Things That Happened Before the Earthquake

by Chiara Barzini

  We gave Azar’s balloon to a ticket-booth salesperson to watch over and crossed the large entrance hall. In the mirrors that lined the hallways I saw the reflection of an ill-matched couple walking in slow motion: the awkward Italian girl in sweatpants and the macho Persian guy with the perfectly starched Yankees cap and clean shirt. Arash reverted to a nighttime version of his school self. He walked in wide oblique strides with a laid-back but vigilant bounce. I didn’t match that stride. My steps were rigid, contained. My body had no messages to share.

  The posters for Reservoir Dogs were beautiful and everyone stood around looking at the men in black suits, splattered in blood. Arash bought us butter-infused popcorn and Cokes. The way he sipped his drink—sucking the straw with a tough smirk from the side of his mouth—was a performance, but I told myself I didn’t care because I felt that I was part of a performance also. The one in which we were adults, sharing things. Man and woman, popcorn and soda, ascending escalators side by side.

  When we reached the theater entrance Arash went pale. Hovering in front of the entrance, his friends from school with another group of bearded guys, maybe their older brothers, were fighting with an usher to let them sit close to one another. They pushed him around playfully. They all wore sagging khakis, gold chains, and buttoned-up flannel shirts just like Arash’s. They looked like a squadron. We were still at a safe distance, but I caught a glimpse of us again in the mirror as we started to break apart—a little tear. Arash turned to me, tense.

  “Your friends?” I said, without expecting an answer or an explanation.

  One of the younger ones, Faraj, recognized Arash and walked over. His eyes turned into a question mark the closer he got to us.

  “Yo, fool! What are you doing out here? We paged you all night.”

  Arash’s body shrunk, his gestures were not grand now.

  “Yeah, I know. I couldn’t get to a pay phone to call you back on time.”

  He glanced over at me. So it wasn’t true they’d flaked on him, I realized. He wanted to be alone with me. For an instant this made me smile, but when I saw myself in the mirror I looked smaller now. Folded arms protecting my chest, ugly sweatpants. Why did I get in that car?

  “What’s up with her?” Faraj asked with a smirk.

  Arash looked away and said he’d bumped into me. I was just a girl from his English class. Someone who wrote his essays for him.

  His eyes wavered for a moment.

  Faraj peered at me again, vaguely interested.

  “How much you charge? I gotta get my college application essay done by someone. Been looking into that.”

  I told him I was too busy.

  In the mirror an older boy questioned a younger boy about the presence of a young Italian girl. The younger boy replied with a nod and a wave of a hand, signaling he had this under control. He’d get rid of her in a second.

  And so it went.

  Faraj nodded at me and edged away.

  I crumpled the ticket stub in my hand and stashed it inside my pocket.

  Arash’s eyes had time to recover. They were stronger and tougher when they turned to me again.

  In the mirror the older boy joined his friends waiting in line. The younger one took his wallet out of his back pocket, withdrew a twenty-dollar bill, and handed it to the Italian girl.

  “There’s pay phones downstairs. You can call a cab to take you home.”

  His friends at the tail end of the line were almost inside the theater, looking back at him.

  “Hurry up, kuni!”

  He shrugged his shoulders at me. “I’m sorry. We should have gone somewhere else.”

  He picked up his bouncy stride and caught up with his friends, pants sagging below his waistline.

  Look at those flannel boxers popping out, I thought. I bet they smell good.

  9

  Monday morning Arash didn’t show up to English class. This was a relief because I didn’t know how to look at him without rage and embarrassment. On my way to PE I went to retrieve Azar’s balloon from my locker. It had shriveled, but I decided I would give it to her anyway. I found a note inside the locker. It was from Mrs. Perks, the Advanced English teacher Simon had introduced me to. I had given her some literary essays before getting suspended, but I didn’t think I’d hear back from her because of what happened. Her note didn’t mention my bad conduct. She said she’d read my essays and was willing to let me try her class the following semester. She gave me a list of books to read over Christmas break. If I came back with satisfactory reports and committed to more writing and reading tasks than my peers, she’d take me on. “English is not your first language, but I can get it to become your first language’s bright younger sister,” she wrote. I read those exotic book titles and her note, smiling as I walked to my PE class. I felt like I had a foot out of the ditch.

