You Don't Live Here

by Robyn Schneider

  I stared down at my vocab sheet, skimming the words and their definitions: line, tone, texture, shape, movement, scale.

  The art he’d chosen was all basic stuff. Rembrandt. Picasso. Dali. But using the language on our sheets was hard.

  My classmates struggled on, commenting on the symmetry and the subtlety and the colors. It was painful listening to them. And even though I knew I could have done better than most, I still wasn’t going to raise my hand and go for it. I didn’t quite have the lay of the land yet. Besides, being quiet was safer than showing off.

  And then Mr. Saldana flashed a riotous polka dot room onto the projector.

  “Anyone know this?” he asked.

  Yayoi Kusama, I thought, in the silence.

  “It’s Kusama,” Lily called.

  “Go ahead,” the teacher said, and Lily made a face, like, I wasn’t volunteering, I was just stating the obvious.

  “Okay,” she said. “Well, what I love about her is that she invites us into her fever dream. She makes mental illness seem beautiful. She overwhelms us. There’s no negative space. No harmony. Our eyes don’t know where to focus, and through the lack of focus, we become unglued from our own reality. It’s thrilling and terrifying, seeing the world like that.”

  I’d never heard anyone my age talk like that before. Like she wasn’t afraid of being laughed at, or being different. By talking about what she saw in the art, she’d inadvertently revealed a piece of herself. There was no way I could ever do that.

  “Yeah, what she said,” a floppy-haired boy called, and a couple of kids laughed self-consciously.

  Lily just shrugged, like she was used to being the smartest one in the room. Like it was all an amusement, and she had nothing to prove, and so what if people laughed? I was slightly in awe.

  We kept going. I didn’t raise my hand once. Not for Diane Arbus or Jackson Pollack or Andy Warhol. I just sat there, bending the cap on my pen back and forth and sinking lower in my seat, too self-conscious to say anything at all.

  Chapter 9

  MY GRANDMOTHER SERVED LAMB CHOPS for dinner that night. It was in honor of my first day, she claimed, as though I had, at any point in my life, loudly announced a craving for grilled sheep. I stared down at the quivering, lime-green blob of mint jelly on my plate, and the watery moat of meat juice that had formed around it, not feeling particularly hungry.

  It was beginning to make sense why my mom had never pressed me about school. Why she’d combed back my hair with her fingers and asked, “Good day?” I’d nodded, and that was it. Because I’d barely had time to buckle my seat belt that afternoon before my grandmother’s questions had started: How were my classes and did I like my teachers and with whom had I eaten lunch?

  And now I was pretty sure we were going to rehash it again, with my grandfather.

  “So,” he said. “How was your big first day?”

  I resisted the urge to sigh.

  “Great,” I said, trying to sound upbeat. “So great.”

  “Tell him where you sat at lunch,” my grandmother prompted, looking smug.

  “Um, with Cole Edwards,” I said through a mouthful of potatoes. “And with Friya, whose last name I don’t remember.”

  “Michael Nassiri’s daughter,” my grandmother supplied, beaming triumphantly.

  “That’s wonderful, sweet pea,” my grandfather said. “Making nice friends already.”

  “Yep,” I said, trying to be happy about it, even though, for the entire lunch period, I’d been terrified of doing or saying even the slightest thing wrong.

  But clearly I’d done something right, because my grandparents looked so pleased. My grandmother went on about what a wonderful young man Cole was, and how Friya was always doing so much charity work, and her father was so handsome, and I nodded, wondering how anyone could think that I fit in with them.

  It felt like an elaborate joke. Especially the part where, here, in this glittering oceanfront town, they thought I was worth noticing, too. Back home, in the dreariness of the inland empire, I had been just as unappealing as the endless beige strip malls.

  Across the table, my grandfather fed the dog scraps, and then shot me a wink, thinking he was being covert.

  “Tell him which honors classes you’re taking,” my grandmother prompted, as though we were in a play and I’d forgotten my lines.

