06. The beach episode

(truly) The events of October 27

“Oh, crap!”

“What?” Evelyn looked up from her magazine and regarded Leila in her usual absent minded fashion.

“I forgot to fold the laundry” Leila groaned into her hands, “my mother’s gonna kill me when I get back”.

“Well that won’t be for like, eight hours, so relax. Are you done with that one? I already know this one by heart.” Evelyn threw the dog-eared Mad magazine she was holding in Leila’s direction and pointed to the one resting on her lap with a raise of the brows.

“Yeah, take it.”

Evelyn gingerly took the magazine and flipped through it vacantly until she found an article she liked. She then crossed her legs on the seat, took a charcoal-colored tendril from the side of her head and ran it through her lips over and over as she read.

Leila regarded her friend for a moment. She was close to Evelyn Soria because she was an outcast like herself. Evelyn and her family moved constantly due to her father’s job as a geologist. It meant traveling a lot because he had to go where there was work. The explanation had been longer, but that was as much as she’d understood when she met Mr. Soria, a stoic-looking man with a wry sense of humor and a lax composure about him. Leila admired the man’s insistence on keeping his family together, although Leila sometimes spoke ill of him for uprooting them from the city where she lived the first 8 years of her life. She spoke of that place like it was an amusement park. It seemed silly and juvenile to Leila, who had never had to move herself, but always thought of it like an adventure.

Evelyn had arrived at Belmonte two weeks into the school year, when Leila was still being summarily ignored by all the inners and uppers. As Mr. Marquez, the math teacher, introduced her to the group, she seemed to have been folding into herself, grasping at her backpack straps like they were an ill-fitting parachute and she was in mid-drop. Leila had liked her immediately. That pale, dark haired cheeky girl with the dimples that were obvious just from the pursing of her lips was going to be her friend, she had immediately decided. Leila had a tendency to consider that very few things work out in her favor, but she was glad this one thing had.

“What did you forget to do?” the voice came from the boy in the passenger’s seat. It retained a childish pitch, with a healthy dose of impish humor.

“Oh, my mom told me to fold a load of laundry like, this big”, Leila jeered as she moved her arms around mocking excessive proportions of an amorphous mass, and making the boy respond with a chuckle “all fitted sheets and socks and undies and good stuff like that. I forgot.” She punctuated with a grimace and a shrug.

“Well don’t feel bad, I forgot to clean my room.”

Evelyn’s twin brother, Vincent, was decidedly similar to his sister in his complexion and coloring. In contrast, he lacked his sister’s dimples, and appeared to be lagging a bit on his height, but he was more of a sincere, witty clown than Evelyn, whose every comment seemed to come out with obvious thought behind it, or so Leila thought.

“Vincent!” Mrs. Soria piped from the driver’s seat. Leila loved Evelyn’s mom, she didn’t have a mean bone in her. She was in sales, although more as a pastime than anything else, but she seldom stepped out of that eagerness to please. Trying to mask her voice in strictness was like seeing a toddler wearing his daddy’s suit.

“I’m kidding, mom! I cleaned it. I’m just trying to make Leila feel better.”

“He stuffed his closet.” Evelyn interjected without looking up from her magazine.

“I did NOT!”

“Did to!”

“Vin, how did you do on your math review?” Leila said, trying to divert the conversation with the first thing that came to her mind. The reaction was unexpected. Before he could compose himself, Vin’s face paled and lengthened. As he regained control of his jaw muscles his eyes widened and his facial muscled tightened into the international “stop speaking” mask. Leila saw everything happen in slow motion, even as the last word out of her mouth was still undulating in the air. Crap, sorry Vin.

“You DID have a math review this week! Vincent Soria, why did you lie to me?” Leila was impressed at how well Mrs. Soria managed to pull off a stern tone.

“I DIDN’T!”

“He did, he failed.”

“Can I get off here, please?” Leila jumped in with broken voice.

Everyone stilled at that, and Mrs. Soria even gave a light laugh. Vin side eyed Leila with an exaggerated pout. Evelyn side eyed Leila with a triumphant grin.

Leila just wanted out of the car.

“We’re here!” Evelyn chirped as they saw the first stretch of blue on shimmering blue in the horizon. Leila always thought of the hour’s drive to the beach as a spiritual pilgrimage through the desert. Seeing the ocean stretch before her, jutting out of the barren landscape, always held a special symbolism.

