If You Lived Here You'd Be Famous by Now Page 2

  Someone’s phone goes off in the back row. The ringtone’s “Fuckin’ Problems,” because of course it is.

  “You are responsible for ten hours of community service per year. If you forget to turn in your forms, you’ll be prohibited from having lunch off campus.”

  “What about theater? I want to hear about theater,” someone near the front says. The voice sounds familiar. I scoot out of my seat to try and catch a glimpse of the speaker, but I can only make out a head of curly blond hair and a giant bedazzled flower barrette.

  “There will be an informational meeting, I’m sure, but you have to check the website calendar. I’m not an oracle,” the teacher says.

  “Theeeeater,” someone mimics from the back. The girl whips around, furious. And here’s the kicker: I know her. Her name is Zoe Melton and we did community theater together in the sixth grade. We were friends. Both of us, theater dorks who were way too into Glee covers and the Camp Rock soundtrack. I sink into my seat.

  “Shut up,” she says to her heckler. And then she sees me. “Olivia?” she says. Far too loud. “Oh my God. Do you remember me? From theater?”

  I look her up and down. She’s wearing a blue fur vest and a pink tutu and neon yellow knee-high socks. She looks like she just waltzed out of the Justice catalogue. I have to make a split-second decision. For survival purposes.

  “Actually no, sorry,” I say. “I’m Via.”

  Kim Kardashian Stole My Salad

  Here’s the problem with LA.

  It’s not the traffic.

  I mean, it is the traffic. And the lines: seventeen minutes for a food truck bagel, infinite hours for a DMV visit. And how everyone’s too attractive (seriously, you hop off the plane at LAX with a dream and a cardigan and you drop three points before you reach baggage claim).

  But all of this is fine. You can put up with it. You can arrange to leave forty minutes earlier than you usually would, or Grubhub all your meals, or invest in a vampire facial—a skincare treatment that involves the rubbing of one’s own blood onto the face. These are the kinds of things a person can get used to, I suppose. But Los Angeles’ most irredeemable fault can’t be brushed away so easily. It sets in so slowly that you may not even notice anything’s wrong until you’ve already subscribed to the whole Southern California shtick. Maybe it’ll creep up on you as you finish up your trial workout at a boutique fitness studio, or it’ll hit as you drive eight miles out of the way to buy pet-friendly CBD therapy oil for your epileptic Maltese-poodle mix. It’ll stand dormant, a silent aggressor, until you finally realize—while examining the caloric value in a bottle of kombucha, no less—that there’s something missing, and for whatever reason, you’re hopelessly, eerily, unfathomably lonesome.

  To live in LA is to experience a unique sort of isolation. The urban sprawl is too great, the goal of an advanced aqueduct system and the Californian preference for wide driveways and rambling backyards. We aren’t friends with our neighbors. In fact, most communities have forfeited neighborhood watch groups in favor of motion-activated security cameras. Thanks to this, in all my years of teenage debauchery, I never once try to sneak out of the house. And because of the immense spread, the city doesn’t have a singular thesis. Unlike New Yorkers or Chicagoans, with their shared metropolitan identities and staunch loyalties to pizza crusts, I don’t feel any sort of default camaraderie with the 818 area code. It’s rare when something worthy enough to rally behind materializes.

  The first time I experience such LA cohesion, I’m growing up alongside the greatest lunch place in the whole entire world. It’s located not in a Parisian square or Italian plaza, but in the dreary nook of a San Fernando Valley strip mall.

  The front patio has overlooked a sun-bleached parking lot since the store’s inception in 1971. It’s a hop, skip, and a jump away from a McDonald’s, flanked by a budget hair salon and a mom-and-pop pet store. It’s accessible from the freeway. Thousands of cars bumble past every day, and it’s in close enough proximity to Calabasas High School to milk a booming teenage lunch rush.

  It’s called Health Nut, and it’s a vitamin store first, eatery second. The shelves are packed with tinted bottles of herbal remedies and sweet-smelling teas. A hodgepodge aisle of lotions and sprays provides a tricky barrier between customers and the lunch menu. Worse, there’s hardly any seating. But this unintentional obstacle course doesn’t sway its loyal customer base. In fact, students at CHS guarantee that Health Nut is the best-kept secret in the greater Los Angeles area.

