by Nina Revoyr
"Wanna stay in the car?" I asked.
"No, let's get out."
The parking lot was usually filled with couples steaming up backseat windows, but the cold weather must have driven them elsewhere that night because the lot was almost empty. It was not too chilly, though, to kick off our shoes and socks and walk barefoot in the sand. The moon was almost full, and as we walked toward the ocean, we could see the moonlight painted on the surface of the water. Tiny figures of people crawled on the pier a few hundred feet away, and every now and then a particularly loud laugh would reach us over the sound of the surf. We walked toward the water in silence.
I'd been to the beach at night many times. It was a popular spot for drinking, for long talks, or for just hanging out, the cheapest entertainment in Los Angeles. It was also a prime spot for serious window steaming, especially for a lot of the gay girls we knew, who couldn't bring their lovers into their homes. The beach was a place we'd come to think of as our own. With a high school social scene that didn't acknowledge our existence and a basketball scene dominated by gossiping straight girls, a space to claim for ourselves was both valuable and necessary. As Raina and I trudged along in the cold sand, I thought of how amazing it was that we'd all managed to find each other. My entry into the gay basketball community had begun with my coming out to an AAU teammate during my sophomore year; she'd then informed me, to my surprise, that some other people I knew were also in the family. I contacted them, or they me, and so on, until I'd become a regular part of that undercover network which had finally led me to Raina.
Raina reached the end of the soft sand and stepped onto the wet sand packed hard by the surf. She picked up a small rock and threw it sidearm into the ocean. "God, I can't wait to get outta here," she said.
I hugged myself and said nothing. I wondered what other people heard in her voice. It was medium-pitched and clear, but also, I thought, a bit hesitant, as if she didn't quite trust it to convey the subtleties of her thoughts.
She continued: "I can't wait to get my scholarship, my diploma, my plane ticket, and just get the hell outta here. I feel like one of those horses at the starting gate, you know? All itching to go, but held back by some stupid gate I got no control over." Another rock flew out over the ocean. Raina stared straight ahead. I remember wanting, then, to stand apart so I could watch her, but also to enter her mind, her consciousness, to see what she was seeing.
"I just wanna get . . . started," she said.
"Started on what?"
"I don't know. Life."
"This ain't life?"
She glanced at me, annoyed. "You know what I mean."
I looked down at my feet, wondering at this outburst. The way Raina was talking, you'd have thought we lived in some small town in the country and not in the huge metropolis which was our home. But I knew what she meant. She was choking in LA, the walls were closing in, and the first impulse you have when you're feeling claustrophobic is simply to get yourself out. Maybe later, when she had breathed awhile, she'd come back into the city, as both of our parents had done, but for now she just wanted to taste the air on the outside. I'd be leaving in a few months too, and I did want to go to college, but I felt less eager to get out of Los Angeles than Raina did. Not just because I loved it—we all loved it, really—but because I was afraid of what came next.
"You just don't know how bad I wanna leave," she went on. "I mean, if I knew I had to be here forever, seeing the same people, staying in the same situations, I think I'd go totally crazy. I'm just too affected by everything, you know what I'm sayin? I'm too fuckin sensitive. All the pain I see around me, I take it on as my own." She paused and I held my breath. "You know, sometimes I'm driving along in the car, and suddenly I get this urge to swerve off the road. Or I see an accident on the freeway and I wish that someone would hit me sometime, you know? Hit me and get it over with."
She covered her face with her hands and bent her head for a moment, then slowly drew her hands back as if smoothing out her skin. I was startled by what she'd said, but didn't respond. I didn't think it was my place to. It seemed that my function was not to comment but simply to hear, to bear witness to the fact that she was speaking. She might have said the same things to the ocean, alone, and my presence there had less to do with me than it did with the dragging muffler on Claudia's car. It occurred to me that while Toni had been the catalyst of this outburst, Raina wasn't going to talk to me about her. What she would talk to me about, or at least talk about in my presence, were the kinds of things she couldn't share with Toni. Whether it was because she didn't trust Toni, or because Toni wouldn't listen, I didn't know. But there were some things she didn't tell her. This I was sure of. Not that it meant, of course, that she could bear to be without her.