We have the promise of abundant life after a voyage through the arid plain. And still, it’s a bittersweet discovery, because it’s a world we can only dip our feet into, swim briefly in, but we can never become a part of it. Our reality is still on the side of the dry, sandy, barren land. This new realm nurtures us, but also limits our access to new, perhaps superior lands. In a situation of survival, I wonder which we would resent first, the desolate land that birthed us or the world that saves us but never accepts us as we are.

“Do you have a pen and paper, Ev?” Leila sighed as she rested the side of her head against the car seat, “I wanna write something down.”

“No. Write on your own damn time, we’re here to have fun.” Evelyn responded with a warm smile, “Let’s go.”

This was Leila’s favorite beach. It was an isolated, virgin expanse off the beaten path, devoid of civilized amenities. The sand was smooth and created gentle dunes that stretched away from the ocean in all directions. Dark blue topaz waters scintillated under the late morning sun, and playful waves crashed and slid with grace into the darkened shore.

Leila had been worried about the weather being too cool to swim, but the day was a welcome gift. The dry desert wind provided some respite from the beating sun, and the sky was a cloudless gem.

Nature smiles onto us today. Evelyn is right, let’s smile back.

It took a couple of trips to get everything out of the car. The larger items were first, including a large ice chest that Vin and Leila carried together, a large beach umbrella, a tarp and a couple of boogie boards. On the second trip everyone brought their bags down and used them to anchor the tarp on the sand so they could have a clean place to sit. The kids found that securing the beach umbrella would be more of a grind than expected. The first time Vin had just stabbed the sand with it and then struck a triumphant pose complete with bent knee and a fist in the air. The resulting image had made Leila laugh and Evelyn scoff. He’d barely taken a step away when the umbrella hurried down the sand with a merry roll powered by the stiff breeze.

“Good job, Vin”, Evelyn spat before all three of them loped after it, screaming with their hands in the air, the pealing laughter of Mrs. Soria trailing behind.

The second time Leila and Evelyn dug a shallow hole in the sand with their hands as Vin and his mom looked on.

“S’not gonna work”, Vin said, trying to get a rise out of his sister. Evelyn just rolled her eyes. Once the hole seemed deep enough the girls angled the umbrella buried the end of the rod in it. As they stepped away, half ready to run after it again, they saw it held fast. Evelyn only just managed to strike a mocking hero pose at Vin before the wind tore the umbrella from the ground a second time. The edge of the canopy barely missed Evelyn’s face as she yelped and sprang back away from it. This time it took them a while longer to retrieve the rebel parasol, they had to wait until Vin and Leila had stopped shrieking with laughter at Evelyn’s panicked reaction.

The third time all three of them crouched on the sand to dig, an action which quickly escalated into an all-out slap-match. The trio giggled, shrieked and chortled until they were satisfied with the amount of sand they had removed from the hole and managed to place on each others’ hair and faces. They piled the removed sand on the umbrella’s pole, and placed the ice chest over that for good measure.

“Okay, it might be the best time for you guys to go in the water now. Rinse the sand off.”

They would have reached the same conclusion in a few seconds, but being told by their mom triggered the twins into a race to the water, with Leila taking off behind them like a wonky kite tail, kicking her heels and tripping twice before reaching the edge of the tide. The girls left their shorts and sandals on the last stretch of dry sand, keeping their tank tops on over their swimsuits. Vin just kicked off his flip flops next to theirs and dove into the surf. He emerged from the water with a high-pitched wail.

“COLD!”

The girls ran into the water and allowed themselves a few yelps before they considered themselves accustomed to the temperature.

“Hey Vin, you still got a bit of sand on your face”, Leila said.

“Where?” Vin said as he palmed at his jaw.

“Right… THERE! And THERE! Oh, you missed a spot right THERE!” Leila answered, punctuating each sentence with a fresh barrage of water drops aimed right at his face.

Vin reciprocated the attack, making it obvious in a second that he had the upper hand in this friendly competition. Leila started swallowing water but couldn’t stop laughing long enough to avoid it.

“Hey, you have some ugly on your face too, lemme get that for you!” Evelyn added as she joined the merriment, aiming all her splashes straight in her brother’s direction.

“Shut up! Your egg had all the ugly genes.”

“No, just all the decent height genes!”

“Oh, you just had to go there, didn’t you?”

“Shut UP, both of you!” Leila interrupted as she doubled up her efforts and nearly pulled a muscle dousing them both to divert their attention. She succeeded, and transformed the argument into a rollicking free-for-all. The battle ended when Leila called a truce, and all three stepped out of the water. They sat on the damp sand to air-dry and enjoy the sun.

