense stabbed into them and dropping big columns of ash. Bare bulbs swing dangerously low over everyone’s heads, turning the clouds of pot smoke and incense smoke and cigarette smoke and smoke-machine smoke a jaundiced yellow that looks like it ought to smell worse than it already does. The smells mingle and disappear into the jangling, screeching noise coming from the CD player that’s sitting in the corner, one that looks like my mom’s with the two attached speakers and the handle. It fits here, though. Everything fits here, the stained concrete floors and the graffiti on the walls and greasy scraps of the SF Weekly scattered like someone was trying to house-train a puppy. Everyone is wearing heavy black glasses and the dudes all have button-down shirts and tight jeans in primary colors. Most of them have beards. They’re all even slimmer than Jolene, elongated like fun-house mirror reflections, and they’re drifting gently around the room like they’re dandelion fluff being wafted by a steady wind.
Now, with all of this smoke, I start to wonder if I’m high.
Yep, I definitely think I’m high.
There’s a mattress in the center of the floor, blue satin and sagging in the middle, with a dark stain that’s shaped like Uzbekistan, and it’s clustered around with candles to make it . . . festive, I guess? Jolene keeps flickering in between all these people, and I think she is flirting with one of the beard group. She actually has a beer in her hand, and she’s waving it as she talks animatedly. I am in the corner and I have to keep reminding myself not to lean on anything. I keep reminding myself to stay here and stay quiet. It feels safe here.
Laura is chattering to the group of dudes surrounding her, a beer in her hand too. She is glowing—I am surprised not everyone is surrounding her. Omar stands there with his hands in his pockets, looking down at the dirty floor with a small smile on his face. You can’t see any of his photographs. They’re all leaning against the walls. The light of the candles next to each of them and the overhead bulb glares off the glass and casts shadows and no one is even bothering to lean down and squint at them. I argued about it the whole time we were unpacking his bags, but no one listened to me.
Everyone is happy. You can see how happy they are just surrounded by art or by one another or by this, all this, whatever this is that fills up the room and keeps me backing away from it. I wonder where Laura got her beer and Jolene got her beer and I want to ask someone where to find a beer. I really feel like I’ve had a few already. I reach out my hand to touch the sleeve of a small, blade-thin person. Their hair is shaved all the way up the back and wisps on the top spill down over their bare skin like a fountain. I miss but I reach out again and they turn with a jerk. They’re wearing a lot of eyeliner, winged up and out in gorgeous swoops and I want to touch that too. I think about putting out my hand to touch it and I must have because they look at my
outstretched hand and sneer at me. That’s what it looks like to me. But then they say, “Oh, what? You want?” and hand over the joint. I am good at pretending so I inhale smoothly and hold it.
They say, “I like your necklace!” and I have to touch my neck to figure out what they’re talking about. My DNA pendant.
I cough out smoke in a stream. When I can breathe again, I shout “Thanks!” I’m too loud. “My grandmother gave it to me! I’m going to be a doctor! At Harvard!” I lift the pendant and smooth it back down. She is not listening. She turns away and leaves me with the joint. The tip is still glowing red. I’m not sure what to do with it so I take another drag so my lungs are full and I wonder why I can’t just enjoy this feeling of being full, my lungs inflated with smoke and the noise and the dark. I don’t know how long I stand there. My eyes flicker around the room but keep getting caught on each of the bulbs of the Christmas lights. I realize, suddenly, that they’re beautiful. I smile at Jolene but she doesn’t notice me, so I push my way around and step on the mattress. I bounce across it in three steps and people are looking at me and I laugh as I stumble off because my knees are made of marshmallow candy. I throw my arms around Jolene and curl in a comma to put my face down on her shoulder.
“Oh, Jolene,” I say. “I love you. I think you are really the best and I will always try to take care of you because you are so fragile like a flower or a small bird.”
She pats me and rubs my shoulder.
“You should just do it,” I yell in her ear. “You should just say, ‘Fuck all the haters’ and do your thing. I mean, whatever your thing is. You know I’m right. I’m always right. I got your back, Jolene, I got you, you got this. You have to do it, you have to take the steps you need to take.” Jolene is pushing back from me and I hear the person she’s talking to say, “Oh, is she yours then?”
“No,” Jolene says. “She’s—”
“Yes,” I say indignantly, standing up straight, keeping my arm around her neck. “I’m hers.”