Beach Girls

for Kate

Ask Slater to drive you to the meet at Stone Steps. Your mom has the truck today. Big surprise, Slater never shows. Walk past the Dairy Queen and the LiquorMart as you hike west to the beach. Rafe’s already there when you arrive. His lips turn up in a smile that eats up his face. He’s got his skateboard with him. Do you wanna see a new trick? You do. Sit on a parking block and watch him practice his pop shuvit. Watch his hair slick back as he pushes the board and gains speed. Watch the small kick turns he makes with his feet, the pop as he ollies, the grim look of determination on his face as he kicks the board 180 degrees and then lands. You clap for him. You motherfucking clap, ok? He’s the first boy you’ve ever loved. Somehow he found you in all that cosmic dark and now you race alongside each other, comets burning across the black.

He can’t stay long. He’s going to play rehearsal soon. He’s the lead. 

Walk down to the shore alone and look south towards the jutting cove of La Jolla and past that, Mexico blurring at the horizon. Wade into the ocean ankle deep. Don’t look north. You never look north. Walk home sandals in your hand, calloused feet on the pavement, and sand between your toes. Billy sings in your ears the whole time: behind me, the grace of falling snow; cover up everything you know; come save me from the awful sound of nothing.

Mom’s at work when you get home. Watch The Simpsons while you eat the food she left you in the microwave before her shift started. Shake & Bake chicken with watery yellow squash. Undress in the bathroom and look at the tan lines on your body. All those shapes and lines curving around your skin like a highway. It’s June and in three months, you’ll be leaving for the city and it’ll be asphalt, fog, and municipal transportation. 

Slater throws rocks at your patio door. You unslide the door from its lock and find him standing in your mom’s hydrangea bushes. Take his outstretched hand. He walks you over to his car, a beat-up old Toyota Camry with a surf rack and a Santa Cruz sticker on the bumper. His dark blonde hair falls to his chin and he’s forever shaking it out of his face. It falls forward onto your cheeks when he presses you against the car and kisses your lips. Listen to him bite back a moan as he presses his fingers inside you. Like he’s been waiting all day to feel you. Call him Peter under your breath. Tell him you’re Wendy. Tell him to make you fly. 

Be good in the water. Be a better swimmer than most girls and most boys. Girls don’t care, but when boys find out you were on a competitive swim team for 10 years, they immediately want to race you. They smile when they ask but the farce is clear. So you oblige them, and you’ve never, not one fucking time, lost. One boy even stopped midway in the pool and reversed direction to try and beat you to the wall and you still lapped him. And each win is exactly the same: the moment the absurdity sinks in, the way they push their hair out of their eyes, chests heaving, trying to figure out how to save face. 

You’re from a beach town. You live in a small condo with your mom 2 miles away from the Pacific Ocean. Your mom’s job barely covers the essentials, so you never, and I mean never, have money. But the beach is free, so that’s where you are. First as a child eating KFC from a greasy paper bin and making drip castles, then as a breakout swim team star learning how to surf at Junior Guards, and now, one girl out there in a pack of boys, gunning for waves and taking your wipeouts. 

You’re not going to go pro or anything. You’re not out there doing aerials or 360s. You drive past the local surf competitions. That’s not why you surf. You’re out there for the silence. When you paddle out past the furthest break and turn your board around, you float barely tethered to this world. San Diego minimized in a yellow stretch of color with pinpricks of neon umbrellas. You’re out there to feel small, to feel grace. This is your church. You paddle in front of a swell and feel the exact moment the wave has you in its grips. You drop in, gut bottoming out, and turn at the bottom. You glide on top of the water, and for the briefest of moments, you ride the celestial tide of the universe.  

But--day by day--you watch the population at the beach, at your home, change. You know what’s happening. 

