Chapter 11: Marlboro

"Now, you don't have to spend your every waking moment teaching these heathens," Marty told me as he walked me through the house. "I'll be pleasantly surprised if you can even get them to sit down for an hour. Plus, they don't have to be fluent by the time summer's over. We just want them to know the basics, get a good foundation going, and before you leave in the fall, you can give them some homework to do throughout the school year so they don't forget everything they teach you. Oh, and watch out for Judd—he can be a prankster sometimes. Like I was saying, just try to get them to sit down in the mornings, and then you can let them loose around lunch. You're here for a whole summer, so I want you to take some time getting to know Los Angeles—I'll have Jo take you out some time, if I can catch her. She's hardly ever here these days—always out with her friends doing God knows what. I stopped trying to keep up by the time she got to high school."

I was nodding so much that my head felt like it was going to roll off my neck by the time we made it into a smaller room that looked like a study room for the kids. There were two small desks for them, a desk for me, and a standing chalkboard. Holly and Judd were already seated at their desks fighting—Judd was pulling her hair and Holly was using her little legs to kick him under his desk.

"Kids!" Marty boomed, and they both stopped and paid attention to him as he clapped his hands loudly. "I want you two to be real nice to Becca here and listen to everything she's gonna teach you. If I hear that you're being disrespectful, I'll tell your mother."

They both gulped at the thought of their mom, and Marty pointed a finger at both of them before smiling charmingly. He gave me a rather rough pat on the back and wished me good luck before walking out of the room.

I was carrying some French books and a notebook to track what I teach them. Holly was looking at me with a half-toothed smile, and Judd had his arms crossed, staring me down. I had already distinguished which kids were most like which parent. Holly was a charming angel like Marty. Judd was rather sinister and judging like Katie. From the two minutes I had met Jo the day before in Holly's room, I had firstly recognized her as more like Katie, but the more I thought about it, I thought she kind of had a charm to her like Marty. I was ashamed of how much I had thought about it that night.

"Alright," I began, sitting my books down on my desk. Both of the kids already had a notebook and pencil on each of their desks, so I thought I had rather just begin.

My very first day of being a teacher was a little unstable. I just wasn't quite sure where to begin, and I was worried that since Holly was so young, she wouldn't be able to grasp anything I was teaching. It turned out to be the opposite—Holly was very smart for a six-year-old, and Judd had the attention span of a squirrel. He also kept trying to throw balls of paper at me, and Holly was the one who finally told him off and got him to stop acting up. I taught them the very basics of French, like pronouns and verbs, until Flo called for lunch, so they were dismissed.

A few hours of teaching already had me fatigued. Marty said that he didn't expect the children to be fluent in French by the end of summer, but I still felt a pressure to do my very best. This was a once in a lifetime opportunity, as Dr. Marlar said, and I didn't want to mess it up in any way. It was vital that I had to be perfect.

It also seemed that co-nannying with Flo was another element of my job that I wasn't expecting. While I would have rather retired up to my room and read for the rest of the evening, Holly wanted me by her side at all times.

"Let's go swimming!" she told Flo a little while after lunch. Marty was in his office making calls, Katie was out to lunch with a friend, and Jo was still nowhere to be found. Holly, Judd, Flo, and I had been sitting on the couch watching the kids draw for about an hour. Holly had the bright idea of drawing the Eiffel tower for me (I think she thought I was from France since I knew how to speak French), and Judd was drawing his favorite football player. I had finally met the family dog who was a golden retriever named Max. He seemed to always stay by Holly's side, a perfect, dutiful family pet.

Although I was getting a little restless from being in the house for nearly two days straight, I was not sure about the sound of swimming in the large pool they had in the back—admittedly because I didn't know how to swim.

Holly was persuasive, but we compromised that I would just sit by the pool and watch her and Judd swim. Thirty minutes later, Holly was in a red and white striped one piece with pink goggles, and Judd was in blue swim shorts with blue goggles. Flo was inside cleaning up the mess they made drawing while I was leaning back on the white pool chair, watching as the two children swam around the pool rather docilely. They had obviously taken swimming lessons with how fast and professionally they waded to and from the sides of the pool.

The sun was hot and bright that day, and sitting around the white pavement reflected it directly into my eyes. Shading my eyes with my hand across my brow, I turned and looked around the backyard. It was perfectly mowed with pretty palm trees standing all around. There was not one cloud in the sky, and the humid breeze from the ocean nearby felt different than the muggy air in New Orleans. One could think that everything in life was perfect, sitting there by the pool of a large, beautiful house, listening to kids giggle and shriek happily, watching the leaves of palm trees sway softly in the wind. In fact, I hadn't thought at all of what I had left behind. I hadn't thought of Mama and the fight. I hadn't thought of Georgia. I hadn't even thought of Greg. I was still feeling a little strange, as all I had done since I got there was get dragged around by Holly in the house. I was growing restless already, which was strange for me since I had always been so content with routine in my life. There was something about California that made me thirst for more.

