by Joy Preble
Max glances at me now, just for a second. “Her friend Courtney came to me. She was crying. And she said that Ash had cheated on me with some frat guy while she was drunk. But shit. What was I supposed to do with that? Take it as an excuse not to visit? Why would she tell me that, anyway? Hell, I didn’t even know if it was true.”
I try to find the words to help him. But I don’t know what they are. So I say his name, “Max.” And then: “Oh Max.” Which is about as lame of a comfort as you can get.
“I ran anyway,” Max says, and by then of course I know that’s what has happened. “Deferred my acceptance to Rice—which about killed my father. My mother, too. Ever see a yoga teacher lose it? Well, neither had I. You want to know how I got this scar over my eyebrow? Prom. Me and a bottle of Jim Beam. In my room. Pathetic, right? Drunk on your own bed on prom night instead of going to sit with your brain-damaged girlfriend like a good boy. Slammed the glass down on the floor and it breaks and this piece flies up and cuts me. More pathetic. I didn’t even know it happened until the blood started trickling into my eye. My father stormed in and starts screaming at me to ‘Do the right thing. Stop being so self-absorbed.’ You know what’s worse? I thought about walking out while he was shouting, but you know why I didn’t? Because I was too afraid that I’d stumble into the street and get hit by a car as some kind of karmic punishment.”
He doesn’t pull back when I squeeze his hand. His palm rests warm against mine. After a few beats, I let go.
“I couldn’t do it, Leo. If I did it then, I’d be doing it forever. Forever’s a long damn time.”
I want to tell him that he is not horrible. That maybe I understand now why he has chosen to drive with me through the desert to find someone who means nothing to him. But in this moment, leaning so close to each other, it is easier to be silent.
After a while, we get back in the truck.
The last of the miles roll and we drive without talking, and at some point I ask him if he wants to put Taylor Swift back on and he does. And then we’re in Hesperia and Victorville and then San Dimas and past the split from the 15 to the 515 that could take us to Pomona. Once when I whined that something wasn’t fair, my sister told me, “If you want fair, go to Pomona.” Because that’s where the California State Fair was.
Remembering it now, I find myself laughing and tell Max why, and then he’s laughing, too, a quiet, hesitant laugh. I think he is waiting for me to judge him for his choices. To tell him he’s a lost cause for leaving Ashley, for running. That he has done something unforgivable. I can feel it pulsing from him, surrounding us in the truck that has been our world for hours now. But judging Max is not something I can do. So we laugh together at my sister’s joke that isn’t funny. And I think again what I’ve thought on and off for hours: that somehow Paris has figured out a way to stick with me even as she’s disappeared.
It’s heading toward five in the morning when we finally roll into LA, I-10 strangely empty because it’s too early for the traffic.
I call Paris—again—on Mom’s phone. “I’m in LA,” I say when it skips immediately to voice mail. “I’m here. Call me. Text me. Something.” I don’t hang up right away, then realize I’m idiotically waiting for her voice to pop out of thin air, like a magician’s trick.
It doesn’t. She doesn’t call. Or text. Or anything.
I do not admit to Max that some tiny part of me had still expected Paris to call back. Or that I am panicked again in a million ways for a million secret reasons.
“Where to?” Max asks. He sounds bone weary.
I don’t know what to tell him. LA’s a big city. But maybe—more than maybe—there is only one place that makes sense.
Not long after that, Max Sullivan and I are standing in front of the white statue of my mother’s favorite saint, the sun barely thinking about rising behind us.
“Hey, Monica,” I say.
FIFTEEN
THE BEACH AT SANTA MONICA IS LONG AND VERY WIDE. LOTS OF DISTANCE between the start of the sand and the start of the ocean. But I like walking at the water’s edge, so that’s where we go.
We have seen Monica and I’ve tapped her feet for luck. It is too early to do anything else.
“So your mother really believed Saint Monica listened to her?” We’ve kicked off our shoes, carrying them now as we walk. The packed sand is cold and hard under my feet, and I’m glad for Max’s hoodie. The Pacific Ocean stretches out to our right as we meander toward the pier, the rush of waves filling my ears and chest, spray from the surf dotting my arms.