BMWs replace station wagons and old sedans. Polos and loafers replace flip flops. Fewer people walk around, but the roads are bumper to bumper. Upscale boutiques and hair salons edge out dive bars and community markets. A new homeowners group has started a petition to revoke the license of a local tattoo shop down the street from your home. 

Your friends are the children of plumbers and mechanics. Of retail and service staff. The rich live just 5 miles east in the Ranch or down the coast in La Jolla. They steadily infiltrate your break, the one you grew up surfing. Tourists escaping the heat of LA and Arizona are right behind. They buy up the coastal properties and leave them mostly vacant year round.

There’s nothing to do but laugh at them side-stepping down the stairs on careful feet, new RipTide wetsuits in hand and zinc bands across their noses and cheeks. Tucked under their arms are shiny short boards they can’t even stand up on. They don’t know about learning first on long boards, preferably foam. Watch them gaze out at the surf, trying to figure out where to paddle out. They don’t know they should start with whitewash. They don’t know how to get out of an actual riptide. They don’t know about the stingrays or bees in the tideline. 

And the local grimeheads at the break--Skindog, Bones, Condor, Beetle, and Slater-- won’t suffer fools. You watch them outgun each other for waves. You see them drop in on tourists. They break boards sometimes. He’s a kook. Get the fuck outta my water. But this is your crew. The broke-as-fuck-but-live-in-paradise crew. In the water, you surf alongside them. You’ve sat front row to their off-color jokes about public hair and VD. They rate the girls on shore (mostly 7s). You hear them comment on your ass (meaty). You see them make jerk-off gestures to their buddies when you paddle by. You hear them greet each other hey boys. Always hey boys. In the water, they don’t talk to you. They only talk around you. You’re allowed in this space because you can surf and you can swim, but that’s it.  

Even so, you like these dirty boys. They smoke you out and drive you places. You drink their beer and film their tricks. If you ask, they’ll give you tips on pumping the wave for maximum speed. If you ask, they’ll teach you how to drive off from the bottom of a wave, turn up the face and carve back down led by your heels and arms. Don’t move your shoulders, Slater always says. They enjoy it when you need them. And sometimes, sometimes, it’s like that. 

But most of the time, you have to arrive a fully formed surfer born from the head of Zeus before even entering the break.

Every girl knows this. Every queer kid and every black and brown kid, too. 

After surfing, you load up your board into your truck bed and deck change into a tank and sweatpants. A car horn blears at you and you turn in time to see a man’s flaccid penis shaking back and forth out of the passenger window of a car. You see the silhouette of the driver throw his head back to laugh as they speed out of sight.

Before you are anything else, you are a fantasy. The beach girl. Desirable, young, and tan. You laugh easily and wear little clothing. You’re Pam Anderson and Gidget and Brooke Shields. A Betty. You have nicknames like Roxy and Blondie. You are vitality, sexuality, and innocence, and you decorate the shore like living seaglass. People don’t expect to see beach girls at the drug store picking up in the morning-after-pill or feeding coins into a washing machine at the local laundromat. Beach girls are known for watching surfers, but never are surfers. Their hair isn't a polished pile of waves, but rather a frizzled briny mess. Their noses are red from the sun and eyes puffy from the salt. They drive run down station wagons, not corvettes. They are tired from working long shifts at the pizza place and at the tire shop. They’re tired of trying to find breaks with the fewest possible boys. Of living in bodies perpetually on display. Of entering spaces which only want to see them as fantasy. 

You once overheard Beetle say i love beach girls but Beetle doesn’t love anything but surfing and Tijuana and everyone knows it. 

Wait for Slater outside the Java Depot. Find Condor on the outside patio, plucking his guitar over a cup of yerba mate. He’s got a Spanish textbook out in front of him. Last month, he walked but technically he hasn’t finished high school until he gets this class done. But after that--he tells you--he’s headed to Thailand for an epic surf trip. Maybe Bali after. He’s trying to go pro. His hair is shaved close to his scalp, and he’s copper bronze all over. He wears a hemp necklace and an oversized Mexican poncho. His big coffee brown eyes always look a little sad. He gives you a clove cigarette and it feels like fiberglass in your lungs but you stay and smoke, listening to Condor’s litless plucking. Realize Slater is standing you up again. Realize you don’t care as much. 

