CHAPTER 8 – I Am what I AM (2)

It took twenty minutes to travel down the 101 from West Hollywood to Cal State, east of which sat the Los Angeles Performing Arts School, LAPA to the locals.

On approach to Valley Drive, one would never have suspected that, hidden behind the glass-and-concrete brutalism of the California State University, was the No. 2 high school for the arts in the USA, dwarfed only by the billion-dollar endowments of Guilliams, NYC.

Though LAPA was a high school for students from Freshman to Senior, its zone of occupation was woven into Cal State’s campus, sharing auditoriums, halls, and transportation infrastructure with the university.

When Eric first pulled up at the gate, it took Eppie almost half a minute to recognise that there was no grand entrance. Unlike Cal State itself, LAPA was hidden behind a foliage of dense buildings and landscaped greenery. If it wasn’t for a bleached-blonde punk in torn military cargos smoking a cig beside a wall, Eppie would have missed the entrance to her new home entirely.

The school building, hidden out of view, was prefaced by an enormous pit, a smooth indent of sunken concrete that looked almost like a skate park, but was actually an amphitheatre. Above the concrete were rows upon rows of blended white arches, from which massive canvas sails stretched, providing shade and shelter for the students below.

Once Eric parked, they made their way with her new clothes and rolling suitcase across the lawnless open-air atrium, and Eppie got a chance to study the students who would be her peers.

It was lunch break, and kids were… kids, she supposed.

She had never paid attention to kids, unless they were making the studio good money, and she wasn’t exactly sure what to expect. First of all, the student body here was explicit exhibitors of American exceptionalism, the epitome of cool.

They were individualistic, but not quite individuals. There were, for example, more ivory-white cords hanging from ears than anywhere she had yet seen. At the same time, Eppie had never in her life seen so much variation in hair colour, from natural blacks to gothic jet, to bubblegum pink, to tyrian purple, to shades of blue, to anime green, to shocking orange.

The most visible were the theatre kids, recognisable by their tracksuits and warmers, practising with their peers, or projecting their voices across the spacious courtyard at the trees. Around each troop of two to six people, there were more coffee cups than Eppie believed was healthy for young adults, which they sipped from incessantly between thickly printed bundles of scripts bristling with sticky notes.

A closely adjacent species was the film students and the photographers, a few of whom had already taken her picture. Like lost birds they were, meandering around the quadrangle, DLSRs in hand, imagining themselves as groundbreaking directors creating the next billion-dollar enterprise, peeking and pecking at anything that moved.

The least organised of the sub-species of LAPA, Eppie discerned, was the musicians. As a conservatory-type school, the student body was split between the Jazz Cats and the Classics. The former were the ones who travelled in packs, wore matching blazers, and mimed ensembles wherever they could. The latter was rarer, for school had yet to officially begin for another week, though Eppie could already spot the violinists with their precious hand-held cargo, and the contrabassists with their man-sized instruments.

The hidden species that Eppie knew of was the visual artists, the painters, sketchers, the avant-garde inventors of the visual language, who were either still enjoying the last days of fall, or already in the art rooms, preening their craft.

Of the four core species, the theatre kids gave the school its most prominent alumni. Many veterans of the arts, six Academy Award Winners, a dozen recipients of the Tony, a baker’s dozen of Emmys and countless fellows of elite Fellowships once called the septic-smelling halls of LAPA their fond home.

Strangely, the school had produced no Grammy winners. That prestige was firmly monopolised by Guilliams.

It was thanks to the school’s alumni that LAPA offered free tuition to its general stream students. It was also thanks to the school’s alumni that LAPA had been pressured into creating one hundred positions for fee-paying students.

It was a compromise that Dr Arthur Burton, the long-serving Principal of the school, had reached after a half-decade tug-of-war with the school’s parental board. Simply put, the school’s well-to-do alumni wanted their kids to have the same opportunities they had, but they couldn’t produce children who could pass the school’s elite audition process.

And unlike Eppie, the sixteen-year-old son of the all-time Hall of Fame rapper Calvin Smith, aka Yo-THUG, could not be considered categorically disadvantaged.

Eventually, the momentum of privileged grievances resulted in a new academic wing, new landholds, new student condos, new staff, new grants, and thus—new students. Principal Burton forsook the school’s four-decade-long principles in exchange for creating LAPA’s endowment program, aimed at providing the best for general-population students by leveraging the fees paid by sponsored kids.

