Part Four - Summer Break (Freshman → Sophomore Year)
The summer break wasn't really a 'break' so much as it was a 'light' period. As Dr. Igarashi had told me, I did need to have classes during the summer, but the schedule was much lighter, and as such, it meant I only really needed to be in classrooms two days a week.
That meant I could spend more time with Julia exploring the Bay Area itself, and she could spend more time teaching me how to surf, although to be fair, I think she was still struggling to get the hang of it herself when we started.
We would take a day or two to drive down to Santa Cruz, check out the boardwalk and hang out with the surfers and the stoners down there before coming back up. Julia loved just getting out and travelling, saying she really hadn't seen all that much of the world, and hoped that once we were out of CARP that we'd be able to go places and see things.
"I don't want to ask a lot of you from our partnership, Josh, but that's one thing I want you to promise me - that we're going to travel as much as we can, anywhere we've never been before," she said sitting next to me on the Santa Cruz boardwalk beach, watching the waves come in. "Not just you and me, but the whole big weird family, whatever it ends up being."
"Tell me about
you
, Julia," I remember saying to her. "You're always sort of ducking the question, but if you want me to make that kind of promise, you have to promise to be open and honest with me in turn, and that means opening up about who you are and where you came from."
She sighed, hanging her head for a second, then nodded. "You're right. You're absolutely right. And that's completely fair of you to ask. We need to be on equal footing. What do you want to know?"
"What was it like growing up in San Diego? Do you miss it?"
Julia smiled although it was a bitter and spiteful smile, one I didn't like seeing on her face. "I don't miss it one fucking bit. My parents are both real blue collar - Dad works at Walmart and Mom works at KFC. Neither of them went to college. When I was born, I wasn't the smartest kid, but I was smart enough, and athletic, so my parents did what they could to keep up. One of the girls in my grade school, Mary Lou, started taking tennis lessons and her parents said she was having trouble focusing on them because she didn't have any friends in the class, so they offered to pay for me to take classes with her, just so she'd have a friend there. But after a few months, it was clear Mary Lou was fucking terrible at tennis and I was actually really good at it, so she quit taking classes, and she quit being my friend on top of that. The teacher, on the other hand, offered to continue coaching me for free."
I could feel her tensing up at telling me this, so I wrapped my arms around her, squeezing her body close to mine.
"By the time I got to high school, I was playing on a competitive level, and guys were starting to really notice me, although not always for the right reasons. I got teased a lot because of my height - I've basically been this tall since I was thirteen - and guys were scared off by that, although once my tits started coming in, a few of the more bold boys were coming around sniffing for pussy. But I found a lot of the guys were intimidated by my athleticism. I had boyfriends on and off, though, and when senior year rolled around, a handful of schools were interested in offering me tennis scholarships. I was considering those offers when Dr. Igarashi came to see me. She told me that while I was definitely good enough to play tennis for a living for a bit, that wouldn't last forever, and I needed to start making plans for my second act before I finished my first one. And she had some thoughts about that."
"Good lord, really?"
"She said that the people who instigate real change in the world, they're the sort of people who have a small, but intricate social clique that help insulate them, so that if one person begins to doubt or falter, the rest of the clique helps buffer against that adversity. And part of the problem is that these cliques usually form in college, and then dissipate when the students graduate from college. Sure, a person might take one part of the clique with them after graduation, usually in terms of a partner, but the majority of that social equity and support network is lost," my Amazonian girlfriend told me. "But what if it didn't have to be? The Doctor's theory is that if you built a sort of polycule, a group of five individuals built over time, they could buffer one another against strife, doubt and adversity, and each polycule would stand a chance at legitimate long term systemic change. I could be an athlete for as long as I could last that way, and my polycule would help me transition into something else if playing tennis didn't work out as a long-term plan."
"So you knew that you and me were going to be fucking before I even walked in that door," I laughed, swiping my hand across my face in astonishment.
"Well, I knew that if I wanted this to work, I'd have to trust that the Doctor would be good enough to find people to pair with me," Julia said, a wry grin on her lips. "But all betas have a ripcord they can pull if they want to, which is to say that they think the matching was poor and they want to be reassigned. None of the betas have pulled that yet, though, so I think whatever pairing research the Doctor is doing beforehand seems to be pretty good at getting us matched well together with people we'll get along with in both the short and long term. We're gonna need more people in the unit, though. And I still need to map out your limits, which is a thing I promised to do for the Doc over the summer."
"My limits?" I wasn't at all sure what she meant by that statement and was a little worried about where she was going to go with this. "What did you have in mind?"
Julia gestured towards one of the surfers who was almost right in front of us, but still out on the ocean a bit. "Take a look at the girl in the floral print bodysuit on the turquoise board. If I told you I wanted the three of us to have a one-night stand, how would you react to that?"
"I'd tell you yet
again
that I really don't need anybody more than you."
Julia giggled a little bit, leaning over to kiss me. "You're sweet, you know that? But you'd better get over that shit quick. You're gonna have three more girls in this new little family unit of ours, maybe even
four
if the Doc deems it necessary, and I'm
never
gonna get jealous unless, like, you totally aren't paying me
any
attention. But sharing you with another girl? Fuck man, that's only fuel for my fire, okay? I'm gonna play with girls too. I like girls. Girls are soft and smell like strawberries. So let's try this again. The girl in the floral print bodysuit on the turquoise board. Would you hit that?"
I think if Julia hadn't been so straight forward, open and honest about all of it, it would've taken me a lot longer to find acceptance with the situation, but she was so upfront about all of it that it felt like arguing with her was just a waste of time. "Yeah, I'd hit that."
