This Is Where We Live (10 page)

Brenda shook her head at Claudia as they walked toward the kitchenette. “That’s Evelyn. Political Systems. Don’t mind her, she’s all bark. And the kids are great.” She extricated a tea bag from her voluminous tote and plunked it in a mug emblazoned with the Ennis Gates logo. Claudia pulled the coffee pot out of the machine and tentatively sniffed its contents. It smelled fresh enough.

“If you want the good stuff, you have to wait for the cafeteria to open at first break,” Brenda said, bobbing her tea bag up and down in the steaming depths of her mug. “There’s an espresso machine in there.”

Claudia opened her mouth to marvel at this latest revelation and then snapped it shut again, realizing that she was starting to look like a wide-eyed naïf. Instead, she filled a mug and took a tentative sip. “It’s OK. My parents raised me on Sanka,” she said, “so I have plebeian tastes.” This wasn’t quite true—living in LA, she’d grown to appreciate a single-source, fair-trade, microbrewed latte—but that didn’t mean she couldn’t still summon that older Claudia, the one who’d never tasted sushi until she arrived in California and who used to eat her mother’s meat loaf and Tater Tot dinners without flinching. The coffee was bearable; anyway, she was still too groggy from getting up at such an unreasonable hour to be picky. Tomorrow she’d look for the espresso machine.

Brenda had wandered over to an enormous bakery box packed tight with croissants. “Who is this courtesy of?” Brenda called to Evelyn.

Evelyn shrugged. “Who knows. The Hoffmans?”

Brenda picked the top layer off a croissant with her fingernail, then gave up and lifted the whole thing to her mouth. “I lost six pounds this summer and I swear it’ll all be back on my ass within the week. I don’t know what the parents think they’re doing to us. Making us all too fat and lazy to chase their kids around, maybe.”

“Speaking of—ask her,” said Evelyn, sitting up.

“Right!” Brenda leaned in close. “I don’t know what you’re doing this Thursday night, but some of us—teachers, I mean—get together weekly. There’s no union here, of course, so we formed a kind of ad hoc support group. We need to stick together, you know. Us versus them.”

“I doubt I’ll have time,” Claudia said. “I need my evenings to write.”

“Write?”

“Screenplays.” She lowered her voice. “I’m actually not a teacher. In real life, I’m a filmmaker.”

Brenda flinched visibly.
Oh God
, Claudia thought,
I managed to insult
her in less than fifteen minutes on the job
. Still, her goal here wasn’t to get cozy with the other teachers, but to put in her time and take home a weekly paycheck. “In real life. Right. Of course not. Well, invitation stands,” Brenda mumbled. Flakes of pastry clung to the front of her blouse, and she knocked them off with the palm of her hand. “So, Claudia, let’s see your roster. I’ll tell you about your students.”

Claudia pulled the sheaf of paperwork from her bag. She’d spent the previous evening scrutinizing these pages, as if they were in code and she needed to locate a hidden key to unlock their meaning. There were convoluted class schedules, indecipherable campus maps, board meeting agendas, lists of school rules (“Do not fraternize with parents outside of school” and “No sexual contact with students, including hugging or kissing” and “Do not accept gifts of more than $200 in value from any parent,” the last of which stopped her cold: Who
were
these people?), and three pages of names that she studied, trying to envision the faces behind them. She handed these over to Brenda, and watched the other woman’s twitching face as she scanned the list.

Brenda jabbed her finger at the pages. “It’s a good group you’ve got here,” she said, as Claudia peered over her shoulder at the list of tiny type. “Jordan Bigglesby, she’s the undisputed social princess of the school, would be our prom queen if the school went for that kind of stuff, which of course we don’t. Mom’s an actress, you’d recognize her if you watch that sitcom with the monkey. OK, you’ve also got Theodore Kaplan, who will undoubtedly fail your class because he misses too many tests for rugby practice. He thinks he’s going to get into Harvard as a legacy—Dad’s an entertainment lawyer over at Mannatt—but he’s got another think coming. Lisa Yang is a smooth talker, don’t believe a word she says. Her mother’s a publicist, reps all the big stars, so she’s learned a few tricks. Mary Hernandez—a scholarship kid, extraordinarily bright, always very serious. Doesn’t quite fit in here but will probably show up everyone in the end.” Her finger traveled farther down the list and then stopped. “Oh. Penelope Evanovich is in your senior seminar.” Brenda looked up at Claudia, meaningfully.

