The Original Page
CA
“I know you don’t want to be anything like me, but if you care about your social life at all, you’ll do cheerleading instead of yearbook for fifth period.”
My older sister advised.
I studied her from across the kitchen counter, in our Spanish colonial-style home, under the Southern California sun. Mount Boney looked in the distance. I was the spitting image of her. We both stood just a couple of inches above five feet, with brown almond-shaped eyes and long black hair, our skin perpetually kissed by the endless summers. We couldn’t have been more different.
We had learned to share our toys, our clothes, and our parents' time and attention to the best of any sibling's abilities, but I wanted my own identity. It was hard to feel like an individual when I was constantly compared to someone who got to do everything first. With my awkward phase hitting right as hers ended and my academic drive simply built smaller, time was not on my side. My sister was an incredible shadow that I chose to sidestep as much as I could. I learned early on that it was easiest to stay out of her way.
We were two sides of the same coin. Her pessimism and my optimism grated on each other's nerves to the point of squabbling over each other’s stubbornness. She was about to graduate top of her class. The extracurriculars portion of her college applications was a mile long, everything from class president to volunteer of the year. She wanted to be a famous journalist. She was too smart for her own good, as society was always her weakest point. Our father always encouraged us to pursue our natural talents and choose our paths. While my sister was ever the intellect, mine were perhaps more social, with a knack for soft academia. My head was stuck in Shakespeare’s works and glossy fashion magazines, and my calendar revolved around my social plans. I wanted to move to New York to write and work in fashion. The only art forms that ever truly moved me—the chosen paths of second-generation privilege.
I was a budding fourteen-year-old, about to enter High School, as my sister prepared to fly the nest. I was faced with what felt like my first life-altering decision. It was a time when all of the little things felt like massive contributions to who I would become.
Despite the differences I had with my sister, I took her advice. Something in my intuition that day told me she was right. Throughout our girlhood, we bonded over the one thing we had in common: we both wanted to see the world. And while our ideas of what else was beyond the Golden State were vastly different, some kids never left California. We lived in a quiet neighborhood of rolling hills named after two winds. The ocean breeze and the valley winds brought ideal temperatures year-round. The beaches, valleys, and mountain peaks offer all they could ever want. But us? We knew there was more than the perpetual 70 degrees Fahrenheit our town averaged. Mount Boney was an 8-mile-tall reminder from nature or the Gods that a whole world lay beyond it.
The winds of Santa Ana raked through the brush every cold season, often stinging our eyes with debris. Physical Education classes opted for yoga in the gymnasium, rescheduling our mandatory Mile Runs for better conditions. Newbury Park was constantly ranked among the top safest towns in the nation. In a city of a thousand oak trees, the gates that protected the estates held a utopian-like balance with the Santa Monica Mountains as its backdrop. The lawns were perfectly manicured, and the pools were kept on a weekly basis. I didn’t realize at the time that the gates divided the classes. Aside from the biotech company that brought us, along with the majority of the community, the biggest things to come out of the town were a few models and a rockstar (who one of them famously dated). Just north of Malibu and Los Angeles. Just south of Santa Barbara. We were right on the edge of everything, including a military base.
Childhood summers were spent barefoot between houses.
The summers of the 805 & 818 teenagers brought a different kind of energy. Summer mornings were spent on the five-dollar beach bus, headed for Malibu, after cheer practice. My sister flew East, where she had been granted a Robinson Scholarship, as autumn nights led to bonfires after football games.
As the years went on, the colors of our cheer bows changed, and my teammates’ hair got blonder. Our teeth, finally pearly white and perfectly straight after years trapped behind braces. The hills went from a pale yellow to a vivid green, and on a sunny day in April, my parents gave me a pretty little white BMW for my sixteenth birthday. Every California kid’s unofficial beckoning into teenage society came the day they got a car. A car meant freedom. Freedom to go wherever your vehicle, babysitting money, and your allowance could bring you. We would drive to the hidden beaches in Malibu. Eyes closed, hands to the ceiling as the lights of the canyon’s tunnels approached,
“Make a wish!”
We’d exclaim, caught up in the taste of sunshine, salt-air, and the promises of our futures as if the sky above could hear us better if we were just a little closer to earth.
Pool parties often led to cliff jumping at La Brinca, a place where teenage depression was banished for a few hours in the presence of adolescent thrills. The kids were not always alright. No one knew how to tell their parents that the life they’d worked their entire lives to give us was suffocating. The inherent power in the privilege of choice granted to us was overwhelming enough to the point where it wasn’t uncommon to be medicated. I often weighed the pros and cons of such lengths during my weekly therapy sessions. But on afternoons under the sun, we’d strip our beach layers and strip our worries and peek over the edge. Either drawn in by the challenge or the promise of just a few seconds of absolute weightlessness.
Everyone would ask,
“Are you going to jump?”
When they should’ve been asking,
“How are you going to jump?”
Some liked a running start, others preferred to stand right at the end and launch themselves up into the air. The girls were constantly squealing as they felt the rush of air break beneath them, gravity pulling them into the water. The boys dared to do tricks, posing midair, spinning, flipping, laughing all the way down. They would slyly ask when they’d get a chance to race my car down the main road. I’d smile and shake my head, grinning. What they didn’t know was that I’d drive home as I pictured my grand escape away from a place that never changed.
Date of Creation: December 13, 2024 at 2:04 AM
Written by Michelle C Lee
