by Melody Mayer
Her mother laughed as they made their way up the grand staircase. “You never know.”
Lydia gave her mother a quick version of the grand tour. The last time Karen had been in Los Angeles, Kat and Anya had lived in a different house, so this was entirely new to her. The kitchen, the sunroom, the game room, the sitting room, the indoor/outdoor back porch, the TV and media room, the family room, the formal living room, the formal dining room—all of it drew appropriate oohs and aahs from her mother. But her mom was most impressed by the library, where Anya kept her rare Russian novels, and where Lydia's hand trailed over a signed first edition of Dostoyevsky's The Idiot.
Her mother rubbed a forefinger along the book's spine. “This is so hard on Kat. She and Anya have been together forever.”
“Between you and me, Mom? I can't stand the bitch.” She led her mother down the hall to the green guest room.
“I couldn't stand her either, sweet pea,” her mom confessed, falling back into her southern drawl as easily as Lydia had. “Every time Kat talked to me, I knew she wasn't really happy. She was like a serf in her own house, which is a bunch of heavy-handed, draconian horse dooky. I hope you're being treated better than that.”
“Now that she's gone, and you're here … ?” Lydia smiled as she set her mom's bag on the floor next to the forest green quilt-covered king-sized bed. “Enjoy your shower. There's endless hot water. Stay in as long as you like.”
“Where are you going?” Karen asked.
“My guesthouse.”
“Good. I'll stop by after my shower. I want to hear everything. Where you eat, who your friends are, what your new school will be like … and most importantly, who's this boy Billy you wrote to me about.”
Lydia started back to her guesthouse, but before she was out the back door of the main house she heard the main landline ring. Thinking that it might be Anya, and deciding she wanted to shield her aunt from talking to the Merry Matron of Moscow, she answered it in the kitchen. “Carpenter residence,” Lydia chimed in a Scottish accent, having some fun at Anya's expense. “ 'Ooh are ya this evening?”
“Lydia? Is that you? Man, I lucked out. Can you speak up? I can't hear you very well.”
Shit. The connection was bad, but there was no doubt about the voice. Luis Amador, the golf pro by day, stalker-freak by night, one-night-fling from hell.
“Luis? Why are you—how many times do I have to tell you? Just. Go. Away!”
The shaky phone line made the chuckling faint, but it was still there. “And how many times do I have to tell you? I am always here for you. Particularly now, since you broke up with your boyfriend and need a shoulder to cry on. Or a lap to sit on. Or a—”
Lydia cringed, her knuckles turning white around the neck of the handset. What was wrong with this guy?
“It's a real sad thing when a boy cannot take no for an answer,” Lydia seethed. “Someone might think you're compensating for being on the small side. And I'm not talking about your height.”
Luis laughed. “We both know that isn't true.”
Shit. She didn't remember anything from that night, so she'd have to take his word for it. Another tack was called for. “Billy and I are exclusive now,” she told him. “You and I had fun. But it's time to go have fun with some other lucky lady.”
“Wait. You're still going out with him?” Luis sounded stunned.
“Right,” Lydia confirmed. “So even if we slept together—and considering that I was too drunk to remember, which by the way, is an incredibly stupid thing to do that won't happen twice, thank you very much—the important thing is that Billy believes me. And you will never convince him otherwise.”
“Well, you might think so, bitch. You might think you're done with the past, but you know what? The past isn't done with—”
Lydia couldn't take another moment of this. She slammed the phone down, then took the receiver off the hook in case Luis planned to call back. She'd hang it back up later.
What a scumbucket he had turned out to be! If he thought he was going to intimidate her, he was messing with the wrong trained-by-a-shaman girl.
With a crack that sounded around the stadium, the referee's assistant fired the starter's pistol to end the first half. Both teams—Bel Air High School in its blue uniforms with white letters, and Echo Park in its white unis with green and gold trim— straggled off the field as the public-address announcer declared the score.
“And at the end of the first half, the score is, the Echo Park Eagles, twenty-seven, and the Bel Air Bengals, three. Please welcome the Echo Park Eagles marching band to the field!”
