This Is Where We Live (20 page)

Out of the blue he wanted, very badly, to lurch across the table and kiss her, just to see how it felt, what might happen to him, whether things would change forever.

He should go home, now, to Claudia, before it was too late.

Looking down, he noticed that they were still holding hands and quickly withdrew his, masquerading his desertion by lifting his coffee cup and draining the last milky drops. “I need to go now,” he said, afraid to sit there any longer. “I’ve got to get in to work. But it was really great to see you.”

“You’ll see me again, of course,” she said. “You’re coming to my opening, yes? All my sycophants are sure to be there—so I’m sure you won’t
enjoy
it, exactly, but at least you’ll get to see what I’m talking about. I did send you an invitation, didn’t I?”

“No,” he said, his chest tightening. “You didn’t.”

“Well, consider yourself invited.” She flashed a wicked smile, revealing a snatch of bright white teeth and pink tongue. “Bring Claudia,” she said.

Claudia

THE APOCALYPSE HAD ARRIVED IN LOS ANGELES, AND A YELLOW
scrim of haze shimmered low on the horizon for days on end, as if something were perpetually on fire in the distance. Still two weeks out from Halloween, the weatherman was reporting temperatures topping 100 degrees, an unseasonable inferno.

At Ennis Gates Academy, the air-conditioning system had gone down in a very untimely fashion, and with the doors and windows closed against the light, Claudia’s classroom was a stifling coffin. The heat liquefied her students’ brains. The teens melted across their seats like softening ice cream, torpid limbs dangling loosely in the dark. Succumbing to their inertia, Claudia had chosen a ringer of a movie today.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
, not exactly art cinema but at least a classic with some interesting film technique and a strong example of the cultural motifs of 1970s pop cinema. She sat on the stage on her stool, sweaty and agitated, as the movie playing on the screen behind her haloed her with pixilated interference.

From the back of the classroom came a rumbling gurgle that sounded suspiciously like a snore. She paused the movie with her remote and used the laser pointer in her other hand to circle a face on the screen above her.

“Wake up, people. I know it’s hot out but let’s focus, OK? Extra credit question for whoever answers first: Who’s the director playing the French researcher here?”

Another snore sent a wave of muted giggles rippling toward the front of the classroom, where it broke and crashed gently at her sandal-clad toes. Annoyed, Claudia squinted into the gloom, trying to discern which of the inert lumps out there was asleep. She simply did not have the patience, not today.

“Come on, you know who he is. We did a whole section on his films earlier this semester. You’re too young to have senile dementia yet.”

From the dark Jordan Bigglesby’s high-pitched voice rang out. “Gus Van Sant?”

“This movie was made thirty years ago, Jordan. Nice try, but think
French
. Think
dead.”

Mary Hernandez raised her hand, as usual. The stub of a well-gnawed pencil was wedged in her fist, and she waved this back and forth as if she were trying to stab the question with its point. She waited, patiently, until Claudia acknowledged her with a nod. “I was thinking, Krzysztof Kieslowski?” she said, wrinkling her forehead intently. “But I don’t know if you’d call him French, really, since wasn’t he actually Polish? Although all his most critical works were produced in French, unless you count
The Decalogue—”

Claudia cut her off. “A good guess, Mary, but no.”
Must the girl always go on and on? Who does she think she’s impressing?
“Anyone else want to give it a try?”

Nothing, just another sonorous snore, so exaggerated it almost sounded like a parody of a snore.

Claudia sprang from her stool and made for the wall, snapping on the overhead lights. Eighteen pairs of dilated pupils blinked blearily back at her, wounded by the fluorescent assault. There, in the second-to-last row, sat Penelope, her head tipped backward over her seat. Her eyes were winched closed, her mouth hung agape. As Claudia watched, Penelope released another snore. The rest of her students erupted in laughter.

“Penelope?” Claudia bit the inside of her cheek to prevent herself from yelling. “Would you care to answer the question? Or would I be interrupting your nap?”

“François Truffaut,” Penelope said, with her eyes still closed, her head still limp over the back of her chair.
“Everyone
knows that.”

“And tell me the significance of his presence in this film?”

Penelope let loose an aggrieved sigh. She slid down in her seat until her head was propped upright and looked accusingly at Claudia. “I don’t know. He was friends with Spielberg, probably. That’s the way it usually works.”