Under the gaze of the Gen-Ed students, she and Eric walked past the main office building…

… toward the Special Admissions building.

The students lost interest at once.

One of them visibly shook their head in disgust.

Unlike the retro-brick with a fresh splash of paint that had been the old main building of LAPA, the Special Admissions building was a glass-and-concrete wonder of modernity. Cut with strange angles that created interlocking trapezoids, the building looked more like something the Cal State had funded from its endowment than something a group of parents had collectively donated.

As they approached, a heavy set of double glass doors slid open soundlessly, admitting her and Eric into the atrium of a modest metropolitan museum. Curved wood, accented lights, and black granite formed the core aesthetic, guiding them toward the smiling blonde at the counter.

“My name is Eppie Fontaine,” she introduced herself. “I am here to see Mrs Carr. I am moving into the… the Stratford-upon-Avon Condos?”

She hadn’t paid too much attention to the title of the brochure until now, but now that she did, the name of her new home rang alarm bells inside her head.

“Ah, she’s expecting you. You must be Mr Eric Lee,” the receptionist gave Eric doubly the attention she had bestowed upon herself. “Come this way, please.”

They followed the click-clacking of the young lady with the shapely calves until the atrium ended, and a secondary set of sliding doors took them into a sloped plane of zig-zagging sandstone paths that led upwards toward a series of modern apartments.

Eppie was sure that the first set of apartments, older-looking and in the brutalist fashion of the Cold War, would be her new home.

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To her surprise, Susan Carr emerged from the entrance to the newer buildings, four storeys tall and made of a composite of glass, brick, wood, and steel, shaped like interlocking, stacked shipping containers.

“Eppie! Mr Lee! Welcome back to LAPA,” the woman tipped her head, and extended a hand. “Euphemia, you are looking very, very hale. That’s awesome! Mr Lee, thank you so much for bringing her back to us. We’re forever grateful for Sony’s generosity.”

Eric and Susan exchanged handshakes, while she and her Operations Coordinator exchanged smiles. From the way the woman was almost pressing herself into Eric, Eppie guessed Sony was a sponsor for the programs Susan oversaw.

“Well, let’s head up.” Carr snapped her heels like Dorothy trying to get home. “Let me show you your room.”

Incredibly, the building had an elevator, and her new home was on the top floor.

“Unit C-401A,” the Operational Coordinator handed over two keycards. “Your individual rooms are lockable both ways. Doors cannot be opened from the outside, but they also cannot be locked from the inside—that’s fire safety rules. The building management, that’s your dorm mother, maintains the right to access any room at any time, for any reason, what with you all being minors and all.”

“These are single-sex dorms?” Eric looked around the mid-budget Sofitel decor.

“Naturally,” Carr grinned. “Eppie is free to invite boys if she wishes. However, there’s a very strict curfew. Violation of this curfew will result in penalties, possibly including expulsion. No exceptions.”

“Not even for the Nepos?” Eric asked conspiratorially.

“That’s above my pay grade,” Carr flirted with her lawyer effortlessly.

DING!

The lift opened.

They walked down a new-carpet-smelling corridor until they reached C-401A. The card kissed the sensor, and the door popped open.

The first thing they saw was the kitchen table, still wrapped in plastic from the deep clean. To the right sat a kitchen so small it was only good for tea, coffee and ramen. A set of couches was placed directly adjacent to the exterior window, through which the LAPA campus could be seen. There were three plus one doors, with the latter being the common bathroom.

“Three rooms?” Eppie inspected the living room. “Isn’t this for four people?”

“The left room sleeps two,” Carr opened the door to show her a cramped bedroom with a walk-in wardrobe and two beds with tiny tables. “The middle-right room sleeps one. You’ve got the master suite.”

“I do?” Eppie was now certain that someone was feeling guilty and wanted the past swept under the rug.

“And it has an ensuite!” Carr beamed. “Usually, this is reserved for our higher tier of fee-paying students.”

Her new bedroom was barely a hundred square feet, but, true to Carr’s hopeful real estate pitch, it was comfortable and cosy, with its own tiny ensuite featuring an integrated bath-shower. Her only gripe, she supposed, was that there were no windows. In a fire, the place was a death trap, with a single door as its only escape route.