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praying in her direction. “Will you have lunch with me though? We have a
spread all set out.”
“I have to get to work,” Olivia replied, buttoning her jacket. “I’ll show
myself out.”
“I won’t hear of it!” She turned her back on me to lead Olivia away.
“This floor can be such a maze, and you don’t want to get lost in the sample
room. It’s like those dirty, loud back streets in Fez where me and June got
lost this one time? It was absolutely…”
“Hellish,” I grumbled, finishing her sentence to myself as I rolled my
eyes.
On Highland Ave, a billboard sat on the roof of a single-story industrial
building wedged between two galleries. A mural with the words BREAK
SHIT took the entire front wall. The permits to demolish the building had
expired when the owner couldn’t buy the adjoining spaces. He rented it to
me for a fraction of the market rate as long as I didn’t ask him for repairs or
refuse to vacate once he could tear it down.
Commercial zoning meant I couldn’t officially inhabit it, but it had
everything I needed. Two thousand square feet divided in the middle. A
bathroom. A hot plate and refrigerator on the side I lived in, and a
workspace for the dozen or so artists in the GAC.
Mandy climbed the telescoping ladder I’d hooked to the back of the
building. There, in the shade of the billboard, on a patch of Astroturf, I had
a little table and chairs set up. Every first of the month—most months—I
heard men clonking around the roof to change the ad. They left my seating
area alone.
“Thank you for the retweet,” I said to Mandy, putting a bag of takeout
on the table. “The GAC accounts were on fire.”
“Any excuse to look like an edgy influencer,” she replied, taking out a
plastic clamshell of salad.
“It was amazing,” I said, reclining on the chair until I faced the night
sky. Though we were on the back side of the billboard, its lights drowned
out the stars. “The sun. The stones. The construction guy getting out of the
bulldozer to check it out. The whole thing.”