Vin snorted loudly, “Ugh, salt water went up my nose.”

“Fishing for oysters?” Leila asked. She was sitting between the siblings, Vin at her right and Evelyn at her left side.

“Gym teacher’s handkerchief!” Vin announced before turning to his right, plugging up one nostril, then the other, and vacating them with swift blows.

“I don’t know you.” Evelyn said evenly, speaking to the horizon.

“Sure your brain didn’t slip out there, Vin?”

“Hey it’s bad enough dealing with her all day, can you not gang up on me?”

“I’m just playing.” Leila was surprised to notice her insides twisted a little when she said this.

“I’m not, I hate you.” Evelyn interjected, but immediately turned to them and showed all her teeth and dimples in a comical grin.

The rest of the morning was spent boogie boarding and burying each other in the sand. Noon found them wet and limp like overcooked noodles. It wasn’t until Evelyn mentioned something about food that everybody realized they were starving.

The three teens and Mrs. Soria sat on the tarp and fished juice cans and sandwiches out of the cooler.

“These are the only times I’m really happy, when I’m with you guys doing stuff like this,” Leila mused absently as she inspected her sandwich. She felt sad admitting this, but it was the truth. Her friends and even their parents had embraced her with an acceptance she didn’t experience from her own family anymore.

“What about your family? Don’t you get to do things like this with them?” Mrs. Soria asked almost like she could hear Leila’s thoughts.

 “Well,” Leila started as the twins looked on intently, “I do sometimes, but I feel like they expect too much from me, I don’t feel like I can open up to them. I want to be comfortable around them like I am with you guys, but it’s harder with them for some reason.”

“Can we adopt her, mom? Look at her pretty face!” As Evelyn spoke the last sentence she took Leila’s face in the cup of her hand and smushed her cheeks together. “Yeah, I’m house broken and everything. I do tricks, too.” Leila said, and then she rolled her bottom lip out in an exaggerated pout. She could hear Vin chortling under his breath and it made the pout morph into a tight smile.

“Oh, really? And what sort of tricks does she do?” the lady replied with a businesslike tone, as if she was scrutinizing another salesperson’s pitch. Leila beamed in her friends’ direction and batted her eyelids, expecting nothing less than shining reviews of her many abilities.

“Well, she brings in the newspaper every morning. And then corrects the spelling in every article.” Evelyn’s review earned her no more than a squint and a side-eye from her friend. Then Vin chimed in “She writes the most amazing poems.”

Stop being so nice.

“Yeah, that too.” Evelyn said like she had just passed a bill. “So, can we keep her?”

“You can certainly keep her, as a friend.” Mrs. Soria looked at the young girl with what felt to her like pure, distilled kindness in her eyes. “Leila, you will always be welcome in our home. I hope you remember that.”

“Thanks, it means a lot.” Leila said as she all at once became engrossed with rubbing the dried sand off her foot.

Once they finished their lunch they asked permission to go hiking in a nerby rocky area. They left Mrs. Soria behind ready to take a dip in the ocean for the first time that day. They tried to find some driftwood to make walking sticks, but there was none to be found. Vin cursed the desert beach, calling it nothing more than “saguaros and shrubs”, and the threesome resigned themselves to trudging the distance unaided.

After walking along the coast for what felt like an hour –and had actually been 12 minutes- Evelyn was the first to grunt and drop to the sand, splayed out and facing the midday sun. “You two go on, just leave me to die.”

“It does feel a bit farther than we thought, doesn’t it?” Vin said, walking over his sister as if she were nothing more than a bothersome log, “I mean it’s right there, but it seems to be getting further away.”

“We’re almost there, let’s just give ourselves a minute to rest here.” Leila dropped to the sand face up and squinted hard against the piercing rays. She closed her eyes and took in the magical, briny scenery through her nose. A sharp inhalation and her mind was full of sea glass and shells, salt and seagulls, sharp rocks and smooth rocks, mermaids and pirates, tinkling wind chimes, a universe boiling over with life and mystery. She moved her hands with sumptuous motions over the sand, caressed its surface, grabbed greedy fistfuls and squeezed them, then relaxed her grip and felt the grains escape with steady cadence. Like they knew for certain where they belonged, and how inevitable it was for them to return to whence they came. The sun burned through her eyelids and soon it became a game of how long she would be able to remain motionless there before the blaze forced her to take cover.

I’m burning. It hurts. It hurts like there will be nothing left of me once the fire is done. Would that really be a bad thing?

