This Is Where We Live (31 page)

Jim Phillips let out a small wheeze, perhaps of disappointment, and picked up his gym bag. Hannah Baumberg was already halfway out the door, followed in quick succession by Evelyn Johnson. Only Brenda remained, lingering near the coffeepot.

“I’m happy I could clear it up,” Claudia said faintly, rolling the offending papers into a tube before Nancy could examine them further.

“So am I.” Nancy reached out to grasp Claudia’s hand. Her palm was warm and well-moisturized, just like Esme’s. “You know, it’s been great having you as part of the team, and the kids certainly seem energized by your courses. We’re really glad you’re here.”

“It’s been a pleasure,” Claudia heard herself saying, and then Nancy was gone. Through the window, she could see the principal crossing the quad through a crowd of students, a veteran salmon battling against the prevailing current.

I won
, Claudia thought, as relief turned her bones to gelatin.
I won
. She backed up from the window, blindly bumping into a sofa. She grabbed the armrest to stabilize herself.

“I just want you to know that I have your back,” she heard Brenda saying in her ear.

Claudia turned to face Brenda, who stood just behind her, bags in hand. “Excuse me?”

Brenda stepped in closer, dropping her voice to a near-whisper even though the lounge was completely empty now. “I had the Evanovich girl for Modern Thinkers last year, and she was a nightmare. Contradicted me constantly, always in pursuit of some private agenda, a lazy little girl with a chip on her shoulder looking for the easy way out. I’m not sure what she’s got against you, but I count myself lucky that she never decided to go after me.”

“Thanks,” Claudia said. She realized she was tearing up in appreciation of Brenda’s support.
I don’t deserve this
, she thought. “But I think everything’s OK now.”

Brenda shook her head and hoisted the bags back onto her sloping shoulders. She pushed her cat’s-eye glasses back up the bridge of her nose with a free forefinger. “I hope for your sake that it is,” she said.

Claudia returned to her classroom just as the final bell rang, settling into her usual position behind the podium onstage. It was still difficult to breathe. The kids entering the room impressed Claudia as no more than a colorful, noisy smudge. Only one person in the entire room was distinct: Penelope. The girl scuttled into the classroom last, chewing on a jawbreaker that stained her lips blue. Claudia watched her select a seat in the far corner of the classroom, at safe remove from—who, her peers? Her teacher? She pulled out a pen and began to doodle unconcernedly on her notebook, seemingly unaware of the crisis she had nearly ignited.

Rain pattered against the windowpanes; the storm had arrived. The students had hauled their jackets and umbrellas out from hibernation, and a path of damp footprints led from the door down the aisle, vanishing just before the stage. Claudia gathered homework assignments with shaking hands, as her stomach began to sour with guilt.
You only did what you had to do to survive
, she reminded herself.
There was no other option, barring total disaster. It was the only way to save
Quintessence.
To save your entire way of life
.

She queued up the DVD of Robert Altman’s
The Player
, part of a weeklong lesson plan about the portrayal of Hollywood in the movies. The male half of the class busied themselves watching the girl’s gym class suffer through a game of basketball on the soggy courts just outside the window. In the back of the classroom, Jordan Bigglesby and Lisa Yang texted furiously on their portable devices. Claudia couldn’t be bothered to stop them.

“Let’s start by discussing what the title of this movie means,” she addressed the class. She was met by a profound silence. Rain battered the campus, amplified by acres of polished concrete. “Did no one care for this film?”

Theodore Kaplan flung a hand over his head, tearing his gaze away from the wet Tshirts of the girls outside. “I liked it,” he said.

“What did you like about it?”

Theodore’s mouth twitched with concentration. “Um. I thought the Tim Robbins character was pretty bad-ass. Killing a guy and then sleeping with his girlfriend.”

From the side of the classroom, Penelope snickered audibly.
“Bad-ass, dude,”
she muttered, and then rolled her eyes so far into the back of her head that Claudia momentarily hoped they might get stuck there, forever blinding the supercilious brat. Theodore turned to stare at Penelope, furious. Next to him, Eric Doterman wadded up a ball of paper that Claudia was fairly certain would be aimed at Penelope’s head the next time Claudia turned her back. She twisted deliberately away, letting him do it.

