Chapter 1
HOLD A GUN TO DESDEMONA Rae’s head and tell her to name her worst enemy? She’d say the deep fryer at her Uncle Bob’s Dairy Barn on the outskirts of Death Valley, California.
Dez is scared of little, but the deep fryer holds a special place of loathing in her heart.
It scarred her, twenty years ago, before anyone else had yet had the honor.
The first pain she remembers, four years old, is trying to help stop her mother, pregnant then with Dez’s younger brother, from dropping the sizzling pan on her way out to the dumpster.
Dez keeps her left wrist covered now. Doesn’t trust the deep fryer any further than she can throw it. Saves cleaning it for last when she’s working the night shift at the Dairy Barn.
She heads to the closet and grabs the mop, wheeling the bucket toward the center of the restaurant.
Dez doesn’t mind closing time at her awful job.
Sucks at it, obviously, but kind of likes the quiet hours when the doors are locked and she’s alone.
She’s come to look forward to the meditative swish of the ancient mop against linoleum.
Uncle Bob texts Dez videos of his orthopedic shoes making these horrible scriiiiitch scriiiiitch sounds anytime he opens the Dairy Barn and discovers a sticky spot from the night before, which is always.
She mops badly, restocks the freezer chaotically, according to her mood, and when it comes to the postapocalyptic hellscape that is the bathroom at this family-run dining institution, Dez closes her eyes, squirts some cleaner in the toilet’s direction, flushes with her foot, and hopes for the best.
She knows she’s the worst employee the Dairy Barn has ever had.
If you were in a generous mood, you could say Dez sucks so badly because her mind is always elsewhere, because she’s destined for other things.
Not necessarily greatness, though she’d take it.
Just … more than this. A ticket out of this dust devil of a town.
And even if destiny is a farce, as Dez sometimes fears it might be, even if Dez might be going absolutely nowhere fast, Uncle Bob can’t fire her or Dez’s mom will kick his ass.
Her paycheck is an insult, but she needs it.
After tonight’s shift, Dez will have enough cash on her debit card to pay the hundred-dollar fee for her grad school application to the American Film Institute in L.A.
Dez loves movies, wants to devote her life to making them because in film, there’s never a wasted moment.
Not in a good film, anyway. Everything means something.
Together, all the frames, shots, close-ups and fade-outs, every music choice and line of dialogue adds up to something larger than their parts.
In real life, Dez can rarely understand why one thing happens as opposed to another.
In her films, she gets to decide. She gets to pay off the metaphoric promise of an opening image with the final shot.
And she doesn’t need a happy ending. Tragedy seems to follow her, and that suits her fine.
What she does need is an ending of significance, of resonance and power.
And since she can’t count on that in life, she makes it in her films.
She dumps a stack of brown plastic trays in the sink to spray down.
She thinks of her latest short film, shot two weeks ago on the pier in Ventura.
The one she’s submitting with her film school application.
Glimpse lives on the hard drive of her Chromebook on the couch where she works in her mother’s garage.
She thinks of it traveling through the internet’s labyrinth, to a faculty committee in Los Angeles.
Filmed on a magical day when Dez and her friend Silas pooled their gas money, drove four and a half hours to the beach, then blocked, cast, and shot the whole sequence in the fading rays of a summer sunset—it’s good, and Dez knows it.
The kind of thing you watch with your breath held.
She thinks, for the thousandth time, of Asher.
The random local Ventura guy they cast to star opposite Dez in the film.
By the end of that day—hell, from the very first moment—Asher felt anything but random.
Dez hasn’t spoken to him since, but she’s spent trillions of hours studying his features, his mannerisms, and his inexpressible Asherness while she edited her film.
Since that day, she’s been too focused on finishing Glimpse, on getting in this application, to think about texting Asher. Or to wonder what it means that he hasn’t texted her.
She knows what she would say if she could take the time to text him. And tonight, after she clicks Submit on the application, who knows …
Hey. That thing we made? I finished it.
Something happened that day between Asher and Dez, something bright and true and lovely.
It started in the parking lot, when Silas thwacked Dez’s arm to draw her attention to the beachfront skate park.
To the spinning shirtless creature seeming to levitate above the half-pipe.
Dez stared. Then warmed inside with a glow of intuition.
That one.
After a series of impossible aerodynamics, the skater reentered the earth’s atmosphere, and Dez beelined.
“I’m making a film,” she said, eyeing the light sheen of sweat along his collarbone, the way his fine golden hair half obscured his eyes. How small she looked in the reflection of his silver mirrored sunglasses compared to the towering man in front of her. “You’re perfect, and I want you in it.”
“There are pickup artists,” he said, taking in Dez’s freckles, flip-flops, fingerless gloves, her short black baby doll dress and dark hair so long it skimmed the hem of her skirt. “And then there are legends.”
“Is that a yes?”
He brushed his hair out of his face, and she saw his eyes were a very light hazel, reminding Dez of the sweet, sun-warmed dates that grew on the young palm outside her kitchen window. Dez ate them by the fistful, could never get enough.
His front teeth grazed his bottom lip as he thought. “I don’t like living with regret.”
“Is that a yes?” Dez asked. She was smiling through her impatience.
