“Fine,” Ginger says. “Go. Emi, tomorrow you’ll see that the couch complements your efforts beautifully.” But she says it coldly, with more edge than I’ve ever heard in her voice, and I start to worry about everything, because she’ll be my boss on The Agency, too, and I know that I’m just an intern. I’m easily replaceable. Maybe there are hundreds of geniuses of teenage decor. Maybe my niche isn’t even that special.
I follow Charlotte out of the office and the building and toward her car. She opens the passenger side for me and I tumble in.
“I just have to wrap up a couple things,” she says. “And then I’ll come back. Don’t go anywhere, okay?”
“Okay.”
“I can’t believe you talked to her that way.”
“I know. Me neither.”
She nods, satisfied, and shuts my door.
I get out my phone and try Toby.
A moment later, his voice rises above many other voices and music in the background.
“Hey, little sister.”
“Hey. Where are you?”
His face appears on my screen but the image is dark and grainy and I can barely see the curves of his face.
“Café,” he says. “London.”
“London. That’s far away.”
“Yeah,” he says. He leans closer to the camera; his face gets bigger and I can see him better. “They talk funny here.” He grins, leans back.
“Come back,” I say. “Come closer.”
He does.
“Hey, is something wrong?”
I nod and I feel my eyes well up and I wish so much that they wouldn’t. But it’s Toby and I know that if anyone will understand it will be him.
“My sofa,” I start, and shake my head because I need to pull myself together.
He waits. If I could see his face better I know that I would see concern, and I hate that he is so far away, and I hate that Morgan is going on a date tonight, and I hate that Los Angeles is full of so many miles and so many bars and so many people for her to be with instead of me.
“Oh, man,” he says before I’ve had to explain. “They went with something else?”
“It’s terrible,” I say. “It’s modern. And gray.”
“But, Em, you love modern.”
“Not for this. It isn’t right.”
“Gray,” he says. “Okay. Could be worse. What about throwing some pillows on it?”
“No,” I say. “I don’t want to throw pillows on it. I understand this scene. I understand why it’s important and what it should feel like, and I know what should be in the shot to make it feel the way it’s supposed to. And I found it. I looked so hard. I found it.”
“You still have the rest of the room, right? That Neutral Milk Hotel poster? You still have that, right? And the trophies. Those are classic.”
“I don’t want you to try to make me feel better,” I tell him. “I just want you to listen.”
I can see people getting up from a table behind him, people everywhere, moving around in the dark.
“Toby,” I say. “I don’t know if I want to do The Agency anymore.”
“What? No, wait a second. You’re really bummed right now. I totally get that. But just let yourself feel like that for a while and then let it go. Do you know how many times I’ve found locations I’ve known were perfect only to have the location manager say he wants something different? It sucks. I know it does. But it’s the way it works.”
“It’s Ginger,” I say. “She tells me she trusts me and that I can do whatever I want, and then when I’m not even there, without even talking to me about it, she just makes this change and ruins everything.”
“Not everything.”
“I don’t want to keep working with her. I want to work for myself.”
Toby clears his throat. He leans back in his chair.
Finally, he says, “This is how it works. You bust your ass. Not everything goes your way, and then, after a while, you get to that point. You get to make your own decisions and people look to you for approval on their work.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I know.”
“You will move up in the studio,” he says. “I know you can do it. You just have to bite that tongue of yours and not let her see you so upset.”
“She already has.”
“Well, show her you’re over it.”
I nod.
“See this project through. See The Agency through. Then see where you are.”
“Okay,” I say, but my heart isn’t in it. There is this distance between us, and I can’t tell him everything I’m thinking, which is that I don’t know that I want to move up in the studio if working for the studio is going to be like this. If I can search for months and months in so many places, and then have all that work undone in a moment.
Charlotte appears by the driver’s side window.
“Charlotte’s escorting me off the lot,” I say.
“That bad?”
“Yeah,” Charlotte says, buckling her seat belt. “She told Ginger that she was ‘aware of their respective positions.’”
“Damn,” Toby says with a half smile, half grimace. “Go cheer her up, okay?”
“I’ll do my best,” Charlotte says.
~
As Charlotte drives us off the lot, she says, “I’m taking you to the canals.”
“That’s a good idea,” I tell her. “I love the canals.”
The canals are why Venice is called Venice, but not that many people know about them. Most people who don’t live here just head to Abbot Kinney for food and shopping, or the beach for the beach. But the canals are beautiful. They were designed by Abbot Kinney himself, and they are lined with houses, so when you walk along the canals, you’re basically walking through people’s front yards.
We park and cross over a footbridge and begin our mazelike stroll.
To our left is water; to our right are the illuminated living rooms and kitchens of the insanely wealthy and stylish.
“I couldn’t live here,” Charlotte says. “These people are so unselfconscious.”
