I didn’t wear Reebok Pumps to school that fall. I wore sandals and shorts and let my tanned legs be part of the scenery. I was equipped. I had my big anthology. I knew where the buildings were. I knew how to open my locker. I knew where to go for naps, where the holes in the fences were, and thanks to the freckled girl with the bouncing ponytail, I knew how to hop them. Arash’s death left me unexpectedly confident, as if I were the heir to a very important secret. He left a space nobody was willing to fill and maybe because of this, everyone was a bit more tolerant. There was a truce—temporary but effective. I walked by the Persian tables on the upper quad. They had allowed Azar in. She waved rapidly but full of pride when I passed by—head still fuzzy and disproportionate but smiling. I felt the weight of Arash’s absence still there on my shoulders, but I aligned with the others and pretended I too had turned a page because the more I pretended the more I felt like turning pages was easy.
I’d spent my summer reading from the American literature anthology and even though my English wasn’t perfect, Mrs. Perks kept me in her class. I wasn’t an excellent student. She was hard on me and was never sentimental, but I could tell she cared. She wore suits. She knew where Rome was. She’d been to Italy. Her breasts were real. She was perfect. Twice a week we met privately during lunch to go over the Italianisms in my essays. I started collecting books at yard sales and writing stories. When Simon came looking for me—wearing sandals with no socks now—I got rid of him fast because nothing about sex with him was appealing any longer. I was on my feet. It wasn’t going to be that kind of year. I would try to get to college without his tutoring. Early in the summer the literary journal with the “Bad Love” theme to which I had submitted my essay about ugly men who didn’t read—the one that got me suspended—published it. The editor said my piece had “reflected the contemporary attitude over the nostrings-attached lifestyle.” They used the essay as a kind of decoration piece for the last page. It was printed in a tiny font and I was sure nobody had read it, but I didn’t care. I felt encouraged for the first time. Henry was wrong: I didn’t have to hide books to be accepted.
It wasn’t just Arash’s death that made the difference but also that enough time had passed since the riots. In the fall of 1993 the city had started to function again, the wound was beginning to heal. Anger against injustice had transformed into silent sorrow, a suffering acceptance that we were all in the same boat—no use fighting. Or maybe, as with any army, one had to know when it was time to withdraw the troops and care for the wounded in order to prepare for the next battle. After all the violence the city seemed to open up to its more benevolent nature—especially the flora and fauna. Elm trees with bulging roots cracked through the pavement of residential streets. Mountain lions climbed down from the canyons and walked stealthily toward the sea. Hawks circled the hills saluting mourners, reminding them of a life up high, away from bus stops brimming with homeless people, away from the LAPD and patrol helicopters. The city had been shocked by the Rodney King riots. Every corner had buzzed with the electric field of war zones and injustice. Everyone had been on the edge over spilled blood and burned buildings, but we’d entered a different stage of mourning now. After adrenaline came anger. After anger, pain. Then peace or the vanishing of something. Nature was the biological aftermath to the riots’ mourning cycle, and it took precedence over everything else. Ivy grew quicker over the industrial buildings downtown. Polluted waterways cleansed themselves spontaneously. The Santa Monica pier became populated by more seagulls than humans. Seals and otters occupied the wood foundations below. You could feel the city’s parameters changing. Its new essence was friendlier, part of an organic order of things. It was right, or at least it felt right. And I wanted to be part of it.
“Hey, I heard you give good head,” a voice called to me as I lay in the shade of the magnolia tree in my new hiding place at school.
I propped myself up, the sun in my eyes. A blazing silhouette came into focus. A guy with a beanie and long hair stood in front of me. He kicked a hacky sack that landed on my legs. Chunks of his hair were twisted inside beaded hemp strings.
“What?” I asked defensively, throwing the hacky sack back at him.
“Wanna suck mine?”
“No.”
I looked at him up close and realized I’d seen him before. Arash had pointed him out to me the day he briefed me on every group in school. He was Chris, Arash’s pot dealer. I remembered Arash mentioning the fact that he’d grown up in some kind of hippie situation and had no social skills, hence the crack about my oral-sex abilities. Arash must have told him about us. He probably thought the guy was too much of an outcast for the news to get out.
“Well, do you at least want to come over to my house after school and listen to music, then?” he asked.
I felt a rush of longing for Arash, as if he were back in a new form but with the same audacity and cockiness. I wanted to draw out the line that could connect me to him a little further, and so I said yes. The tacit agreement with my parents was that I was granted more freedom because Max had taken over my bedroom. I needed to get out of the house to obtain privacy, I explained. So far that had translated into uneventful strolls up and down the grids of the San Fernando Valley, but that day I was invited to experience the thrill of a different area code.
Chris lived in a funky collective of wooden cottages on a slope at the top of Topanga Canyon. The main house on the property had a panopticon-like presence and floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a valley of oak trees. The smaller cottages below—creaking wood satellites to the master house—served as bedrooms for him and his twin sister. Between the main house and the cabins there was a kind of small amphitheater; the bricks on the edge had crumbled apart a bit, but the semicircular shape was intact. Chris hopped in the center of the miniature arena and let out a small scream. There was a specific point that generated an echo.
“You have to stand right here or it won’t work.”
Chris showed me to a little dent in the ground.
I screamed an “Oh” sound that bounced back to us. Chris said that when he and his sister were kids their father told them “echo” was a man who lived in the air and he only stayed alive if you screamed at him.
“We had to scream for so long every day because we were worried he’d die. It was his way of keeping us busy without having to play with us.”
We both laughed. We heard the thump of a glass bottle falling to the floor in the balcony of the main house. Chris shoved me inside his cabin furtively and peeked out the window.
“Oh…It’s just a bottle of beer that fell with the wind.”
He kept an eye out toward the balcony.
“Are we not supposed to be here?” I asked.