“Olé, olé olé olé!” The cheer went up from the Echo Park bleachers. This cheer was so familiar to Esme; they always greeted the marching band with this Spanish chant taken from the world of soccer. The utterly bizarre thing was, she was not sitting with them.
Esme was sitting with the enemy.
How many times had she looked disdainfully over at the rich kids from the rich school and hated them, with their salon-streaked hair and their designer whatever. Their Beemers and Jeeps and hot-shit little sports cars filled the parking lot. You knew which vehicles belonged to kids from Echo Park. The rusty pickup trucks. The pimp-your-ride vans with the oversized wheels and the ghetto-blasters. And then there was the way the rich kids would look at the Echo Park kids, like they smelled bad. It had pissed Esme off so much that she'd stopped going to away games.
Only now here she was. Part of them.
She'd arrived with Kiley and Lydia. Kiley had driven them in Platinum's white BMW 321i, and parked in the three-level parking structure north of the athletic complex. They paid the nominal admission charge and entered the vast, gleaming football stadium right out of Remember the Titans. Esme saw three or four girls she knew from the Echo. They cut their eyes at her; twitched their hips and whispered to one another, obviously about her. Esme told herself she didn't care—it wasn't as if she'd liked those girls when she was still in the Echo. Two of the girls, Consuela and Daisy, were in the Razor Girls and could gangbang with the best of 'em. In tenth grade, Daisy had a baby who was being raised by her mother. Consuela was in and out of juvie. Still, Esme couldn't help it. As she climbed the bleachers on the Bel Air side with Lydia and Kiley, she felt like a traitor.
Now it was halftime, and as much as she liked Lydia and Kiley, she really could not sit on the side where she did not belong another minute, even if she did go to school there. She excused herself and went around to the Echo side of the stadium, peering around, looking for her best friend, Jorge. He'd sent her a text message that he was coming to the game, but she hadn't seen him.
She slid into a seat next to Marisol, a shy girl with a long braid down her back who Esme knew from her honors English class. Marisol was also a friend of Jorge's.
“¿Qué pasa, chica?” Esme asked, falling into the cadence of the Echo without even thinking about it.
Marisol eyed her coolly. “Esme.”
Marisol's friend Antoinette studied Esme through half-closed eyes. These girls were at the top of their class, two of the few Esme knew who would go on to college. And they didn't seem to like Esme any more than the gangbangers did.
“Have you seen Jorge?” Esme asked.
Marisol just shrugged. She two-fingered a homemade tostada from some aluminum foil and took a bite. Esme's mouth watered. Evidently Marisol had brought food made by her mother, who had a job in Santa Monica cooking for a famous movie director and his actress wife. A real job, because she'd actually been born in the United States; not an off-the-books-because-she-was-illegal job.
“How you like Gringo-land?” Antoniette asked.
How did she like it? How could she explain that it was wonderful and horrible at the same time? Over here the people looked like her. Dressed like her. Talked like her. Over here, she didn't have to feel strange about using Spanglish if she wanted, or even a word in Spanish if the Spanish word was better than an English one.
“It's okay” was all she fina
lly said.
The Echo Park cheerleaders finished their cheer. Across the stadium, the Bel Air kids rose and cheered as one: “That's all right, that's okay, you're gonna work for us someday! That's all right, that's okay, you're gonna work for us someday!”
“Charming,” came a familiar male voice that Esme would have known anywhere. She looked up. Jorge was standing in the aisle regarding her. “You slumming it?” he added.
She took in his familiar lanky frame and piercing dark eyes. Just seeing him made something inside her relax. He was the smartest person she knew; a poet, a rapper, a political organizer. Plus, he knew her better than anyone else in the world.
Jorge wore black jeans and a blue T-shirt. His hair had grown since Esme had last seen him, and he had it slicked back on his head. Not nearly as tall as Jonathan, nor as well built, but he was still very handsome. In fact, Esme thought he'd never looked better.
“Makes me not want to sit over there. Ever.” Esme's eyes were dark.