“I don’t know if it mattered,” I say once I’ve thought it over. “I think it was enough that she could say hello.”
Max threads his long fingers with mine. Our thumbs wrap around each other. I try not to think about how good it feels. Because this—whatever this is—can’t possibly last.
“Do you talk to her?” I ask, not sure I want to know. “Ashley, I mean.”
Max shakes his head.
We walk some more at the water’s edge, sand bunching cold and grainy under our toes. I think about slipping my hand away and putting it in his back pocket, but I don’t. Our hips bump lightly as we watch the waves roll in and out, leaving white froth in their wake. I dip my toes in the freezing Pacific. The surf splashes my ankles.
Max lets go of my hand and spreads his arms wide, facing the ocean. A long wingspan of Max Sullivan. “It smells primal, doesn’t it? Like it’s got everything that’s ever been.”
“Including crap that keeps washing up from that tsunami in Japan,” I say, because we’ve had enough deep thinking for like twelve lifetimes. But I tell him I’m impressed with the primal. “Ten-dollar word,” I say.
Max scrunches his nose at me. His eyes are laughing.
In my pocket where I’ve shoved it, Mom’s cell vibrates against my thigh. Paris. My hopes rocket.
But my stomach sinks as I read the text: Get your ass home and stop worrying your mother. And tell your sister to get home, too.
Tommy.
This stolen phone has been my thin but hopeful tether to Paris, but now I heave it into the water. When it washes back up in the surf, I grab it again, breathing hard, nails digging into the wet sand, then wade into the water, the cold biting at my ankles and calves. I hurl the phone once more into the dark ocean—as far as I can.
This time it disappears.
It’s not like it was helping me find her, was it?
Max looks like he wants to say something when I slosh back to him, but he doesn’t. Just pulls me into a hug and we stand like that for a while, my legs dripping, then drying.
The sky is big above us and the Pacific stretches out and out, far away to places I’ve never been. Max’s arms holding me, his skin warm against mine.
Something inside me shifts, a little and then more. I wrap my arms around Max’s neck. Pull him close, then closer. Or maybe it’s both of us, leaning in.
“Leo,” Max says, his lips against my hair and the deep, even sound of his voice makes my belly contract over and over, swamping me with feeling: his skin, his mouth, the solidness of his body pressing against mine.
No one has ever held me like this. No one has ever made me feel that no matter what, maybe, just maybe, everything will work out.
I take it all in, telling myself to remember. To savor each molecule that’s connecting us. The sun. The sky. Max’s arms around my waist. The way his palm brushes against my cheek and his fingertip traces, gentle as a breeze, over my eyelids.
This time when our lips meet, it feels mutual, the best kind of kiss. Max’s tongue slides against mine, salty and warm. His hands grip my hips. Boy smell fills my nose, and the kiss deepens, sending tingles down my body, making me dizzy with sensation. I slip my hands under his shirt, press them to his smooth, bare skin. He makes a low sound and pulls me closer, fingers massaging the nape of my neck, kissing the corner of my mouth and then all of it, a rush of lips and breath and tingles.
It is the kiss I’ve wanted my enti
re life. The kiss I thought existed only in movies or books.
Overhead, a seagull gives a sharp cry. The air smells like ocean and sky and Max.
We sink to the sand, still kissing, still pressed against each other. I am happy and scared and a million other feelings. He is muscle and smooth skin and rough jaw and sweet breath. He kisses my eyelids. I kiss the tip of his straight, pretty nose. His lips move back to mine and mine to his. Quick, eager kisses.
“Leo,” Max says over and over, “Leo.” His voice forms my name, the sound echoing in my head like a mediation. A prayer. It is perfect and beautiful and I think if nothing else good ever happens in my life, this moment might be enough.
Max strokes a hand through my hair, and for the first time in a while I stop believing the purple streak in my bangs was a mistake. He nuzzles kisses on my neck—each one sending me flying. I run my index finger over his scar, that tiny white line above his eyebrow. He wraps his hand around mine as I lift it away, kisses my fingertips.
