The Optimistic Decade

by Heather Abel

Genres: Coming of Age; Family Life; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Framed by the oil shale bust and the real estate boom, by protests against Reagan and against the Gulf War, The Optimistic Decade takes us into the lives of five unforgettable characters, and is a sweeping novel about idealism, love, class, and a piece of land that changes everyone who lives on it.

There is Caleb Silver, the beloved founder of the back-to-the-land camp Llamalo, who is determined to teach others to live simply. There are the ranchers, Don and son Donnie, who gave up their land to Caleb, having run out of options after Exxon came and went and left them bankrupt. There is Rebecca Silver, determined to become an activist like her father and undone by the spell of Llamalo and new love; and there is David, a teenager who has turned Llamalo into his personal religion. But situated on a plateau in the heart of the Rockies, Llamalo proves that it might outlast anyone's heady plans for it, from the earliest Native American settlers to the latest lovers of the land.

Like Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings, Heather Abel's novel is a brilliant exploration of the bloom and fade of idealism and how it forever changes one's life. Or so we think.

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 384

Sample

One

Utopia Is Greek for “No Place”

It was April 1990, not even four months into the new decade, and already Nelson Mandela had been freed and Daniel Ortega defeated and the first McDonald’s opened in the USSR, which was about to drift apart, ending the Cold War, and still, although increasingly people chose to ignore this, everything was awful when it came down to inequality and Earth destruction and generally being fucked by capitalism. Rebecca Silver, thinking about all of this, walked through residential Berkeley to meet her father for lunch. Above her, a traffic signal swung threateningly in the woolen sky. She passed houses without front lawns, steep spillages of blackberry brambles and nasturtium, stalks of feathery fennel, ice plants with purple faces closed up against the cold, their crawling leaves like the severed feet of ducks. Cement steps led to porches with crappy furniture, painted signs announcing the names of co-ops. Staring at each house, Rebecca found herself locking eyes with a woman—a college junior or senior—on a porch swing, nearly naked in bra and pajama pants, as if the weather affected her differently. She was beautiful, mature, exhaling cigarette smoke, and yet Rebecca, graceless in hiking boots and ski hat, backpack bouncing upon her back, hoped that her own aura of importance might be visible to the woman above.

She was, after all, headed to her first reportorial meeting. Her father, Ira Silver, publisher of Our Side Now, had called yesterday. “I’ll be in Oakland for an interview with the Greyhound drivers. A total mess the way they’re being strong-armed. Let me take you to lunch. Wherever you want. We should talk about the summer.”

He’d never visited her at college, never even called, leaving all direct parental communications to her mom, while he transmitted only his newspaper, sent weekly from Santa Monica in a manila envelope, Enjoy! -- Dad scrawled above the masthead, those two dashes standing in, she hoped, for a love so profound it couldn’t be written.

But now that she’d be joining his staff for the summer, he wanted to meet with her. He’d been vague as to his purpose, but she couldn’t suppress the hope that he might already have an assignment for her. Maybe there was an article that only Rebecca, having been raised knowing the way of ledes, nut grafs, and the systemic fault lines, could write. Her first byline. Already, the unlikely possibility had become the one she was counting upon.

Turning onto Telegraph, she passed a bookstore with a pyramidal display of The Satanic Verses. On a velvet cloth in the next window lay pipes with ceramic faces twisted in agony, like souls suffering Satan’s eternal flames. Beside them, a protesting handwritten sign: for decorative use only. And then she arrived at the restaurant she’d chosen because it had bad food and you shouldn’t spend money on good food when others couldn’t. Pausing at her reflection in the mirrored door, she took a moment to feel slightly disappointed in the girl with eyebrows like black moss, her angular features far from the impish femininity she admired in others.

A bell jingled her arrival; an odor of cumin greeted her. Nobody looked up. On her left was a lit refrigerated case, depressingly empty except for a bowl of tabouli salad and platter of marinated mushrooms. On her right, a small card table with bumper stickers and stacks of Our Side Now for sale. In the second row of tables sat Ira himself, reading a newspaper, not his own.

At her approach, he peered over the paper’s rim. “Sweetheart.” He hugged her briefly and fiercely. Rebecca had recently grown as tall as him, but he was broader, enlarged further by a nimbus of black-and-gray curls—rising up and out from his head and his chin, tufting behind the collar of his shirt. “Sit,” he said. “I only have an hour.”

