First There Was Forever (6 page)

T
he bus to Clean the Bay was full of just the kinds of people I’d expect to sign up for it. Hailey insisted that we try and find a seat in the back of the bus, even though I would have much preferred to sit in the front row across from the supervisor, Leo.

Leo had a bushy beard and glasses. He wore khaki shorts and a hemp necklace and rode his bike to work every day. We had him for American History in ninth grade, and he was a really good teacher. Hailey made fun of him for being such an eco-nerd, but I thought he was interesting.

When Nate darted onto the bus at the last minute and sat in the second row, Hailey’s eyes burned with disappointment.

“See,” I said. “We should have sat in the front.”

Hailey rolled her eyes at me and sulked the whole way there.

At the beach, Leo told us we could go as far north as the lifeguard stand and as far south as the Santa Monica Pier.

Beach cleanup wasn’t as terrible as I’d thought it would be. The beach down here was different from the one near my house—it was bigger and louder and dirtier. There were tourists walking on the sand with cameras and knee-high socks, and police officers on bikes.

I liked the way being near the ocean made me feel a little dirty and earthy. The air coming off the water was thick with minerals, and the wind wrapped itself around me and climbed inside my clothes.

The class was spread out over the whole beach. I could make out Nate, about a hundred yards away, bending over and depositing little bits of trash into his plastic orange “Clean the Bay!” sack.

At one point Hailey ran up to talk to him, and I watched but couldn’t hear them. The wind and waves swallowed their voices. She returned a few minutes later, walking toward me in the slow, painful way people do when they’re walking in sand, like it hurts to move.

“He’s in a terrible mood,” she declared. “What an asshole.”

I didn’t ask.

• • •

“You’re unusually quiet, Hailey,” Mom said, glancing at her in the rearview mirror as she drove us home that afternoon. “Is there something on your mind?”

“I hate boys,” Hailey grumbled.

“I doubt that,” Mom teased.

“You’re right. I don’t hate boys; I love boys,” Hailey said. And then she added, “Well, I actually love one boy.”

“The same one you’ve told me about?” Mom asked. “Nick?”

I shifted around uncomfortably in my seat. It always annoyed me when Hailey talked to Mom about Nate.

“Nate,” Hailey corrected. “I’m so confused. Like, he’s nice to me one second and then he’s all mean and weird the next. I can’t tell what he wants.”

“Maybe he doesn’t know what he wants,” Mom said. “Boys at your age are different from girls. And in your case, it’s especially true. You’re a romantic. I can pretty much guarantee you spend more time thinking about love than this boy does.”

“Maybe,” Hailey agreed. “I mean, I do think about him like twenty-four/seven. I just want him to like me as much as I like him. I like him so much it, like, physically hurts.”

“I know, sweetie,” Mom said. “And he probably does feel the same way as you, whether or not he can show it. You’re such a wonderful, fun, fantastic girl. If he can’t see that, well, he might not be worth liking.”

Hailey let out a long, whistle of breath. “I love you, Laura.”

Mom beamed at Hailey in the rearview mirror and I tried not to roll my eyes. She looked like she was ready to pull over on the PCH just to give Hailey a hug. I looked out the window. The sun had started to go down, and reddish, late afternoon light splintered across the surface of the water.

Maybe Mom noticed my silence, because she glanced suspiciously at me. “Are you still with us, Li?”

“Yeah, totally,” I said, and scanned my fingernails for a good one to bite.

“W
e’re five minutes away from your house and we’re picking you up,” Meredith said over the phone that Friday night. “We’re going to get food.”

I was home alone watching reruns of
House
and eating popcorn in the living room. I was wearing my favorite fluffy bunny slippers and boxer shorts. The idea of getting dressed and getting on the freeway sounded unbearable, but Meredith was hard to deny. “You’re gonna drive me all the way back to Malibu afterward?”

“You can stay over at our house,” Meredith said. “We have lots of extra beds.”

I texted Mom to ask if I could go over to Meredith’s, but she and Dad were at the movies and they still hadn’t responded by the time the twins’ car pulled up in our driveway. For a moment, I contemplated telling Meredith I couldn’t go because I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to, but that would sound ridiculous. They had come all this way just to see me; it would be insane to make them leave now.

The Hayeses drove a big, noisy 1955 Chevy. It was painted black and upholstered with bright red vinyl. The lining of all the seats was splitting in multiple places, and yellow spongy stuffing was bursting out.

Next to me in the backseat was a girl named Lily who I recognized from school. Lily was round and baby-faced, like a doll, and she dressed like a pinup girl from the fifties. She curled her dyed black bangs into a perfect coil, as hard and shiny as a pole, and she wore tights, high-heel pumps, and orangey red lipstick to school every single day.

Now that I was so close to her, I noticed other things about Lily. She had skin as smooth and white as porcelain. Her arms were pale and almost hairless looking, as if she was covered in flour. She had a small Celtic pattern tattooed onto the inside of her left wrist.

In the front seat, a boy I didn’t recognize sat between Meredith and Walker. In old cars like the twins’, the front seat is like a bench.

“The famous Lima,” he said, craning his neck around to see me. “We’ve been hearing all about the wild party you had a few weeks ago. We heard y’all went skinny-dipping in the ocean.”

“Well—” I began to clarify, but stopped myself. Why ruin the glamorous image he had in his head by telling him it was my parents’ party and I didn’t even go in the ocean? Instead I said, “Who are you?”

Everybody laughed.

“I’m Henry,” he said.