The patio door slid open, and I looked across the yard to see a blonde woman step out. I thought it was Katie at first, but upon seeing that the woman was dressed in denim capris and a sleeveless white blouse with dark, square sunglasses on her face, I realized it was Jo. I straightened in the seat suddenly, but it was quite hard to sit up when the chair was permanently laid back. As I moved, I could feel that I was getting sunburned, and Jo was walking towards me now.

"She finally let you escape the tea party?" Jo called out, the wind blowing her golden hair behind her shoulders. I squinted in the sun to look up at her as she came rather close to my chair. I couldn't help but compare how she looked to me. She looked so cool, her hair down and wearing jeans and a white shirt with sunglasses, and I was wearing my stupid little green sleeveless dress with my brown hair pulled into a ponytail and my overgrown bangs crowding my eyes.

"I thought it was a hostage situation for a moment," she said before I could respond, sitting down on the edge of the pool chair next to mine. She laid her head back on the seat of the chair, her long legs bent at the knees and holding her lower body up. Reaching into the pocket of her jeans, which I knew for certain were men's jeans since they had pockets, she took out a red and white pack of Marlboro cigarettes and a Zippo lighter. I watched as she put the brown end of the cigarette to her lips and wiggled it a little with her mouth before leaning her head up slightly to flip the lighter and light the cigarette. She flipped it closed and laid back down again, lifting her hips up to stuff the tore-up cigarette pack and lighter back into her pocket. It was a little odd, seeing a young girl smoking a cigarette like a man. She didn't hold it delicately like female smokers did. She held between her thumb and finger like a man.

Jo was a strange girl, I thought to myself as the wind blew her smoke right into my face. I cringed a little at the smell and looked back to the kids to make sure they were still okay, before I turned back to her. I couldn't tell if she had her eyes opened or closed due to her sunglasses, but she looked rather relaxed laying halfway off that chair and smoking her cigarette.

"You know," I began quietly, feeling the urge to make conversation. "They're saying these days that those are bad for you. They cause cancer and stuff."

Jo took the cigarette out of her lips and held it upside down so that the lit end was facing the ground, and the brown end was facing the blue sky. "It's a filter."

I just raised my eyebrows in response, and she flipped the cigarette back around and put it to her lips. I couldn't help but watch as she took another drag, hissing through her teeth as she breathed in before blowing the smoke slowly back through her lips. The sun was beating down hard on her body, glowing off the ridge of her tanned shoulder that looked toned.

"What's your name again?" she asked me, loosely turning her head towards me. The movement made her hair fold over the side of her face, and now that her sunglasses were facing right at me, I knew she was looking at me.

I looked away out of habit. "Becca."

"Short for Rebecca?"

I nodded, fiddling with the skirt of my dress. "I assume Jo is short for something?"

I looked back to see her blowing smoke again. "Joanna, but don't ever call me that," she snapped suddenly, jutting her jaw out as she took another drag.

My eyebrows crunched at her attitude. "Well, don't ever call me Rebecca, and we have a deal," I said back to her, surprising myself a little.

She turned her head slowly back to me and gave me a wide, toothy grin that was apparently a signature Donnelley smile. She wiggled the cigarette between her teeth and suddenly jumped up, sitting on the edge of the chair with her elbows on her knees. "You can't even see, can you?"

"What?" I blurted, but then I realized that I had been squinting my eyes the entire time I was talking to her because of the sun. "Oh." I rubbed them a little, but they were starting to burn.

"Here," she said, standing up in front of me. She threw the cigarette on the ground and stomped it out with her boot. She took her sunglasses off her face and ran a hand through her hair a couple times before turning to me. I could see her green eyes now, looking hard at me.

I wasn't sure what she was doing until she leaned down close to me, turning her sunglasses around and moving them towards my face. I jumped back out of surprise, but she slid the glasses right onto my face. My hands went up to my ears to adjust them, my eyes feeling instant relief as I looked at the world in a shade of dark tan. They felt a little clunky on my face, but when I looked up, Jo was grinning down at me.

"Makes you look so cool. You keep 'em." She cocked her jaw back and forth as she looked at me again before she turned and sauntered back towards the patio, slipping inside the house.

Gulping, I nervously straightened the sunglasses on my face, knowing full and well that they didn't fit my face or look right with what I was wearing. But Jo gave me them, and grinned at me so brightly, that I would have felt bad for taking them off. So I kept them on, cautiously leaning back in my seat and watching the kids fight in the pool. It felt ten degrees hotter.