No, I wrote back. I have not gone to LAAC or any art school. I am not an artist or hoping to be, though I love writing about art. I once worked for Jay Eastman, and he told me that “you know that you’ve found your subject when it changes how you see the world.” Mentioning Eastman was a little brag. I knew Janis would recognize the name of the famous reporter.

I’m flattered to be asked, though, I went on. To be a graduate of LAAC was, I knew, to be an inductee into one of the most selective art circles in L.A. The small school in nearby Valdivia had produced a long list of stars, from all the way back into the eighties. Our designers at the Rocque went to LAAC, and they have told me terrific stories of the place.

Why? I added. And then I erased the word. It sounded so bold. I wrote it again, a different way. Why are you curious? Erased that, too.

Let me know if I can be of any help, I typed finally, and left it at that.

Janis responded this morning.

Maybe you can, she wrote. There’s a tragic story involving LAAC, and someone discreet needs to tell it. Let me know when you’re back.

2

“ARE YOU GETTING ENOUGH AIR back there?” Yegina said, twisting to check on me for the fifth time since we’d left her house in Silver Lake. Huge round sunglasses obscured her eyes.

“If you can call what we breathe air,” I said agreeably.

Air wasn’t my problem in the cramped back seat of my best friend’s yellow Mazda. It was leg room. Yegina and her boyfriend, Hiro, had packed as if they had been evacuating Paris instead of spending a night in the desert outside Twentynine Palms, looking at new art installations. Duffel bags bulged beside me, their zippers straining. Grocery sacks filled with snacks and drinks enough for twenty. And I knew that a large canvas tote held Yegina’s snowy comforter. She couldn’t sleep under hotel duvets. Most hotels washed their coverlets only a couple of times a year, she had informed me once, a statistic I could have guessed at, but then we all have obvious facts we like to ignore.