  When I got to class Azar was sitting on the track staring at her feet. She looked more depressed than usual. She glanced at me and my shrunken balloon and sighed.

  “Thanks,” she said without looking up. Her eyes had dark circles around them. I sat next to her, waiting for the coach to take roll. Then the school speakers began to crackle. The principal’s voice came on.

  “Good morning, students. It is with great sadness that we make the following announcement: On Saturday evening, Winnetka High School tenth-grader Arash Yekta was shot and killed at the Woodland Hills Mall. Eleventh-grader Nadir Javan was also shot and remains in stable condition at the Encino Medical Center. Arash will be remembered fondly by family, friends, and the Winnetka High community. He was vivacious and good-natured, and will remain in our hearts. We send our best wishes for recovery to Nadir and his family. There will be a gathering this afternoon at the Woodland Hills Mall, at four o’clock, for those who wish to mourn Arash together. We will now have a moment of silence.”

  On the speakers, the S sounds broke, screeching into our ears, and this reassured me. I thought if we couldn’t properly hear what was being said maybe it wasn’t really true. A gust of wind blew across the football field. The seagulls scavenged for leftovers from the weekend’s football game. They shrieked and sunk their claws into the ground, bickering over soggy fries. Azar’s birthday balloon was a lump of sparkly plastic hanging from her wrist. I batted my lashes a few times. All I could think was that I should have gotten her a new one that morning. I should have woken up early and gone to the twenty-four-hour Taiwanese party store. I should have gotten her five balloons with kittens and I should have thrown a teddy bear in there also—but why was everyone getting quiet all of a sudden? Why were they all looking down at the ground? Didn’t they also know this was just a misunderstanding? I would see Arash. We’d go to the abandoned middle school, like always. I know I told myself I wouldn’t speak to him again, that I would not know how to look at him without rage, but I changed my mind—I took it back, I swore. We were going to bust through the side doors and break free on the sidewalks like we always did. We’d go to the building with the cracked pavement and the tall grass and the shafts of light that made dust sparkle—that school, tucked between the hills with the lonely gardeners in orange vests. We would talk about nothing and spit on the ground and listen to the chain saws. That school. We went there every day. That’s what we did, so he wasn’t dead.

  Some students started to cry. Azar looked for someone to comfort her. She was Arash’s cousin, but nobody knew that except for me. I hugged her tight and my hug communicated something like we were going to get to the bottom of that misunderstanding together. She hugged me back, pretending to believe me. She was wrapped around my waist and I felt like a mother. Her feeble body was like a cracked branch inside my arms. Her big black hair tickled my neck. Black hair on her arms embracing me. Black hair over her lips pressed against my chest. Black eyebrow shutters, opening and closing onto my clavicles while she cried. She unwrapped the balloon’s silver string from her tiny wrist, hoping for a cathartic moment, a liberating flight, but the balloon had lost helium and gravitat
ed in front of us. Even the wind couldn’t carry it away. It wouldn’t fly up and it wouldn’t lie down. It just lingered like a piece of bad news we did not know what to do with.

  —

  The last time Arash and I had escaped to the abandoned school in the hills I tried to take a photo of him with a camera I bought at a garage sale for three dollars, but he pushed my hand away. He said I might blackmail him and tell his friends about us. Then he hugged me and pushed the hair from my eyes. When I developed the photo it looked like Arash was saying goodbye with the hand he was using to distance me.

  “I know we’re just fooling around. But you know, this is the best part of my days,” he had said.

  “It’s the best part of my days too,” I told him. And it was true.

  “I could never come to such a shitty place with my friends.”