“Is it, now. Aren’t we lucky we have such an expert here to share with us how the film industry works!” Her response was maybe a touch too bitchy, but she had the right to be short-fused once in a while, didn’t she? It had not been a very good month. All the gains of September—the new job, the roommate, and subsequent apparent relief of their foreclosure crisis; the near-completion of Audiophone’s album and Samuel Evanovich’s unexpected interest in her script—had been obliterated by the disappointments of October. She felt like a bricklayer who has just completed a dam, only to watch the mortar crumble and water come pouring through the chinks.

Jeremy had been moody and irritable all week, perhaps a symptom of Aoki’s unsettling appearance in Los Angeles but more likely just the fallout from Audiophone’s sudden disintegration. Claudia knew how much that must have hurt. She could still feel it herself, that gnawing ache of creative failure. It was a loss, a huge loss—although, truth be told, she was starting to grow just a little impatient with his defeatist moping. He’d skipped out on work three days in a row, instead spending his time sleeping and watching hours of music videos on YouTube. He was acting as if he’d lost a
child
, not just a band.

Really, what he needed was to pick himself up and move on. There was no room for self-indulgent pouting, not with the economy crashing around them and the few remaining opportunities winking out one by one. As much as she knew she should encourage him to go start another band, she couldn’t quite put her heart into it. And she was too cowardly to tell him what she really thought: That what they needed, instead of embarking on yet another risky new endeavor, was a nice safe trench to huddle in while they waited out the storm. Solid jobs, practical expectations. In just a few brief months, the worldview that they and all their friends had grown so accustomed to—a heady mix of recklessness and optimism and self-entitlement—had become completely obsolete. As if disapproving parents had just returned from a long vacation and grounded the world for the wild party that had taken place while they were gone. Dreams of rock stardom—they were a relic of the time before. But she hadn’t told Jeremy any of this. No, her role here was to be the sympathetic shoulder, to rub his back and empathize with the vast unjustness of life. She hoped that with just a little encouragement, he’d come to the same conclusion she had.

But in the meantime, Jeremy was so preoccupied with the failure of his band that he hadn’t once asked about the status of Claudia’s script. Not that there was much to tell him. Claudia had spent a week blowing off all other school deadlines—grading essays, writing college recommendations—as she conjured up some hasty revisions to make the script more appealing to Samuel Evanovich, and then sent the package off by courier with signature required. Since then, nothing. Her e-mail address was right there on the title page—along with her phone number and home address and the contact information for her agent Carter Curtis (more truthfully her former agent, considering that he hadn’t returned a call since August)—so it certainly wasn’t that he didn’t know how to find her.
Hollywood executives never do anything quickly
, she reminded herself. Yet it still required superhuman effort not to look up Samuel Evanovich’s home number in the student directory and call him, even if the news was bad, just to end this miserable limbo.

She said nothing to Penelope, of course, about the possibility that she might be working with her father. And Penelope, in turn, continued to cultivate her aggressively indifferent façade. Last week, she’d failed to turn in a single homework assignment. Was that fake snoring a feint intended to provoke her? Claudia shouldn’t let it bother her, but it did; she couldn’t help seeing Penelope as a proxy for her father, wondering what—if anything—she should read into Penelope’s behavior.

“OK,” she said curtly. “Since you all seem so uninterested in the film today, I’m going to switch things up. Pop quiz!”

The room erupted in groans as Claudia distributed the quiz sheet that she’d originally planned to spring on them later that week. Maybe it was unfair to do this on the hottest day of the school year, but she was feeling punitive. She sat in front of the classroom grading homework to a soundtrack of operatic sighs and dulled pencils scritching across paper.

She collected the quizzes as class ended and shuffled through them while her students gathered up their backpacks and snack wrappers.

They sat poised on the edge of their seats, feet edging forward, ready to spring forth at the first sound of the bell. The oppressive temperature in the room silenced any end-of-class chatter, leaving only a mute détente. Claudia flipped to the last test in the pile and stopped. It was completely blank, except for a doodle in the corner—a series of concentric stars—and the name
YOURS TRULY
scrawled at the top in Penelope’s unmistakable all-caps handwriting. The girl hadn’t even
tried
.

The electronic drone of the first bell burst through the silence and the students leaped as one toward the door. She hesitated and then called after the receding herd, “Penelope, will you come see me up here, please?”

Penelope turned, separating herself from the pack. She walked slowly toward the stage, her regulation plaid skirt swinging around bare thighs, the laces of her combat boots flopping against the carpeted aisle. The teen twirled a lock of hair with stubby fingers frosted in black lacquer and then tugged it to her mouth to gum its end.