“You really wanna define yourself by where you sit?” Jorge asked.
Esme shrugged. “Why not? Other people do.”
“Oh, well then,” Jorge mocked, a smile tugging at his lips.
Just looking at him made her realize how ridiculous she sounded. She watched the Echo Park band step onto the field wearing their familiar green and gold uniforms.
“So.” Jorge shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “You don't call, you don't write,” he teased.
“I've been busy,” Esme said.
“Jonathan?”
“Work,” Esme replied. She didn't really like talking with Jorge about her love life. He hadn't approved of Junior, her former boyfriend. And she was sure he wasn't high on Jonathan, either.
“And soon school,” he added. He tugged her away from Marisol and Antoinette, who were listening in on their conversation while pretending not to. “Your parents are right, you know. This is a huge opportunity for you. Don't blow it.”
“I don't need a third parent,” Esme said crossly, tossing her hair off her face.
“Good, because I'm not in the market for a daughter,” Jorge shot back. “The whole teen-dad thing is highly overrated.”
“No shit,” Esme agreed. She knew many teen dads, the vast majority of whom did not parent their kids. It always came down to the mom, age sixteen, fifteen, even fourteen, often with the help of her mom or grandparents. That, along with gangbanging, was the life Esme vowed she would never live.
The band started a medley of songs by Ricky Martin; Esme pretended to listen. But really, she was lost in thought. There'd been many strange experiences since she'd decided to come to live at the Goldhagens' and take care of their children. But this football game, where her old high school was playing her new high school, and where her old friends were sitting together on one side of the field, while the kids from her new school were on the other side of the field, had to be one of the strangest.
“I should go back over there,” Esme mumbled. She was trying to pick out Lydia and Kiley from clear across the field but couldn't.
“Come on, Esme,” Marisol called. “Be with your homegirls.”
Oh. Great. Now they were her homegirls. Just a moment earlier they had been treating her like a traitor to La Raza.
“Now they're your homegirls, huh?” Jorge asked, his voice low, as if reading Esme's mind. But that was how it had always been with them. His eyes flicked over her. “You look nice,” he added.
She was wearing a short black skirt and sandals with a skinny three-inch heel, and a black halter top. She sat with Jorge and they talked about everything, paying little attention to the game down below—Echo Park was way ahead. Jorge's band, the Latin Kings (he wrote the lyrics for their songs), had played at a recent immigration rally. He was already thinking about where he wanted to go to college and had recently been on a trip to Princeton with his parents to check it out. Esme knew he had the grades and the test scores to get in.
“You want to go to Princeton?” Esme asked. “Could you pick any place whiter?”
“Well, just think,” Jorge teased, “I can rep all the brown people.” He leaned his forearms on his thighs, hands dangling. “I don't know where I want to go yet, really. What about you?”
“I can't think past senior year of high school.”
“Don't give me that,” Jorge said sharply. “You are going to college.”
“Fine, I'm going to college, I just don't want to talk about it.”
Down on the field, the Echo Park marching band finished up its halftime show with the school fight song, and then marched off the field to thunderous whoops and hollers from the local fans. The announcer came on to say that in keeping with tradition, there was no Bel Air High School marching band, but that a famous BAHS graduate would be entertaining. The Bel Air side cheered when a former member of the Eagles was rolled out onto the field on the back of a flatbed truck with his band, and launched into “Hotel California.”
Jorge stood up. “Your friends are here, right?”
Esme nodded.
“Then let's go over and say hi. I haven't seen Kiley in forever. 'Cept on television, of course.” He laughed; so did Esme. To-day's testimony at Platinum's trial had been all over the news, as a representative of the Los Angeles Police Department testified to the drugs that they'd found in Platinum's living room. Platinum's lawyer tried to argue that the drugs might have been planted, but Judge Terhune had disallowed the line of inquiry.
Esme hesitated. Across the way were Kiley and Lydia, yes. But there were all those other people.…
“I don't know, Jorge. Maybe we should just stay here and hang out.”
“What? Eh, you afraid?” Jorge looked at her closely. “You can't be afraid. That's where you're going to be going to school. You made that decision already.”
