Breakout: List 1

And be sure to describe the dressing room as 'opulent’ and crammed with bouquets.

They would have laughed to see her disguised just an hour before, in baggy sweats and huge sunglasses and floppy hat, walking with a quirky gait picked up from a passerby, unfolding her Little Mermaid towel on the sand at her spot south of Venice Pier, quickly arranging her sandals and sunscreen, discreetly dropping her bathing cap in the water.

Los Angeles! City of tanned shoulders! Smog-spewing, pay-per-viewing, sitcom maker for the world! Mall builder! Pierced-tongue purveyor of tacos!

Surfboard toter, deal closer, looter, shooter, barbecuer, black-jacketed valet parker of a million BMWs! City of thronged roads!

A chance for profound examination of your behavior: “Why didn’t I wait until rush hour was over?”

A metaphysical, out-of-body, out-of-automobile experience. A Scenic Vista vision of Los Angeles, of the whole freeway of life.

She needed to start living the part she was dressed for, her interim identity, until she began building a permanent replacement.

She'd bought it and the cap and her shorts at the same thrift shop, not thinking about the psychological ensemble.

Others were put off by her mélange of features: light brown skin, wide nose, thick lips, eyes and cheekbones that might have been Vietnamese or Guatemalan, curly hair the color of Georgia clay.

Every freeway has its own personality, like a wine. “Capricious, mildly psychotic, with hints of broken glass and a long, smoggy finish.”

We stop. We sit. We wait. We pray for deliverance.

In L.A., immobility is not next to godliness. It’s next to failure, stagnation, death.

I feel myself growing strangely light. Helium instead of oxygen inside me. Lighter than air. Powerfully buoyant, straining upward.

I move higher, slowly, astonished and delighted, unafraid, arms at my sides, hearing my dress rippling like a sail, falling upward through the bracing air, up through the canyon’s shade and into the bright light above, able finally to look down on all the miles of cars below, able, I realize, to see into them, and, more amazing still, to see into the lives of their drivers, able to behold the whole scene at once, watching in wonderment as it unfolds.

She knew she wasn't acting like April's Student of the Month, which she'd been. Then again, deportment had never been her strong suit.

She locked her elbows, unable to stop looking. The prospect was as static as a graduation class photo, the subjects pressed into lanes instead of bleachers, a moment in the freeway's life frozen for posterity.

All Del sometimes heard from her life on land were the gospel songs from the house in El Monte, the rapturous accounts of the tranquility awaiting "on the other shore," a realm she'd felt she'd found in the ocean.

This was vital for discerning the natural laws of each new home, the moods and likes and limits of her caretakers.

She regaled teachers, classmates, therapists, and telemarketers with tales of traveling circuses and visits to spas and bathing in wine, rendering her extended, eccentric family in posture, gestures, manner of speech.

Del counted her the most inept of her foster parents and was amazed she'd been licensed to keep an ant farm much less kids.

She could hear the woman screaming to her about rattlesnakes, heatstroke, vampire bats, and checking her bra for scorpions before putting it on. She snorted at this aural mirage.

She had serious qualms about this, as if she were abandoning their daughter to a stranger.

He felt a solidarity with the other parents on the freeway, practically waved at a stunning, auburn-haired mother in a new BMW wagon—and then traffic stopped.

He holds the reeking rag, unsure what to do with it, then uses his left elbow to lower his window and discreetly drops it outside on the ground.

It lands with a conspicuous plop. The woman one car over stares at him.

“The floor on the same level with the chassis? Right?”

He extracts himself from his minuscule Mitsubishi pickup, ambles forward, puts his red face to the passenger window, and jerks his head in greeting to the driver while he brazenly ogles the interior.

He spreads his arms over the top of the burgundy velour seats and inhales with gusto.

He feels a surge of desire to divest his car of its cell phone, Fuzzbuster, fax, CD player, and its chatty onboard computer.

They had to let the world know what they were driving, had to maintain the hierarchy here, among strangers, lest they lose their identities. Make and model were like genus and species, with subspecies differentiated by year, horsepower, leather, accessories.

The thought took her back to that dreaded first morning each time she entered a new school, furtively scanning the different groups, wondering if she should stand with the blacks or whites or Hispanics or off by herself, hating the feeling of being watched, hating always being new and alone.

Del watched the conversational kindling ignite into sudden laughter, and tried seeing the scene around her as Mr. Carbon would: bonds forming and dissolving, inert personalities remaining in their cars, the heat and compression from crowding encouraging reactions.

"And someday, when life doesn't give you what you want, you won't have quite such a violent reaction." He thought back to her tirade.

I'm soaring, swooping, parting the air with my face. Reveling in my x-ray vision and hearing. Losing myself entirely in other people's lives.

I hear the mother clearing her throat, very softly. Then again, just a bit louder. A signal for the imminent arrival of words, like a train being announced at the station.

The mother chooses her voice settings. She flicks the switches for Cheery, Nonjudgmental, and Nonchalant.

She lowers them and faces the round, side-by-side gauges for fuel and temperature.

Two men walked past her, talking politics, one with a pungent New York accent.

In the same way, she'd become a regular reader of Calvin and Hobbes, a fan of a panoply of music groups, a devoted viewer of The Real World, firmly attaching song lyrics and scenes to herself with her powerful memory.

Chances of being seen by someone she knew, much less being recognized without her long hair, were infinitesimal.