Claudia held up the blank test and let it dangle in the air between them. “Want to tell me what this is about? Why didn’t you answer any questions?”

Penelope shrugged. “I didn’t feel like it.”

Claudia stared at Penelope, astonished by her chutzpah: She herself would never have had the guts to say something like that to a teacher. No, she’d spent her life diligently answering questions, doing all the extra credit she could, sucking up to whomever was in charge. For a moment, she almost admired her student, but she quelled this, and forged ahead. “I know you can answer these questions—even if you haven’t been doing any of the homework I’ve assigned you. You’re a smart girl, and you already know a lot about film. I just don’t understand why you’re doing this. “She flapped the paper in frustration. Why couldn’t she break through to this girl? Claudia was a nice enough person, a pretty decent teacher by all accounts; why did Penelope—and this had become unmistakable—
dislike
her so much? “You realize I’m going to have to give you an F on this test, don’t you? And, honestly, that’s something you can’t really afford, considering your grades in this class so far. If you keep this up, you’re not going to pass.”

Penelope released the curl from her mouth. It sprang back to her shoulder, drawing a spidery silver thread of saliva with it. “Yes, I am.”

Claudia paused, confused.
“Yes, I am
, as in ‘Yes, I am going to do the work?’”

“No,” Penelope said. She pulled a pack of gum from her backpack and extricated a neon-green rectangle from its paper nest. She popped it in her mouth and began smacking it between her teeth. “As in, ‘Yes, I am going to pass the class.’”

The heat was choking; Claudia couldn’t take a satisfying breath at all. “What are you trying to say, Penelope?”

Penelope looked at the blank test for a long minute and then back at Claudia. “We both know you’re going to have to give me an A. It’s really only fair. If you want to work with my dad, I mean.”

Claudia’s hand hung in the air, frozen and quivering. Silence fell between them, a static sheet separating teacher and student. Outside, Claudia could hear the thump of the girls’ basketball team, taking up position on the court behind her classroom. She lowered her arm, letting the paper fall to her side. “I’m going to pretend that I didn’t just hear that,” she said, her quavering voice betraying her shock. Then she turned on her heel and fled like a coward, away from Penelope and into the A/V closet.

She fussed with the DVD players, trying to slow the heartbeat that rattled in her chest like an oncoming train on a wooden trestle bridge. She should go straight to the principal and report this; and yet couldn’t she also be culpable here? Would Nancy Friar, perhaps, be less than pleased that Claudia was attempting to find outside employment with a school board member? (She recalled rule number one on the orientation sheet:
Do not fraternize with parents outside of school.)
She was stopped cold by yet another epiphany—didn’t this also mean that Samuel Evanovich had read her script, perhaps even discussed his intentions for it with his daughter, because why would Penelope be bothering to try to use this as leverage if Samuel didn’t plan to work with Claudia in the first place? And yet—perhaps Samuel had only pretended to be interested in the script in the first place and was in fact colluding with Penelope, using Claudia’s career desperation as leverage for a better grade for his daughter! Her cranium throbbed as she tried to parse through the possibilities.

Behind her, she heard Penelope’s footsteps, then the squeak of the girl’s gum. Penelope’s rasped voice drifted from the doorway of the closet. “Honestly, Mrs. Munger, do you
really
think you have that much to teach me?”

Shocked, Claudia turned to face her student, trying to frame a measured, teacherly response: something about true knowledge coming from experience, or work being its own reward. But she hesitated for a crucial second too long—combating, in that brief moment, an old familiar self-doubt (a
pathetic $39,000 box office in its opening weekend)—
and in the void that this pause left, Penelope saw her opportunity. She took a step into the closet, boxing Claudia in next to the whirring DVD players, and gazed up at her teacher with a sympathetic—
sympathetic?
—expression. “Look, Mrs. Munger, I took your class because I need it to qualify for the summer scholar program at USC film school; but if I already know all the stuff you’re telling us, why should I waste my time with all these stupid assignments? Especially when I know you have to give me the A anyway.”

The electronics were hot against Claudia’s back. She felt the knob of a DVD player pressing into her spine and wondered how on earth she’d ended up here, in an airless school closet, being bullied by a teenager. She was a Sundance-annointed director, for chrissakes, with more than a decade of industry experience: Of course she had plenty to teach the world.
Claudia
was the one in charge here, not this self-important brat. It was her classroom, her script, her life.