Free This Is Where We Live by Janelle Brown

person now, and at least 43% more sane .
    He’d immediately closed the e-mail, shut down his computer, and walked away. But he hadn’t deleted it, and he hadn’t told Claudia about it, either.
    Even now, as he swung up the hill toward their house, the car’s wheels jolting across the potholes in the neglected asphalt and his wife silently fretting beside him, he could feel Aoki’s e-mail tugging at him, demanding a response. Just thinking about it made his cranium throb, as if someone had wedged it in a vise and was slowly, meticulously, tightening the screws around his temples.
    The world headquarters of BeTee sat above a discount copy shop in a rambling old Spanish building on an otherwise desolate strip of Hollywood Boulevard. BeTee had inherited this warren of rooms from a production company that went bankrupt producing straight-to-DVD fantasy films, and they had never bothered to remove the previous tenant’s posters from the walls. In the foyer, DRAGON MAGICK greeted customers. Over Jeremy’s desk loomed the sneering, black-vinyl-clad heroine of VIRAL VIXEN. Edgar, sitting directly behind Jeremy in their shared office, gazed at the surreal purple landscape of THE CRYSTAL GATES. Under their chairs, the industrial carpet was marred with violent burn marks, suggesting that the previous occupants had not left happily, and the bathroom generally smelled like mold. But the view was unbroken all the way up to the HOLLYWOOD sign, and they’d dragged a clutch of folding chairs out onto the old iron fire escape, and sometimes he and Edgar would sit out there after work drinking canned Tecate and watching the sun set over the western hills.
    It was the morning after the meeting with Tamra, and Jeremy couldn’t draw. He sat hunched over his stylus for three hours, finally doodling a cartoon house with a happy stick-person family standing in the front yard. It was something a second-grader might render in finger paint: Mommy and Daddy and little androgynous stick child, all holding hands. Their smiling faces smirked back at him from his computer monitor: In stick-person land, houses were free and no one ever worried about money and everyone grinned even in their sleep.
    The headline of the Los Angeles Times sitting on his desk read, FATHER KILLS FAMILY AND HIMSELF, DESPONDENT OVER FINANCIAL LOSSES. Jeremy dropped his stylus and scanned the first paragraph:
The 45-year-old Agoura Hills financial manager who once made more than $1.2 million a year had lost his job. His luck playing the stock market ran out. His house was in foreclosure. On August 6, he purchased a gun. He wrote two suicide notes and a last will and testament. And then, sometime between Saturday night and Monday morning, he killed his wife, mother-in-law, and three sons, before turning the gun on himself.
    Jeremy flipped the newspaper into the trash can. He spun around in his chair and addressed Edgar’s back. “Any chance of another raise anytime soon?”
    Edgar swiveled his own chair around to face him. Jeremy’s friend was starting to go bald, and the tender areas of newly exposed skin at his hairline were pink with sunburn. The chambray button-down shirt that hung loose over his jeans didn’t quite conceal a pale swell of gut that rose over his belt. Maybe it was the stress of running a company, but Edgar—a guy who, in college, had dyed his hair blue and pierced his ear with a safety pin—increasingly resembled a middle-aged man.
    Edgar tapped a pencil against his nose and frowned. “I gave you a raise three months ago. A generous one, if I remember correctly?”
    “You can afford another. The shirts are flying out the door. The company is hugely profitable.”
    “Yeah,” said Edgar. “It’s profitable because I’m a cheapskate.”
    “And because I’m a goddamn design genius , don’t forget that,” he reminded his friend. “Maybe I should find a job where my talents are actually appreciated.” This was an empty threat, and Edgar knew it.