Now Raina locked her fingers behind her neck and took a step into the surf. "You just can't count on people," she said.
I stepped forward too. "You can't judge the whole human race by the fuck-ups of one person."
She turned and looked at me, surprised, perhaps, by my presence. One good thing about talking at the beach is that you don't have to face the person you're talking to, and until that moment our eyes hadn't met all night. She turned back toward the water and laughed softly. "I don't just mean Toni. But it would be nice if she'd start proving people wrong."
I glanced at her. "So you know that people think she might not be the best . . . match . . . for you."
"Of course I know. How couldn't I? It's not what you think, though. It's just that I guess we got different ideas of the way things should be. I mean, I know what y'all say about her, and maybe you're right. She's a badass, she don't give a fuck, but that's kind of why I liked her, you know? I'm always playing by the rules, but Toni don't do that, she just does whatever the hell she wants. But she can be so good to me sometimes, Nancy. You wouldn't believe it. You just don't know Toni. You wouldn't believe it." She paused. The receding waves left white foam on her ankles. "I just wish she'd . . . I don't know."
We were silent for a moment.
"You think you guys'll stay together after you leave?" I asked now.
"I don't know. No. No way. She's been trippin about it, though."
I pushed some wet sand around with my foot. It occurred to me that Raina might be depending on college to provide a breaking point, since neither of them seemed likely to end the relationship herself. Much later I'd have a different view of the abandon with which Raina threw herself into this relationship. I'd still see that there was a purity in the all-accepting way she loved Toni, but I'd also see the self-denial, the self-destruction.
"But really," she continued, "there's no one you can count on, even outside of girlfriends. The last person I really counted on was my dad, and look what happened with him."
I glanced at her. I didn't know anything about her father, except that Claudia had divorced him when Raina was ten. "What about your mom?" I asked. "Don't you count on her?"
Raina sighed. "Yeah, I guess so, but not the way I used to count on my dad. We don't really talk about stuff—not important stuff, anyway. I mean, she knows about Toni, but I don't think she likes her, so I can't really talk to her about our problems. Besides, I'm older now, and I just don't trust people as much." She paused. "After my dad took off, I kept waiting and waiting for him to call or something, but he never did. I don't know how my mom got through it, except that she's the strongest fuckin person I know. Five years he went without getting in touch with me, and then one afternoon he just strolls up to our front door like it was something he did every day. Suddenly he wants to be my best friend. He keeps quiet all that time, and then he wonders why I don't wanna hang out with him."
"Do you still talk to him?"
"Hell no. I wouldn't take his calls. That day he came back was the last time I ever saw him."
A wave broke thirty feet offshore, curled into itself and rushed forth again, sent fingers of water shooting up the sand. A muscle in her cheek twitched and her eyes shone, either because they
were reflecting the light of the moon, or because they were filled with tears. There'd been one other time I'd stood with Raina at water's edge, by the duck pond at Blue Star a year and a half before. I had thought I loved her then, although I couldn't have; I didn't know her. But something of significance did happen that day. Maybe I understood that I would know her eventually. Or maybe once you decide to love someone, you'll love her, no matter who she turns out to be.
"But the point is," she began again, "you're the only person you got. You're the only one you can depend on, you know what I'm sayin? I mean, maybe this doesn't happen with other people, but I've always thought I was gonna end up being alone. I've always known that. I got someone now, and maybe I'll have someone else after her, but sooner or later it's just gonna be me. That's okay, though. As long as I know better than to depend on other people. You gotta learn to count on yourself, you know? Because who the hell else you gonna count on? Who the hell else is gonna be there for you?"