The first twelve minutes of that hour were lost to his attempts to get the waiter to take their order, a period of time during which he found it impossible to do anything but seethe. Six more minutes were given over to the requisite exclamations about Bush: his bellicose bumblings, the Iran-Contra players in his administration, his kinder, gentler covert ops. Horrifying! I know! Idiotic! I agree! Had Rebecca read Ira’s latest editorial? “Yes,” she lied, enjoying, despite the falsehood, how proudly he looked at her.

The food arrived, as if to help them change the subject. “So talk to me,” Ira said, stabbing his fork into the weak heart of his salad. “Tell me everything.”

She could feel herself smiling back at his smile, the shared pleasure of parent-child parallelism. Despite his rush, he wanted to know all about her. And she wanted to tell him.

She described the special major she was creating—Third World Revolt and Media Studies—and the faculty she’d found to approve it.

“Jimmy,” Ira shouted. “Shit! Tell Jim I say hi. Better yet, tell Jimmy fuck you for choosing the Nation over us. He judges the Omni Prize. You know about that?” But then he stopped himself, raising a glass of water to the ceiling. “No, no, sorry. I’m listening. Go on.”

She listed, for his outrage, the sad lineup of campus political organizations. There was the Democratic Club, if you wanted to waste time being centrist. There were two environmental clubs that spent their reformative energy hiking Mount Tamalpais. But where was Ira’s coffee? Was it that hard to get a cup of coffee? Ira flagged down the waitress while Rebecca recited the clubs for people with shared identities: La Raza, Southeast Asians United . . .

“Welcome to the nineties,” Ira said loudly, interrupting her list as the coffee arrived. “Radicalism has died! Now we team up with those who look like us. They’ve given up on changing the economic structure that keeps their oppressors in power.” He sipped. “The coffee, in case you’re wondering, is tepid. But the company—you look terrific, Rebecca—the company is fantastic.”

She felt so adult, her backpack full of used books with colons in their titles that would teach her everything Ira already knew. She felt, even with her problematic hair, almost beautiful. She began to describe an essay she was working on—“Black and White and Re(a)d All Over: Representations of American Socialism and the Red Scare in the Gray Lady”—when Ira interrupted again. “Sounds terrific, pumpkin. Really punchy and astute. But listen, we need to talk about summer.”

Rebecca reached under the table and into her backpack and retrieved a pen and narrow notebook bound spirally at the top, the type he used, which she’d bought for the occasion. She set the notebook on the napkin, uncapped the pen.

He smiled at her provisions. “I’ve been thinking about that place. That place, you know . . .” He circled his hand as if he might conjure the word through physical effort. “Where David goes.”

“David?” She silently ran through the many Davids. David Goldstein. David Grunbaum. David Gross. David Marks. (Ira’s friend, Ira’s enemy, her SAT tutor, a classmate in poli-sci last semester.)

“David,” Ira repeated, bugging his eyes at the obviousness. “David David.”

“Oh. David.”

A young boy walked into her mind, treading on the cuffs of his cords. The son of her parents’ closest friends. Once her own best friend. A pierce of pain. David. David was now a sullen teenager with whom she shared nothing. A yawn. A thorn. A general disappointment. David cared little about scholastic achievement or political activism. What did he care about instead? She had no idea. He spent his summers at a back-to-the-land camp run by Rebecca’s cousin Caleb—“the visionary,” as David once called him, when he still spoke to her. She couldn’t remember the camp’s name either. Did Ira want her to write an article about it?

“That place. Caleb’s place. What’s it called?” Ira pressed his temples until he extracted the camp’s name: “Llamalo!” He pronounced it with relief, as well as an embarrassing Spanish accent. Yama. Low. “That’s it.”

But it wasn’t quite. “Actually, I think you say the initial L. Llamalo.” She pronounced the first two syllables as she would a Tibetan monk, Dalai-like. That’s how David did it.

“I told Caleb from the start it was a weird name. So, Mom and I were thinking.” He paused for coffee. “Maybe you’d like to go this summer.”

“To write about it?” Llamalo, she wrote in her notebook.

He cleared his throat. “No, hon. As a counselor. Among others of your ilk. Exploring the wilds of Colorado. Fun, huh?”

This could only be a joke. She’d never expressed interest in summer camp as a child, and even if she had, Ira wouldn’t have sent her. “Right. What did you used to say? ‘Llamalo: where Caleb teaches privileged kids to live simply, so their parents might simply live without them.’ ”

“Yeah, sure, we made fun of it. We did.” Ira was eating as fast as he was talking, helicoptering a lettuce leaf onto the floor. “But look, if you plan on avoiding everything we ridicule, you’ll live a very constrained life. You’re eighteen—”

“Almost nineteen.”

