We Run the Tides(13)
I sit up. Petra isn’t in sight and Svea and her dour friend are walking up the concrete stairs—probably going to the restrooms that smell like dirty fish tanks.
“What are you doing?” I ask. My voice sounds sleepy, seductive. I don’t clear my throat.
“I just came down here to check it out. See what the beach would look like on an actual beach day.” He’s wearing shorts and a white surf T-shirt that’s been worn and washed enough that it’s thin and, I imagine, soft.
“Same,” I say.
I look at his feet, buried in sand to the ankles. I know why he’s done that. I slowly sweep sand from his toes. I look up at him to make sure what I’m doing is okay. His long, oval face looks pained but he nods. I continue running my fingers over the sand, gently, as though I’m excavating, searching for delicate treasure.
I’ve never seen his webbed feet before. I’ve only heard about them. “Spiderman,” his not-close friends call him. His best friends know he’s too sensitive for that. His feet are wide and not webbed like a duck’s the way I thought they would be. Instead, the toes are attached halfway down, and then each toe is independent right near where his toenails start. I don’t know what possesses me, but I bend over and my lips graze the knuckles of his toes in one slow stretch from second toe to little toe. I get sand in my mouth but don’t spit it out.
I look up at him and I think I see a tear in the corner of one of his blue eyes.
“It’s bright out,” he says.
“Yeah,” I say so he’s not embarrassed. “I forgot to bring my Ray-Bans.”
“Want to go for a walk?” he says.
I stand and he turns to the left, but that’s where I last saw Maria Fabiola and Lotta, so I gesture to the right. “Let’s go this way,” I say.
We run into Petra as we stroll. Or rather, she runs into us. “Hey. I’m Petra,” she says to Keith.
“Okay,” he says. He must assume she’s an overly friendly stranger.
“She’s a family friend,” I explain. “She’s babysitting my sister.”
“Oh,” he says. “I’m Keith.”
I think I see him glance down at her pubic hair, and I get embarrassed for her. “Where you going?” she says to me.
“We’ll be back in five minutes,” I say.
“Okay,” she says and lifts her chin up, as though to say I’m cool. I know better than to say, “Have fun.”
Keith and I walk to the cliffs. Someone’s spray-painted “ABC” on a large rock. That’s the tag of one of the local gangs of teenagers. “ABC” stands for “American Born Chinese.” The other tag you see around the neighborhood is “CBS,” which stands for “Can’t Be Stopped,” which is a group of skateboarders. To an outsider, it might seem that the news teams are competing. I show Keith how to time the waves. Then I yell “run” and we make our way to the other side of the promontory before a wave crashes against the rock. The enormous splash looks like something that would be captured in a bad oil painting. We stand on the other side of the promontory not talking, not touching, just breathing loudly in unison. After our exhalations have quieted, I show Keith how to run back.
When we’re on the main beach again we see Petra in the distance and Keith says he’s going to walk home. “Okay,” I say. “See ya.”
“See ya,” he says.
I return to the towel where I was sleeping and see that someone’s written “Slut” in the sand next to it. I look around to see who could have written it. I think about using my hand to erase it, but then don’t. Now I have a tag, too.
8
The next day Lotta calls me and disinvites me to her birthday party. “The problem is I’m new and trying to make friends and no one will come if you come.”
“I get it,” I say. I do.
I end up going to an engagement party with my parents that night while my sister goes to a sleepover. The party is for the eldest son of our Gold Rush neighbors. There are often work parties at the house that we’re not invited to because they’re for bankers. But tonight’s celebration is personal, neighborly. The eldest son, Wes, is engaged and tonight’s a party for him and his soon-to-be bride. I don’t know Wes that well—he left home for Dartmouth five years ago, and after graduating, he moved to Boston.
We enter the house through the front door, which is a first—I’m accustomed to leaping through the window. The entranceway is dim: the windows are tinted and curtained and the floors are dark. My house is light, with mirrors everywhere. This is the result of a design trick my parents adopted when they were younger and broke and wanted their living spaces to appear larger than they were. Now that they live in a big house, they still haven’t abandoned the mirrors.
Mr. Finance and his wife greet us. She’s thin and wearing a large diamond necklace that doesn’t rest flat and makes me notice how much her clavicle juts out. Her dress is emerald green and her blond hair is pulled back to the nape of her neck. Standing behind the host couple is their elderly Irish maid, wearing a uniform. She’s holding a silver tray with glasses of champagne. I have only seen the maid from a distance, when she hangs hand-washed items outside a window that faces our house. Apparently, no one has told her this is not a neighborhood where you hang your laundry outside windows to dry.