  Didn’t we have something else to talk about? Apparently not. So I dutifully recited my class schedule.

  “Good, good.” My grandfather nodded. “I hope you know there’s going to be a lot of homework.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’ve already started.”

  I regretted the words as soon as they were out of my mouth.

  “How much do you have left?” my grandmother asked.

  “Um, a history worksheet and some math,” I said. “I already did the English. But it’s block schedule, so nothing’s due until Wednesday.”

  “You better not leave it for tomorrow,” my grandmother warned.

  “I won’t,” I said, even though I’d been thinking about it.

  As if she could read my thoughts, she launched into this whole speech about how you should always do homework on the day it’s assigned so you have the opportunity to ask questions.

  “I will,” I said. “I promise.”

  “Come on, Elle, give the kid a break,” my grandfather said.

  “Because that worked out so well with Alice,” she retorted.

  Instantly, the room went quiet. Too quiet.

  She shouldn’t have said that, and we all knew it.

  “Um, I’m going to get back to my homework,” I said, standing up and bringing my plate over to the sink.

  “This is her most important year, Joel,” my grandmother whispered as I rinsed my dishes. “I have to stay on top of her or she won’t get into a good college.”

  “Give the girl some credit,” my grandfather whispered back, and I realized they thought I couldn’t hear them.

  “Tuition’s the same whether she gets into UC Riverside or UC Berkeley,” my grandmother retorted. “Which one would you rather pay for?”

  I dropped my cup into the sink with a loud clatter. I couldn’t help it.

  “Just put it in the dishwasher,” my grandfather called.

  I did, and then I escaped upstairs, my heart pounding.

  They couldn’t actually intend to pay for my college. That was insane. But it did explain the sudden intense interest in my schoolwork. I’d always known that I had to be on top of things, because there was no money for college, so merit scholarships dictated my future.

  One of my mom’s rules had been to never, ever ask my grandparents for money. Not the time the car got towed, or the summer all my friends went to this expensive sleepaway camp, or when our laptop straight-up died in the middle of finals week.

  “There are strings attached to everything your grandparents give,” my mom would warn whenever it looked dire. And then she’d work late at the salon, or pick up a Sunday shift at the blow dry bar in Cabazon, and the crisis would be averted.

  But college wasn’t a busted laptop. It was the first time I’d get to choose for myself how and where I wanted to live my life. And if my grandparents were willing to help with that, then I guessed I didn’t mind giving up yearbook, or taking too many AP classes, or indulging their fantasies about Cole asking me to homecoming. A few nights ago, when I’d put on my mom’s old dress and looked in the mirror, I’d been unsure who I was, and who I was supposed to be. But maybe that was a good thing. I knew what my grandparents wanted from me. So maybe that’s who I was supposed to become.

  Chapter 10

  MY SECOND DAY AT BAYCREST WAS no less disorienting than my first. I still felt like I’d been dropped into a life that wasn’t mine, but at least I knew where the bathrooms were and that I should bring a sweater. I hated that my grandmother had been right about my needing those.

  I was switching books at my locker between classes, lost completely in my own thoug
hts, when someone yelled, “Dog thief!”

  It was such an improbable accusation that I had to turn around and see what was happening. When I did, I nearly crashed right into Adam.

  Instead of his Academic Decathlon jacket, he wore an eighties acid-wash bomber and a knitted vest. His hair had been mussed into a kind of faux-hawk, which looked ridiculous.

  That’s when I realized—I was dog thief.

  “I thought it was you,” he said, grinning.

  “Loving the outfit,” I said, since I couldn’t not.

  “Oh. Yeah.” He laughed. “Student government. We’re filming a segment for the morning announcements. Join a club! Have some school spirit!”

  He wiggled his fingers in an ironic rendition of jazz hands.

  “So you’re in . . . Time Travel Club?” I asked.

  “Hey, no spoilers,” he warned.

  “Exactly what a time traveler would say,” I pointed out, and he grinned.

  “Wait, are we permanent neighbors now?” he asked.

  “Afraid so,” I said.