“Okay, then you’ve been watching us put out this paper once a week for nearly nineteen years. Don’t you want to do something new?”

The question was so unthinkable she found herself unable to answer.

“Hello? Hello?” Ira called to the passing waitress, raising his arm and scribbling the air with his hand. Turning back to Rebecca: “Maybe we’re pushing you into the newspaper.”

She’d been the one to ask, as they both knew. “I really don’t feel pushed.”

“David’ll be there, I imagine. You’ll already know one person.”

“David? We’re not exactly close. The last time I saw him, at the potluck, the Christmas one, he didn’t even take off his headphones. He just sat on the couch drawing those heads, those oversized heads. I can’t think of the last time we talked.”

“No, he’s not much of a talker, is he?”

She had a memory of the kid David once was, reaching out to her in a thicket of eucalyptus. Come on, chicken. Jump. Now that boy was gone. All those years she’d spent missing him, and for what? One had to at all times remain free of the delusion that anybody was who you believed them to be.

A fly landed on a tomato in her salad. As calmly as she could, although she was trembling inside, she said, “Do you not want me to work for you?”

“Oh, honey. It’s nothing like that. It’s just, you know, we never took you anywhere. Jesus, we never even took two consecutive days off. There’s so much we didn’t do with you. No travel. No camping. I just thought you’d like it. After nineteen years, you deserve something fun. The desert! Supposed to be beautiful. Sleep under the stars. Sounds like a blast to me. But you certainly don’t have to go.”

“Fun? Who cares about fun? The whole world’s going to hell,” she said, aping Ira’s sentiment and inflections.

A waiter slapped the check onto the table, and Ira pulled down his glasses to study it. Rebecca imagined again the moment when she’d tell her friends about her article. “Oh, nothing really. Just a cover story for the most important paper of its kind.” She held up the relevant issue. “Oh, that!” A crowd gathered. “Just a three-thousand-word exposé on the S and L crisis and how it robbed public schools.” (What exactly was the S and L crisis? She would find out!) But this usually reliably pleasing fantasy was ruined. The crowd dispersed. What had she done to make her father want to send her away?

Ira placed a twenty on the table and borrowed her pen to write a notation on the bill, which he folded into his shirt pocket, finally looking at her. “Caleb couldn’t have built that camp without me—did you know that? He owes me. So I called him. Made up a whole song and dance about your deep and abiding love for kids.” He shook his head. “I was so sure you’d be thrilled. I really expected you to be excited. That’s why I kept it a surprise. The thing is, pumpkin, you’re already hired.”

“You called Caleb?”

He smiled wistfully. “Dumb of me, wasn’t it? I had this idea we could go to the camping store, get you some stuff. Sleeping bag . . . What else do people take into nature? Flashlight!” He stood and knocked twice on the table. “But don’t worry about it, pumpkin. I’ll call Caleb tonight. Tell him you’re not interested.”

At that, he excused himself to the bathroom. Alone, she considered the possibility that she’d misread the situation. What if he wasn’t trying to punish her at all, but to offer her a gift? He’d never given her a gift of any kind before, material or experiential, although of course she’d always wanted him to. And now he had, but he’d chosen wrong, all wrong. Shouldn’t he know that she’d hate everything about nature camp—the nature and the camp?

Still, the astonishing thing was that he’d been thinking of her. Although he hadn’t called or visited this year, he’d kept her in mind. He wanted to rectify the deprivations of her childhood, and there’d been many. She imagined him triumphant as he landed on the idea of David’s place, even though he couldn’t remember its name. She imagined him dialing Caleb, calling in a favor in his imperious way. Thinking she’d be pleased, thrilled even. Drove all the way to Berkeley anticipating her delight.

Ira returned to the table, picked up his briefcase, and waited with an embarrassed expression while she packed her notebook and hoisted her backpack. How could he have known her loneliness this first year away? That all she wanted was to get back home? But now if she did, he’d be hurt, her presence a rejection of the gift he’d so carefully prepared.