  No, he couldn’t. I smiled and lifted my face from his chest. I looked at him, half naked—his pants still unbuttoned and his soft white T-shirt rolled up against his chest. The cars cruising the residential streets were in another world and we lay in our made-up living room on the cold classroom floor. I looked at him and he seemed like just a boy. A boy with a penis. A man. One of those beings stripped to their essence. No Persian pride, no gold necklaces, no oversize pants. It was him—naked with his deep dark eyes, long lashes, and dimpled chin. But on that Saturday night when he was shot, I knew what he wanted to be. I felt it just looking at his undulating stride the second we crossed the mall’s sliding doors.

  After he got rid of me, he performed the essence of his public self: loud, crude, offensive. Inside the theater Arash and his friends had screamed at the screen and gotten kicked out for being too rowdy. Who knew why Arash had screamed at the screen, why Robert did—why they all did. Maybe screaming at screens was the only way young people had to be part of the city’s culture, to subvert it. Movie theaters were places where we were expected to be silent and still, but they were also the few places where underage people were free to go on Saturday nights. That freedom was too small an allowance.

  The newspapers said the drive-by shooting revealed the allure of gangster culture among Valley teens. I read the articles over and over because it was the only way to know what had happened. Nobody knew about my relationship with Arash. I had no access to direct information. So I read and imagined and placed details where none were given. I filled in the blanks.

  The night I rode the bus home from the Woodland Hills mall, eating stale buttered popcorn, saving the twenty-dollar bill Arash had given me for a taxi, while Arash and his friends screamed in Farsi and threw candy at each other, in another part of the city, not far away, three bored private-school Valley girls with no criminal records were figuring out what to do with their weekend.

  I read their descriptions. They could have been any number of girls from our school. Natalie was blond and had perfect bangs. She had a job at the Sherman Oaks Galleria Gap. Audrey was identical to her, but with longer eyelashes and greener eyes. They looked like sisters, everybody said, except one had bangs and the other didn’t. Erica, the third, was overweight and nobody bothered to describe her beyond that. The girls were hanging out in a hot tub in the backyard of Erica’s luxury home in Encino. As I read, I could feel the Santa Ana wind blowing on their skin, the temperature of the lukewarm water—how it made everybody look and feel the same. I imagined Erica floating with her big arms spread open, a wet T-shirt over her bathing suit to cover her rolls, staring at the sky. She knew she’d spend her Saturday night watching a movie. It was probably what she did every Saturday night while her prettier friends called boys and snuck out of her bedroom window. I imagined the giddy girls murmuring about parties into Erica’s pink phone. All rich Valley girls had private lines. Erica never went with them. She stayed behind because boys called her “Big Bertha” and said she took up too much space. I thought she probably didn’t mind, though. Maybe it was enough to see her friends getting ready—living the excitement and anticipation of a night out without running any of the risks.

  The night of the shooting Natalie, the girl with the perfect bangs, called two guys she’d met at the DMV. They were older and belonged to a San Fernando Valley gang. I read their gang names and thought they were out of a movie: No Good Capone and Baby Huey. Natalie had picked them because they were “different.” They knew Ice Cube and Eazy-E from when they went to school in the Valley. They’d lured the girls with fun nights at Dr. Dre’s mansion in Woodland Hills. They had guns, which was hot. Their gang was called Every Woman’s Fantasy. It was a promising name. They had the best parties in the Valley and both Natalie and Audrey were fed up with Saturday nights doing drugs in McDonald’s parking lots.

  It made sense.

  I imagined Natalie and Audrey climbing out of the window, leaving Erica behind, warning her not to pick up the phone in case their parents called. I pictured Erica, disappointed, pushing The Bodyguard tape into the VCR deck, telling herself to pretend she was Whitney Houston, lighting a candle, closing her eyes. Kevin Costner would lift her up. He didn’t think she was too fat.

  —

  Audrey and Natalie cruised the Valley with the boys. No Good Capone knew someone who knew someone who hung out at Suge Knight’s Death Row recording studio in Tarzana, but that night he was nowhere to be found. The four of them kept driving, waiting for a plan to come up. Every Woman’s Fantasy members were famous for their wild parties, but where was the party now? Where were Dr. Dre and Suge Knight? Where was Ice Cube’s mansion? The girls became restless. Suburban somnolence, more warm wind, a succession of strip malls. No guns, no fun, no music, no party. Just a crack pipe in a Carl’s Jr. parking lot. Another Saturday night taking drugs in a fast-food parking lot after all.