  The menu is small, offering only a few lunch options. Owned by a Korean family, the Chois, the place is run with the help of just a few employees. One works the register while another tosses salads and toasts sandwiches in the back. You can order a BLT or a tuna salad. But no one ever does. If you’re going to Health Nut, there’s really only one thing to order.

  It’s called the noodlerama. They serve the salad in a clear plastic bowl with a domed top. Order like this: extra ginger, avocado, fork in the bag, please. And to drink, an iced mango greentini.

  I lose my Health Nut virginity halfway through my freshman year, when I’m smuggled off campus by some newfound upperclassman friends. Brooke and Melissa bring me with them during lunch period. They teach me the routine. Pour the dressing, close the lid, and shake. And with my first bite, I come to understand that there are about three things I am absolutely positive of. First, this salad is delicious. Second, there is a part of me—and I don’t know how potent that part might be—that will hunger for this eleven-dollar salad on a daily basis, from now until the end of time. And third, I am unconditionally and irrevocably in love with it.

  My palate is romanced by a near-perfect flavor profile. The dressing, a spicy concoction of sesame with notes of cayenne, engages in a perfect dialogue with the cool tanginess of the mango greentini. It clings to rice noodles, smooth and bouncy and piled on top of the lettuce in a glossy heap. The ratio of spice-to-sweet is sublime at a mathematical level, proportionally rounded so that I finish both the salad and the drink at the same time.

  Health Nut has awakened a cultish following in the Calabasas High student body. It isn’t mainstream, like Chipotle or Starbucks. And it fits neatly into the Los Angeles healthy-but-make-it-cute expectation. A salad from Health Nut is delicious, for sure. But it is, above all things, an accessory.

  The salad says I’m locked in to a symbiosis with the rest of my school. It’s the final stage in achieving a mid-tier Calabasas popularity (the first being a significant drop in grade-point average, the second being a re-wardrobing of Brandy Melville sunflower print). I guess I’ve done a decent enough job of conforming, because here I am, sitting across from two upperclassmen, a privileged Calabasas inductee with a fast pass to total blend-in-ability. And an eleven-dollar salad.

  “It’s not as easy as everyone thinks,” Brooke says, manicured fingers picking a particularly girthy chunk of chicken out of her salad. “Like yeah, we live in a nice place. And it sounds great. But, like, it’s hard! And sometimes…” She lowers her voice and takes a dramatic sip of iced tea. “I wish I was more … you know … normal.”

  “No, I totally get that,” says Melissa.

  This isn’t the first time I’ve heard these, shall we call them, confessions. Brooke, Melissa, and I are all involved in the theater program. Theater kids aren’t ostracized like they are at other schools—instead, they’re the ones considered closest to the entertainment industry. Rich kids with C-list parents give up hoity-toity private schools for our theater department. We’ve got an unreasonably high budget and brand-new, state-of-the-art performance space (so nice that it’s actually called a performance space instead of a theater). I’ve received the supreme luxury of a background role in the fall play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Brooke laid herself bare with aspirations of economic averageness a few weeks ago, at Pass the Candle. It’s a bonding tradition among theater kids; we all sit in a circle at someone’s house, monologuing our teenage ire through the early hours of the
morning. One girl, Jennifer St. Claire, had broken into tears about her parents’ broken marriage, the expensive consolation presents, the loneliness that arises when you live in a house so big it requires an intercom system.

  “So fucked,” Brooke says. “The only reason we’re doing that stupid play is because it’s in the public domain and Purcell blew too much money on last year’s West Side Story.”

  West Side Story was a big deal. It sold out almost every night and was even nominated for a Jerry Herman Award (the SoCal high school equivalent of the Tony Awards). The cast performed “Jet Song” at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre, a vaudevillian relic that houses traveling troupes of ongoing Broadway shows. West Side Story set an impossibly high precedent for all subsequent plays at the school, and it’s rumored that the musical’s success was directly responsible for a huge uptick in enrollment this year. The school even had to put up temporary lockers to accommodate the surge.