As they walked to the door, she felt the urgency of tears, and Ira saw this, even though she turned her head. She could tell he saw, because he waved his arm up and down, wanting to comfort her and not knowing how. This gesture was so dear to her that her tears flowed now, and then he, wanting so much, she could tell, to speak softly and with solace, did the very opposite. “Do they think this will do anything?” he blustered, pointing to the stacks of bumper stickers they were now passing (it will be a great day when . . . , visualize world . . . , war is not the . . . , u.s. out of . . .). “A bumper sticker on a Volvo driving around Berkeley? They really think this will change the fundamental injustices of capitalism?”

She wiped her eyes and smiled and said, “Preaching to the deluded,” as they headed outside, because the trick was to care so much and then to ridicule all others who cared so much. She’d never want to hurt him. “You know, Dad, why don’t I go?” she said, missing him already. “The desert! I’ve never seen it.”

Rain dripped from the brim of her hat and curled into her ears, which is what the half-nude woman still on her porch saw: a freshman of little import, nothing more than a babysitter in nature. But Rebecca could spin a story out of garbage, out of the plastic bags flying past her in the wind, getting pinned by blackberry brambles, shuddering with rain. Ira had raised her to know how to do this.

“Guess what—I got a job at this totally intense utopian camp. No flush toilets, no phones,” she said, lying on the floor that evening. It seemed she spent most of her time lying down or lounging uncomfortably on her elbows, as if the purgatorial condition of college students meant that they were both too young and too old for chairs. The kind of parties she went to didn’t feel like parties, just people on the floor making puns with the names of philosophers. I Kant stand up. You can. I Kant. The kind of party where someone might say, “Actually, utopia is Greek for ‘no place.’ ”

“Exactly,” Rebecca said. This party was four people in Megan’s room: Rebecca, Megan, and two guys who wanted to sleep with Megan. “It’s in the middle of nowhere. The wilds of Colorado. Hours and hours from a city. True Mongolian isolation.”

“Wasn’t there something about you working for your dad’s paper?” Megan asked. Neither of the boys seemed to be listening.

“Not really. Anyway, this’ll be a blast.”

“How’d it go?” Georgia asked before Ira was even through the door. He dropped his briefcase by the record player, his keys in the bowl, and turned to find his wife on the couch with a mug balanced on the cushion beside her, even though he’d asked her not to do that.

“The drive? Nine hours of utter hell.”

“Come on. That’s not what I mean.”

“Fine. It went fine.”

“Rebecca said, ‘Sure, I’ll go. I’ll be a counselor’? Just like that?”

“No, not just like that, George. But she came around.”

“Is she okay? Should I call her?”

“She’s okay. She’ll have a great summer. Fun, nature, all the naturey things. It’ll be easier for her ensconced like that. It won’t damage her so much. She’ll be distracted.”

Georgia touched the mug and then released it, sending it teetering. “So what’s your plan? You’ll call her up once she’s settled a safe distance from you and tell her then?”

“Jesus, can you just . . . pick it up?” He took two steps and grabbed the mug, finding inside a desiccated tea bag not a danger to anything. Still, he set it loudly on the coffee table in demonstration of proper cup placement. “We’ll send her the final issue, and she’ll read my letter like everyone else. That way she can, I don’t know, process a little before she has to talk to us. Isn’t that what you’re always pestering me to do—process?” Now standing above the couch, he put a calibrating hand on her forehead.

“Ira, don’t.”

She was still mad. He walked into the kitchen with a finality Georgia chose to ignore by following him.

“I hope you didn’t say ‘we.’ I hope you didn’t say, ‘Mom and I want you to go to Colorado.’ ”

He peered into the fridge, at all the usual uninspiring bowls covered gently with waxed paper. “Look, you wanted me to figure something out, and I did. She’ll have a blast there. Or she won’t. But either way, she won’t be here.”

He closed the fridge, then walked into the bathroom but left the door open, because Georgia, he knew, wasn’t done. As he was zipping up, she appeared in the doorway.

“I just feel uneasy. She’ll think we’re sending her away.”

He turned on the water and looked at his wife in the mirror. “The hounds’ll be all over me. It’ll tear her up. You think I could stand seeing her like that? My own daughter? No, I can’t. I can’t. I could barely stand to see her today. Do you know how she looked when she said she’d go? All that false happiness for my sake.”

“Then don’t do it,” Georgia whispered, enunciating harshly, as if a change in tone might change his mind. “Keep the fucking paper. It’s my life, too.”