That’s where Charlotte and I diverge, because I could totally live here. What’s the point of decorating your home if nobody gets to see it? But on a night like tonight I understand where Charlotte’s coming from, because I wish more than anything I could find someplace dark and quiet and away from civilization.
“Clyde fucking Jones,” I say.
“Yeah,” she says. “I’m so sorry I didn’t get to see the room the way you planned it.”
“I didn’t even get pictures!” I moan. “It looks so stupid with that couch.”
“It doesn’t look stupid—it’s a really nice couch—but it also doesn’t look like a cast-off piece of furniture.”
“No,” I say, “it doesn’t. It looks like a four-thousand-dollar Adrian Pearsall sofa, because that’s what it is. I thought this movie was supposed to be about a normal middle-class family.”
“At least Kira gets to lose her virginity on a really nice piece of furniture.”
“It doesn’t even matter,” I say. “It changes the whole mood of everything. Ginger can have her mid-century-modern teen sex scene. I was going to give her a fairy tale.”
We cross another bridge and I have to pause to stare into the house in front of us because it’s just so amazing. The entire side is glass. A spiral staircase rises from the living room to a lofted bedroom. In the gleaming, silver kitchen, just a few feet from us, a man is cooking dinner.
“I’m really hungry,” I say.
“Me, too,” Charlotte says.
We wander farther.
“Morgan’s going on a date tonight.”
Charlotte sighs. “And how do you know this?”
“I kind of ran into her today. I think my life might be falling apart.”<
br />
“A little.”
“She keeps flirting with me.”
“She’s a terrible person.”
“I don’t think so.”
“That’s the problem.”
“So what are you going to do about my brother?”
I swear, she stumbles a little when I say it.
“What do you mean?”
“You should just tell him how you feel.”
“Em,” she says. “That was a long time ago.”
“Nice try,” I tell her.
She’s referring to this time in sixth grade when she wrote me a note during third period telling me she had a crush on an older boy. She was trying to be subtle but I already knew. Everything Charlotte feels is obvious to everyone. I wrote her a note back that said, Does he happen to be in 10th grade? Does he happen to share my DNA? which I thought was clever, considering we were in science class at the time.
She blushed and never wrote me back.
“I’ve been thinking a lot lately,” I say. “Life is short. People die. I mean, think of all those obituaries we read. Think of Clyde and Caroline. You should talk to Toby. He hasn’t had a girlfriend in a while. He’s probably just waiting for you to graduate and now you’ve graduated.”
“I’m really hungry.”
“Just think about it,” I say.
“I’m out of money or else I would want tacos.”
“I wouldn’t mind, you know,” I say. “It wouldn’t make things weird between us. I’ve had, like, six years to get used to the idea.”
“Okay,” she says.
“Good. I’m broke, too, but there’s some stuff we can cook at the apartment.”
~
Back at Toby’s, we cook dinner. Either the emotional strain from the day has caught up to us, or we’ve allowed ourselves to become so hungry that all we can think of is food, because our conversational skills are reduced to this:
“Should I add garlic to this?”
“Did you wash the lettuce?”
“How old do you think this cheese is?”
“Is there too much garlic in this?”
Finally, Charlotte lifts the plates and I follow her outside to the patio, to the warm night air and the ranchera music from next door.
Toby’s neighbors are having a loud conversation in Spanish, shouting and laughing, and I wish I could follow but I took French in high school.
“What are they talking about?” I finally ask.
“Hairstyles,” Charlotte says.
“What about them?”
“Whether someone’s hairstyle is out of fashion or not.”
“Is it?”
“The loud guy thinks so. The woman with the softer voice thinks it’s timeless.”
The loud guy says something especially loudly and they all laugh.
I smile. They sound so happy.
“What did he say?”
“I didn’t understand it.”
“Oh.”
“Why aren’t you eating?”
A moment ago I was ravenous but now I can’t imagine taking a bite. The heartache comes in waves and this particular one is the enveloping kind.
“I’ll save it for later,” I say.
“The girl or the couch?” Charlotte asks.
“Honestly?” I say. “The girl.”
Charlotte shakes her head and eats her pasta while I move mine around on my plate. She doesn’t say anything but it’s fine with me because I wouldn’t be able to even fake interest in anything Charlotte might want to talk about. I keep wondering who Morgan is going on a date with, and what this girl has that I don’t. Her own apartment? The legal right to drink?
“That girl is so—”
“Just stop,” I say. “It’s not what I need right now. I don’t care how terrible she is. I don’t care that you hate her.”
“Okay,” Char says, her voice soft. “We’ll leave how I feel about Morgan out of it.”
“Thank you.”
“But I do have something to say.”
I force a bite into my mouth. Force myself to chew.
“It’s over,” Charlotte says.
I stare at her. I swallow.
“Um,” I say.
“It’s time for you to accept it. She was your first love. That’s a huge deal. And I know how much she’s meant to you, and that it isn’t easy to accept that it’s over. But it is. It’s over.”