Lose endless afternoons with Rafe driving down and up the coast in his Wagoneer to different surf or skate spots. Sing along to Fugazi and Bad Religion. Rafe’s afro has grown out and when he sings, he shakes it back and forth wildly. He pantomimes drumming on the steering wheel. His drink cup holds a lighter, a hair pick, one of his silver rings, and the haiku you wrote him during your creative writing class last semester: we drip like honey; a slow and golden sunset; now a fire sea. He’s a year younger so you don’t have to worry about him moving away just yet. Lean your seat back. Prop your right foot out the window. Rafe switches it to 91X and then it’s the Chili Peppers and Bob Marley and Sublime. 

When you’re alone, listen to The Jesus Lizard, The Pixies, The Replacements. New Order, Bjork. Thom rhapsodizing from your speakers: kill me Sarah, kill me again with love. 

Rafe has a problem with fighting. He’s easy to anger. Not at you. Never to you. But he’s been suspended twice, and this summer he’s taking an anger management class his parents insisted on. He tells me he reads the whole time. Bukowski first. Then Kerouac. He’s moving onto Ellis next. His knuckles are still scabbed over from a scuffle at the skate park last week. Maybe read some girls, you say. 

Spend your mornings and early afternoons nannying for a couple kids. Their mother used to be your counselor from the Boys and Girls Club. After that, you go home, walk the dog, and eat your mom’s food from the microwave. Take a shower, and wait until it’s dark. Drive to Slater’s. Walk through the unlocked front door. All the boys are sitting around watching Bones’s new video. Sit behind them on the kitchen stool. You watch their tawny manes nod and jeer at each other when someone gets a good wave. Condor turns around and signals you to meet him outside. He lights up a joint and takes a long inhale. You don’t speak. Not when he passes it to you. Not for the entire it takes you both to finish. And then, you forget time. You’re as high as the motherfucking eucalyptus which tower over the house. And what a perfect word to capture such a feeling. You’re so high you don’t notice Slater coming outside and reaching for you. He pulls you face forward into his chest and you tuck your nose into his armpit. He smells like salt and beer. He takes you down the hall past his roommates. In his bedroom, you fall into his unmade bed and sand on his sheets grits the back of your naked arm. He stands over you, giving you a strange look you’ve never seen before. You know I like you, right? he asks. If you were sober, you’d answer I know, but since you’re not you stare back at him. You stare for so long he flinches and says I’m sorry. You reach out and press your hand between his legs. He hardens under your touch. When you look up at him, his features are pained. For a brief moment, his ache matches your own. It makes everything desperate. When you take him in your mouth you feel him shudder all the way from the tip of his dick to the center of his third eye.  

At parties, watch the boys zero in on the drunkest girls. You watch as they settle around one on the couch. They ignore her. The joke around and posture with the animal energy of young men. The girl is timid, almost unsure how she became the center of the group. She nods in and out, laughing with them at times. Through it all, no one says a word to her. When she gets up to leave, you watch Beetle grab the back of her shorts and yank her back down. Her legs jut out from the force as she lands on her ass. The look on her face haunts you as you leave. Happy to be noticed, terrified about what that means.