He leaned his forehead against the cool mirror. “Goddamn it, George. I don’t have a choice. Don’t you ever listen to me? I don’t have a choice anymore.”

two

Yama Low

During the school year, when Llamalo was a world in his head like the Forgotten Realms or Middle-Earth, David drew it over and over during class. Today, he began with the mountain in the center of the page and a wizard (Caleb) in the upper left-hand corner. Along the bottom of the page, he drew the river, shading it with cottonwoods and tamarisks, adding some towering boulders that looked a little lame, but the gnawed metal end of his pencil had lost its eraser. He found the pencil sharpener from his backpack and twirled until the lead was needle-sharp and able to represent in miniature the exact twists of the path up from the river—here’s where it’s so steep that you feel like puking; here’s where that kid once threw a rock and screamed, “Landslide,” hitting a counselor in the shoulder. When he finished the path, he saw that he’d drawn it too far up the mountain, so that the plateau at the base of the mountain on which camp was built had to instead jut out from the side of the mountain like Jupiter’s ring. What this lacked in realism, it definitely made up for in magnificence. On this ring, he penciled the barn, the ranch house, the garden, Don Talc’s trailer, a cluster of tiny people standing with hands raised in awe on the Great Overlook.

From a tape recorder on Señor Thacker’s desk at the side of the room came the interminable saga of José and María, who had been trying for the five years that David had been taking Spanish to get to the beach. “¿Vamos a la playa?” María asked in a voice that seemed to David increasingly desperate, with the breathy, high pitch of false optimism.

“Sí, sí,” José said, but there was this hesitation. You could hear it coming. A pause and then: “Pero . . .”

“¿Pero qué?”

Dramatic pause. David looked up as if he might see them: Anxious María, whom he pictured like the girls in this class, in skintight pants, pumps, winged eyeliner, and black bangs lacquered into a never-crashing wave above her face. José would be schlumpier, his clothes ill-fitting, undeserving of her endless attention, the two of them standing where nobody else stood—in front of the class, the direction the chairs faced, beneath the ticking clock.

“Pero . . . necesito un traje de baño.”

Who the fuck didn’t have a traje de baño? José—that’s who.

While, at the beach, waves crashed endlessly and the churro vendors sold churros to nobody, María and José were stuck inland, boarding an autobús for a tienda with bathing suits. David drew the arts-and-crafts shacks. Caleb’s yurt. Eight sleeping platforms. He made rays of sun emit from the wizard Caleb’s hands and land upon these platforms. Every picture, his mom had explained once, had to have a source of light. And then, since this class would never end, he added, in the voluptuous style of R. Crumb, a blonde maiden above the river: Suze.

“Righteous,” Yuji said, looking up from his own drawing just as David penciled the exaggerated ellipses of Suze’s breasts emerging from overalls.

On David’s other side sat Toast, who before falling asleep on his desk had given David a stoned smile of complicity. But David was sober this late April morning. He’d been sober for twenty-eight days now, sober since the Saturday afternoon he’d called Caleb, so freaked when he’d dialed that he’d messed up a digit and reached the Escadom post office, which itself seemed a minor miracle, the simple fact that the two-block town of Escadom existed while he was in an apartment in the swarm of Los Angeles, more people living on his block than in all of Escadom and the outlying rurality. He’d shaken out his hand, dialed again, and there was Caleb’s voice. “Hello? Llamalo.”

David had planned out what to say, but he’d mangled it and he had to try twice before Caleb understood just what David was asking for: permission to move to Llamalo when he turned eighteen next September. Move there, like, permanently. Without graduating from high school.

“Whoa . . . Huh.” That had been Caleb’s initial reaction. David held his breath, tried to hear Llamalo through the phone line, some proof of its existence—crickets in the peppergrass, the shrill of a hawk—but he heard only a song from the TV show Barney coming from the apartment above. Finally, Caleb continued. “And your parents? How do they feel about this? Their kid moving to Colorado, ditching high school. They’re on board?”

If he weren’t so nervous, David might have laughed, imagining his dad, Joe Cohen—Harvard grad; Columbia Law Review; beloved, if barely paid, lawyer to the farmworkers; recipient of the presidential award for something or other from Jimmy Carter; cofounder of Our Side Now; stern and self-disciplined—being “on board” with his son leaving high school. What could David do but wiggle around the facts? “They get it. They know what it means to me.”

“I’m impressed. That’s some open-minded parenting.”

“And besides”—David had rushed on, lest they dwell on his parents—“I’ll be legal. Full of sound mind and I don’t know, courage, and, Caleb, seriously, my school’s bullshit. I’m learning less than nothing. I’m getting the knowledge actively drained from me. I learn more in a single day at Llamalo than in a year here. I can help you with everything. Fix things, build things, clear the ditch for you. I need to be there.”