Esme fidgeted, and Jorge sat back down.
“I'm not like you,” she told him.
“Not like me how? You're much better looking, not to mention just as smart and just as talented. Okay. You don't rap. But you're an artist, Esme.”
“I don't get it,” Esme ruminated. “Back in June, you were wondering if I should even take this job, or go to this school. Now, it's like you want me to be one of them. Jorge, I'll never be one of them.”
Jorge grinned. “Now, my girl is being honest. Tell me what you're thinking.”
Through the rest of halftime, and most of the third quarter, Esme talked and Jorge listened. All the time they'd grown up together in the Echo, she'd felt that Jorge was like a brother to her— a wiser, smarter brother, even though they were the same age. Jorge's father was a public defender. Jorge himself talked about going to law school at UCLA, working in government, and running for mayor. It wasn't impossible. The current mayor was Latino. All it took was brains and drive, and Jorge had plenty of both.
Esme told him about Tarshea. About Jonathan. About what was going on with her tattoo business and how much money she was making. About the weird orientation sessions she'd had here at this very school. About how the hopes and dreams of June had come crashing into the hard reality of August. About how she was having second thoughts about anything and everything.
“You finished?”
Esme nodded, and she felt Jorge's muscular arm go around her. It was the nicest gesture that he could make, and she felt so comfortable.
“You have a lot going on,” he acknowledged. Then he stood and reached a hand down to her. “I'm gonna mull all that. We'll talk about it later. Now let's go say hi to your friends.”
His arm stayed around her all the way down the bleachers, and all the way around the field.
She spotted Kiley first, about halfway up the bleachers on the Bel Air side. With the score sitting at forty-five to ten, and only ten minutes to go in the game, the crowd had thinned out considerably. Also sitting with Kiley and Lydia were two of the girls who'd given them the orientation tour. Staci what's-her-name and Amber. Staci wore an aqua-and-brown-polka-dotted babydoll t
unic with brown leggings and ballet flats. Amber wore a lace kimono over skinny jeans and sky-high Jimmy Choos. They had guys with them—cute in a generic, we're-cool-rich-boys kind of way.
“Hey, y'all!” Lydia called when she saw them. “Were you guys across the field hollerin' for the other team?”
“Yeah,” Esme said, just as Echo Park scored another touchdown.
“Evidently it worked,” Jorge added with a laugh.
Staci and Amber had to wait patiently to be introduced. Then they introduced the guys. Richie, the red-haired guy, was Staci's boyfriend, and was in the film program at USC. Trent was with Amber—he went to BAHS, and Amber reported that he played guitar in a fast-rising post-punk group that already had gigs at some of the biggest clubs in Hollywood.
“And how do you know Jorge?” Staci asked easily.
Here it was. Esme was going to have to admit the truth. That she knew him from the Echo. Then there'd have to be a long explanation of who Jorge wasn't. That he wasn't a gangbanger. That he wasn't a hood. That he wasn't going to take names and numbers and come back with his cholos.
No, wait. She didn't owe them any explanations. She didn't have to tell them shit. Before Esme could decide what to do, Jorge did it for her. And he did it in such a funny, charming, disarming way that Staci and Amber were utterly dazzled.
“Your friend is so cool!” Staci exclaimed. “You've got to come out with us sometime and party, Jorge. Did I pronounce your name correctly? I took three years of Spanish.” She batted her perfectly mascaraed eyes at him. Esme suspected instantly that she had extensions glued on.
“You said it perfectly,” Jorge assured her.
“We're just thrilled that we've got Esme and her friends in our class this year,” Amber said. “It's always so boring, same people, same faces. And even the new faces are the same. Just like ours. But these girls?” Amber indicated Kiley, Esme, and Lydia. “These girls are a breath of fresh air.”
“They're so fun. We're gonna hang out together and party and everything.” Then Staci looked at her watch with regret. “Well, I guess we're gonna book. Trent's playing a gig at a private party in Mar Vista tonight. Wish we could invite you guys, but you know how it is.”