No one has kissed me like this. Certainly not Buddy Lathrop. Not anyone. I have not kissed anyone back like this. It feels somehow both wonderful and dangerous and I cannot get enough of it.
Then Max leans back to look at me. “I like seeing you smile,” he says. “I like seeing you happy.”
Happy. My brain, so busy with kissing, engages. Leo, it says. This is not why you’ve driven all the way to LA.
But it is hard—no, impossible—to let go of this moment, this kiss. This everything.
Max brushes his lips against mine again, light as a feather, setting my nerve endings on fire. I tell my brain to shut up. We collapse together gently onto the sand and he covers me with his body, our legs entwined and everything pulsing with sensation.
LeoandMax, I think as we kiss, our names combining into one sound.
“Hey look,” says a girl’s voice from somewhere that is not here, underneath Max, who is currently kissing the sensitive hollow of my neck.
“What?” says another girl’s voice as Max shifts to press a trail of tiny kisses up my jaw and onto the tender spot just under my ear, and my already tingling skin is now aching with the need for him to keep doing that.
“Tide washed up someone’s cell,” says the original voice.
I push Max off me and sit up, shaking sand from my hair. Two early-morning joggers—shorts, sports bras, Nikes, blond hair pulled back—stare down at what is probably my mother’s cell phone that the tide has washed in yet again and is now sucking back out to sea.
Max reaches for me, but I pull away again, and eventually he turns and sees what I see.
“I am not going to take this as a sign,” I tell him. “I really am not.”
He smiles his crooked smile, eyes a mixture of amused and sad. Breathes in and out, then claps his hands together. “So where to now?”
Good question. We were happy here in LA, in Santa Monica, at least happier. But where is Paris?
“Somewhere you both liked, maybe?” Max suggests. My gaze is on his mouth, on that slightly fuller lower lip, and what I really want is to kiss him some more. “Wouldn’t that make sense?”
“We don’t like the same things,” I say, because it’s true.
Max pushes up in one fluid motion. He holds out a hand to me, but I rise on my own, brushing sand off my clothes.
“There has to be something,” he says. “Some place you went. Some things you did.” He smiles—the full-on type of Max smile now, bright as the sun that’s shining over our heads. “Like I don’t know. Bowling? Karaoke? Bingo? Square-dancing?”
I make a face. Despite the smile, his tone sounds artificial, like he’s trying too hard, and this sends up a brief warning signal, which I choose to ignore.
“You went places with her, though, right?”
Maybe it’s the ridiculous image of Paris and me square-dancing—something neither of us would do ever. Maybe it’s being back here in Santa Monica, the familiar smells and sights and sounds washing over me, seeping into my pores. The scent of salt water. The crisp blue of the California sky. The quirky shops lining the streets that lead to the beach. Air that isn’t dry and endlessly heated and people doing things other than racing to yet another air-conditioned, sealed-up casino.
Maybe it’s none of those. But suddenly, I know, the answer rising in my brain effortlessly, connecting me to my sister in a way that no washed-up cell phone could ever do.
Not just where Paris was happy. But where Paris and I were happy. The two of us.
I’m laughing then, because it’s so obvious. Of course. Of course. Of course. In my head, I see the two of us, paying our admission with nickels and dimes from that ridiculous plastic sack of change.
“The movies,” I say. “Beach Cinema. God, Max. How could I not—it won’t be open until like noon. But that’s it. It has to be. We spent a lot of afternoons there. I bet that’s where she is.”
“You sure?” Max does not look convinced. He hands me his phone. “Tell her that’s where we’re headed. If you’re right, then she’ll know you figured it out and she’ll be watching for you.”
I debate this with him for a minute. I don’t want to spook her somehow or make her come up with another note and send me on another wild goose chase. Max argues that she needs to know we’re on our way.
“I guess,” I say.
I text her that we’ll meet her at Beach Cinema when it opens. Up at the bar, I type. Like we used to.
