Page 28 of The California Dreamers

27

Fame

1986

California

Sixteen years old

After the grunion run, Charlie and I steal off together whenever we can. Dunes, parks. We kiss and talk and laugh, giddy with our new discovery.

“You give me butterflies in my stomach,” she whispers.

“You give me hummingbirds.”

One day when all of us are eating dinner, Dyl spies a ruby-throated hummingbird and sketches it in his field journal. Charlie and I share a secret glance.

We’ve hidden the change in our friendship without discussing a plan to do so. We get so little time alone. It would be wasteful to spend it talking about what everyone might think.

That’s what I tell myself. But after a few weeks, I begin to detect worry in the corner of Charlie’s eyes. And once, after we’ve been kissing for a long time in a warm, deep dune, she finally whispers the question I’ve been dreading: “What would everyone think about this?”

I don’t know what my family will think about it—two girls. My attraction to Charlie feels so natural I can’t pinpoint when I started. Probably when I saw her surfing that first day.

Gay is used mostly as an insult. Citizens toss it around. That’s so gay . It means lame. Stupid. Silly. And I’ve found boys cute, too. Thought about kissing them. So what does that mean?

Last week, Mag used gay to describe someone’s bright, banded wet suit in Newport. And Cap looked at him sharply while I held my breath. “I mean immature,” Mag had corrected. Just as he would when letting other citizen slang slip in Cap’s presence.

Now I wished I’d been braver—that I’d asked Cap if the silent rebuke was only for using slang, or if that particular word offended him for a second reason. How he felt about couples different from him and Mama.

I feared the answer.

Charlie wants to talk about it, to be open. But I’m afraid we’re something dirty.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “What about Bass and your mom?”

“My dad wouldn’t mind. My mom… We’ll never know unless we tell them all.”

“When you come back,” I say. Stalling her. Charlie is going to visit in four months, at the start of her summer vacation. A long separation, but at least we know its end date.

She agrees, but our remaining time is heavy with need and confusion.

Then one night in the dunes, after she’s slipped her hand under my suit, I cry out, “I love you.”

Charlie sweeps my cheek with her thumb and says only, “You’re lovely.”

I stiffen with embarrassment and she quickly continues, “Ro. I’m falling for you, too. But I’m not sure you can be sure of that yet. You know so few people. I mean that came out condescending, but—”

“It’s not important, forget I—”

“It is important. We should talk about it.”

There’s a long, awkward silence. We cover it with laughter, with a final late-night swim and promises to write daily. And then she’s gone.

***

My ache for Charlie is so all-consuming, her first letter so slow to arrive at the bait shop, I would have been unhappy even if life was otherwise perfect.

But two things happen within the month after she boards her 747 back to Oahu that add to my heartache.

The first is a knock in the night: Rap-rap-rap-rap-RAP!

I’m jolted from a sweet dream. I know cop knocks. They always use the side of their fist, not their knuckles, and there’s almost no time between flesh hitting metal, and the number of knocks is always five, with a loud one at the end.

Rap-rap-rap-rap-RAP!

In our bed, I hold my hand on Dyl’s shoulder—he’s stiff and scared under our blanket, and I trace waves on his back, calming him.

Then: “Open up, City PD.”

“It’s just a police officer,” I tell Dyl, and we both relax.

Cap hits the floor, slides the door open. He goes out to talk to the officer, shutting the door behind him, and Mama’s quiet behind the library wall.

The officer laughs, says a lot that I don’t hear, though I catch a sarcastic “celebrities.” This is new.

The discussion takes a long time. There’s a tangle of voices, rising, calming, rising again. Silence.

And then Cap says, “Fine. Yes, sir.” I don’t like the sir .

A flashlight beam shoots through Mag’s window into the van, bounces around. This is new, too.

In the moonlight, Mag sits on his bunk with his back straight as a board, fists balled. He doesn’t like the sound of sir , either. Griff, up in his bunk, smiles at me. Not his real grin but a nervous, pretending-it’s-okay smile.

“Why is it taking so long?” Dyl asks me.

“Don’t worry, Dylly,” I whisper. I dig around and find his sweaty hand and we trace the waves on our bunk together. One time around, two times.