The fair comes to town and, like always, your mom gets the free summer pass from her job, some perk that came from her union’s bargaining. You go with Rafe. You go with Slater. You go with Condor. You go by yourself. You eat grinders, kettle corn, fried oreos. You wander the exhibition halls, rubbing on age-defying lotion on your unblemished skin and buying a toe ring. You look at woven purses from the Rasta shop and Russian nesting dolls from another. You watch a demo of a paring knife that does all the cutting while you do all the eating. Go outside and sit on the Footsie-Wootsie. Sometimes you slip in a quarter, sometimes you don’t. You wander through the Gem & Minerals tent and the woodworking tent; the local art expo takes a whole afternoon. Your favorite is the floor hosting collections. Old license plates, brass spoons, Star Wars collectibles. Old Watson’s bottles,  pastel pyrex cookware, and jade buddha statues. You wonder about the one who owns the Cabbage Doll collection and the one with the switchblades. On the Grand Stage, you see Smokey Robinson and Carrot Top. You ride the Zipper, the Falling Star, the Scrambler. You bribe adults to buy you Coronas in the beer garden. You get your natal chart rendered (born under a waxing crescent moon traveling through Aquarius); the mystic tells you you’ll never fit in. You look down at your tan skin clasped in the milky flesh of hers; you fucking know that already. You walk past the pig races and the motorcycle bike competition, through the livestock tents and gardening showcase. You leave the fairgrounds and walk west less than a mile until you hit the Pacific Ocean. You walk the beach under a full moon traveling through Taurus. Where God is.  

At the beach, you lay out on your towel nearly naked. You cross your arms behind your head and tuck your chin to look down the length of your body. Through your parted thighs is the endless glass of the Pacific. No waves means no surfers, so there’s nothing to mar your view. It’s just you and the sun on your flesh and later the cool ocean water tonguing you like a lover. 

Condor gets his passing score on his Spanish I test and now he’s a high school graduate. You drive him, Skindog, and Bones to the airport in your truck. They're indeed off to Thailand. Bones is going to film Condor. He’s newly signed to Hurley and he needs footage decked out in his sponsored gear. Skindog’s just going to drink. Drive them 45 minutes south to Lindbergh Field, San Diego passing by in a series of dreamy postcards. Del Mar, Opal Cliffs, OB, Old Town. At the airport drop off you lean over the center console and say through the opened passenger window don’t drown motherfuckers. 

Slater’s moody without the boys. He wants to shoot video but nobody’s around. You ride his skateboard down to Pizza Port to grab the two of you dinner. You run into Marisol there, your old friend from swim team. She’s sloppy drunk and she holds onto you, swaying on her feet. She’s not going to college in the fall, and she’s already begun her new life. I have to tell you something, she says. You know Casey, right? From school? Of course, you reply. Everyone did. He’d been very popular in school, a bit of a charming bad boy, always dating the newest popular girl. Marisol shakes her head in disbelief and proceeds to tell you how they ran into each other at a party. He came up to her and started flirting. She was perplexed at first. I didn’t think you knew who I was, she told him. They went back to her place where she accidentally spilled a bottle of beer all over them both. So they took a shower together. All of a sudden, she says, he’s crying. The kind of crying where he’s fighting to hold in each sob. Where everything comes out choked and harsh. She didn’t know what the fuck happened. She patted his back and he reached for her hand. He said he was sorry. He said he was lonely. This guy didn’t look at me twice in school--she tells you--but there he was telling me I was as beautiful as the moon.

You skate back to Slater’s, the pizza balanced on your palm. The cool humid night curls your hair and dampens your skin. The sky’s in twilight the whole time. You don’t look up at the moon. You never do. There’s so much down here. 

You don’t really like it but Rafe loves ska. He’s forever taking you down to SOMA Live to watch $10 shows. One time he even got onstage to sing with The Aquabats. And you marvel at it even though you’ve seen him on countless stages. The way he was born for it. 

You check the mail and find a letter from your university. Inside is an off-to-college checklist with items you don’t even own now. Shower caddies, under-the-bed storage bins, stackable desk trays, and portable speakers. You hope your roommate doesn’t care when you just show up with good music, an extensive book collection, and your hippy-dippy clothes. 

