I’d been to the Sea Cliff house only twice before, for a few days over Thanksgiving break and for a week at Christmas. I know that seems strange. People who live in one house their whole lives—like my friend Cora, for example—can’t imagine it.
“How does it feel like home?” she asked.
“Home is where your family is,” I answered, but this was a lie. I only said it because I knew the moving thing worried her. Honestly, the idea of home was confusing. If it meant what was most familiar, then home was there, in that dorm. With her and Lizzie, and our other friends, Hailey and Gia, and even Mrs. Chen. Home was Meredith’s house, where we’d go and watch TV and Ellen would make us popcorn, and Meredith’s sister and dad would come in and we’d throw pillows at them. Home was Edwina’s, even if she told me to get my feet off the furniture, and said stuff like Do you think I’m the maid? I’m not the maid, and asked me if I’d met any new boys since Daniel. Samuel, but whatever.
If home was what you knew and what knew you, then home was the big evergreen out my window, and rainy, rainy days, where the needles would drip, and windy, stormy ones, where the boughs would bend and shake. Home was the curve of the Montlake Cut and the houses that followed its south bank. Home was Coach Dave, and the crew team. Yeah. Definitely them. Home was my favorite teachers: Terrence Oglio, English; Jayne Fiori, art. Or maybe, home was a longing for a place I’d never been.
It was hard to get attached, after all the houses. Papa Chesterton’s mansion in Hidden Hills, the Spanish colonial a few blocks from the beach in Santa Monica. When Lila wanted to “escape pretension” (meaning her Papa Chesterton money was running low), there had been the smaller redwood-and-glass contemporary in Topanga Canyon. She sold that one a little over a year ago to rent the one on Sea Cliff Drive. Our family has a long history in San Francisco, which is why she moved there, Lila said. Edwina was raised in the city too. She told me a million times about her beautiful great-grandmother Ella, who survived the 1906 earthquake and fire. The story was, Ella fled with only her baby and her wedding photo, her cruel husband trapped in the blaze. Whether it felt like home or not, now that I was in that car with Jake, I couldn’t wait to get there. Or maybe I just wanted to get out of that car. Jake wasn’t much of a conversationalist, though I admit I wasn’t exactly helping. I stared out the window as we drove down 101, turned onto busy Octavia Boulevard, and then finally headed down Fell, where I started to recognize things—the Painted Ladies (the row of Victorian houses on all the postcards), Golden Gate Park, with its big glass conservatory.
“You like the car?” Jake finally said.
“Yeah. It’s nice.” It sounded brattier then I meant. But then again, he was fishing for compliments, so yuck.
“Aventador,” he said. I had no idea what that meant. It sounded like a character in one of Hoodean’s video games. Maybe Jake was showing off his flair for languages. C’est la vie, carpe diem, aventa dor.
“I’ll let you drive it if you promise not to crash into a tree.”
“I don’t even have my permit yet. And Lila doesn’t want me to drive until I’m older.”
“You’re kidding me. The minute I turned fifteen, boom. No one took you to get it? All these years?” He was ready to be pissed at Lila or Edwina on my behalf, which, honestly, was kind of nice.
“It hasn’t been years. I’m only fifteen now.”
He seemed truly confused. He gave me that Whaa? look.
“Well, basically sixteen. My birthday’s tomorrow.”
He raised his eyebrows at me like this was surprising information, but I couldn’t imagine Lila not mentioning either of these things. And then, I swear to God, his eyes went straight to my boobs, but maybe I was wrong, or just feeling uncomfortable in that small space. “Wow, well, you look a lot older.”
This was news to me. I tried to sneak a glance at myself in his side mirror to see if he was right. It was hard to tell. I was used to myself. Maybe I did look a little older.
It was quiet for a while. And then, “So, you like school?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s your favorite subject?”
“All.”
“All, huh?” He chuckled like I was a real go-getter.
After this, we ran out of conversation topics. Jake tapped his fingers on the steering wheel as he drove. I could tell I was making him nervous. I noticed the giant diamond ring on his right hand. It was one of those big, clunky kinds that look like college rings but aren’t. Every time we hit a red light, he exhaled as if the world were against him.
We were on Twenty-Seventh—I was paying attention to street signs so I could learn my way around—when he started whistling. He looked over at me and lifted his eyebrows in some sort of question, only I didn’t know what the question was. Then he grinned. I smiled back. I was supposed to smile back, but I felt uneasy in that hard-to-explain way, like when a certain man sits next to you on a bus. Or like that time Gia’s brother drove me back to the dorm after her birthday dinner. You don’t get the creeps exactly, just the pre-creeps. You start imagining how you’ll roll out of the speeding vehicle if you need to.
I smiled back out of duty, but he must have thought we were pals now, because he reached over and squeezed my knee with his two fingers, in that place where it really hurts. He shook it a little, like we were playing a game. I think I was supposed to squeal. Instead, I said, “Ow,” and he took his hand back, and I couldn’t tell, but I thought he looked pissed.
The scenery was a disorienting mix of the familiar and unfamiliar, since the city was still newish to me. I was sure I recognized a street of tightly packed houses, but then again, it looked like all the other streets of tightly packed houses. Suddenly, though, the homes got larger and nicer. There was more space between them. And then, yeah, those I recognized—two cement pillars standing like guards on either side of the street, with the little metal plates labeled SEA CLIFF.
The first house through the pillars was a white wedding-cake mansion with a manicured green lawn. The street was wide and roomy, and the houses had actual yards, and the gray sky got brighter and larger, as it does when you get closer to the ocean. There were terra-cotta roofs and brick stairwells, hedges cut into fancy shapes. There were columned estates with large, curved white windows and embellished balconies and gated driveways. You felt the calm orderliness of money. You felt the way some people paid other people to clean up their messes. You felt… like there were lots of secrets hidden behind all that order.
The crew from a yard service swarmed a lawn like hedge-clipping ants. A leaf blower hummed, and the smallest gathering of leaves blew up like confetti. In between the houses, I spotted glimpses of the Pacific Ocean and the orange Golden Gate Bridge. We made a left and there it was: 716 Sea Cliff Drive.
You’ve seen it, I know, but for the record, Lila’s house was a Mediterranean-style stucco painted a Tuscan orange, with a large stucco wall closing off the garden. It was maybe the fixer-upper on the street. At least, the garage needed a tiny bit of painting in spots, and the grass had a few rogue dandelions.
As Jake pulled into the drive, I was suddenly nervous to see Lila. This always happened. Even though she was ever-present, in texts and calls and magazines right on my lap, not seeing her for almost six months could make it feel like our first date. My stomach fluttered.
“All righty. Here you go,” Jake said. He released the trunk so I could get my pack.
“Thanks.”
Thanks. It was the wrong word. The very most wrong word. I forgive myself, because we say a lot of wrong things to a lot of wrong people. Still, when I think about it now, I want to spit that word right out of my mouth. I can see it landing in the dirt, feeding some ancient tree, one with the kind of big, old roots that crack sidewalks and lift foundations, same as an earthquake.