  “And we’re locker neighbors, too,” he said, spinning his combination.

  His locker was only three down from mine.

  “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” he joked. “Otherwise people will talk.”

  “Let them,” I said, playing along. “I have nothing to hide except this ill-gotten bag of jewels and the seventeen bodies in my basement.”

  “Seventeen? Jeez, that’s dark,” Adam said.

  Oof, he was right. I watched as he dumped the contents of his backpack into his locker. “You didn’t bring a change of clothes?” I asked, trying to switch subjects.

  “What for?” He shrugged.

  I shook my head. It was so strange to think that he was dating Lily. He didn’t seem like her type. Not that I knew what her type was.

  The bell rang, and Adam flipped up the collar on his ridiculous jacket.

  “Stay cool, daddio!” he called, flashing a peace sign and strutting off.

  The rest of my week unfolded without incident. It was like I’d fallen headlong into an alternative universe, one where I lived in a weirdly spotless house and ate home-cooked dinners and sat at a lunch table full of pretty, popular people.

  The whole experience was bizarre. And the absolute strangest part was how Cole kept smiling at me, and finding excuses to tease me.”

  I spent our lunch period soaking up the strange sensation of having a coveted seat in the quad, and of people assuming that I deserved to sit there. I wasn’t dead mom girl or earthquake girl. Although I did come close on Wednesday.

  We had an earthquake drill in third. I wasn’t expecting for it to feel any different than it had every other year. Emergency drills were standard, like bringing no. 2 pencils for Scantron tests or playing Heads-Up 7-Up whenever we had a sub. At least during earthquake drills, you didn’t have to sit there with your head down and your thumb up, knowing that you would never, ever be picked.

  But that morning, as Ms. Meade made us crouch under our desks, protecting our necks, my heart sped up. I couldn’t breathe. I was back at the museum, scrambling under the cash register.

  I saw the displays fall and heard the distant screams of everyone in the museum scrambling for shelter. And then I pictured my mom, in the back room of the salon, with nothing to duck under.

  Spots of darkness colored the corners of my vision, and I felt nauseated and clammy.

  I tried to breathe normally, because I wasn’t going to go to pieces here, in my English class, in the middle of a stupid drill. I just needed to hold on another ten, maybe fifteen seconds, and—

  “Sasha!” Friya whispered, trying not to giggle. “Sasha! Look!”

  I opened my eyes, realizing I was pressing too hard into the back of my neck.

  “Huh?” I asked, confused.

  “Julia’s underwear,” she whispered, motioning toward a girl whose jeans had slipped down and whose yellow Pikachu print panties had ridden up.

  Friya was waiting for my reaction. Her mouth was twisted into a smirk, and her eyes glittered with amusement. And suddenly I was back here, in this place where I was on the giving end of the joke, instead of the receiving end. I knew I was supposed to laugh or roll my eyes or whatever. Because Julia’s outfit wasn’t crouch-under-the-desk proof.

  So I forced myself to smile, because Friya had no clue I was a hundred miles away, reliving the worst day of my life. And I wasn’t about to tell her.

  Julia finally figured it out about her underwear, tugging her shirt down. Our teacher called an end to the drill, and I climbed back into my seat, realizing that, in a weird way, Friya distracting me had actually helped. I wasn’t in my own head anymore, replaying my personal nightmare. I was just here, in the present.

  When Friya told the story at lunch, she embellished it so that we were both “in hysterics.” I knew she was only doing it to impress Whitney, who was too busy taking selfies to care. She’d learned about some new posing trick where you made triangle shapes with your legs and arms, and she looked ridiculous doing it. The boys weren’t paying attention at all. Some guys from their soccer team had dropped by, carrying bags of fast food from an outing off campus and making us all jealous that we weren’t seniors yet and didn’t have the privilege.

  At least I’d finally figured out how everyone was connected: Ethan and Whitney were dating, and Cole was Ethan’s best friend, and Friya was Whitney’s. But of course that was just the current state of things. They’d all known each other forever. Their parents were friends, and so they’d become friends, in this simple TV sitcom kind of way that I’d never thought happened in real life. At least, in a way that had never happened to me. My mom never got along with the other parents. She was too young, and then too young and single.

