California: A Novel by Edan Lepucki

sure we still have some in the years to come.” Their mother thought Micah could become a water man and solve the city’s problems. Plus, the college was free, and not so far away.
    This was what Dada liked, that it didn’t cost anything to attend. There would be no other option for someone like Micah, who couldn’t afford the private colleges. Scholarship was an endangered word. Back then, some people were still getting into college, but fewer and fewer were going; it was becoming a path reserved for the very rich. When Frida had started her senior year, she told her parents she didn’t want to go to college, and they were relieved. Why bother with all that schooling if there wasn’t a job waiting for you when you finished? “You don’t need college,” Dada had said, which seemed like a compliment at the time.
    Her brother, though, he was different. He did need it. By then, UCLA and Berkeley had shut down, as had all the other public universities worthy of Micah’s attendance. “Budget problems: the understatement of the decade,” he liked to say. He was fucking brilliant, and he’d been born at the wrong time.
    It took a single Internet search to learn about Plank’s all-male student body. Frida was convinced her mother had kept this fact out of the story because it would scare Micah off. Girls liked Micah, and he liked them right back.
    But then one night at dinner, her brother came to the table, his face held solemnly, and said, “I’m applying.” That was all. Frida realized then that his beard, which he’d just started to grow, and the books on homesteading and animal husbandry that he’d recently downloaded, were making him into the kind of man Plank would accept. That morning, he’d quoted Thoreau, and she hadn’t thought anything of it. But he was preparing. He was cunning, her brother.
    It wasn’t until Micah moved to Plank that she realized he’d gotten away. She was still in L.A., still living with their parents. Meanwhile, her brother had gone to live a grown-up life.
    Cal liked to describe Micah as a prankster at Plank, but Frida didn’t see him that way. She would say he took on dares, and with that bravery he defied you to take on your own. Plank was a dare. He would become a person who could live without women, who could work a farm, who could live in the past. “And you will give up that stupid deli job,” he told Frida, “or you’ll ask them to hire you in a different capacity. No more validating parking tickets at the register, for fuck’s sake.” Frida waited until Micah left for Plank, and then she took his advice. She asked to be put in the bakery, or she’d quit. To her surprise, they promoted her right away.
    Frida smiled now at that tiny coup and from her bag brought out the laundry soap. The Millers had left it. She had a feeling its ingredients had come from August, but until they ran out, she wouldn’t ask. Frida actually looked forward to making detergent herself; she thought it might remind her of baking: the measuring and mixing. It made her heart ache a little. She had been so good at her job.
    She remembered writing to Micah about her promotion. She had sent him a letter, because Plank didn’t allow email. In reply to her news he had said, “I knew you could do it, Freed. When I’m home this summer, can you give me a few lessons? Our head bread maker is graduating in June, and Cal says the position should be mine.”
    That’s how she learned about Cal, through Micah’s anecdotes. In the beginning, she was jealous of this new roommate who seemed to take her place as Micah’s main confidant, recipient of his advice, and sounding board for all of his plans, both ridiculous and ingenious. But soon, she began to look forward to the Cal stories, as if he were a character in a soap opera she followed loyally. Cal had stayed up every night for a week, reading. Cal was so clean, Micah thought he might be psychotic. Cal knew how to fix a fence, “like a goddamned