Rafe swings by and you down a Coke real fast as he explains his progress in moving from a 3 to 5 stair ollie. Wanna see? he asks, and like always, you say yes. You pee right before you leave, but on the five minute drive down to the County Plaza steps next to the beach, your bladder fills up again. And it’s so stupid but it fills you with shame. You watch him run up the steps and set up the trick. You try to ignore your discomfort but just as soon as he pops the ollie, front knee shifting into a slant as he sails through the air and lands, you tell him you have to pee again. You always tell him the truth. Well, you did drink a whole can, he says without a hint of insincerity and then takes your hand as you walk back to the car. He rubs his thumb over yours. The two of you have never even kissed. You probably never will. On the ride home, he puts on Social D and smokes a joint. You race in the house to pee and notice your mom--still in her scrubs--stretched out on the couch, her feet in nursing clogs up on the coffee table. In the bathroom, you pee in extreme relief and overhear Rafe chat your mom up and down like he’s not high as a sonuvabitch. Always the actor. Always onstage. 

Later, Rafe says how cool your mom is. How much love she has for you. How he could tell right away when he met her she was a nurse. Except he didn’t say nurse; he said healer. And it rewired something in your brain about her. 

Mail update: you get your dormmate’s name with a short description she provided and her phone number. Meet Priya from Los Angeles who loves flea markets, Converse high-tops, and street art. Call her up and say you’ll bring the records if she brings the wall deco. She responds back: 
All over it. You drink?
Like a fish. You smoke? 
Like a chimney. 

Lately, your dog has been standing in the doorway to your bedroom. That’s it. Just standing there, staring at you in your bed. Like he knows. 

Slater comes over and you sneak him past your mom’s room. He is quiet, even for him. He takes off your clothing, item by item. He watches your face as he does it. He seems sad and for the first time since this started with you two, kind. He licks you out until your thighs are shaking and you're arching your hips up into his mouth, desperate to come. Always so desperate.

Wake up and see Slater passed out next to you. He’s got an angry furrow in his brow. Reach over to smooth it out and wake him. Drive to the Potato Shack. Share a plate-sized pancake in silence. He’s distant, staring at food without seeing it. You suggest a nap on the beach after? He declines. He says he has to go. He pays and says I’m sorry. Always I’m sorry. You look around at the table in confusion, ignorant your whole life. For what? 

The next day Rafe tells you about seeing Slater with his ex Caroline. I’m sorry honeybee. Don’t lose your stinger, ok?

Back home, you find a letter from Condor in the mailbox. He’s met someone. A Thai girl. They’re in love and he’s going to stay. He doesn’t know when he’ll be back. He has to marry her first for the green card.

You try calling Slater but he never picks up. He ignores you at parties and at the coffee shop. He gets Bones to go over and grab his favorite Encinitas Surfboards hoodie from your house. At the beach, you see Caroline wait for him on the sand. She doesn’t surf, but she stars in the side skits in his surf videos. In one she’s doing a bike trick dressed as Evil Knievel; in another she’s walking down the street, asking random men if they want to fuck her. 

You get up every day. You nanny. You surf after work. You drive down the coast, smoking cigarettes and listening to The Cure. You wonder how long it will take for your skin to lose its salty flavor and for your tan to fade. For your sun-bleached hair to grow darker. To get used to wearing shoes again. You wonder how long it will take to miss this fucking beach town because right now you hate it. 

The days grow shorter. Rafe coaxes you out at night to watch him hit golf balls down at the course next to your condo complex. He hits these long drives. The balls sail into blackness and disappear from sight. He leans back and his too-large mouth opens up to howl at the moon. He nudges you to join him, but you don’t. You don’t want to hear the sound of your own voice so loud. He taps one finger--so light it’s a kiss--on your upper lip. I miss it already, he says.

It’s barely August when you get the news about the fight. A sidewalk fight. All three under 20. The details are scant, but a passerby says Rafe started it first and in your gut you know it’s true. Running his big mouth and he got a knife in the gut for it. He died at the scene, his blood rushing out like high tide all over the sidewalk before paramedics arrived. The other two males were last seen escaping in the same direction. Their fight forgotten in the wake of its violence. 

