Porter gets us past the main herd of fleeing cattle. We jog around a boulder and he spots a secondary path through dry coastal brush that a couple of other partygoers are climbing. It’s dark but serviceable. “Stay low,” Porter tells me, and we head that way, sneaking through the dry grass. Just before we crest the hill, we have to stop and wait for a cop car with a high-beam spotlight to finish sweeping the area. When I’m half a second away from having a stroke, I get a text from Grace: Where are you? To which I reply: Escaping with Porter. Are you safe? She answers: Yes, okay. Was worried I lost you. Tell P to go N on Gold to Cuangua Farm. Text me when you get home.
I show Porter the texts. He nods, and when the coast is clear, we jog past a million parked cars until we get to what appears to be a sky-blue Volkswagen camper van—the kind from the 1960s and ’70s that are long and surrounded with a ring of windows. Surfer vans, my dad calls them, because they’re big enough to haul longboards on top. This one is covered with peeling surfing stickers on the back windows and has painted white fenders. Porter opens the passenger side and slips into the driver’s seat from there, then beckons me in after him.
“Shit!” He’s shoving the keys in the ignition as flashing lights head in our direction again. The engine protests and doesn’t want to catch, and it’s like a bad horror movie. “Come on, come on.” And then—finally!—it rumbles to life, loud as you please. Wheels spin, kicking up sand, and then we’re off, turning away from this nightmare, trundling as fast as a fifty-year-old bus can go, which isn’t very fast at all, but who cares? The whole nasty scene is in Porter’s rearview mirror.
I click on my seat belt and immediately melt into the seat. “Jesus.”
“Are you okay?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want to talk about what happened back there?”
“No.”
His brow furrows. “I’m sorry about all that . . . about Davy.”
“Yeah. He’s a complete dirtbag. No offense, but why are you friends with him?”
Fingers lift and fall on the steering wheel.
“We grew up surfing together. He used to be my best friend. His family life has gone down the toilet, so my dad took him under his wing for a while, trained him. My mom felt sorry for him. He practically lived at our house for a while. Then he got hurt surfing a few years ago. Has a leg full of metal and pins.”
The limp.
“He’s in a lot of pain, and it screwed up any chance he had of surfing seriously. Made him bitter and angry . . . changed him.” Porter sighs heavily and scratches his neck. “Anyway, he started screwing up, and I told you about how my dad is. He wouldn’t tolerate Davy’s BS, so he stopped training him until he gets his act cleaned up. And on top of all that, Davy basically thinks I’m an idiot for not wanting to go pro, because he says I’m privileged and throwing it away. Also . . .”
Whatever he was going to say, he seems to think better of it and clams up. I wonder if it had to do with all the drunken smack talk Davy was spewing at the bonfire. About that girl they mentioned outside the vintage clothing shop, Chloe.
“Anyway, I’m sorry about all that,” he says. “I’ll go talk to him tomorrow when he’s sobered up. No use seeing him tonight. It’ll just turn into a fistfight. Always does. And who knows, maybe he got arrested this time. Might do him some good.”
I don’t know what to say to that. I can’t imagine having a best friend you hate. That’s messed up.
“It smells like you in here,” I say after a long moment.
“It does?” The steering wheel on this van is enormous. I just noticed. Also, the seat is one giant thing that goes across the whole front of the van. And there’re tiny rubber monsters stuck to the dash: an alien and a hydra and a Loch Ness Monster and a Godzilla. Wait, not an alien: a green shark. Huh. They’re all sea creatures—all famous water monsters. What doesn’t kill you . . .
“Coconut,” I say. “You always smell coconut-y.” Then, because it’s dark in the van, and because I’m wiped out from all the panic and my guard is down, I add, “You always smell good.”
“Sex Wax.”
“What?” I sit up a little straighter.
He reaches down to the floorboard and tosses me what looks like a plastic-wrapped bar of soap. I hold it up to the window to see the label in the streetlight. “Mr. Zog’s Sex Wax,” I read.
“You rub it on the deck of your board,” he explains. “For traction. You know, so you don’t slip off while you’re surfing.” I sniff it. That’s the stuff, all right.
“I bet your feet smell heavenly.”
“You don’t have a foot fetish thing, do you?” he asks, voice playful.
“I didn’t before, but now? Who knows.”
The tires of the van veer off the road onto the gravelly shoulder, and he cuts the wheel sharply to steer back onto the pavement. “Oops.”
We chuckle, both embarrassed.
I toss the wax onto the floorboard. “Well, another mystery solved.”
“Not a big one. Let’s get back to yours.” He turns down a small road on the edge of town. This must be the way Grace suggested. “I remember you mentioning something about not liking movies with guns in them when you were with Patrick in the video store.”
Ugh. This again. I hug my stomach and look out the passenger window, but there’s nothing but residential houses and it’s dark outside. “God, you really did hear everything that morning, didn’t you?”
“Pretty much. What happened? I mean, I did tell you about the whole shark incident, and I barely knew you then.”
“Yeah, but you’re all open and talkative. You probably tell everyone that story.”
“I actually don’t.” His head turns toward me, and I see his eyes flick in my direction. “People at school know better than to ask me.”
And I didn’t.
“Look, I’m not going to force you to talk about something,” he says. “I’m not a shrink. But if you want to, I’m a good listener. No judgment. Sometimes it’s better to get it out. It festers and gets weird when you bottle it up. I don’t know why, but it does. Just speaking from personal experience.”
I don’t say anything for a long while. We just ride in silence together through the dark streets, silhouettes of mountains rising on one side of the town, the ocean spreading out on the other. Then I tell him some of it. About my mom taking the Grumbacher divorce case when I was fourteen. About her winning it for the wife, about the custody she got for the wife’s daughter.
And about Greg Grumbacher.
“He started harassing my mom online,” I say. “That’s how it started. He’d post nasty comments on her social media. When she didn’t respond, he started stalking my dad, and then me. I didn’t even know who he was. He just started showing up after school a lot, hanging outside where the parents carpool. I thought he was one of my friends’ fathers, or something.
“We only lived two blocks from school,” I continue, “so I usually walked home with a friend. One day when I walked home alone, he walked with me. Said he was my mom’s coworker. And because he’d done all this detailed research online, he rattled off all this stuff about her, so it seemed like, yeah, he did know her. And I was too trusting. A stupid kid.”