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.”
“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.