Then I explain to Max as we walk across the beach and up to the street. It’s over, I think. This whole thing is finally over.
I do not assess if this is good or bad.
Beach Cinema, I tell Max, is this tiny theater off the Promenade, not too far from the little apartment we’d been subletting. It’s old—built in the twenties—and has one of those huge marquees out front and a second-floor balcony and in the upstairs lobby there’s a bar. A real, functioning bar with a bartender and a small variety of drinks and snacks, too, and little round tables and rickety old mismatched chairs and a sofa that looks like it came from Goodwill or someone’s garage.
“The bartender was almost always this guy Oscar,” I tell Max as we pass Saint Monica again and reflexively I trace my fingers across her feet but don’t stop walking.
“We were underage for the booze, obviously,” I say as we head up Wilshire, palm trees lining the streets like tropical soldiers, leaving Monica to guard the beach without us. The old record shop I remember is still there, and this Mexican restaurant, and the pretty boutiques with clothes I can’t afford. I glance briefly at a leather bomber jacket on the mannequin in one window.
“But Oscar liked us. He was one of those guys where it’s hard to tell how old he is. Fifty maybe? Maybe he was sixty. He had this long ponytail and he wore mostly tie-dyed shirts and cargo shorts and he had a tattoo of a bird on the side of his neck. I think he’d been working there since before we were born or something. He’d always give us Cokes, me and Paris. He’d pour them in real glasses and then he’d take one of those plastic sword toothpick things that you put in cocktails and he’d stab up a bunch of maraschino cherries—four or five for each of us all jammed on the plastic sword—and put those in our glasses. We used to joke that maybe he liked me better than Paris because sometimes he’d hand me a shot glass full of extra cherries.”
The sun is shining and it’s morning in LA, the breeze blowing off the Pacific and the air warming but cool. Sand is still sifting off our clothes and my lips are having this perfect skin memory of Max’s delicate, shivery kisses.
I think about Beach Cinema as Max and I step into our shoes and he waits while I bend to lace up my Converse. Sometimes they would have movie marathons and Paris and I would stay there all day. They’d start at ten and by the time we left at four or five, we’d be full of popcorn and fizzy drinks, our lips sticky from all those cherries, our brains swirling with happy endings.
Then another memory rises unbidden. The first time Tommy Davis stayed over at our apartment back in
LA, I woke up and there he was drinking coffee at our kitchen table and then there we were, talking about movies and how he liked those old black-and-white ones. Mom wasn’t a movie person—not like Tommy was. Grammy Marie either. I had never talked to an adult who liked something I did.
Later I realized that he was just showing off. He’d heard me and Paris talking about this marathon of John Cusack movies we’d gone to and he’d chimed in, trying to win us over.
It had worked.
For a while.
Tommy really did like old movies. But mostly he liked telling us that he did.
Paris and I did not tell our not-quite-yet stepfather that Beach Cinema was our place, though. Of all the things Tommy learned about my sister and me in those early days, this was not one of them. I think it felt private—our own safe world where images floated on screens and nice bartenders put cherries in our Cokes and life as it really was seemed far removed for a few hours. It made me think of those castles she used to draw for us.
Once, I told Paris I could live in that movie theater. Not forever, but for a while. Like those kids in that book where they hid out at the big art museum in New York.
“Crazy,” Paris had said. But I could tell she was thinking maybe it wasn’t. I hadn’t thought about all that in a long time. Because who remembers dumb stuff you say when you’re a kid? But I was thinking about it now.
“If you’re so positive. We’ll go there,” Max says. “Beach Cinema. Then we’ll see.”
My stomach pinches. Somehow the way he says it makes me understand that no matter what, there’s a time limit to this journey. If we don’t find Paris today, soon, we’ll drive back to Vegas and whatever this is between us, me and Max, will disappear, fading into the air like smoke from a lit match.
Gone.
It occurs to me now that Tommy Davis is not the only liar I know. I’m one, too. This road trip—no matter how it turns out—isn’t enough. I want more than just one kiss on the beach. I want more good things to happen.
