Everything Leads to You(75)

“It’s beyond great,” I tell her. “We just need to get it furnished. Let’s go look at the view again.”

Back outside, everything feels less sad. The skaters are doing tricks on the street below us; the Ferris wheel on the Santa Monica pier spins and spins; from somewhere in the distance comes laughter.

“Can you believe it?” Ava asks. “Last night I was living in a shelter. A few months ago I was living in my car, sleeping under overpasses, hoping no one would find me.”

“You were untethered,” Jamal says.

“Yeah,” she says. “I guess. I never thought of using that word before.”

“Marcy used it on me,” he says. “I hadn’t thought of it either.”

“Who’s Marcy?” Charlotte asks.

“One of the counselors at the shelter.”

“The only nice one,” Ava says.

“Not the only nice one. The least strict one. The youngest one.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Ava says. “We never have to go back.”

“So you’re going to live here, too?” I ask Jamal.

“Nah,” he says. “She wants me to, but it’s not in the master plan.”

He smiles when he says it, looks out over the ocean. I don’t question him until later on, after Ava has fallen asleep on one of the outdoor sofas and Charlotte has taken a chair on the other end of the roof to e-mail one of her future professors about something. Jamal and I are sitting together a few feet away from Ava, still looking over the water.

“So explain this to me,” I say. “You could live in a shelter or you could live here, and you’re choosing the shelter?”

“This place is crazy nice,” he says, “but it wouldn’t be real for me.”

“But you could live here for free, right? Quit your job? What would you want to do if you could do anything?”

He smirks. Shakes his head.

“What?”

“Not everyone’s like you,” he says.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Don’t get upset.”

“I’m not upset.”

“We’re friends now, right? So I can tell it to you straight.”

“Yeah, okay,” I say, trying not to feel hurt already.

“We don’t all have it figured out. We don’t all have internships and college all lined up and our parents’ credit cards.”

“I don’t have my parents’ credit card. I make my own money.”

“For some things, yeah,” he says. “But we don’t all have dens with pictures from the ghetto in frames on our walls.”

“It’s not like that,” I say. “That makes it sound terrible. My parents care about that stuff, they spend all their time teaching people about it. My grandfather—”

Jamal holds his hand out. I stop.

“I like your family,” he says. “Your mom told me about a lot of stuff I didn’t know.”

“And she called you handsome and graceful.”

“She did,” he says. “And I’ll always love her for it. But my point is that we don’t all have brothers getting us fancy jobs in movie studios.”

“I get it,” I say. And I do. But I still don’t want to hear it, don’t want to think about the conversations he and Ava must have about me when I’m not around to defend myself.

“What I’m saying is this: The shelter got me my job. And I finally got promoted so now I even get to work decent hours, on the floor, not doing stock. The deal is I work there until I have enough money saved up to get a place, and then the shelter hooks me up with an apartment. I keep the job, I pay part of the rent, and the shelter pays the other part. It’s not something I’m trying to get out of. It’s not just for the money, even though the money is something I need. I’ve seen the building where I’ll live. It’s cool. Near downtown on a quiet street. I need to start my own life and it can’t be here. I mean, look. This might work out for Ava, but I’m still a kid who’s only been to the beach one other time in my life.”

“You mean Venice Beach?”

“No,” he says. “I mean the ocean. I mean this.” He extends his arms toward the coastline. “This.”

“But you grew up here,” I say. “How did you only come once?”