Via Bleidner - If You Lived Here Youd Be Famous by Now: True Stories from Calabasas

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To my mom

Its mid-September. But in Los Angeles, autumn waits. Autumn sits back and lets summer overstay her welcome while we settle in our desks and listen to the rhythm of an old air conditioner chugging through a dense heat. It never gets cool enough. The archdiocese regulates room temperature from Wilshire Boulevard, but they never account for the special kind of heat that lives in the Valleyspecifically, Woodland Hills. The sauna suburb. Its often a good ten degrees hotter than anywhere else. Right on the edge of severe drought, the city has just recently turned to regulation gravel yards and potted cacti. Chapped soil crunches under our uniform sneakers. At home, neighbors are encouraged to alert the city about any houses watering their plants more than once a week. We grow suspicious. Sprinklers turn on only in the loneliest hours of the morning. Some nights I lie awake, tuned in to the gentle chirping of irrigation systems activating in secret. Where is El Nio, we wonder? Does he watch us while we brush our teeth? Each time I open the faucet for a drink of water, I feel a pang of guilt, imagining the Valley a year into the future: a concrete, postapocalyptic wasteland, strangers divining the LA River for one last drop of septic muddle.

Woodland Hills is the purgatory of the San Fernando Valley. Its the middle child, nestled between Calabasas and Tarzana, the quiet, declining byproduct of a wilting porn industry. There is at least one Porn House in every neighborhood. Block parties and cul-de-sac kickball games are soundtracked by the coital groans of invisible porn stars, as predictably suburban as the drone of a lawnmower or clack of an ice machine. We accept it into our humdrums. Every middle school parent knows that no matter how high you crank the volume on Owl Citys Fireflies at the sixth-grade pool party, it just cant seem to drown out next doors in-production Avatar porn parody. Grape Capri Sun will forever have a synesthetic association with the fleshy smack of Navi braid-mating.

Zombified and heavy-footed, Woodland Hills trudges into early fall. The air stays sweltering and stagnant. No humidity. Just plain heat. Sometimes, in the morning, the temperature lifts, and well be shivering in a surprising seventy degrees. But the San Fernando Valley is tricky; come one oclock and youll be shedding layers of clothing like onion skin. By the end of the morning, the heat presses through our classrooms plaster walls, and we resort to prehistoric cooling mechanisms like fanning study guide packets and three-ring binders.

Morning prayer is at 8:05. The Pledge of Allegiance is sandwiched between an Our Father and a Hail Mary. On one side of the room, there is a flag, and on the other side, a cross. We flip back and forth until a message from the principal releases us to our chairs. We start the day.

A teacher calls roll. There are usually thirty-one of us. But today, there are two absences. One is Owen Mason (who has head lice) and the other is Bridget Penderman, who usually sits right in front of me.

Her empty desk leaves a window between Marcus Brown and me. Hes got dark hair and green eyes and were all in love with him. During social studies he turns around and asks: Wheres Bridget?

I shrug and he turns back to the front.

Wait, shoot, I think to myself. I reach forward and tap him on the shoulder. Shes probably sick or something, I say. Im grasping for straws here.

He nods. Probably.

But a week passes, and Bridget is still gone, apparently in the throes of the swine flu. Each day I talk a little more to Marcusshort conversations about art class, or recess kickball. Bridget even misses Sex Ed Day. Our teacher passes out virginity contracts and puts the extra on top of her absent-work pile.

They separate us. Boys in one room, girls in the other. We watch an ultrasound of a fetus at six weeks while an old lady from the church barks about vacuums and murder and mortal sins. Gracie Knibbs, three desks over, is so scared that she whimpers big, shaky tears. We pass around pamphlets with chlamydia and syphilis printed in the Goosebumps font. The woman then warns us about the dangers of SEX and TEENAGE BOYS.

Many only want one thing, she says. They might not even care about you. They might lie. They might say whatever it takes to get what they want. They could tell you they love you just to get you in bed. TEENAGE BOYS are not like us. She scans the room until she spots Emma Hawthorne falling asleep in the back of the class. You, there. What did I just say?

Boys just want sex.

Alright, the lady says. She stares us down. Good.

We still have our virginity contracts on our desks. In a pretty cursive scrawl, the words leer up at me: I make a commitment to God, myself, my family, my friends, my future mate, and my future children to a lifetime of purity including sexual abstinence from this day until the day I enter a Biblical marriage relationship.

I flash on a deeply disturbing montage of myself padding around the desert with some old bearded dude, eating mustard seeds and whining over lost sons.

These are a promise to God to save yourselves for holy matrimony, the teacher says. Raise your hand once you have signed yours.

Slowly the whole room has their arms raised, all except for Ruby Smith. Her hands stay folded. When the teacher asks, she says she doesnt feel like making any promises to God. From now on, Ruby is the official whore of the eighth-grade class.

The boys come back. Its awkward. Our minds reel with words like sin and pubic crabs. The presentation is over, but we havent forgotten the ladys warnings. Sex must be the most awful thing in the world. I decide that I will definitely never have it.

Marcus sits down. I look at him, curious. I wonder if our little chats have some ulterior motive. I lean forward, the first to break the silence that the church lady has dropped on us. What did they say to you guys? I whisper.

All girls just want sex, he says. Basically.

School lets out. I hold my contract close to me because Im scared of seeming like Ruby.

I see her throw away her contract and get into her moms minivan. Her dog is sitting in the front seat. Its cute. A floppy yellow Labrador. She laughs and scratches its ears and her mom leans over to kiss her on the forehead. Theyre playing the new One Direction album.

Annie Kostov shoulders her backpack and calls Ruby a slutjust loud enough for us to hear.

Three times a year, my class goes to church to receive the sacrament of reconciliation. We line up in our formal uniform. The monsignor hands out orange cards printed with the Ten Commandments and were supposed to reflect on what weve done wrong, what sins weve committed, and how weve disrespected God. Most confessionals last five, maybe ten minutes, because nobody tells real sins, just generic easy ones. Sip of wine at Thanksgiving. Wandering eyes during a spelling test.

If we were honest, reconciliation would take hours. Twelve-year-olds are sinners by nature. I stole my dads credit card to pay for extra lives in Clash of Clans. I drew dicks all over the class test folders. I tried to get high off the auditoriums fog machine, and I also had sex with a vacuum cleaner and every object with a hole in it that I could find in my house. Confession doesnt mean much to us, besides the fact that it is a substitute for religion class. I would rather lie to a priest than spend an hour memorizing a list of good and merciful popes who most definitely were not guilty of rape and murder.