Westwood had been rated the Best City For Young People by someone or other a few years running. It had the nightlife, the daylife, the storefronts, the popup galleries, the jobs and the money; a solid gig for someone fresh out of college, Julien O’Hare’s father told him, real quantitative work, and besides, Westwood was the Best City For Young People. Julien entirely regretted moving there.

It was the sort of warm Saturday evening people pay good money for. The golden wash of the sunset illuminated gaggles of young men and women, drunk, affectionate, beautiful. Julien tugged at his blue collared shirt to keep it tucked flat into dark khakis and pushed his way onto Main street.

Resentment often permeated Julien’s trudge to the metro station, but weekends were the worst. It seemed each cohort of revelers was more attractive than the next. He found himself staring at a group of approaching students, led by a pair of tall boys in baggy jeans and accessory-laden tees. The boys, looking to be in their early twenties with angular faces and perfectly tousled hair, sauntered in parallel, carelessly pushing, throwing their arms around one another, laughing, and moving hypnotically around the clique’s gravitational center. Behind them was a loud trio of girls with dark eyeliner, sprezzatura sluts sharing cigarettes and parading their little noses and unobtainable eyes and black bangs after the leaders. Julien realized he was no longer walking. His world seemed to comprise only excruciating knowledge of his body and perfect snapshots of the students in motion. He forced his eyes shut until dark, dizzy blobs of light drowned out the scene.

What a comedy! Here he was, having done everything right, followed the rules, blessed with safety in his person and iron sensibility, relegated to an awkward audience member in a grand production by prodigious actors. How he hated them and their skills! None had spent even a minute of contemplation over their place in the game like he had, Julien thought, and this ignorance was the core of their abilities! Youth was passing, and he could see the flow of time, each demigod brushing by a tick of the second-hand. But just as this familiar monologue travelled from the flush of his cheeks to his toes and began to wrap him like a cool blanket, one of the girls from the group yelled out to him.

“Hey! Dude in the shirt!”

Julien felt like someone had slapped him. He whipped his head around and instinctively pointed a limp finger at his chest.

“Yeah! You know where the Halal Factory’s at?” She broke off from the group and floated to the edge of the sidewalk where he stood, frozen. She had light brown skin and held a blurry screen in one hand. The Halal Factory! He had once been a patron of the Halal Factory.

“Yeah,” Julien said quickly, “They, uh, got rid of that place. Paved it over with a parking lot for the Scientology building.”

“No. Fucking. Way. Eva!” She called out at one of the other girls, an ethereal model in a green crop top. “There’s no Halal Factory. It’s some scientology shit now.”

Eva floated over, jaw dropped. “Oh my God. That is so LA.”

Julien smiled on autopilot and managed to eke out a “Right?” while fidgeting with his belt. “Thank you so much,” the first girl said, earnestly. “We would have been looking for the next hour.” One of the boys made some imperceptible signal and the two girls gave him one last look-over. “Ok bye! Thanks again,” Eva said, already drifting back to her friends. Then, in a mist of cigarette smoke, they turned the corner and disappeared. Julien’s dumbfoundedness slowly morphed into contempt. For the actors to break the fourth wall with something so trivial, so meaningless; it felt like mocking. And mocking in their special, inexplicably condescending way. This familiar cloud of rage battled with a large gloss of Eva’s smiling face for dominion over Julien’s field of vision. Once again he winced, hard, and when he opened his eyes he saw something different entirely.

Julien was enveloped by a vision of him and everyone on Main street as children. They wore oversized puffy coats and friendship bracelets that fell off their little wrists. Some held backpacks, others carried plastic toys. He looked at his chubby arms and laughed. The sign over the metro station was written in fist-held crayon, reading HALEWOD LIN with a backwards “E.” He waddled down the steps, laughing in the pursed-lips way that holds back tears, blinking vigorously the entire time, ensuring that it was real, at least for now.