He takes us along Venice High down towards Abbot Kenny Street. On the threadbare lawn students sit with their backpacks and others lean into cars by the sidewalk and gather in groups by the fence. Hanging out. Next to it stands the apartment complex, with its phone number and orange FOR RENT banner furled across three windows. Little colored flags stick out of the lawn. I am sorry for the poor foreigners who are attracted to the nice building front and do not know what they are getting into. I lasted in Venice High a week until a black kid came running down the hallway, chased by some others onto a playground of bright, weeded concrete and was shot surrounded by a crowd of kids. He died the next day. The black girls were clustered and vicious and I avoided walking by them in the hallways and schoolyard. I’d spend whole breaks in the bathroom waiting for the sounds of feet scurrying into the classrooms to fade, and then I would come out into the empty hall and arrive late for class. I did not last long, but there are people I remember well and would not want to see again. Now, I duck low in Tomas’s new truck, but nobody from the school’s lawn looks in our direction. We are only a couple blocks from the Venice Hood, but also near Marina Del Rey, and you will find nice condos here among the older, weather-beaten bungalows with the peeling porches and the old black people who like to hang out on them. We get to South Santa Monica. Abbot Kenny Street’s New Age boutiques and artist’s stores look funky and bright with afternoon shoppers. At night here it is empty except for the black kids who hang out at the liquor store and the Lee Fan kick-boxing students who are not afraid of the black and Mexican gangs that come here to shoot each other and sometimes die.

Tomas hangs a left onto Westchester. The air here smells cool and salty. I catch blue glimpses of ocean between the buildings whose walls are wind-beaten; my brother turns in that direction and we pull into an alleyway between two apartments. It is narrow here, the walls above us chipped and faded by salt and wind, and the buildings stand on metal stilts above unsheltered asphalt crowded with nice cars.

Keep your eye out for his yellow Jeep, he says, not bothering to turn to me.