Another pause, then Caleb said, “You know, David, I have to tell you, I’ve thought a lot about something like this. Getting people up here year-round. And now you’re . . . Wow.”

“So, I can?”

There’d been a painful pause. Pause without end. José would crumple; he could never achieve such pause. David had opened the fridge, closed it, opened it again, lined up his mom’s Yoplait in color order on the top shelf, stared out the kitchenette window at the courtyard shared by the four six-apartment units. There was a small pool, painted teal but empty of water, full of brown palm fronds and diapers and the cardboard from a Coors twelve-pack. What’s the worst? he’d asked himself. What’s the worst, the very worst that could happen? Caleb could say no, and you’ll survive. No, I won’t, no, I won’t, he responded to himself. He’d been living on hope for months now, ever since he came up with this plan; he couldn’t live without it.

His mouth dry, his right palm clammy as it gripped the receiver, David considered blurting out into the pause all the ways he loved Llamalo, but you didn’t want to interrupt Caleb when he was thinking. Finally, Caleb said, “Sorry. I’m on the cordless and I saw fox prints, had to follow them awhile. So I should go check on our friends the chickens. See who survived the night. Well, look, David, it’s really great to hear how much you want to be here. That might really work for me. It really might. Of course, there’s more to think about and now’s really not the time for that. How about this? We’ll see how the summer goes. Check back in at the end of it.”

After David hung up, he shoved into his Vans, flew down the outside staircase, sprinted around his city block without feeling a muscle. Caleb hadn’t said no. He’d said, We’ll see. They would see! They would see! Like blind men granted vision.

Later, in his room, David had more carefully analyzed the words. We’ll see how the summer goes. Check back. See how. It was, he’d concluded, a sort of test. Caleb wanted David to prove his dedication to Llamalo this summer, and David could do that. No problem. No problemo at all.

Right away, although Caleb couldn’t see him, David had begun. While there were limited opportunities for high mesa chores in an apartment complex in Culver City, he kept to the routine of Llamalo as best he could—showers on Tuesdays, eggs for Thursday dinner, washing the dishes in a bucket—although his mom complained and ran them through the dishwasher as if LA were not its own desert and water not scarce.

More difficult by far were the abstentions. For twenty-eight days now—twenty of them at school—David had stopped doing anything disallowed at Llamalo, which meant he no longer drank beer with Yuji and his brother, didn’t buy pot from Toast or even smoke when Toast offered freely. He wanted to be clearheaded like Caleb, but this had, honestly, created problems with his friendships. At first, he tried to hang out without participating, but they didn’t get it. You have pneumonia or something? Why you acting this way?

Without Yuji and Toast, it turned out he was totally alone in this school of 3,100, in this city of three and a half million. He hadn’t anticipated the loneliness. Every day around this time—toward the end of fourth period, lunchtime looming—he considered that he might smoke a little, just this once, just to be able to stand with them in the parking lot during lunch. He’d started carrying an array of pens in the pocket of his sweatshirt, with which he wrote LL on his books and the back of his hand as reminders to himself, like the straight-edge kids wrote an X. Yesterday, he’d drawn LLAMALO with a black Sakura paint pen on his locker in the heavily serifed thick block letters like Chicanos used. It looked good and had satisfyingly filled a lunch period and would likely not draw ire from the administration, who turned over Chicano and black kids caught writing on school property to the LAPD gang specialists but generally had a hands-off policy when it came to white kids and graffiti.

But he couldn’t spend lunch doing that again. And so what would he do? David reached in his sweatshirt pocket for his Sharpie while a shopkeeper informed José that the store did not carry bathing suits in his size. Desafortunadamente, José was too grande.

There was nothing David would miss when he dropped out of school, but he did acknowledge that there was a friendliness to the Spanish-language experience. Other than David and Yuji, the class was entirely Chicano—kids who spoke Spanish at home and to each other with a rapidity and accent that Señor Thacker, an aged white man in a guayabera, could only yearn to achieve—but since they were tracked remedial, this was their class. Señor Thacker dealt with the potential for embarrassment by talking as little as possible. At the start of fourth period, he’d turn on the language tape, dim the lights, and lower the blinds, as a kindness for anyone who wanted to sleep.

Teacher and students alike took a break from 10:17 to 11:09, during which time