These aren’t the streets that Venice is known for. Most people know Venice for its boardwalk, the long stretch of pot pharmacies and pizza joints and tourist traps. They know about the Venice Beach Weight Pen, though most of them call it Muscle Beach, where bizarre, blissed-out steroid junkies pump iron in their tighty-whities, pretending to ignore the steady click of tourists’ cameras and cell phones. A few tourists might know a little more—about the three remaining canal streets where the really rich people live. And maybe they know about the web of canals that used to be here, about the ghost pier and torn-down roller coasters and maybe even the camel rides. But our neighborhood—our cheap stucco apartment buildings and dingy drywall caves? Why would anyone want to know about that?
I was planning to sleep over with Marissa, but she got a text from her boyfriend, Sal, that his mom was going to spend the night at her boyfriend’s house, so he had the apartment to himself. Marissa and I told her dad that we’d decided to cruise over to my place, and then we parted ways in front of Sal’s, her heading inside—petals already spreading, no doubt—and me wheeling solo the rest of the way home.
I have the hood of my sweatshirt pulled up, my ponytail tucked inside. In my loose jeans and black sweatshirt, riding my skateboard, I can pass for a boy. Just in case someone isn’t fooled, inside the pocket of my sweatshirt my fingers wind around a can of pepper spray. I flip the safety cap on and off and on again, a habit I’ve developed.
Lately, I spend as much time as possible away from the apartment, away from its yellowed walls and stained neutral carpet. My mom does her best to make it “homey,” as she calls it, but there’s only so much you can do with a few well-placed scarves and candles. (Nothing too permanent—like paint or shelves attached to the walls. There’s a security deposit to think about, after all.) So my backpack is my home away from home, filled with its usual assortment of supplies: a sketchbook, some charcoals, random food I’ve scrounged, and, clanking together at the bottom, my water bottle and some things I’ve collected throughout the day—a few pop-tops, a translucent orange lighter (empty), and a crushed fake-gold earring I found in the gutter outside Sal’s house.
It’s like this. Sometimes things call to me. Not all things, just some things. And not the things you’d think. Marissa likes to say the things that call to her are almost always inside the display cases of overpriced stores, and sometimes she counts on me to distract the salesgirl while she worms her way inside to answer their cries. The things that call to me don’t always shine. I do like metal, though, and wood, but I don’t consider myself too good for plastic. I’ve been known to pull things out of trash cans. I’ve lifted things here and there that had price tags attached to them, but I’m not proud of it the way Marissa is.
Half a moon winks in the sky, providing a little light to skate by but not so much that I feel safe taking my finger off the trigger of the pepper spray. I skate hard in the stretches between streetlamps and cruise in the curved circles of light that they cast. Light to dark to light. And within that rhythm, the regular click of each section of the sidewalk. My mind is everywhere else.
I’m thinking about what I’m going to do with the things I’ve found. And I’m thinking about Marissa and the way she hooks her index fingers in the front belt loops of Sal’s jeans, how he crashes into her when she pulls him by those loops. I’m thinking about something I started that isn’t finished yet. All day long I’ve thought about it—first as I headed to the coffee shop where Carson works (he’s always good for a free mocha), and then later as I changed into my bikini to meet Marissa and some other kids for a few hours of R & R. And again as Marissa and I headed back to her place to raid her dad’s fridge and sock drawer (beer and pot). I think of the mini blinds on her dad’s bedroom window, the way they were angled and the shadow lines they cast. Black bars of shadow slashed across the bed. I think about the shit I had to paw through—some gross porno DVDs, among other things—to find his baggie of pot. Ever since Marissa came across a couple of pretty raunchy girlie magazines one time when she was foraging through his socks and skivvies (“The girls in those pictures don’t look any older than us, Seph,” she’d said), she’s put me in charge of the marijuana-plundering detail. Then we’d headed over to Carson’s place with the beer and pot (I owed him after all the early-morning mochas), along with a pizza Darrin gave us out of the back door at the place he works, and the night had ended—I’d thought—back at Marissa’s place. Just the two of us again. But stories—and nights—don’t always end where they should, so here I am, thinking.
***
Fairy tales are like that. The real ones, the originals, before Disney raped them. The story gets to what you think will be the end—say, Sleeping Beauty wakes up—but that’s not the end at all. It’s just a reprieve. There’s more in store for her, farther to travel, heavier burdens to bear.
But there’s my apartment building just up ahead, a dingy, gray-blue rectangular box of stucco and windows and doors and lives all stacked up one atop another. Like it or not, I’m home.
About the Author
ELANA K. ARNOLD writes books for and about children and teens. Some of her books have been included on the LA Public Library’s Best Books of the Year list, the Bank Street Best Book list, the YALSA “Best Fiction for Young Adults” list, have been ALAN picks, and have been selected for inclusion in the Amelia Bloomer Project. Her most recent YA novel, Infandous, was a Westchester Fiction Award Winner and won the Moonbeam Children’s Book Award. She holds a master’s degree in Creative Writing/Fiction from the University of California, Davis and currently lives in Huntington Beach, California, with her husband, two children, and a menagerie of animals.