She stared out over the water and pressed her fists against her thighs. There was such an intense look on her face that I thought she saw something, but if she did, it was nothing that was there in front of her. The third-quarter moon lit her eyes, and made them look soft despite the expression she wore, which was hard, hurt, frustrated. For the first time, it occurred to me that Raina had been wounded, irrevocably damaged, and that this damage had something to do with why she pushed herself so hard. I didn't know what might have caused such damage—her father was surely a part of it, but only a part. And I didn't know what kind of achievement could make her feel complete, or if she'd ever let anyone help. Her last question, asked of no one, still echoed in my mind. I'd be there for you, I thought to myself. I'd always be there for you.
CHAPTER 11
Sometimes it doesn't take much to make you think your life has totally changed. It took just five minutes into the first Laker game I saw at age nine for me to feel an exhilaration so intense I knew I'd seek it forever. It took one miserable tenth grade geometry test to make me realize that whatever I did in my grown-up years would not involve graphs or numbers. It took my father one sight of Claudia's proud, perfect back to impress upon him that his life, as he said later, had "found a junction to a whole 'nother freeway.'" And it took that talk at the beach with Raina to make me think our relationship had turned some kind of corner.
Although I wasn't particularly superstitious as far as athletes go, I did believe in fate. What else could explain why Claudia's car had been unavailable on Wednesday night, thereby making it necessary for Raina to come to me for a ride? What else could explain why Raina, the picture of self-sufficiency, had decided to open up? She had finally allowed me a look at what stirred beneath that implacable front, and somewhere, in the back of my mind, tiny voices of hope began to clamor. For the first time since I'd known her, the thought of Raina brought me a joy that was based on something tangible, something real.
The other way in which fate had intervened was by arranging for this to happen just before Christmas vacation, when, out of both design and necessity, Raina and I were certain to spend a lot of time together. We'd both be off from school, we'd planned to go shopping together, and then, on Christmas Eve, we were driving with our parents down to her grandparents' place in San Diego. Late on Christmas Day, the four adults would drive to Baja with some friends of my father's, and so for the twenty-four hours after that, we kids would have the grandparents' place to ourselves. Although my father had said the house was only a mile from the beach, this wasn't its primary attraction. The main appeal was simply that it wasn't home. It was not our house, it was not our city, no one could reach us and we'd be alone. A full day of sun, water, basketball, drinking, and lots and lots of talking. Needless to say, I couldn't wait.
The morning after our talk at the beach, I flew out of bed an hour before my alarm went off. I hadn't slept for a second. All night I'd replayed our conversation in my head, fast-forwarding over the relatively unimportant parts, slowing down and repeating the parts where Raina had revealed something new. I reconstructed the entire night, all the way up to the moment at the end just before I unlocked the front door, when Raina had actually hugged me and whispered, "Thanks." The memory of that whisper fueled my day. It took me first to Raina's door, where I pressed my ear against the wood so I could hear her breathing on the other side. It took me to Mr. Wilson's liquor store, where I bought my usual Twix. It took me through my tests; I breezed through them both, hardly noticing them. I fell asleep for a few minutes on the bus ride down to Torrance for our game, and then, running solely on fumes, I proceeded to have one of my best games ever, with four scouts conveniently watching from the stands. On the way home I sat alone in the back of the bus with my Walkman cranked up to full volume and a big grin on my face. I thought of Raina the whole way back. It felt like I hadn't seen her in days.
When I finally got home she wasn't back yet. My disappointment was tempered by the parents' enthusiasm about planning Christmas dinner.
"Do you want turkey or ham?" Claudia asked when I went into the dining room after my shower. "My mother's trying to decide what to cook."
"Turkey. Can we get some extra legs?"
My father waved a head of broccoli at me. "She didn't say we'd buy it for you, she just asked what you'd prefer." He looked especially large that night because he was wearing a small white apron that belonged to Claudia; it said World's Greatest Mother across the front.
I gave him a fake snarl while Claudia put a bowl of salad on the table. "So what do you two plan to do in San Diego after we leave?" she asked.
I shrugged. "I don't know. Just chill. We both need a break."
"Just don't tear the house apart," my father said.