“So you admired the murderer,” Claudia repeated. “Did anyone else feel the same?”

Mary Hernandez, a row over, shook her head. “I thought it was a fairly hypocritical movie,” she said, lisping slightly.

“Hypocritical how?”

“Well, he’s making fun of cinematic tropes, like sex scenes and happy endings and a three-act structure, but then he gives the movie a sex scene and a happy ending anyway. So it’s as if he’s pandering to the lowest common denominator but also complaining about it at the same time. He’s having his cake and eating it too, so to speak.” She grabbed a rope of black hair and pulled it over her shoulder.

“A good observation, but maybe that was his point,” Claudia responded, finding it difficult to meet Mary Hernandez’s eyes. She thought of the effort that the girl put into her work, week after week—God knows when Mary slept, between slinging chicken buckets at Chicken Kitchen and the hours she apparently spent perusing French philosophy books for fun—and felt sick that she had credited Mary’s work to her most problematic student. The girl spent her free time driving her sick grandmother to the doctor, for chrissakes; and Claudia’s first callous response when she ran into Mary outside her house had been to suspect her of
stalking
her?
Maybe Mary does try too hard
, she thought,
but that doesn’t mean I’m not a terrible teacher and an even worse human being
. She pivoted and walked across the stage. “Let me ask another question. What do you think Altman is trying to say about the film industry in this movie?” She waited. On the edge of the room, Penelope cackled—maybe the paper ball had hit its mark?—but even she had nothing to offer for once.

“No one? OK. This is a movie about the moral bankruptcy of the film industry. Altman used it as a way to vent about his own demoralizing experiences in the studio system. It’s no coincidence that the screenwriter gets murdered, and the producer is the one who kills him; this is a symbolic expression of the death of creativity in Hollywood at the hands of executive power.”

Again, silence. Claudia looked out at the room and saw a sea of faces staring at her with confusion. Or was that silent accusation that she saw? Because who was she to lecture about the moral bankruptcy of the film industry, when she’d just sold out her star student (a scholarship student, at that!) in order to secure a job directing the biggest piece of trash she’d read in years? She gazed around the room and finally landed back at Penelope, who now had her back turned to the front of the room. She was holding up a piece of paper for Theodore and Eric’s benefit, some sort of sign with words written on it in capital letters.

“Penelope?” Penelope turned, startled, and dropped the paper. “Would you care to share your sign with me?”

Penelope fiddled with her pencil, examining her handiwork under a curtain of sticky bangs that she stroked, absently, with her free hand. She was wearing a studded, spray-painted leather jacket that looked like it belonged in the bargain bin of a gutter punk supply store; it was definitely not regulation uniform, and the fact that she could get away with wearing this was yet another sign of the Evanoviches’ exalted position within Ennis Gates. It was utterly unfair.

“No,” Penelope said. “Not really.”

A palpable current of shock washed across the classroom: a fellow student so openly defying the teacher? Claudia felt her face growing pink. Months of hot fury at the girl bubbled on the surface, dangerously ready to erupt.
Control yourself
, she thought.
The last thing you need is a confrontation
.

“Fine,” she said, slowly. “Then why don’t you just tell me whether you agree with my assessment of Altman’s film?”

Penelope slouched back in her chair and stared at Claudia. “I don’t know. I wasn’t listening.”

“Clearly,” Claudia said, through her clenched teeth. She knew she should just move on to the next student—she had already prevailed today, hadn’t she? Penelope wasn’t a threat any longer, she could just ignore her for these last remaining days at Ennis Gates and everything would be fine—but she couldn’t make herself do it. Something had cracked open inside her, and rage was leaking out. The sarcasm fell off her tongue before she could shut her mouth to stop it. “In that case, why don’t you pull from your
vast
experiences in the film industry and simply tell me how talent is treated in Hollywood.”

“I have no idea,” said Penelope. “Do you? Honestly?” She giggled and looked around the room, an invitation for the rest of the class to join her. A nervous titter started at one side of the room and passed across it, finally undoing in five seconds what Claudia had spent all semester trying to build. Her class disliked her, after all, and it didn’t respect her, either.

