The Way You Make Me Feel(16)

“Clara, one sec!” I heard her laughing, the camera on her face but also moving wildly. I turned my head away to avoid feeling nauseated.

Finally, she steadied the camera on herself—all tousled hair and perfect brows. “Hey, filha, sorry. We’re in the middle of this shoot for Whimsy.”

“What’s Whimsy, and where are you?” I was already annoyed at not having her full attention.

A flash of sunshine from the window behind her blinded me for a second. “Whimsy’s a new online styling service, and I’m in Brooklyn!”

“You are?” I felt myself cheer up, just knowing she was in the same country as me. “For how long?”

“Leaving in a couple of days, actually. Have this trade show in Italy.”

I flopped down onto my bed and stared at the dusty yellow light streaming through my threadbare curtains. “Oh, this little ol’ thing in Italy.”

She laughed, her teeth white and recently veneered by some fancy dentist who sponsored it when she live-Storied the procedure. “We’ll go together one day and stuff ourselves with pasta.”

My eyes closed, imagining a day when I wasn’t stuck in LA all summer, desiccated as the plants.

“So what’s going on?” she asked, interrupting my brief daydream of eating gelato in a cobblestoned alley.

“Pai’s pissed at me.”

“Uh-oh. What did you do?”

“Why would you assume it was me?”

Her sharp bark of laughter made me cringe. “Give me a break, Clara.”

I couldn’t help but smile. “Well, my first day on the truck with Rose didn’t go so great.”

“I can’t help but think that might be an understatement.”

It was hard to fool my mom because we were so similar. Every time I tried to gloss over something or play it cool, she called me out instantly. “We just got into a fight. What else is new? Rose and I have never gotten along.”

“You’re going to have to, though. You’re working with her all summer, right?”

Flo decided this was the perfect time to hop onto my chest, her sturdy paw digging into my boob painfully. I winced but let her stay there because I was always at her mercy. “Yeah. But don’t worry! I’m going to try and make it to Tulum, no matter what.”

A low voice on the other end interrupted before my mom could respond, her gaze drifting somewhere to the left of her phone. Suddenly, Brooklyn seemed light-years away.

“Clara, I have to run. But don’t worry about Adrian; you know he always gives in. Wear him down!” With that, she gave me, or the phone rather, an air-kiss and was gone.

I went to bed that night still feeling unsettled and craving a giant bowl of spaghetti.

*

Thursday morning I was woken up by blinding sunshine again. I squinted and saw my dad taking a sip of coffee next to the window.

“You have fifteen minutes to meet me downstairs, Shorty.”

Relief pulled me out of bed at record speed. My dad was waiting for me with an avocado toast and tea in a thermos. Not my favorite breakfast, but I didn’t complain. I was just happy that he was talking to me again.

He pulled on his shoes, a pair of pristine black Nikes with neon green stripes running down the sides. “Okay, today we’re doing two of our regular stops. Rose is meeting us at the first stop. And I swear to God, Clara, if you two don’t figure out a way to work together, I’ll have a bigger punishment in store.”

I bit into my toast. “Yeah, yeah.” I hid my excitement at being back on speaking terms with my dad, the bread covering my smile.

*

After prepping the food, my dad and I headed to Pasadena, which was just northeast of us. But to get there, you had to take the Western United States’ first freeway, the 110. Pretty cool, except the lanes were about as narrow as a bicycle and the on-and off-ramps were two feet long and often set at ninety-degree angles to the freeway.

And this time, I was driving.

“This is, like, terrifying,” I said, my sweaty hands clutching the steering wheel.

My dad patted my shoulder. “You’re good. I taught you how to drive this freeway last year.”

“Yeah, in a normal car, not the KoBra!”

“Nah, you got this.” If only his confidence in my driving skills was at all warranted.

We finally got off Murder Freeway and arrived at our destination in one piece: an office park filled with grass, big shady trees, and depressing 1980s architecture. “Oh, so this is where your youth goes to kill itself,” I announced as we pulled in.

As we parked the truck alongside the curb by the lawn, I caught some movement out of the corner of my eye: an Asian guy my age or so standing on the corner, holding one of those arrow-shaped signs that advertise a business. It said JAVA TIME and had a hand-painted illustration of a mug of steaming-hot coffee.

I wanted to look away from the secondhand embarrassment of it, except I couldn’t. This guy was good. He was tossing the thing up in the air and catching it behind his back. Then when he got sick of that, he did a backflip and held the sign up with his feet while doing a handstand.

“What in the world is that guy putting in his ‘java’?” I asked with a snort of laughter.

My dad followed my gaze, then grinned. He jumped out of the truck and hollered, “Yo!”