She was a lanky woman who looked like an athlete and when she walked, especially fast, placed extra emphasis on the balls of her feet.
A family outcast since the day she was born, she moved through the world with a lofty air and a certain resignation—but things started to change right around the time she graduated from Cleveland State University with a degree in art history.
She’d been out of school for a month and had little to show for it. No job, no love interest, no loft on Lakeshore Boulevard, not a single meeting or prospect in sight. Julie had little business skills, and she barely knew how to use a computer.
“Work seems superficial,” she’d explained to her childhood friend Dawn over coffee. “I don’t know, a full-time job just doesn’t seem authentic to me.” Julie and Dawn had known each other since Montessori, and Julie often felt that Dawn was the only person who understood her.
“Authentic.” Dawn repeated, a wisp of a woman who was preoccupied by the logistics involved with the extra shift she’d take that night. “Day job? You do understand that you need money to live, right?” While Dawn didn’t particularly like Julie, she did feel an obligation to be friendly given their long history.
“I’m not thinking — you know — that money is about to fall from the sky,” Julie had said, “Or whatever. Everyone in my family except me has an inheritance, and meanwhile they hate me just because I exist. I need to do something, and it has to be big. It has to be larger than all of that. I’m going to outdo them all, just wait and see.”
She took a delicate sip of her coffee, then a second, folding the liquid back with a bird-like swallow and gazed across the street.
Julie wasn’t dumb, and she didn’t lack agency, though it often seemed that the world owed her something grand and in perpetuity. What she did know about was taking things.
In class she’d smoothly pilfer the contents of other student’s backpacks, canvassing the front pockets and deep designer handbags until she collected what amounted to a satisfying amount of cash and cards.
But in the news people always get away with more, much more, and Julie was amazed by how easy it looked. She understood that there were larger wallets all wide open for the taking.
From the High Grounds parking lot she could see a gallery going in across the street. If she squinted hard, she could make out a now hiring sign.
It was the peak of a midwestern summer and the slanted, late-afternoon sun highlighted the granite storefronts, groomed sidewalks and German cars roaring down Detroit Avenue.
It was August 1999, and the century was preparing to tip its hat and bid adieu. Y2K was in the news, and companies were spending millions to prevent end-of-year meltdowns. In Lakewood, the city would keep the American flags waving high through Labor Day.
But it was what was west, further west, flash forward past Detroit Avenue and Cleveland and Motor City then swipe through Chicago and across the vast farmlands, mountains and desert, all the way across until Julie got to where she ultimately wanted to be — Los Angeles.
She’d never been further west than the food court bathrooms of Beachwood Place. She’d heard about Los Angeles, though, a place that sounded suspended in time: disconnected from brutal winters, devoid of bad neighborhoods, and distanced from butterfat dreams.
In a place like Los Angeles, Julie thought, everything dripped in gold and honey.
It was an unusually frosty fall morning that she happened on the Chevy Beretta, a vintage shell of a car parked sideways in her uncle’s driveway. “I should take it out west,” her cousin Steven had said. “Sell it there and get more dough.” And that’s how Julie made a deal to drive the car to Los Angeles, oversee and handle the sale, then wire him back the money.
As he handed her the keys, two things occurred to her. First, that her uncle still kept a wad of hundred-dollar bills in his desk drawer wound tight with a rubber band. And two, she knew where her other cousin Jeff kept his pot stash.
That was how it started, with two minor misdeeds. Since she was leaving anyway, what did it matter?
Not at all, Julie reasoned. These were stepping stones for getting her to California, where the palm trees would soon wave her in with open arms to roads paved with silver.
She packed five large black trash bags containing her belongings, two suitcases with broken hinges that popped at the seams, and a large cardboard box with “boots” scrawled along the top with a sharpie.
She’d go to Shop N’ Shop for a carton of Parliament Lights, a six pack of Slim Fast, and a box of NutriGrain bars then hit the onramp to I-90 West, where she’d chase the sun and drive until it dipped low into the horizon and back again.