We sat down to dinner, my father's chicken-and-vegetable stir-fry. Somehow I managed to function on two levels at once. Half of me participated in the family discussion, while the other half conjectured wildly about the events of my impending time alone with Raina. When Claudia and my father debated about the best way to cook a turkey, I pictured Raina and me, on the twenty-sixth, making cold turkey sandwiches and eating them on her grandparents' porch. When Claudia mentioned how nice the beach was by her parents' place in San Diego, I pictured Raina and me watching a sunset there with cold beer bottles sweating in our hands. Each of these thoughts brought a huge grin to my face, which my father took to be the result of my having had a great game with several scouts in attendance. I gathered, too, that I was acting quite giddy, since my disproportionate burst of laughter at a relatively stupid joke prompted my father to cock his head and ask, "Are you drunk?"
After dinner I bounded around the house in, of all things, a cleaning frenzy, which really must have made my father think something was wrong since normally not even the threat of torture could induce me to vacuum. But now the house seemed an unacceptable mess, an eyesore; I wanted to clean it to make it worthy of Raina. After an hour of dusting, vacuuming, and scrubbing, I took the dog outside and ran sprints up the street. I imagined that Raina was sprinting beside me; the three of us did six 40s and four 100s before I crawled back inside and went upstairs to take a shower. The real Raina was not yet home. What was taking her so long? We had some talking to do, or at least some hanging out, in the afterglow of the night before. What would things be like between us now? It seemed to me that our time alone in San Diego would be a litmus test for the future of our relationship. If we took what we'd found and ran with it, our post-Christmas chill-out time would at the very least cement our friendship. It could possibly do a lot more than that. But if we didn't build on what had happened, or if we ignored it, our friendship might stagnate, or worse. That wasn't going to happen if I could help it. It had to work out. It just had to. This thought occurred to me with such intensity that I punched the door of the shower, which brought Claudia running to the bathroom door to ask if everything was all right. I said that it was. Then I got out of the shower, went into my room, and fell asleep still wrapped in my towel.
; The ringing of the phone woke me up. I fumbled around, disoriented, saw that the clock face read 9:30. I picked up the receiver, said hello. Raina, on the other end, said, "Hi."
I woke up immediately. "Hey. Where are you? Did you win today?" Just a little extra intimacy crept into my voice.
"Yeah," Raina said. Nothing else.
I paused for a moment. "When you comin home?"
"I'm not. I'm stayin at Stacy's. Tell the parents for me, all right?"
Now I was puzzled. She rarely spent the night at someone else's place, and this was a weeknight. "Well, what's up?" I asked. "Is something goin on over there?"
"I'll tell you later. I really gotta go now. Bye." I heard the receiver click, and she was gone.
For a few seconds after I hung up the phone, I wondered if something was wrong. Had I pissed her off in some way without knowing it? That was impossible—I hadn't even seen her since the night before. I decided that Stacy was having some sort of problem, and that Raina was staying over to help. That must have been it. Probably her curtness on the phone was related to whatever was happening. I put on some shorts and a T-shirt and went to bed.
* * *
On Friday morning, the last day before vacation, I was totally exhausted. I dozed off in two of my classes, but when I was awake, I managed to move around in a happy daze. I had another good game, but for once it wasn't basketball which dominated my thoughts—the whole Christmas plan could now claim that distinction. At dinner, which Raina once again decided not to show up for, the parents and I finalized our arrangements for the drive down. We discussed the menu for dinner, and also the complicated transfer of keys from children to grandparents once we finally left the house on the twenty-sixth. Meanwhile, I worked on my personal agenda. I'd bring along some romantic but not mushy music. I'd bring a football to toss around at the beach. I'd buy a bottle of wine, perhaps, and also, instead of eating leftovers for all of our meals, maybe I could take us out to dinner one night. The part of me that was paying attention to the mealtime conversation continued to laugh loudly at all that was said. Claudia and my father looked at me strangely; I knew they were wondering what was up. What they couldn't see was that while my butt was planted firmly in the chair, my head was roughly five miles above it.