Claudia stared back at her, as the name plucked at her memory. “Evanovich, as in Samuel Evanovich?”

Brenda nodded soberly. “Oh, yes. He’s on the board here.”

Claudia took this in, excitement pistoning in her chest. Samuel Evanovich was one of her film idols, a legendary movie producer with a long list of Oscar-nominated dramas; in the golden days of American cinema, back in the sixties and seventies, he’d put his thumbprint on almost every significant Hollywood movie and at least a dozen Oscar winners. He
was
the Hyperion Collection. Claudia attended his lecture at Sundance last winter, a shambling ursine figure who drank scotch on stage, and yet somehow his expansive memories of wilder times in the industry seemed not drunken or solipsistic but searingly insightful. She seemed to recall that he was currently married to a former soap-opera actress who once held the title of Miss Arizona.

“So? What’s Penelope like?” To her own ear, she sounded overeager.

“Too spoiled for her own good,” barked Evelyn, from her couch, not bothering to look up from her catalog.

Brenda sighed. “That kid. She is—how shall we say this?—not cute, which has made things rather hard for her here. She’s smart, but not always very diligent about doing the work assigned to her. An attitude problem, you could say. Though”—she peered over the top of the red frames—“word is that she wants to be a filmmaker just like her daddy. So that could be interesting for you.”

“Interesting how?”

Brenda shrugged and picked up a second croissant. “The kids here are amazing. Really. You’re going to have fun. Just don’t let them intimidate you. When they smell blood, that’s when things get out of hand. Remember—you’re the boss.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem.” Claudia proffered a smile that belied the butterflies flapping about in her stomach. “I figure if I can coerce a Vicodin-addled actress out of her trailer or discipline a bunch of middle-aged teamsters, I can probably handle this.”

Brenda patted Claudia on the back as she hoisted her tote bag back on her shoulder. “That’s the right attitude,” she said. “Go knock ’em dead.”

As she left the teachers’ lounge and began the hunt for her homeroom, Claudia felt her pace quicken. Suddenly she had a clearer picture of the year that lay before her. Stepping around a massive steel curlicue sculpture (either a real Richard Serra or a very good knockoff), she found herself fantasizing that Penelope Evanovich might become her star pupil. There would be a cozy mentorship, after-school hours spent discussing the techniques of French New Wave cinema, perhaps even the occasional invitation for a home-cooked dinner chez Evanovich, where (after watching a classic film in the family’s home theater) Claudia could be coaxed to show an appreciative Evanovich
père
her last script—which of course just needed the guidance of an understanding producer to get off the ground ….

She stumbled, realizing that she’d somehow tripped over the front steps of her own classroom. The room she was to teach in was a brand-new screening room that seated fifty, with stadium seats canting down to a small stage. It had a high-definition projection system, a DVD library with four hundred titles, Wi-Fi, and an equipment room outfitted with several professional-quality video cameras. Unfortunately, the architect who designed the screening room had neglected to consider the fact that this was also to be a teacher’s office, and built a desk in only as an afterthought. This was shoved in back of the stuffy audiovisual closet behind a humming rack of DVD players.

She flipped on the overhead spotlights, illuminating the vintage movie posters she’d hung in previous visits:
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Jules et Jim
, and a somewhat shopworn Polish print for
2001: A Space Odyssey
. She threw the windows open to let some warm September air into the dark room. She wrote her name in big letters on the whiteboard, still stained with the blue-inked ghosts of lessons past, and straightened a stack of handouts entitled
AMERICAN CINEMA SINCE 1960
. And then she sat in a wooden chair on the dais and waited for her students to arrive.

The bullying echoes of the first bell rang through the concrete corridors, where whirlpools of teenagers now swirled and eddied and drifted, carried along by a hormonal tide. Her students began to spill into the room, raucous and giddy from their summer vacations. As the second bell rang, the students shook out their plumage and distributed their backpacks and settled down into studied poses of adolescent ennui. A bespectacled boy with a miniature purple mohawk ran in from the hallway and flung himself into the closest available seat and then smirked, daring her to say something. Twenty-eight eyes stared expectantly at her. She cleared her throat, and her career as a teacher officially began.