  Of the three or four other freshmen in the cast, there’s Zoe Melton (my old community theater friend) and Elijah Fisher. Elijah’s not from Calabasas either, hailing instead from the fringes of Woodland Hills. When we met, we’d both been waiting for our parents to pick us up. He offered me a Gusher.

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I have braces.”

  “Sike. I wasn’t going to give it to you anyways.”

  I decided then and there that Elijah would be my number one enemy. He’s the lead of the play, our director Mr. Purcell’s favorite new prodigy. I’ll admit he’s a good actor. But regardless of his talent, I’ve made it my goal to supersede him in all other things. It’s totally not because I’m jealous, though. Like, dude, I swear. Halfway through the Health Nut lunch I mention him casually, clueing in Melissa and Brooke to my distaste.

  “He’s so immature,” I say. “I think he subsists off of Gushers alone.”

  “I dunno,” Melissa says. “Not to be creepy or anything, but he’s cute.”

  “Mm-hmm. He has good bone structure,” Brooke adds.

  “I heard he hooked up with a senior girl at the district relay last year,” Melissa says.

  “No way. My gaydar goes off on him.” Brooke pauses, then shakes her head. “No, sorry, that’s problematic of me.”

  “He’s probably just another Valley douche. They all are. I thought this one guy in my chem class was cool for like two whole seconds before I heard he had”—here Melissa leans in and lowers her voice—“the Drive.”

  “What’s a drive?”

  “You sweet child,” Melissa says. “It’s not a drive, it’s the Drive. It’s totally controversial. Some people don’t even think it really exists. It’s this game a bunch of senior boys supposedly came up with years ago. Someone drops a flash drive into another guy’s backpack or locker anonymously and it’s filled with girls’ nudes from this school. The new guy has to import all the nudes he has from his past hookups or whatever onto the Drive and then he passes it on the same way.” She shudders.

  “Pretty sure my boobs are somewhere on the Drive, if I’m being realistic,” Brooke says. “And anyway, I doubt Eli has the Drive. He doesn’t seem the type. Maybe I should go for it.”

  “He’s not cute at all,” I say. “I think he’s annoying.”

  Brooke’s fork clatters to the bottom of her plastic bowl. “Oh. My. God. Do you like him?”

  “No, I’m just saying.”

  “Because I will totally back off. That’s girl code. So let me know.”

  I’m haunted by visions of Gushers. “I promise.”

  * * *

  The rest is history. Like when you learn a new word and then see it everywhere, the salad makes similar repeat appearances. In post-lunch classes, the dressing’s scent wafts through the air like the first trace of spring wildflowers. It’s impossible to walk through the quad without catching the twinkle of a plastic bowl from a campus recycle bin. Even my desk in Spanish class is sticky, and it only takes one whiff for me to identify the residue of a mango greentini. But it’s wonderful. The most perfect salad in the known universe belongs to us and us alone.

  The Chois prep extra noodleramas just in time for our lunch period. When fifty of us spill through the front doors, packing the vitamin store with knobby teenage elbows and Herschels, they accommodate us, making sure we’re all fed in the forty minutes before the last bell rings.

  Months flirt by; the fall play is a moderate success. The spring musical, Young Frankenstein, tempts wider audiences, only stirring up trouble when a handful of parents complain about one scene that calls for a seventeen-year-old cast member to mimic an orgasm onstage. But that’s only a minor blip, and the show is otherwise well-received, at least according to the county newspaper.

  In regard to my self-engineered rivalry with Eli, it’s business as usual. We’ve degenerated into hallway shoulder-checks. It’s something to occupy the time.

  I’m glaring at him from across the room when Brooke grabs my hand and yanks me into the lobby of the theater, where a crowd of kids is hunched over someone’s laptop. An episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians is playing, full volume.

  “What’s happening?”

  “Watch,” she says.

  A wide shot, and I see it. We all see it. I gasp.

  It’s our clear plastic bowl, filled with our noodlerama, situated next to our iced mango greentini. And a forkful of our lettuce is headed directly for Kim Kardashian’s mouth. The on-screen conversation is something along the lines of:

  “Mmm, I love salad,” Kim says, poking at a piece of avocado.

  “Salad is good,” Kourtney adds.

