Flash Fiction 2nd Place: West Coast Minors by Shanley Kearney
There are no parents within the city limits of Los Angeles. Only when Tucker drives Janie and I out of the city, down to Irvine or Newport for a beach day, will we begin to see parents reemerge like rare creatures hiding from predators. We see them, tugging down the rash guards of their boys who keep wrestling on the sand and carefully unwrapping the sandwiches from the cooler. We watch them closely, these attentive parents, and avoid each other’s gaze. We pretend it doesn’t bother us — that we’re sixteen and can’t conceptualize what that might be like — and say adult things like, “Pass the beer” and “We should try to beat the traffic on the 405.”
Everyone at my high school lives alone. Sure, the parents sleep in their master bedrooms sometimes, making a pit stop in between NYC and Tulum, then back to LA for a night before heading back East, moving onward to Paris and Barcelona after that. I think they all had kids just to meet each other at the Beverly Hills preschools, seamlessly filling their social calendars for the next eighteen years. They’re efficient people.
The nice thing is, they usually leave lovely stashes of pills in medicine cabinets, their prescriptions automatically refilling internationally. Janie’s mom has drawers of Xanax and Ambien, Tucker never has to buy Adderall before exam week, and I supply the hard stuff — Vicodin and Valium. LA passes by easier this way, under a haze. We swallow and the dirty, overcrowded, sluggish city slips down our throat like syrup. Sweet and soft.
I take Ambien before I let Tucker take my clothes off. He takes a shot of vodka. We listen to the sirens wail after.
Tucker’s housekeeper, Olga, makes us cookies every Friday. Spiced snickerdoodles, warm gingerbread in December, these sharp lemon ones for the summer, and always pans of our favorite, the gooey peanut butter. Janie’s housekeeper, Amy, taught her how to braid her hair and put in a tampon, but after that she stopped talking to her so frequently. Apparently, her mom didn’t like the way Janie raved about her over the phone. Mine just leaves notes on the fridge saying what days she’s requesting off. I take a photo and send it to my parents.
We can be quite ruthless to each other, all the LA kids. Parentless, we border the line between fact and fiction while putting on our show of Lord of the Flies. We kiss each other, biting lips to draw blood, and then rewrite the story over lunch. “Did you hear what Emily did in Venice?”
Maybe this is all why I figured the lot of us were infertile. I mean, we were born from barren land — sand and concrete. Nothing grows here. It all just gives to the ocean, a glimmering ending of water and waves.
But my test was clear. Double lines like the paint on the streets we drive, always fast and never wary.
Positive.
