Page 22 of The California Dreamers

21

Bruce Balboa I peek often now. And we haven’t gone near the hotel.

With wave after wave, I have tried to drown the memory of Cap in that hotel garage, and I have failed. But over time, I have washed it clean. He did it for us. He only did it when we really needed money. And he’s stopped.

He’s stopped, but I still take pictures. Since the one in the Triton was published, I have taken a thousand mental pictures and eleven real ones.

But they’re only for me now—I’ll never share them.

***

Mag, Dyl, and I are reading on the sand, in the Gull’s shade. Charlie mailed me a puck of Mrs. Palmer’s wax, gardenia flavor, and I put as much on my wrists as my board, and as I read Island , I breathe in the scent, like it’s part of the story.

Charlie. When I saw her handwriting on the package, I felt a curious flutter, deep in my stomach. I didn’t just miss her company, her conversation. I missed the feeling of her, in the simplest sense of the word. Her breath on my neck, as we sat two on a board, scouting waves. Her hand on my wrist. Her knee knocking mine…

Cap says Island is “too young for me,” so I’m careful to open it less than I want to. Since my birthday I’ve read David Copperfield and Call of the Wild and Dharma Bums and Travels with Charley . But I always come back to Island .

I’m just at my favorite part, where Karana fights the wolves, when Griff collapses onto the sand by us. “Does she hate the island this time?” he jokes. At one time his good mood wouldn’t have been notable, but now it catches me off guard. He’s been acting off for months. Frustrated by our lean rations, counting down the months until he turns eighteen and Cap will let him earn money.

I’ve missed Griff’s cheer. I didn’t realize how much until this moment, witnessing its return—his smile in the middle of his new chin-hair dots that are trying to be a beard.

“Where’ve you been all morning, bro?” Mag asks him.

“I walked down to Morro Bay.” Griff glances at Dyl, who’s copying coral diagrams from a book into his Mer field journal, and lowers his voice. “There’s a surf contest next week. Amateur stuff, but they’re giving out cash prizes.”

Mag knows where this is headed. “You’re kidding yourself.”

“What if I registered under a fake name? Stuffed my hair down my suit like Charlie does? We need cash.”

“It’s risky,” I say.

“You already registered, didn’t you?” Mag asks. “You’re delusional, bro.”

“Have you seen our meals lately?” Griff’s good mood has vanished, and he hurls his towel in the bushes. “There’s no rule about surf contests.”

“You can’t. Griff?” I shake my head. “You’re outvoted. You know he hates contests even if it’s not a rule.”

Bad enough that I have betrayed Cap. I can’t watch Griff do it.

***

Mag proposes something to cheer his twin up; Griff won’t participate, but we’ll go watch the 18-and-Under contest together.

So the next day, the four of us rise early for the long walk to Morro. From the safety of the dune grass, we spy on the competition, and it’s clear Griff would’ve won easily. The scene is chaotic, though. Loudspeakers, blaring music, judges recording points, countdown clocks, sponsors, T-shirts. So much money to be made off what we do every day just for the joy of it.

“All four of us could’ve swept our divisions.” Griff’s shoulders tilt, sway. Even sitting down, he’s imagining what he would do on the current swell, where the competitors have a few more minutes to impress the judges. When the female contestants battle it out, Griff says of the leader, “Look at her. Ro, you’d crush her.”

I can’t argue. And a fifty-dollar prize would be a dream right now. Yesterday, in secret, I fished twenty-three cents from the fountain in the Hilton lobby to buy Dyl a pack of cheese crackers.

Griff rises and zig-zags down the bluffs toward the contest before we know what’s happening.

“What’s he doing?” I ask Mag, worried.

“You think I can read his mind?”

“You usually can.” Because Mag had whispered something to me as we walked over: Griff secretly dreamed of competing. My heart broke for him, but it was also frightening. Griff was our steady one.

I watch Griff as he approaches one of the long white tables on the beach, talking to a woman, taking something from her… Relief surges through me. “It’s okay. He’s only taking free things.”

Griff returns, raining energy bars with a surfer logo down on us. Only pride stops me from devouring mine on the spot. Then something else flutters into my lap—a brochure from the event.

“Happy?” Griff asks.

“What am I looking for?” I ask.

“Page two. Guess who I was going to be?”

There, I see it. “Bruce Balboa, Covina, Calif.—withdrawn.” Or, as we know to be the real case, a no-show.

“Bruce Balboa?” Mag laughs.

Of course Griff’d pick that pseudonym. Bruce after Bruce Brown. Balboa for his favorite break near Newport.

As the four of us trudge back to the van, I poke Griff. “I’m sorry, Bruce.”

“It was a ridiculous impulse. Cap’s right about contests. I’ll find another way to make money.”

We stretch those energy bars out for a week.

Three nights later

Over a beach campfire, I’m idly reading between stirring our pinto beans, the boys lazing nearby, when Cap’s voice pulls me from Karana’s world to this one.

“Entertaining literature, Ronan?”

I hand him my book. When Cap’s upset about something in the citizen world, he paces and gestures, his voice rising like a preacher I heard once through an open chapel door. But this quiet voice like ice—we don’t hear it often.

He’s thumbing through the contest brochure I’d used as a bookmark.

I shoot Griff a worried look. Does he somehow know Griff entered that contest? That he’s the flaky “Bruce Balboa”?

But Cap’s not searching for the list of entrants. He unfolds the contest brochure to a page we all flipped right past earlier, spreads it out. And what he holds up for us is surreal.

It’s us. Our picture.

My picture, the same one that ran in black-and-white in the UC San Diego newspaper months ago.

Except now it’s bigger. Placed in a circle with a yellow border and rays. We’re inside a cartoon sun. A full-color ad for Kenny’s Beach Outfitters.

It feels impossible. And yet there we are, the six of us running across the sand toward the ocean.