“He’s my boyfriend,” Lily said. She stretched out her arm so she could just skim Henry’s cheek with her fingers. He turned to face her, made a kind of a barking sound, and then clamped down on her fingers with his teeth. She squealed with glee.

“So, Lima,” Henry continued. He had honey-colored skin and high cheekbones, and his voice was slow and sultry. “You’re named after the capital of Peru.”

I nodded. “Most people don’t know that. Where do you go to school?”

He smiled a little. “I’m not in school anymore.”

“Oh. How old are you?”

Everyone laughed again.

“I’m eighteen,” he said. “School just wasn’t my thing. I dropped out last year and moved to LA.”

“From where?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Lots of questions.”

I laughed. “Sorry.”

“From all over,” he said. “Last place I went to school was Indiana.”

“Wow.” What he said—dropping out of high school, living in lots of places, ending up in LA—it just implied so much more than I could imagine. I had a million questions, but didn’t even know where to start.

“We went down to the beach for a little fresh air,” Meredith said, twisting back to look at me. She must not have been wearing a seat belt because she curled around the back of Henry’s body to face me. She rested her bejeweled fingers on his shoulder and let her long hair tumble down into his face. He didn’t flinch. “And now we’re all starving. We’re going get some food on the way home.”

I’d never been to Canter’s Deli before. I had seen the big 1950s neon sign and wondered about it, but it wasn’t the kind of place Mom and Dad would ever go, with its retro, seedy-looking storefront. Inside, it was livelier and more crowded than its exterior promised. I scanned the enormous room, registering right away that we were the youngest people there.

The five of us squeezed into a big, red vinyl booth and Walker ordered a round of milk shakes while we perused enormous sticky menus. At the table next to us, a man with long hair and weathered, sunken cheeks was eating breakfast: eggs, bacon, even coffee.

“We’re going to the Rose Bowl Flea Market tomorrow, Lima,” Meredith said. “You have to come. It’s so fantastic.”

“I’m obsessed with flea markets,” said Lily. “They’re lame if you don’t know what you’re doing, but I go all the time so I know all the good vendors.”

“My buddy has a booth there. Old records and shit,” Henry added. His arm was draped around Lily’s shoulders, and his fingers hovered near her breast. He leaned in and bit her earlobe.

These people have touched each other everywhere
, I thought. Contact wasn’t even a big deal to them anymore. Their hands and eyes had slipped all over one another’s bodies. It seemed impossible that I would ever, in a million years, feel that comfortable with another person’s body. For some reason, my mind flashed to Hailey and Nate.

“Remember that eight-track player we found last summer?” Lily asked Henry, ignoring his nibbling.

“What’s an A track?” I asked.

They all laughed.

“I get it,” Henry said to Meredith. “This girl is sweet.”

The Hayeses lived in Laurel Canyon, the hills above West Hollywood. The road wound up and up for what seemed like forever. The streets got narrower and steeper as we drove. Hidden houses lined one side and mountains the other.

“Does anyone else from school live around here?” I asked.

“Someone just moved in to a house at the bottom of our street,” Meredith said vaguely. “Brian? Or Ryan? He’s in your grade.”

“Ryan,” Walker corrected.

“Ryan Masterson?” I asked.

“Maybe,” Meredith replied. And then, after a minute, she pressed her forefinger to the window as if it were a screen. “There. His dad just bought that house. You can’t really see it.”

Finally we arrived at the twins’ house. It was enormous and modern, with walls of glass and strange concrete additions. It appeared to have innumerable stories and wings and balconies.

The furniture inside was dark and sleek except for one glittering white grand piano. The ceilings were high, which made the rooms feel cavernous, glamorous. Everything was immaculate. The whole place was a surprise. I guess I’d pictured the Hayeses living in a shack with tiki torches everywhere and Christmas lights hanging from the roof. I hadn’t realized they were so insanely rich.

“Where’s your dad?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

“Saint Barts,” Walker said.

Meredith told me I’d be sleeping in her bed with her, and for a second I was nervous. I’d only ever shared a bed with Hailey. But once I saw Meredith’s decadent, king-size canopy bed, I relaxed. We would both have plenty of space. Even Meredith’s bathroom was bigger than my bedroom at home.

Meredith had a TV mounted on the wall across from her bed. We climbed under her satin sheets, watched
Seinfeld,
and played with her cat, Leonard Cohen. Meredith was surprisingly easy to be around. Sometimes she seemed all complex and mysterious, but she was really disarmingly normal.

I reached for a framed photograph that was resting on her bedside table. “Can I look at this?”

Her eyes drifted over to my hands, and she nodded slowly, pensively.

It was a photograph of a woman with the wind in her hair, standing on a big wooden deck. At first I thought it was a picture of Meredith—it looked just like her, with the long dark hair and heart-shaped face—but then I saw that there were two tiny children standing at her feet.
Meredith and Walker.

“That’s my mother,” she said. “Anne.”

“She looks exactly like you.”

Meredith smiled vaguely. “She was pretty. She was a model.”

I grew quiet. It worried me to hear her referred to in the past tense.

Meredith laughed. “Oh, no, don’t worry. She’s alive. She just lives in Paris. We almost never see her.”

“Why?” I asked.

Meredith shrugged,
“C’est la vie.”

It was just the kind of cryptic answer I was starting to expect from her. She seemed so at peace with everything. Not angsty. Not confused.

She stared off into a space for a moment, and then she said, in response to nothing in particular, “Paris.”

But this time she pronounced Paris like “puh-ree,” like a real French person would. After she said it, there was a strange pause. And then she giggled.