  “This mango iced tea is literahhhhly to die for,” Kim says. “I just love supporting small businesses.”

  “Bible,” Kourtney adds.

  And then the scene ends and cuts to Kardashian baby daddy Scott Disick brandishing an electric razor while Kourtney giggles in a bathtub. “I can’t believe Scott is gonna shave my hoo-ha for me,” she says, before someone in our crowd yells to please turn that shit off.

  We’re quiet.

  “Well, fuck,” someone says, breaking the silence. “RIP.”

  But maybe it’s fine. Perhaps the camera hadn’t zoomed in enough on the logo for anyone to see where it was from. Maybe our secret is safe after all. And during the next lunch period, there don’t seem to be any more customers than usual. Because it isn’t until Kim hosts a Twitter Q&A that a curious fan asks for clarification and thrusts us into the mainstream.

  “It’s from Health Nut! And the drink is the mango greentini,” she answers. And Calabasas High devolves into chaos.

  “What are we? Second-rate citizens?” Lindsey Webster screeches, when we go to Health Nut next and can’t get through the door. Whatever salads the Chois had prepped for us have already been sold to fans, and what was once a clubhouse for students has become diluted with unfamiliar faces.

  “This is the worst thing I’ve ever heard,” Melissa says, when the cashier tells her that they’re out of ginger, that they’ve been out of ginger since even before Calabasas High let out for lunchtime.

  I make eye contact with a woman carrying her baby—the kid’s in a TEAM KOURTNEY onesie. I wait in line: Five minutes. Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. Twenty minutes go by, and I have to leave, or else I’ll be late for my next class.

  We’re all seething. Why couldn’t Kim like Arby’s? Carl’s Jr.? Christ, we’d even be willing to bargain with Stonefire Grill.

  Student sleuths perform a frame-by-frame analysis of the episode. The worst part is that the family isn’t even eating the noodlerama. They’ve ordered chef’s salads. But without cheese. Easy on the avocado. And low-cal dressing. It’s blasphemy. Like. Who does that?

  As I grow up, so does Health Nut. Eventually, the shelves are cleared of vitamins. The skin-care aisle is removed in favor of chic white tables and chairs. The owners install a TV, which doesn’t play cable, but instead a looping slideshow of celebrity tweets about the restaurant. The menu expands, too, now offering poke bowls and pho a
nd different variations of the iced teas. The sons don’t work the register anymore. They hire an entire team, all sporting black visors emblazoned with their new logo on the brim. And it isn’t uncommon to spot a KarJenner assistant at Health Nut. We see the G-Wagon parked outside, a black-haired woman with a Bluetooth and a grimace at the wheel. I wonder if this is what the elusive American Dream looks like.

  Summer comes and goes. The Valley slips further into drought. Kim Kardashian releases a video game to the App Store called Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. You can dress up your character in digital lookalike outfits: Balmain and Juan Carlos Obando, cartoon imitations of Kim’s real life red-carpet-wear. The goal of the game is to social climb for Star Points until you reach the final level: A-list. Everyone plays it. It makes $1.6 million in the first five days through in-app purchases alone.

  We come back to school from summer vacation and I make a visit to Health Nut. But it’s not there. I’m met with a stripped facade, an empty storefront. The El Camino Shopping Center looks bleak. I’d been annoyed with Health Nut’s sudden popularity, but I would never have wanted it to go out of business. It was the only thing I held in solidarity with my classmates. And the employees were always kind to everyone.

  I begin to walk away—until I notice the tail end of a line. It’s almost twenty people, single-file. I follow them to see what they’re waiting for, and I’m introduced to Health Nut 2.0. The logo’s been enlarged and hoisted to the top of a new storefront. There are posh chandeliers, a shabby-chic wooden deck. I step inside. Canvas, high-def prints of the noodlerama hang on the walls. Now four times its original size, the place resembles a Jonathan Adler catalogue. A backlit menu hangs over the register station. There’s a designated photo op area by the water cups. The store sells merch now, too: hats, tees, sweatshirts, and prepackaged dressing. I hear they’re opening a second location in Sherman Oaks, and rumor has it they’re looking to branch out to Venice Beach and Malibu, too.