  “What are we going to do?” “What is there to do?” “Where should we go?” The girls asked the same questions over and over. They were high. They forgot what they just said. They said it again. The articles made it clear that there was some kind of role-playing. Everyone had a part. Natalie and Audrey did what was expected of them: raspberry body spray, apple shampoo, Victoria’s Secret lingerie stolen from the Sherman Oaks Galleria. But No Good Capone and Baby Huey weren’t living up to their end of the deal. The boys kept their eyes on their pagers. Why weren’t they blowing up like they said they would?

  In an interview Audrey said she became a little bit worried when one of the guys decided to call a friend from West Adams. He boasted about how the guy had done drive-by shootings, kidnapped babies, and killed people. That was the moment when she realized maybe things could have taken a wrong turn. But her friend Natalie, she said, wasn’t afraid. She thought it was a game and going to West Adams was perfect because it was a chance to get out of the Valley.

  Once they decided to go over the hill, they stopped by a pay phone in the parking lot of the Woodland Hills Mall so No Good Capone could page his friend and tell him they were on their way. The pay phone was crowded with a rowdy squadron of Persian kids. After getting kicked out of the theater Arash and his friends were making calls, looking for something to do—same as No Good Capone and Baby Huey. They wore baggy khakis, gold, buttoned-up flannel shirts. Baby Huey and No Good Capone wore the same clothes but were part of a different kind of squadron.

  Arash’s friends who spoke to the journalists explained that No Good Capone didn’t want to wait his turn to use the phone. He did not want it to seem like he was the type of man who waited in silence for other men to do things.

  No Good went up to Arash with a confident stride, the same one Arash always had, but less undulant, less bouncy, more like warfare.

  “Where are you from?” he asked him.

  Arash turned from the receiver and rolled his eyes at him without answering. From the car the girls were now paying attention.

  “Where are you from?” he repeated.

  Arash told him to back off. He was trying to talk on the phone and was annoyed, his friends told the reporters. He didn’t think the guy was for real. He looked like a k
id, a little older than them, but still just a kid.

  No Good insisted.

  “Do you gangbang?” He asked the question forcefully. But Arash wasn’t intimidated. He lifted his face from the receiver, annoyed.

  “Do we fucking look like gangbangers?” he replied, then turned his back to No Good.

  Too mercurial. I could just see him. And then that question hovered. Arash’s simple reply had left No Good Capone speechless and he didn’t like being speechless. He did not want to use the phone after that.

  He returned to the parked car. Natalie laughed. “I know that fool. I thought you were badass. I thought you’re Every Woman’s Fantasy. You gonna let him get away with that?”

  Natalie said she recognized Arash from summer camp a few years back. He’d peed his bed. The papers said she tried to speak with a gangster inflection, but I was sure she still sounded like a rich, white Valley girl.

  No Good Capone asked her to get on the wheel and got Audrey to sit in the front next to her. He and Baby Huey climbed into the back. It felt innocent, like a game of musical chairs, Natalie told a journalist. No Good asked her to circle the parking lot a few times while he got ready. Then they drove back to the dimly lit rear of the mall where the pay phones were. No Good asked Natalie to douse the headlights and drive slowly toward the Persian group.

  I imagined Natalie turning to her friend, proud. It wasn’t going to be another boring Saturday night. The car slowed down and started to creep forward. Arash and his friends didn’t see it approaching. They were busy laughing at someone’s joke—laughing so hard that Nadir had tears in his eyes.

  Natalie pressed her foot on the accelerator. The car caught up with the group, then slowed down almost to a halt.

  “Duck now!” Baby Huey screamed to the girls. Everyone heard that scream, even the Persian kids, but before they could realize what was going on, No Good Capone was already leaning out the window shooting in their direction. He shot ten times, hitting Arash in the stomach six times. Nadir was wounded in the left leg.