Episode 2

We pass under a collection of road signs, one above each lane, outlining the surrounding cities and neighborhoods. The words are nothing more than a blur as we speed under them. A new silence is forming, so Dad quickly clears his throat and makes a second attempt at holding a conversation with me.

“You’re going to love Santa Monica,” he says, smiling only briefly. “It’s a great city.”

“Yeah, I looked it up,” I say, propping my arm up against the window and staring out onto the boulevard. So far, LA doesn’t look as glamorous as it does in all those images I saw on the Internet. “It’s the one with that pier thingy, right?”

“Yes, Pacific Park.” A glint of sunlight catches the gold wedding band around my dad’s finger where his hands grip the steering wheel. I groan. He notices. “Annie can’t wait to meet you,” he tells me.

“And I her.” This is a lie.

Annie, my dad informed me recently, is his new wife. A replacement for my mom: something new, something better. And this is something that I can’t understand. What does this Annie woman have that my mom doesn’t? A better dish-scrubbing technique? Better meat loaf?

“I hope the two of you can get along,” Dad says after a moment of suffocating silence. He merges into the farthest right lane. “I really want this to work.”

Dad might really want this to work, but I, on the other hand, am still not completely sold on the whole reconstituted-family-model idea. The thought of having a stepmom does not appeal to me. I want a nuclear family, a cereal box family made up of my mom, my dad, and myself. I don’t like adjustments. I don’t like change.

“How many kids does she have again?” I ask, my tone contemptuous. Not only have I been blessed with a lovely stepmother, I have also been graced with stepbrothers.

“Three,” Dad shoots back. He is growing irritated by my obvious negativity. “Madhav, Krish, and Chris.”

“Okay,” I say. “How old are they?”

He talks as he focuses on the stop sign only yards ahead and slows the car down. “Madhav just turned seventeen, Krish’s fourteen, and Chris—Chris is eleven. Try to get along with them, honey.

” Out of the corner of his hazel eyes, he fixes me with a pleading stare.

“Oh,” I say again. Until now I just assumed I’d be meeting a couple of toddlers who could barely string sentences together yet. “Okay.”

Thirty minutes later, we’re driving through a winding road in what appears to be the outskirts of the city. Tall trees decorate the parkway on each sidewalk, their thick trunks and crooked branches providing shade from the heat. The houses here are all larger than the one I live in with my mom back home, and they’re all uniquely designed and constructed. No two houses are alike, neither in shape nor color nor size. Dad’s Lexus pulls up outside a white-stone one.

“You live here?” Deidre Avenue seems too normal, as though it belongs in the middle of North Carolina. LA isn’t supposed to be normal. It’s supposed to be glitzy and out of this world and totally surreal, but it’s not.

Dad nods, killing the engine and closing his sun visor. “You see that window?” He points to a window on the second floor, the one right in the center.

“Yeah?”

“That’s your room.”

“Oh,” I say. I wasn’t expecting my own room for the eight weeks that I’m here. But it looks to be a pretty big house, so I’m sure spare rooms are plentiful. I’m glad I won’t be sleeping on an inflatable bed in the middle of the living room. “Thanks, Dad.” When I try to push myself up, I realize that wearing shorts has proven to have both pros and cons. Pro: my legs feel fresh and cool in this weather. Con: my thighs are now stuck to the leather of Dad’s Lexus. And so it takes me a good long minute to actually get myself out of the car.

Dad heads around to the trunk, collecting my suitcase and placing it on the sidewalk. “Better head inside,” he says as he yanks out the handle and begins wheeling it along behind him.I take a wide step over the parking strip and follow my dad along the stone path. It leads up to the front door: mahogany and paneled, just like the doors to houses owned by the rich should be. All the while, I’m just staring at the Converse on my feet, taking a moment to let my eyes run over my scrawling handwriting, which decorates the sides of the white rubber. Just like my suitcase, there are lyrics written in black Sharpie. Staring at the writing helps keep my nerves at ease: slightly, just until we reach the front door.

The house itself—despite being an obnoxious symbol of consumerism—is very pretty. Compared with the house I woke up in this morning, it may as well be a five-star guesthouse. There’s a white Range Rover parked in the driveway. How flashy, I think.

“Nervous?” Dad asks, hesitating outside the door. He smiles reassuringly down at me.

“Kind of,” I admit. I’ve tried not to think about the endless list of things that could go wrong, but somewhere within me, there is a sense of fear. What if they all absolutely hate me?

“Don’t be.” He opens the door, and we head inside, my suitcase trailing behind us, its wheels scraping along the wooden flooring.

In the entryway we’re immediately overcome by an overwhelming scent of lavender. In front of me there is a staircase leading upstairs and a door to my right leading, from what I can see through the crack, to the living room.

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