You have to remember to turn off your fans when you wake up in the morning, both the ceiling fan, whose job it is to circulate air throughout the room, and the small table fan sitting on your desk, which points at your bed and keeps you cool at night. If you forget either, you'll be scolded for wasting electricity.
As much as you hate waking up early, the mornings are actually sort of nice. The house is cool when you leave for class, still a bit sleepy and weary-eyed, and you can imagine that it'll be like this all day.
Average morning temperatures are in the 80s, Fahrenheit – not as cool as you would like but noticeably different from the 105 daily average.
None of the schools here are indoors, like they are in the movies, and that kind of bugs you. Air conditioning costs make that too expensive. Instead, classrooms are lined up together in wings with their doors facing out into small courtyards. During breaks, students huddle together under the covered walkways or in the shade of trees or buildings. Freshmen unable to score Upperclassman guardians leave their backpacks where they can and run around in a way that tires out the seniors.
You lost contact with your Upperclassmen when they left for college, but you inherited your spot from them, just as your Freshmen will inherit it from you. That's the unwritten law here.
The state requires there to be a certain amount of water fountains on campus, but you can't imagine they get much use. During the winter your fountain is clogged and in the summer you have to hold the button down for a minute until the hot water flushes out of the pipes - and then you still have to ignore the bits of trash and dried gum collected in the bowl. The best water fountain is across campus from your spot, and you only bother if you're really thirsty.
And there's always the one classroom where the air conditioning doesn't work, and the one where the teacher's tricked out the thermostat with a heat lamp so it's always cold. The people at the district office hate it when teachers do that, but then they're not stuck in a room with 30+ teenagers.
You talk with friends at lunch about making plans for the weekend. Generally this involves going to the movies or to the local outdoor mall, if you decide to go out at all. It's getting into late spring, which is essentially the same thing as summer but the breezes are still cool, and it's generally agreed upon that one shouldn't leave the house unless one has a very good reason. Your parents may not like it, but if you're going to be getting together with friends then it will probably end up with everyone at your house, flipping through Netflix and musing that it might've been nice to go to Sammy's instead. Sammy's parents have a pool, but they're a bit wary of teenagers.
That's for Saturday, tho'. Tonight you'll go straight home and stay there, locking the door on your way in and pulling closed the west-facing blinds. You get an hour or so alone, until your parents get off work. In that time you leave the house dark, turn the air conditioning down lower than dad likes, and set the laptop to boot up while you take a quick shower to rinse off.
If you were planning to go anywhere this evening you might change into another dry outfit, but tonight you can change into pajamas and dedicate a large amount of time to the internet. You like to imagine that you'd be able to survive in a world without internet, but you don't actually know what you'd do if that world arrived today.
As you already caught up with your school friends, now it is time to catch up with online friends. That girl you've been chatting with from Ohio will have been out of class for four hours now, and she's already updated her blog. You kind of hate how the time difference means that you can only talk between the time you get home, late for her, and the time she goes to bed, early for you.
If this was winter, your evening would be very different. For one, you wouldn't feel the need to take a shower, and instead of closing all the blinds you'd be letting in as much light as possible. If it managed to get cold enough you might even be able to convince your parents to let you start a fire in the fireplace.
And then there's always that awkward time between winter and summer, when you feel the need to wear a sweater as you leave for class than then can't wear it for the whole rest of the day. This is the reason you got into scarves and arm warmers – much easier to carry around.
In the summer, tho', you have to remember to turn the air conditioning back up before dad gets home. If mom's home first she wont mind, and may even cover for you. Air conditioning can be expensive, but you both agree it is really hot.
Sometime you talk to people from other parts of the world and they sort of pity you for how hot the desert is. You used to feel the same way until your family took a trip one summer to the midwest, and you realized just how miserable humidity could be. Your desert is at least dry. When people online ask if 'dry heat' really makes any difference, you fix your computer with a blank stare and reply "yes. yes it does."
If people from out of town were to visit and ask you what there was to do, you could easily point them to the local 'zoo', which houses all sorts of plants and animals native to deserts, or to the date store, with the huge knight landmark out front, even though you've never been particularly fond of the palm tree fruit yourself. Those both seem to be necessary places to visit, but as a resident you haven't actually been to either spot in a long while.
However, it's not as if people come here to visit often. If non-residents do come down, they're either: visiting family; snowbirds, part time residents who take advantage of the 'good winter weather' and who are constantly made fun of, for some reason; attendants to one of the major annual music festivals, which you've only been to once because the tickets are expensive and you can hear the music pretty well at Max's house; attending the major sporting event, which involves tennis because apparently tennis is still a big thing in some circles; or rich, and just here for the golf.
You are biased against golf. It's never done anything bad to you, personally, but it's never done anything good to anyone either.
Generally it's you and your people who are leaving to visit other areas. Disneyland's pretty close by, and there's a beach only half an hour away, along with some other pretty neat areas because this is Southern California and SoCal is pretty neat in general. It's always kind of strange, leaving the valley, passing through the sprawling wind farm, because it seems to drop in temperature almost immediately. As if there's a pocket or barrier, and on one side is "desert" climate and the other... something "not desert."
And since you were nine and realized you could, in fact, leave your parents for good and decide on somewhere else to live, you've been firmly set on that place being somewhere in the "not desert."
Somewhere that there are seasons, where the leaves change colors and it snows, and summer nights are a blessing, not a curse. Somewhere that wasn't cut off from the nearby communities by a range of mountains, where you didn't have to worry that what you hung on the walls might fall during an earthquake. Where water droplets falling from the sky weren't mana from heaven, and where snuggling up in a cozy warm bed could be a comfort.
You're in high school now and that dream hasn't disappeared, but you're starting to wonder. As much as you really hate the desert, you really sort of love it too. And you're not even sure why. You still insist on moving out when you can, but for the first time in your life you realize that you may actually miss it, when you're shivering beneath multiple layers in the snow.