  It was sheer luck that my grandparents knew Cole’s grandparents, and that Friya’s dad worked at my grandfather’s firm. I had been stitched into their quilt somehow, a last-minute addition.

  Without them, I don’t know what I would have done. Eaten lunch alone in the library, I guessed.

  I saw Adam occasionally by the lockers, and he was always friendly. But then, he was our junior class representative, and friendliness was pretty much his personal brand. His girlfriend completely ignored me. Lily and I had Phys Ed together as well, and she paired off with a friend, their heads bent together as they walked field laps, an unbroachable unit.

  As much as I hated Phys Ed at my old school, at least here it was a break from notes and slides and quizzes. I’d never worked so hard in my life. When I wasn’t in school, I studied, and when I wasn’t studying, I slept so deeply that I didn’t even dream.

  The nightmares of endless earthquakes, of bodies being pulled from rubble—sometimes my own, sometimes my mother’s, sometimes people I barely knew—were gone. It was a welcome reprieve. Although I worried that they were still there, lurking in the corners of my school planner, waiting for an opening to come back.

  In Studio Art, we’d started sketching our first still life. It was a simple tableau of fruit and a pitcher of water, set on a tablecloth. Mine was awful. Whatever talent I had with a camera lens didn’t translate to charcoals. My hands felt clumsy, the whole piece precarious, as though at any moment I could set down a bad line that would ruin the whole thing. Plus, I hated the way Mr. Saldana prowled around the room, watching us.

  “Ahh, no,” Mr. Saldana said, pausing over my shoulder on Friday. “Sasha, is it? You’re not drawing what’s there. You’re drawing what you assume is in front of you.”

  I stared up at him, confused.

  “What’s the difference?” I asked.

  “That banana is overripe,” he said, nodding toward the tableau. “And yet yours is perfect. The dots are too symmetrical. And see that flaw near the top? You have drawn what you know to be a banana. But you haven’t drawn that banana.”

  “Oh,” I said, realizing he was right.

  “You must do more than look quickly and assume,” he went
on. “You must see.”

  If any other teacher had said that, I would have rolled my eyes. But something about Mr. Saldana, with just the faintest traces of an Argentinian accent making his sentences roll off his tongue like poems, made his pronouncement sound serious.

  “I’ll try,” I promised, and then I stared up at him, unsure how exactly I was supposed to do that.

  “Start over,” he instructed.

  Chapter 11

  THAT WEEKEND, I TRIED TO MAKE my mom’s old bedroom feel more like it was mine. I sorted through my clothes and put everything school appropriate into my top drawers. For months, I’d kept stuffing everything back into my duffel bags, but I didn’t have time in the morning to dig through the mess. And even though I knew the best solution was to just use the closet, I didn’t think I could bear it. Already my life was so mixed up with my mom’s. My wardrobe didn’t need to be mixed up with hers too.

  When I opened the bottom drawer of the dresser, my camera stared back at me. I’d forgotten I’d stashed it there, in a mess of T-shirts I wore as pajamas and socks that had shrunk unevenly at the laundromat. I took it out, feeling the familiar heft of it in my hands. And then I turned it on, hearing that soft click as the lens engaged, telling me it was ready to capture photos.

  But I wasn’t.

  My mom had bought me this camera, spending more than she should have on my fifteenth birthday. “I can’t wait to see your photos,” her note had said. Except she was gone, and she’d never see any of the pictures I took again, and the next time I snapped a photo, it would be of a world that didn’t have her in it.

  Better to leave my camera in the drawer. So I put it back, and then got started on my never-ending homework.

  There was a sheet of paper waiting for me on the kitchen table on Monday morning, next to a cup of Icelandic yogurt. I approached it cautiously, nervous that it was something awful. My heart sped up as I tried to think what was so bad that it had to be written out formally.