Later she would look back at the events of her first day at Ennis Gates and recall very few details. She took attendance, over and over, carefully matching faces to names, attempting mental mnemonics until she finally gave up and just figured she’d remember them all in time. She laid out a three-month curriculum for each of three different classes, and distributed a small forest’s worth of handouts. She played the opening sequence from
Dr. Strangelove
, led a slightly halting class discussion on political films, and played the climactic sewer hunt scene of
The Third Man
and lectured on noir lighting techniques. She had each student write a brief in-class essay on the subject “The Best Movie I Saw This Summer” and was surprised, when she flipped through them afterward, how bright these kids really were. Sure, a few offered insights like “Yeah, the action sequences in
Batman
rocked” or “I really liked the lesbian pool scene,” but others cited films like
9½ Weeks
and
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
and
His Girl Friday
, and if they did pick a blockbuster Hollywood flick, they cited it for “cutting-edge animation technique” or “an interesting twist on the genre of comic book adaptation.” Perhaps they were just trying to impress her, but as she read the essays, she could see the semester unfolding in a much more promising way than she’d ever imagined. The students were attentive, eager, and intellectually curious, and only tiny details revealed the fact that many of their parents resided in an entirely different tax bracket than Claudia: a $2,000 Chloe purse here, rare Japanese skate shoes there, the widespread use of MacBooks rather than spiral-bound notebooks.

But of all the students she met that day, only one really stuck in her head when she got home that night: Penelope Evanovich.

The girl was in her afternoon senior seminar, and she recognized her right away: In the game of genetic roulette, Penelope had lost her spin, inheriting none of her mother’s symmetrical beauty-pageant features. Instead, she had acquired her father’s hyperthyroidism—her eyes protruded in a permanently goggle-eyed expression of vague panic—and his hirsutism—wiry black curls erupted from her head. She had even inherited her father’s paunch, which probably wasn’t helped by the bag of Cheetos she was eating.

If Penelope hated seeing her furry pop-eyed form reflected in the gazes of her Master-Cleanse-slimmed, vacation-tanned, and professionally highlighted Beverly Hills peers, she hid it well. Instead, she appeared to embrace her own nonconformity. Her legs were housed in defiantly shredded purple tights, her backpack was regulation army surplus, and a faded black T-shirt that read (from what Claudia could see)
RST CLASS BITC
peeped out from under a button-front shirt. A streak of inartfully applied green hair dye looped through her ponytail before fading out in a bleached end. From her left lobe hung an earring that appeared to be a diamond-studded skull. Claudia could only imagine how the former Miss Arizona felt about all that. She smiled at Penelope as the girl plopped herself into a front-row seat. An encouraging sign.

Claudia began that class with a group viewing of
The Graduate
. Standing on the stage, she guided the students through the magnificent seduction scene between Mrs. Robinson and Benjamin Braddock, thinking to herself as she did that her new job was almost too fun to be real. Just as she was pointing out how the director had used a black-and-white color palette to delineate the character’s moral dilemma, Penelope’s hand popped up. Cheered
—not even ten minutes in and she’s already excited about the class!
—Claudia barely had a chance to acknowledge the hand before the girl abruptly began talking.

“Um, my dad executive-produced
The Graduate?”

The students in the room sat up to ogle Penelope, who was surrounded by a moat of empty seats. Penelope twisted the green curl of hair around a thumb and tugged it straight.

“Oh, really?” Claudia wasn’t quite sure of the proper response to this statement.
Of course he had
, she thought. She should have realized that sooner. “That’s wonderful.”

“Yeah, and he told me the only reason they used that color palette was because the production budget was cut in half, they had to use the costume designer’s house as a set, and that was just the way it looked. So it wasn’t actually intentional.”

For a moment, Claudia was completely flummoxed. She could feel the eyes of the other students sliding from Penelope to Claudia and back again, eagerly anticipating conflict. “Well,” she said, finally, “in this class one of the skills we’ll be learning is critical interpretation, which is subjective, depending on the perception of the viewer.”