Away for the Weekend

“LA?” Otto has never been to LA but he knows that it isn’t peaceful or homey and that a lot happens there – a good percentage of it bad. “Why LA?”

“It is the city of angels, you know.”

“Not literally. It was originally Nuestra Señora de los Angeles.” If you told Otto the sky is blue, he’d tell you the exact shade. “It was just another mission town. They didn’t name them because they were filled with angels and saints.” Seeing that Remedios has stopped listening, he adds, “Anyway, we’re supposed to stay here.”

“Where does it say that?” demands Remedios. “Nobody told me that. We go where they go…” The bowling alley … the pizza place … the mall … “Isn’t that the deal?”

“But I don’t want to go to LA,” bleats Otto.

“So stay here.” As if. It would take more than a miracle for her to be allowed to go to LA by herself.

“You know I can’t do that,” says Otto.

Remedios is already walking away. “So come.”

Welcome to LA!

Beth was so worried about the weekend that she forgot to worry about the flight. When she got to the airport, rather than being at least half an hour early as she is for most things, she was exactly on time – so that, what with checking in and answering questions and taking off her shoes, it wasn’t until she sat down and buckled her seat belt that she started to panic. She’d only flown twice before and never without her mother beside her, holding the airsick bag in one hand and the emergency-landing instructions in the other. As a result, she spent the entire journey with her head on her knees, trying not to throw up and afraid to even glance out of the window in case she saw the wing snapping off.

As soon as they landed Beth turned on her phone (she’d been afraid to leave it on in case it interfered with the aircraft’s electrics and caused a crash), put on her headset (so she doesn’t radiate her brain) and called her mother to tell her that she’d arrived in more or less one piece. Shaky but determined, she managed to stagger off the plane, make her way out of the airport and find the hotel bus. The other passengers were several prosperous- looking businessmen, three less-prosperous-looking middle-aged couples on vacation and one teenage girl wearing a batik dashiki.

The girl smiled as though they’d already met. “You’re in the writing competition?”

Beth nodded.

“Me too.” She held out her hand. “I’m Delila.”

“Delila Greaves?” Beth sat down next to her. “I’m your room-mate. It said in the letter. Beth. Beth Beeby.”

“Well, how’s that for luck?” laughed Delila.

Delila Greaves has been shortlisted in the category of poetry. She’s written a series of poems about heroic, and largely forgotten, women in American history. She’s nearly six-feet tall, loud and outgoing, and about as far from most people’s idea of a poet as Tokyo is from Black Kettle, Wyoming. Delila Greaves comes from Brooklyn and isn’t fazed by any of the things that send Beth running for the painkillers.

“Really?” said Beth. “You’re not stressed out?”

“About what?” asked Delila.

Where was Beth supposed to start? There are some people who enjoy competition. It fires them up, stirs their imaginations and whets their minds. They don’t care about prizes; it’s the game itself that matters. Beth, however, is not one of those people. Who sold the most cookies in the school’s book drive? Who got the highest marks in the maths test? Whose geography project was the longest? Whose plant grew the fastest? Whose goldfish lived the longest? Whose science project was the most complex? Whose macaroni necklace was the neatest? This is a girl who can’t do a crossword without turning it into a competitive sport. For Beth, the game barely exists; it’s the prize that matters. If you don’t win, you lose. If you don’t think you can win, don’t play. Which is why this weekend is the stress equivalent of a nuclear bomb.

“Well, you know,” Beth muttered. “Everything.”

Delila laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”

But Beth, of course, was not kidding.

“Relax, girl. Just flow with the go.” Delila patted her knee in an almost maternal way. “They’re giving us a free weekend in LA, so no matter what happens, we’re ahead of the game. I don’t see anything to worry about.”

“You don’t?”

Delila doesn’t. Not the competition; not the other contestants; not even the congestion, pollution and vibrating brightness of the city cause her a second of anxiety.

“You know what they say,” said Delila. “Que será, será.”

Beth looked at her feet. “I don’t believe in fate,” she whispered.

Delila patted her knee again. “Well, you’d sure better hope, then, that fate doesn’t believe in you.”

But despite the sanguine presence of Delila, Beth’s stress got even worse when they pulled up in front of the hotel, a Churrigueresque confection of pale stucco and faintly tinted glass that stands out against its more mundane neighbours like a castle set down in a development of summer bungalows.

Delila, of course, didn’t so much as blink. “Hot dang!” she laughed. “Will you look at this temple to Mammon! I’ve always wondered how the other one percent live.”

As arresting as it is on the outside, The Xanadu is even more impressive (or, alternatively, more terrifying) on the inside. The rooms are small and understated but elegant, and come with all the amenities its guests expect (music system, iPod dock, Wi-Fi, large-screen TV and mood-lighting). Should you want to leave your room, the hotel has three pools, a sauna and a health and fitness room, complete with personal trainers and yoga instructors, hot tubs and a jacuzzi; three restaurants, a bistro, a coffee house, two bars, several stores, a beauty salon and a laundry.

Beth has never seen anything like The Xanadu, and rather wishes that she weren’t seeing it now. The one time Beth and her mother stayed in a hotel, it was a motel and they snuck their cat Charley into their room in Beth’s backpack. Beth wouldn’t try to sneak a gerbil into a place like this. She’s so afraid that she’ll break something or spill something that she can barely move. If she had any fingernails left, she’d have chewed them all down to the quick before she got out of the elevator. And what if her mother is right about the allergies? Lillian Beeby (who has excelled at nothing in life so much as being afraid of it) has impressed on Beth that she not only has to fear things like migraines, nervous rashes and being so anxious that she sits on her glasses again, but the possibility that she might be allergic to the hotel itself.

“These fancy hotels are all recycled air and synthetics,” her mother is saying now – almost as though she hasn’t said it before. “Didn’t I tell you that when Mrs Panki stayed in Toronto that time, she was allergic to the carpet? Her head puffed up like one of those blimps. She thought she was going to die.”

Beth doesn’t want to think of Mrs Panki and her head like a blimp. “I really have to go now, Mom. I have to unpack before supper. I’ll call you later.” And she disconnects before Lillian can think of something else that could go wrong. Beth pulls off the headset and drops it and the phone on her bed, and starts to remove things from her bag.

Delila lies on the other twin, eating a bag of barbecue chips and watching Beth put her things away with the curiosity of an anthropologist studying a lost tribe. “Johnson says it’s blood money,” she says at last, continuing a conversation that was interrupted by Lillian Beeby’s third and most recent phone call. Johnson is Delila’s grandfather. Delila has lived with her grandparents since she was two because her mother is unreliable. “Johnson’s some kind of anarchist now. It makes him argumentative like you wouldn’t believe.”

Beth stares at her precisely folded clothes, systematically arranged by size and function. She was expecting a dresser – for all the things that don’t go on hangers – but there’s only a desk and the small table between the beds. How can things stay unwrinkled if she has to root around in her suitcase every time she needs to change her socks?

“Anyway, Johnson says these big corporations exploit everybody. The people who work for them … their