Overnight, Rafe becomes a lost cause, a martyr of the working class, a cautionary tale. The news report calls him a “troubled young man from the poorer side of town.” But in the pictures sitting on your desk, he appears a beautiful young man with a caramel-colored afro and a ferocious smile, a caged sun, the love of your life.  

A memorial is planned down at the beach for Rafe. You rsvp yes. And you want to go, you really do. You want to show everyone what this grief has made you, you want to show him, but you can’t. You can’t pick out the clothes. You can’t lift your hand to apply the makeup. You can’t get the hair dryer out. You sit at the top of the staircase and tell your mom you’re not going. She nods with understanding. Of course, you always forget. She loved him, too. She makes you roasted chicken and rice. Your favorite meal.

In the water, you dolphin out until your waist-deep. You dive under the next wave and begin swimming. You swim out to the kelp beds. As soon as the slimy tops of the kelp forest touch your feet, you stop. A pack of Garibaldi disperse at your arrival. You push your chest out and float on your back. You heard once that otters tangle themselves in the kelp so they don’t float away when sleeping. You reach out and grab the frond closest to you, twining the stripe around your arm as you drift. But it’s not quite right, you see. Because you’re already gone. 

Slater leaves you a voicemail but you erase it without listening. The rest of the crew go out of their way to avoid you. The grief hollows out your eyes and turns you brutal. Gone are your easy smiles and your go-with-the-flow nature. Now everything matters. It matters so much you can’t fake anything. They’re right to steer clear of it. The things you would say to them. 

Take all your nanny money and go to Target. You buy everything from your checklist, plus new headphones, shoes, a plaid flannel and a jean jacket--essentials for city life. It feels surreal to plan for this future. If Rafe was here, he’d be dancing in the aisles.  He’d be singing about your upcoming move. He would be too much about it because he was too much about everything. Too loud, too charming. Too angry and too joyful. He gave you too much love and made you big with it. And now you watch your items as they slide across the checkout counter. These new items that will mark your new life. Because that’s the cruelest joke of all. That you will go on living without him in this body made big with his love, and it will pour out of you but never again into him.  

Your last weekend at home arrives. You spend the day at the beach with your mom, smelling her sun block (Bain de Soleil) and eating her tuna fish sandwiches. You write Rafe’s name in the sand. The tide washes it away, so you write it again. You resolve right then and there, the sun as your witness, to write it forever. 

The next day you hear Caroline is pregnant with Slater’s baby. Cry about it deeply for 34 minutes in a beach parking lot. Deep anguished sobs, all of your grief mingling into one release. You’ve never cried something so completely out in your life. Drive home in complete silence, feeling your organs and blood rearrange under your skin to their new fit. Come home and tell your mom you’re fine when she sees your face. Actually mean it though. Go upstairs and smoke a cigarette on the upstairs balcony. Watch the moon appear through the swaying eucalyptus. Think about the girl Condor met in Thailand, how you’ll probably never hear from him again.  Think about Casey crying in Marisol’s shower. The girl Beetle yanked down by her shorts. Your dog, staring at your childhood bed. The mornings you woke up in it with Rafe. His smile eating up his face. Think about the dreams you’ll have of him for the rest of your life. The way he will appear, forlorn and angry about his death. That you’ll always be slightly reeling from it. Get OK living just on the border of that black hole. You’re leaving in 12 hours. Look down at the sand between your toes and realize that’s all that’s left now. Just the sand.

SARAH FAULKNER is originally from San Diego County. She is a 2021 University of New Orleans Lab Prize finalist for her collection, American Heartbreaker. You can find her work at The Los Angeles Review, PANK, Night Train, Iron Horse Literary Review, and The Southeast Review.