“I’ll bet by the fifth time, it’ll be over,” I say, guiding his index finger slowly over the grooves.

“Is it a robber or a cop?” Dyl asks.

“You heard him say. Cop. So it will be over soon.” Cap told the man at the Sapphire he would no longer transport money for him. But if that’s not true, if a white packet is changing hands outside the Gull’s metal wall, Dyl does not need to know about it, ever.

“But maybe he was lying.”

“It’s nothing to worry about, follow my hand.”

At four times around the waves, Cap comes in and says, “All taken care of, go back to sleep.” He climbs up and he and Mama talk, low, in their bunk.

“See?” I whisper to Dyl, who snuggles down to sleep.

But instead of sleeping, Cap jumps back down, hops into the driver’s seat, and the Gull rumbles.

The magic did not work this time.

My heart’s racing, and the twins exchange a shocked look in the shadows, but I make my voice as soft as I can and whisper to Dyl, “It’s all right,” drawing waves on his back with my finger while he traces them on our bunk. I know our pattern by heart, all the little points and slides and valleys. The same waves are tattooed on the arches of Mama and Cap’s feet, and soon they will mark the twins’. Then mine, then Dyl’s.

As I sketch along Dyl’s back, I try to let the Gull’s familiar engine humming rock me. But as I drift off, I think—she is not humming. She is shuddering. She is shaking.

***

We drive south to the next beach, ten or twelve miles by my calculations, as I count by the yellow highway strip unfurling from the back window. We must be coasting on fumes; lately I have begun checking the gas gauge along with the stovepipe. Cap parks us under a tree and climbs up to bed. But I can’t sleep.

“Are they all asleep?” Cap asks Mama.

I hold my breath.

“I think so,” she whispers. “We were parked so far off the road, what happened?”

“It’s like he knew where we were.”

“But how?”

“I don’t know. But he gave me this. Called me a celebrity .”

What?

I wait a long time for clues, but they don’t come. And neither does their deep breathing which means they’re asleep. I imagine my parents, tense with worry on the other side of the library wall, and sleep very little myself.

We’ve stopped in a town that was no one’s choice. There’s no surf break, and we have to content ourselves with swimming. The twins and I try to amuse Dyl by creating a little river wave next to a creek, but it feels forced.

Cap finds work at a garage. He comes home drained, and doesn’t make any coins there—it’s not a place he has worked before.

I walk there to spy on him, sensing his despair. And he’s not under a car, but he has a stick in his hand, and for a second I remember that mirror under the golf cart. But he’s pushing a broom around. I hurry off, wishing I hadn’t come.

But it’s all temporary. When we have enough cash, he’ll drive us another two hundred miles south, to a board shaper called Daniel’s where he’s respected and can make his own hours.

In the meantime, we all feel uneasy about the cop making us leave. Cap seems distracted. Mama doesn’t ramble far, and I heard Cap tell her that just to be safe, she shouldn’t.

The first night in the new nesting place, jerked from a deep sleep, there are thuds that at first I think must mean another cop outside. And then rocking.

Or had we started south already? Impossible. Cap has accepted garage work in town and we have no gas money. The rocking and thuds end—probably just one of the twins deciding to night surf, or sleep on the roof…it was so warm. Really, it might have been a good hammock night.

“Ro,” Dyl whispers.

“Hmmm?”

“Look.” I join Dyl, who’s looking through the back window. Outside, Griff and Mag stare at something I can’t see behind them.

We tiptoe out, not wanting to wake Mama.

Blurry from sleep, it at first only seems like a word floating in the dark. Sideways, in fuchsia glow-in-the-dark paint: “HYPOCRITE.”

Then I realize it is written on a board. Cap’s board. The letters smeared on in Stick Glo surf wax.

The four of us circle the garish monolith.

At last, Griff speaks. “They knew it was Cap’s board.”

Someone must have unstrapped it from the roof. They left the others, didn’t steal anything. Only a childish, chilling message.

“I heard Cap tell Mama yesterday when that cop knocked, ‘He gave me this.’ What? Did he tell you, Griff?”

