YULUNGA (SPIRIT DANCE)
My room hadn't changed. I had.
An inescapable conclusion and yet it didn't have the ring of truth. I didn't
feel
any different. I was still the same person. But every individual is actually a ship of Theseus. Little things change, one by one, and suddenly, you turn around and you are entirely different. You end up standing in a room you lived in for your entire childhood, and it's the room of someone you no longer know.
It was early June of 2002 and I was home for the first time after graduating college. Drove all the way from Santa Cruz in my old Nissan. I had a degree now. I was supposed to be ready to start my adult life. And the scary part was, I had no fucking idea of what I was supposed to be doing.
I went to my window, which looked down onto a grungy alleyway and the rooftop patio of Rosarito's Mexican Kitchen on the other side. The iron fire escape gave me a tiny balcony barely big enough for two if they didn't mind getting friendly. In high school, I'd spent more than one night brooding while the cool ocean air while the sounds of Rosarito's washed over me. That place had been the soundtrack of my childhood, the steady thump of banda music, the accordion over top, and below, the susurrus of conversation and the clink of margarita glass.
"Hey, kid. Good to have you back."
My dad leaned on my doorframe. I'd never seen him look so old. His sunbleached hair was thinner than I'd remembered, and the wind-burned wrinkles of his dace had never been deeper. He looked like what he was, a man who had surfed since he was little, the sun finally catching up to him. I'd probably look the same, no matter how much sunscreen I slathered on before going out. It was that or give up surfing, and I'd never do that.
"Good to be back," I lied. I didn't want to be here, but then, I didn't know of anywhere else I wanted to be either. Nowhere else I
could
be.
"Can I count on you in the shop this summer?"
"I hadn't thought about it." I hesitated. I wanted to do anything else other than sell cheap plastic shit to tourists, but it was a job. And I couldn't let my dad down. "Sure, yeah."
"Great. I know you probably want to do anything else. When things slow down at the end of August, maybe that's when you start looking?"
"And next summer?"
"I'll figure something out."
He left me, leaving me in this space I no longer recognized.
Every spare inch of wall in the room was bookcase, filled with stacks of old sci-fi and fantasy. The classics. Asimov, Niven, Anderson, Tiptree, Campbell, Tolkien, LeGuin. Go into those shelves and trace my evolution as a fan, as a writer myself. The way those spellweavers had shaped my dreams and the way those dreams shaped me. Now, staring at those creased spines, I had the realization that the dream was over.
I was awake.
I woke up before dawn and was in the water by the time the sun peeked over town. I spent a couple hours on the waves before making my way to shore. I rinsed off the frigid Pacific under a beach shower, stripping out of my wetsuit in a parking lot filled only with other surfers and seagulls scavenging for dropped food from the previous day. I was behind the register at my family's shop by nine.
We'd had the store since I was born. My sisters had worked there before they grew up and moved away. That was the thing about Aragon Beach. When you got old enough, you left, or you'd become one of the sunsoaked townies. We were a community of burnouts. Hippies from one generation, slackers from another, united by not fitting in anywhere. Back in college I thought about making it out, but now, I had no idea how that would look.
The store didn't even really have a name. ARAGON BEACH SOUVENIRS said the sign outside, but we were the kind of place that didn't need a name. It was somewhere tourists wandered into to look at overstuffed shelves. Racks of Aragon Beach t-shirts and hoodies, animals made out of seashells, funky magnets. If you wanted something weird to remind you that you once visited a small California beach town, we had it. It was one of nearly a dozen functionally identical shops in town.
I was starting to think about lunch, wondering if I'd hit the taco truck that always parked at the corner of Vista and Pacific, or if I'd take the walk down to Gremmie's for a burger. I was weighing the pros and cons of each option when a familiar face came through the front door.
Tessa van den Berghe was my best friend through two years of high school. That might not sound like much, but it was. Two years of high school is like ten years anywhere else. It's when you built memories you'd never love and couldn't quite hate. The last time it felt like anything was possible, but knowing that was a lie. It was the last time you could try a new identity on just to see how it fit.
Tessa and I were best friends for only two years because she was a year older than I was. My senior year, when she was gone, was the longest of my life. We saw each other on breaks, and it was always like we were right back to where we were. Best friends.
Tessa pushed her sunglasses onto the top of her head and her eyes hit mine, her face lighting up. She had lovely eyes, blue like an iceberg. Her hair, cut in a long bob with flat bangs, was dyed a matching color. She'd been dyeing it so long I only knew her natural ash blonde color from the pictures of her as a kid on the wall of her house. Tessa, as she liked to point out, was the palest person in Aragon Beach, the only person whose skin wouldn't hold even the slightest hint of a tan. Her complexion was so pale it held a touch of blue, and at night it could look silver.
It might sound like I had a crush on her, but I didn't. I had one when we first started hanging out, when I was a nerdy 10th grader and she a worldly 11th grader, but it faded quickly. I could recognize her as beautiful without dwelling.
She was a few inches under six feet with a willowy figure, long legs with small breasts and hips. She was dressed in summer Tessa wear, which meant a black Depeche Mode t-shirt, black cut-offs, and scuffed black Converse All-stars.
"Theo Bright," she said, like she was seeing me for the first time. "As I live and breathe."
"Tessa van den Berghe," I drawled back at her. "Ah, fuck it." I came around the counter and hugged her. She smelled of citrus sunscreen.
"You hungry?"
"Yeah, I was thinking of hitting Gremmie's."
"Of course you were. Adam around?" Adam, my dad.
"Yeah, he's in the back." I raised my voice. "Hey Dad, I'm taking lunch!"
My dad came out of the back, framed by the doorway and our collection of novelty shirts, and broke into a smile when he saw Tessa. "Take your time, Theo. Hey, Tess. Good to see you."
"It's always good to see me," she said. "I'll return your son in approximately the same condition."
"You break him you bought him."
The boardwalk was just out the door and to the right, past Rosarito's. I looked up at my fire escape. Our place was the second floor over the shop. Not quite a house, not quite an apartment. Tessa followed my look.
"We spent way too much time out on that rickety thing," she said. "I think I still have the imprints on my ass."
"I could check later."
"You wish."
Gremmie's was at the very northern tip of the boardwalk, where it gave up and turned into sand. Behind it, the cliffs rose up, sprouting iceplant and yarrow. The restaurant was a rundown shack with a wooden patio, plastic tables and chairs under sun-faded umbrellas. Built in the '60s, it originally catered to surfers, but it had become a local institution and now everybody went there. A radio blasted old school Madonna over the sand, the wind making the Material Girl sound tinny.
A portly guy with a bit of black hair still clinging to his skull worked the flat top grill. That was Tony MacLaren. His daughters rung up the orders and brought the red plastic baskets full of burgers and fries to tables. The savory aroma of the grill mixed with the salt air and brought me back to high school, when I had wasted more time here than anybody.
Another bolt of nostalgia hit me when I recognized the daughter working the register that day. She was cute as ever, her face and shoulders a mass of freckles and her hair as fiery as ever. She'd put on a few pounds, but it sat well on her. I found myself following the pillowy contours of her, from her tank top down to the blue jeans that fit like a second skin. She and I had been in school together since kindergarten, always friendly and sometimes friends.
"Theo?" she said as I approached, breaking into an unsure smile.
