The Way You Make Me Feel(74)

Rose, Hamlet, and I stood off to the side as they talked.

“Hi, Adrian. I’m really sorry you didn’t win the competition,” Stephen started. My dad held up a hand like, like “No problemo!” Please.

“But I wanted to say, you’re doing something really special here. That pastel, the combination of flavors! Truly inventive.”

“Thank you,” Pai said, rubbing the back of his neck, suddenly shy.

Stephen handed him a business card. “If you’re still interested in opening up a restaurant, I’d love to talk about investing. What you said about your Brazilian and Korean cultures—that was fantastic, and it’s exactly the sort of thing that is integral to the food scene here. I’d love to set up a time to talk.”

A very quiet, very long squeak came out of Rose, and I held back from dragging my hands down my face and screaming.

“Yes! Of course! Thanks, man,” he said, holding out his fist. Stephen glanced down at it, then smiled, giving him a bump.

When he left, we remained cool for about .5 seconds. Then jumped up and down. Hamlet ran over to my dad and lifted him up.

“Ohmygodohmygod!” I screeched. I had zero chill and zero cares about it.

Rose paced in circles, beside herself. “Your investor problems are solved! Just like that! And what if he features you on The Weekend Feast?”

“What’s that?” Hamlet asked, excited before knowing why.

“An NPR show about food!” she exclaimed.

My dad held his hands up. “All right, you guys. Let’s remain calm. You don’t know if he’ll invest yet!”

But hope was making me buoyant. “Don’t say that! Think positively!”

The three of them stopped moving. They exchanged glances then laughed. As one. One laugh unit.

“What?!” I asked, testy and defensive.

My dad shook his head. “You sound like…”

“Me,” Rose finished for him. “You sound like a total try-hard.” Her tone was like mine, flat and rude.

I flushed. “So?”

“It’s a good look,” Hamlet said with a wink. My own moves being used against me made me flustered, but I couldn’t help but smile. So big my cheeks hurt.

We went back to the truck and cleaned up, everyone considerably less glum than before. When I noticed that the sun was setting, I had an idea. I hopped into the driver’s seat. “Grab a hold of something,” I announced as I lurched the truck out of the lot, finding the main road in the park.

“Clara! The four of us can’t ride in this thing,” my dad said, bracing himself against my headrest.

“It’ll just be a few minutes, hide yourselves from cops,” I said as I adjusted the rearview mirror. Rose threw herself into the passenger seat and put on her seat belt frantically. “Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

*

We followed a road that led us out of the park and up into the hills. A few minutes later, Hamlet popped up next to me, leaning against my headrest. Squinting into the tunnel we were headed toward, he asked, “Are we going to the observatory?”

Ugh, Google Maps boyfriend! I didn’t answer, instead taking us up the hills until we reached the parking lot for the Griffith Observatory. Since it was a Saturday evening, it was completely packed. I drove by the lot and instead went farther up the hill, to an area I knew we weren’t really allowed to drive into—it was more of a hiking trail.

Rose sniffed out disobedience quicker than a cop. “Clara, we’re not supposed to drive here.”

Again, I ignored her. There was nothing obstructing us from driving on the dirt path. It was just wide enough. And finally, we reached the spot I was looking for. An old stomping ground of mine—a dirt lookout with the hillside behind us, and a view of the city in its entirety in front of us.

I parked and got out of the truck, climbing onto the hood and then the roof. I called down, “Come up!”

They joined me one by one. And by the time we were lined up on the roof, the sun was very low in the sky. To the left was the observatory—my favorite place in the entire city. Most people knew it from Rebel Without a Cause, the beautiful art deco architecture with the three domed buildings, the middle one housing a telescope that could view distant planets. It had a planetarium and exhibits inside, but my favorite thing about the observatory was the view. You could see all of LA from here.

What tourists usually came to see was the Hollywood sign, which was directly to the right of us, larger than life. Iconic but completely meaningless to me, to be honest. People who were born and raised here didn’t see LA with the same starry eyes. It was just home, and the Hollywood sign did little to stir any feelings in me. But I did feel something when I looked down at the city stretched below us.

From this vantage point, you could see downtown to the left, Dodger Stadium a little farther north of it, a sprawl of suburban areas, the main drags that crisscrossed the entire city—Wilshire, La Brea, Santa Monica. And on a clear day like today, you could see a glimmering strip of the Pacific Ocean to the very west of us.

When you saw the city like this, everything inside you slowed down. Relaxed. It wasn’t that LA was perfect, or some immigrant utopia. Like other good things in the world, it was deeply flawed, and on some days you sat parked on the 110 surrounded by buildings you couldn’t see because of the smog, and you hated it here. It could be relentless and lonely. But it was also where my dad had built his life, where so many people had. It was a place where you could grab Brazilian Korean food in the park where Walt Disney dreamed up Disneyland. But more important, it was home. And I related, deeply, to a home that was a little messed up, but ever-evolving.