“Hey, you’re gonna be a crispy critter if you stay down there any longer,” Vin’s face and outstretched hand welcomed Leila back to reality. Evelyn was already back on the trail to the rocky patch. Vin’s kind and funny face, she thought. Vin’s rounded, beady eyes so similar to his sister’s, his straight dark hair that fell unevenly over his forehead, his frank, thin-lipped smile and button nose. She sometimes wondered if he’d have taken Evelyn’s place in her life and her heart as a best friend if he’d been the one assigned to her class. As it was, Evelyn had been there, and as much as she liked Vin, Leila’s loyalties would never lean in his favor. He was her best friend’s brother, and an unspoken barrier was there. No one had to tell her as much, she gathered all this from simple common sense. “All right, let’s go.”

The hike to the rocky place proved to be a fruitful endeavor, bearing the prize of fine aquatic plant and wildlife sightings. Vin chased both girls around with a plump vine of seaweed, and they had countered by catching a jellyfish in Leila’s cap and threatening to throw it at him. In the end Leila felt bad for the creature and released it back in the water. They all contemplated the possibility of taking a couple of hermit crabs home, but once again, Leila doubted they could keep the creatures happy and talked the other two out of the idea. Exploration ended abruptly when Evelyn spotted a stingray flapping under the sand barely a few inches away from where Leila set her foot under the shallow water.

Once the three of them were satisfied with their wild adventure, they settled to watch the surf on the shady side of a rock formation. They covered the usual topics of conversation during this time, starting with how much they hated their teachers and wrapping up with how much they hated their classmates. The chatter then turned to idle banter on shows and movies they’d seen recently, then finally they all gave themselves a few minutes of respite to enjoy the view of the expanse before them. This was the moment Leila had been waiting for.

“I had another dream last night.”

“Oh, is it about the giraffes again? I love the giraffes.” Vin’s enthusiasm was sincere, and so was Leila’s exasperated groan in response to it.

“We don’t talk about the giraffes anymore, didn’t you get the memo?” Evelyn said this from behind a pair of oversized tortoise shell patterned sunglasses.

“The giraffes were just one time! I’ve told you guys like a million dreams and that’s the one you hold on to. Anyway, no, it wasn’t about the giraffes, this was like a whole other…” Leila struggled for the right word, “this was another dimension of dream, it was a whole other league. I’m starting to doubt it was even a dream.”

“What do you mean? Like you weren’t really asleep? You know, sometimes I wake up feeling like someone’s sitting on my chest and I can’t move. When I told mom she said it’s actually pretty common.” Evelyn had to push the sunglasses back up the bridge of her nose twice while she spoke.

“Yeah, I know those. You can’t call those dreams because you’re conscious but you can’t move. I read somewhere once that you can die in those.” Vin offered this while he looked at the sand as if he was trying to look through it.

“I don’t know about dying, but I did feel for a moment that I wasn’t dreaming. But no, that’s not where it started. It started with me sitting in Lit class, and there was someone else there.”

“Boy or girl?” Evelyn interrupted. Vin slapped sand in her direction without taking his attention off Leila. “What? It’s important.”

Leila smiled and a good amount of air escaped her lungs all at once before she went on, “It was a boy, a good looking boy, but only so much that you would doubt that he was in fact a male, you know what I mean?”

Evelyn’s eyes widened and with the smoothness of a snake she craned her neck, inching into her friend’s personal space. “I think that means he was a fox. So did you guys make out or something?”

“No, Evelyn. I mean yes, he was, I guess, what one can consider an attractive male specime- Oh shut up both of you, I can hear you judging me!” Leila palmed some sand in their direction. “But the point is, at that point I was aware that I was dreaming. He was in my dream, but everything was vivid. And the memory hasn’t faded like it does with all my other dreams.”

“That is weird I guess, but maybe you were just really asleep? I mean, in deep enough sleep that you could remember everything?” It unnerved Leila how much more seriously Vin was taking this compared to his sister, when it was her she was relying on to be the willing ear.

“Well, that’s not the end of it, though. I woke up and went to the living room to think about my dream, and then I realized I was still dreaming.”

Evelyn stopped doodling in the sand when she heard this. She missed a beat before asking, “So you dreamt that you woke up?”

“No,” Leila answered, then racked her brain for a satisfying way to explain what even she still had not been able to interpret, “it wasn’t a dream anymore, I’m sure I was out of bed and walking about, or at least…” she stopped herself here, dreading the theory as her conscious shaped it, even before she set it into the realm of reality through the sound of her voice, “at least… part of me was.”