Tears rush in without warning.
“Okay, I take it back,” I say. “I’d rather just hear about how much you hate her.”
“Em,” she says. “You did a really good job of loving her. You put up with all her bullshit. You were a really good girlfriend. And now it’s time for you to find someone who will love you back.”
She scoots closer to me and grabs my hand. She waits for me to look at her.
“I’m sorry I made you cry,” she says. “But you really need to hear this.”
I nod.
“It’s over,” she says, once more. “Okay?”
“Okay,” I whisper, but I don’t really know what I’m agreeing to.
Charlotte stacks my plate on top of hers and moves them out of the way, but neither of us gets up. I could sit here in silence all night, which I’ll admit is rare for me. I don’t want to think about the fact that Morgan never loved me, even though I know that Charlotte is right. And I don’t want to think about the decisions I’ll inevitably have to make tomorrow. I’m caught between self-preservation and self-righteousness, between apologizing to Ginger and quitting. Neither option feels good. So I just want to listen to the sounds of the neighbors’ conversations and their lively music, all of these words I don’t understand.
~
Charlotte’s phone rings so she goes inside to answer it, and an especially good song comes on. I wish I knew what it was so I could find it again.
I hear Charlotte say hello.
And then I hear her say “Ava.”
I turn around and she’s wide-eyed, pointing to the phone pressed to her ear.
“Thanks for calling,” she says. “I know you don’t know me—”
She looks confused. “La Cienega Bakery?” she asks. “No, I don’t know anything about that.”
“Speakerphone!” I mouth to her and she nods and switches over.
A raspy voice says, “Oh, okay. I applied for a job there a while ago, so I thought . . . It doesn’t matter. So who are you?”
“I’m Charlotte. My friend Emi is here, too.”
“Hi,” I say.
“This might sound strange, but we have something that was meant to belong to Caroline Maddox.”
Ava is quiet on the other end, and I look down at the phone and see that it’s trembling in Charlotte’s hand.
“Caroline?” Ava finally repeats, her voice breaking on the question.
I say, “We got this letter for her, so we tried to find her but then found out that she died, so we’ve been just kind of connecting some dots, and eventually we found you—”
“You have a letter for Caroline?” Ava asks.
Charlotte says, “It’s kind of a long story. It would be better to talk in person, if that works for you.”
“What are you doing now?”
“Now?” Charlotte asks. “We’re just hanging out at our apartment.”
“In Venice,” I add.
“I can be there in twenty minutes.”
“Oh,” Charlotte says. “Okay.”
I give her the address, and then we hang up.
I stare at Charlotte. She stares at me.
I scan the living room. Clyde Jones stuff is everywhere. Toby’s desktop computer screen is full of search windows for Caroline and Tracey and Ava, as is Charlotte’s laptop, resting open on the coffee table.
/>
“Shit,” I say, and we begin closing screens and putting away Clyde Jones DVDs because neither of us wants to look like we’ve been collecting all the information there is to have about the girl who is about to walk through our door and possibly hang out for a while.
And somewhere in the frenzy of sweeping evidence and cleaning up our dinner dishes, the gravity of the moment captures me. I feel a camera panning across the room as if I’m watching us from a distance. A counter covered in garlic peels and cutting boards and bread crumbs. The door to the patio ajar. Two girls in a colorful, lived-in living room. They don’t know what’s coming, but one of them—the one with the faraway expression and the dark hair, the one whose eyes betray that she hasn’t been sleeping well—she has felt on the verge of something.
And when they hear a knock at the door, it’s this girl who crosses the room to answer it. She turns the knob, and here it is—like Clyde appearing on the horizon or emerging from the tall grass—a redhead in the doorway of a Venice courtyard apartment. A curious gaze, a tentative step inside. The curve of her mouth when she smiles, the raspy timbre of her voice when she says hello.
Chapter Six
As soon as I open the door I wish we’d had just a few more minutes, because Ava is standing in the doorway looking movie-star pretty, looking Clyde Jones pretty, and I am facing her in a shirt with a red tomato-sauce smear on the chest, my hair in a messy ponytail, realizing that in spite of all our planning I have no idea how to deliver the news we summoned her to hear.
“Hey. Come in,” I say, but I’m fighting the urge to tell her never mind.
Charlotte and I have involved ourselves in other people’s lives in a way that suddenly makes me uncomfortable. Like there was a NO TRESPASSING sign in front of a family’s driveway, and not only have we trespassed, but we’ve gone through their garage, opened all of their private boxes, rifled through their photo albums and diaries to discover dozens of secrets that were never meant to be revealed.
Ava is here, though, in the middle of Toby’s cozy living room, thanks to luck and fate and our will to find her. Charlotte is offering her the last of our Ethiopian iced tea and she is saying yes. She’s slipping a worn brown leather purse from over her shoulder and apologizing.