Worst of all: The students were
right
.

She stared at Penelope and thought of the deplorable
Quintessence
. What was she thinking? There was no way she could put her name on
Quintessence
and feel proud of herself. If that trite piece of shit was what would get her on the inside track in Hollywood, then she wanted nothing to do with Hollywood. There were better ways to win back her lost career, better ways to distract Jeremy from the glittery toy that was Aoki. She’d gone into film because of her love for a well-told story; because she wanted to make audiences feel something authentic and original, not to be a disposable hack for hire, generating garbage for America’s cultural trash heap. It was better to be broke and anonymous than to be wealthy and famous for making dreck. RC was right—she didn’t have the stomach for this. She would rather give up entirely.

She tried to remember the person she’d been, the idealist just out of film school who carried a notebook jammed with script ideas; the woman who patched together
Spare Parts
with tenacity and duct tape; the “gimlet-eyed auteur” who went an entire week without sleep in order to capture just the
right
moment when the winter light would convey the pensive air her movie required. Who had she become? Why was she letting herself be tortured at the hands of the Evanovich family for the sake of a miserable chick flick? Father and daughter were tearing away her last vestiges of self-worth. But she didn’t have to let them do it anymore.

“What Altman is saying,” she said, very slowly, “is that to be an insider in Hollywood—a player, so to speak—you have to sacrifice your principles.”

“Yeah,” announced Penelope, meaningfully. “Assuming you have principles in the first place.”

Claudia was at Penelope’s seat in three strides.

She hadn’t intended to tell Penelope to go fuck herself; the words just slipped out of her mouth, a good three seconds before her brain was conscious that this was even what she was thinking. For two electrifying seconds after she tenderly muttered the words into Penelope’s ear—“Go fuck yourself, kiddo”—teacher and student were both frozen in time, with Claudia’s breath stirring a few fugitive tendrils of curly hair, the flush of mortified blood rising up from Penelope’s neck just inches away from Claudia’s face. The girl smelled of expensive scent, a sickly lavender that burned Claudia’s nose, and her skin was caked with a sallow concealer that failed to conceal a fresh speckling of pimples. In those two seconds before time caught up with her, Claudia was touched by her student’s surprising, ineffectual little vanities: Her fury abruptly vanished, and instead her heart swelled with painful empathy. She almost reached out and stroked Penelope’s cheek: She wasn’t the enemy after all, just a pathetic little girl who was buckling under pressure put on her by her parents; a girl who hadn’t had enough love, who wasn’t as smart as she was supposed to be, and who erected a confrontational façade in order to conceal the pain of rejection by her peers. It wasn’t too late for them to understand each other.

And then Penelope jerked her face away, breaking the electric moment, and Claudia’s awareness finally caught up with her. She straightened up in horror, noting now the sound of Mary Hernandez gnawing wetly on her pencil, the rubber squeak of the basketball game thumping across the courts, Jordan Bigglesby tapping away at her BlackBerry—all the familiar little noises that had been the soundtrack to her life here for the last few months. The whole class was staring: She could feel it, even though she purposely looked out the window and up toward the rain-spattered sky. They had all heard.

She knew she was fucked even before Penelope twisted her face up and around to meet Claudia’s and hissed, “You’re so screwed.”

Claudia stood upright and turned back toward the front of the classroom. “See if I give a damn,” she said.

Driving home, she felt free for the first time in months. It was all incredibly clear. She should have listened to Jeremy back in August. They would sell the house, even if they had to take a loss on it. Hand it over to the bank. Whatever had to be done to get rid of it. She would tell Jeremy to quit that job at BeTee, and instead they would head off to Barcelona, just as he had suggested all those months ago. They’d get jobs as bartenders, or waiters, or au pairs, and write screenplays and make music on the cheap; maybe they’d apply for art grants or find European financial backers who were more open-minded than their American counterparts. So what if they were on the downhill slide toward forty, the time in their life when they should be popping out babies and installing central air-conditioning and contributing to IRAs? That could wait another five years. Ten, even. They might be broke, starting at zero again, but they would at least be doing what they loved. At least they would be able to say they were sticking with their principles. At least they would be
together
.