Happy 2nd Anniversary!

Next week will be my and Lucie’s two year anniversary in RC, although not in this apartment. When we first moved here, it was the end of seventh grade (can you believe she made us move like, a month before the year was over?). She had gotten a job answering phones for an insurance company in an industrial park not far from the freeway. It was the exact definition of “desolate.” The office building looked like a giant metal shed, with a gravel parking lot that Lucie used to break her heels on until she got smart and wore sneakers in the car and changed in the ladies room.

Our first place was one room, a studio apartment in this dingy complex that had a metal railing that chipped black paint onto your hands whenever you touched it. Everyone had a dog, except us, and they would all start barking at the same time if you walked by. It was like a domino effect: one would start and then the next and the next and the next and soon, all you could hear was a hundred dogs woofing it up for the next twenty minutes. Then they would calm down for a while until the next person walked by.

And the whole complex smelled like chlorine. This was probably because there was a crappy pool in the middle of the place that no one ever used because it was cracked all over and because there was a rumor that some kid drowned in it one night. Still, they treated it with chlorine anyway, every single day.

We left after five months, one month after I started eighth grade (can’t we ever get it straight?), and moved into this place, where it’s way cleaner and where only five people have dogs and there’s no pool.

You might not think our place is so great but compared to where we were, it’s a frickin’ mansion. I sometimes think you have to live pretty crappily to appreciate when you have it good.

Happy Anniversary, Luce!