“Not gonna be that guy who looks back on his life and says, ‘Why’d I let that strange, adorable, very forward woman get away?’”
“We don’t know what the hell we’re doing,” Silas chimed in next to Dez. “Just saying.”
“Shut up, Silas,” Dez said. “Yes, we do.”
“I bet you know enough,” the skater said.
He smiled, at Silas, at Dez. No teeth, just smooth, very pale, pink lips.
It felt familiar, that smile … not like they’d known each other before, but like they would know each other after.
Like Dez was editing this moment from the future, marking it: Cue the music, this is where it all began.
They shook hands on the terms of his casting commitment. One day of work, no monetary compensation, but beers at the end, if the bars were still open, and credit in the name of Asher Ibrahim.
Asher Ibrahim. He was twenty-seven, three years older than Dez, and a native of Ventura. He’d been skating at that park since he could walk. She loved the way his name sounded like he came from the other side of the world, or like somewhere even farther, somewhere Dez wasn’t yet able to imagine.
Working with Asher, filming him that afternoon, was the best experience of Dez’s life. It was a taste of what she wanted out of whatever the future held.
“Al,” a familiar voice calls, muffled through the glass door of the Dairy Barn.
Dez looks up from the sink toward the sound.
She knows who it is before she sees him.
Her brother. No one calls her that anymore but Moses.
Her childhood nickname is short for Albatross, because when Dez was younger, she’d take off into the desert behind their house for such long stretches of time that their mom would say she feared Dez had flown away, across the desert and over the Pacific Ocean.
Mo taps on the window. Grins.
“Fuck off,” she calls. “We’re closed.”
Dez always brings home food for Moses and her mom after work.
She has tonight’s to-go sack sitting in a warmer.
Onion rings for her mom, and the ignominious side salad in a separate sack on the counter.
Her mother is the only Dairy Barn customer ever to enjoy the menu item Uncle Bob has the nerve to call a salad.
Mo is an extra-pickles, extra-bacon, no-sauce cheeseburger guy.
He eats it standing up in the kitchen after a night of partying.
Sometimes, if Dez is still up working on her laptop, and if Moses’s movements above her don’t sound too wasted, she’ll come upstairs from the garage to hang out with him, and they’ll talk like they used to. It hasn’t happened in a while.
“Hey, let me in,” he calls, banging on the door.
“If you’re in,” she calls back, “you’re on toilet duty.”
“Fine. I’ll scrub that shit.”
She expects him to flip her off, or at the very least, demand a share of her wages. But he doesn’t, just waits at the door, shifting his weight like he has to pee. Or like he’s worried about something. What did he do this time? Dez’s mind is already making a list …
“Come on, it’s a thousand degrees out here,” Mo whines.
“Okay,” she says, “keep your pants on.” She dries her hands and goes to the storage closet to get the keys.
As kids, Mo was the cute one. Even though their features look almost exactly alike—onyx hair, fair, freckled skin, small straight noses, pale blue eyes—her brother wears it differently.
He’s five years younger, but his adorability lingered long after it was no longer detectable in Dez.
Mo can talk to anyone, knows exactly what to say to make them pay attention to him and enjoy it, whether it’s a toddler in a sandbox, or a con man at the racetrack.
Everybody likes Mo, whereas most people tolerate Dez.
Her mother calls her an enigma. Even Silas says she’s an acquired taste.
Which is why it was so remarkable that Asher had come out and said it, right away, the night they met. After they finished shooting, halfway into their second Sierra Nevada, he leaned in while Dez was selecting “Drunken Angel” by Lucinda Williams on the jukebox and whispered:
“I like everything I’ve seen about you so far, Desdemona Rae. What else you got?”
She can still make herself shiver when she thinks about his breath against her neck.
When Dez and Silas left Ventura at two in the morning, with barely enough time for Silas to drop her off at the Dairy Barn for her opening shift, when Asher didn’t text and Dez didn’t either, she buried herself in her work.
She told herself she wouldn’t think about their connection—couldn’t afford to think about their connection—until after she’d turned in her AFI application.
Now, walking to the Dairy Barn’s front door, Dez jingles the keys.
Mo grins, and Dez can’t help grinning back, because even if they’re only going to scrub toilets and stack Styrofoam cups, she’d rather do it with her brother than with anyone else.
“Hey, Mo,” she says when she opens the door. “What’s the drama?”
Before he even steps inside, Mo flings his arms around Dez and holds her like he’s drowning, like she’s a life raft.
This isn’t the first time in recent months he’s fallen on her like this, so she knows to use the door to support herself, holding up her enormous younger brother’s weight.
Mo has eight inches, fifty pounds, and their father’s alcoholic tendencies on Dez.
A sob ripples through him, into her. It cuts her heart. Oh, Mo. For all her dreams to get the hell out of Death Valley, she knows that she also belongs here, always. With her brother. With her mother. Even Uncle Bob.
“What happened?” she asks.
“Dez, I’m sorry—”
“Hey,” she coos against his chest. “It’s okay. I’m here.”
“I had to.”
“You had to what?”
Strange boots flash on the pavement, and before Dez understands what’s happening, she and Moses are shoved aside by a man wearing a black hoodie and a black skeleton-print balaclava.