“A notepad with that same picture of us on it,” Griff confides. “Fifty pages, us at the top next to ‘Hang Ten!’”

Celebrity. Hypocrite.

“How can someone just use our picture on souvenirs without permission?” Mag asked, balling his fists.

Then we hear Cap, whistling along the road. He comes into view, tossing a coin up and down. He seems happy. So he’d managed to make his coin. My heart swells for him. For a second, spotting the four of us there, he seems touched to see us, as if we’d sensed his return from his long evening’s work and come out to greet him.

My first impulse is to block his board with my body.

Cap stops tossing the coin, and all the joy drains from his face.

“Is everyone all right?” he asks. “Where is your mother?”

“Still asleep,” Griff assures him. “I should have woken. I’m sorry. I should have stood guard after the cop yesterday.”

Why would any cop, let alone two of them, care about a cheap souvenir notepad?

Cap shakes his head slightly, indicating that Griff’s not to blame.

The four of us help our father scrape his board, then we wash it in the moonlit waves.

“I’ll wax it for you now,” I offer.

“Thank you, Ronan,” Cap says. “But I won’t need my board for a little while.”

Mag says, “Does someone think we posed for that souvenir trash. Made money from it? And who would even care if we did?”

Cap looks out to sea. He has rakes of fluorescent fuchsia on his rib cage where he wiped his hands.

“I don’t know if they truly believe it,” Cap says. “People often pretend to believe, when it’s helpful.”

“Helpful for what?” Mag asked.

“For hurting. Helpful for hurting, Magnus. Well. Let’s strap this back on the roof.”

“So we’re just going to leave?” Mag sputters. “We’re not going to fight back?”

Griff glares at him.

But Cap’s expression is soft. “There is no fight, Magnus. This is only someone to pity.”

“I’ll drive so you can sleep,” Griff says, his chin lifted defiantly.

But Cap, weary as he is, insists on taking the wheel wrapped in dried kelp. He sits in the captain’s chair, his hat on, and we roll onto the road.

None of us asks where we’re going.

***

Four more towns south. Nowhere we like. The glow-in-the-dark board paint doesn’t appear again, but Cap can’t work because he doesn’t want to leave us alone, even with the twins on guard.

After two weeks of this, I confer with them in the dunes. Mag says, “Maybe it’s one of the old-school board shapers stirring trouble with the cops, telling them when we’re parked illegally. Or another vanner, mad because they think Cap made money off our picture. Hypocrite. ”

And I remember what the police officer said after pounding on the Gull and making us leave in the night—that mocking celebrity .

“It doesn’t explain why the police would care,” Griff says. “A vanner would never willingly approach a cop, or have any sway with them, if they did. It could be someone from the Sapphire hotel, angry because Cap quit working for them…”

Mag: “Or the opposite! A cop who’s gone straight could be behind it?”

“Then why did that officer mention us on souvenirs? He said ‘celebrities…’”

“I don’t know. Just to be a jerk, maybe…”

They go on like this, theorizing. Who might have a grudge against Cap, or if it’s only a coincidence, us having to move twice in one week.

How easy it is for outsiders to control our lives, after all. Knocks in the night, a little paint, and the Gull’s favorite nests are smashed.

The boys can debate for hours about the details, the exact chain of events and who our mysterious nemeses might be, but the picture links everything. None of this happened until the flyers, the souvenir Hang Ten! notepads, the towels…

Celebrity. Hypocrite .

I know who’s to blame for whatever’s happening to us. Me.

***

Cap decides the six of us will hide the Gull behind the bait shop and split up for a few weeks.

He’ll go off alone to see how far the merchandise with our picture on it has spread, try to make amends with whoever is mad at us—however unjust their grievance. He is sure that he will get work again, shaping boards, if he can just explain.

“And the twins will hitch to Big Bear. You’ve been curious about snowboarding, right, boys? And you three will camp, somewhere inland. Ronan and Dyl, you’ll remember what you see and tell us all about it when you return. Interest in that…picture will subside by then.”

“I have a beautiful ramble in mind,” Mama tells me and Dyl.

Everyone’s being so kind to me, but they wouldn’t be if they knew this was my fault.