by Carrie Arcos
“Not really what I’m aspiring for.” I laughed as I fell into step beside him.
We walked south toward the beach on the main street, which was lined with tall, emaciated palm trees. The usual beach clothing, surfing, and jewelry shops, along with some restaurants, marked our way.
“We should talk with anyone who might look like they’d know Micah,” said Tyler.
I was about to ask Tyler what that person would look like, when he stopped a few paces ahead of me, in front of a guy who looked to be in his early twenties, with stringy brown hair, a ratty red T-shirt, and cut-off jeans. He sat on the sidewalk next to a beat-up cardboard sign with the words NEED MONEY scrawled across it in black ink. Tyler reached inside his pocket and put a dollar on the small pile of loose change and dirty, crumpled bills.
I couldn’t help staring at the guy’s earlobes, which stretched around large black plugs that almost sank to his shoulders. I wondered how big the holes would be if he took them out. Piercings I could take, but plugs? No thanks.
Tattoos traveled up both of his skinny white arms like dead vines. His body moved back and forth in rhythm to music I assumed came from his headphones. It was hard for me to picture Micah hanging out with this guy.
Tyler bent down in front of him, and the guy removed one earpiece. “We’re looking for someone.”
“Oh yeah. Who?” The guy started flipping through songs on a small, lime-green iPod.
“Her brother.” Tyler nodded in my direction.
The guy looked at me, beginning with my legs, progressing toward my face. His eyes spoke things I didn’t want to hear. I instinctively wrapped my arms around my chest.
“What’s his name?”
Even from where I stood, I imagined his breath stunk.
“Micah, Micah Stevens.” I said his full name, and suddenly the heaviness of what we were doing bore down upon me.
“I don’t know any Micah.” The guy put his earpiece back in.
“Show him the picture,” Tyler told me.
I held out the most recent picture I could find of Micah, the one taken at his last year’s birthday dinner. The picture showed the two of us squeezed together in a large booth. Micah had on a black button-down shirt, his nicest one. His hair looked as if he had just woken up, but that’s how he normally wore it, dirty and tousled, kind of like Tyler’s, but not as straight. Dad had instructed us to smile, but my brother smiled only with his mouth. His amber-brown eyes looked like they were focused on another world.
“No.” The guy spoke a little too loudly. “Don’t know him.” He started rocking back and forth again.
“All right, thanks, man.” Tyler stood up.
I wanted to ask the guy to look at the picture again because he had barely glanced at it, but Tyler had turned to go. I stuffed the picture into my back pocket, already weary. I wasn’t prepared for the callousness, the apathy.
We were a couple of paces away when the guy shouted after us, “What makes you think he wants to be found?”
Chapter Four
Crank. Ice. Chalk. Crystal. Speed. Trash. Tina. Tweak. Shards. The names of Crystal Methamphetamine. Poor Man’s Cocaine. The last name scared me. Everyone knew cocaine could kill you.
After Googling it, I found a site that explained some of the common effects of using crystal meth. They were euphoria (lasting sometimes twelve hours), increased energy, weight loss, diarrhea and nausea, agitation, violence, and confusion. There was also increased libido, something to do with one’s sex drive, meaning wanting lots of it. If Micah acted on that one, I didn’t want to know. Chronic users often had drug cravings, depression, anxiety, and meth mouth, where their teeth rotted and disintegrated in their mouths. The worst were these intense hallucinations where users felt like bugs were crawling all over their skin. Bugs terrified me, so I was the most freaked out by that.
I scrolled down to a section about its effects on the brain. Meth released dopamine, the chemical that caused pleasure or euphoria. Over time, meth destroyed dopamine receptors, making it impossible for a person to feel good or happy on his own. It could take a whole year of being off the drug for the receptors to grow back, if they grew back at all. Users ended up requiring more and more of the drug so they could feel normal, because the drug changed the brain’s ability to produce dopamine naturally. Meth addicts suffered from anhedonia—the inability to experience joy.
The last section of the site posted before and after pictures of meth users. They reminded me of those beauty-makeover TV shows where they showed the ugly picture of the person looking all sorry and somber alongside the pretty picture after she had her hair dyed and makeup applied correctly and was smiling. Only here these pictures were in reverse. A normal, happy-looking woman occupied the left side of the screen. The right side showed how she had been transformed into an older, thinner, almost unrecognizable version of herself, with sores on her face where she had tried picking at the imaginary bugs under her skin.
I stopped looking at the pictures. Micah was not like them. He didn’t have sores or meth mouth. He was skinny, sure, but he had always been naturally skinny. “A regular beanpole,” my dad used to call him. Micah looked like a normal, healthy eighteen-year-old. He was my brother. He knew joy. At least I thought he did.
Chapter Five
As Tyler and I continued toward the beach, I thought about what the loser with the huge plugs had said. Of course Micah wanted to be found. What kind of a person wanted to remain lost?
Tyler paused to talk to a guy and girl who looked more our age. He strummed a guitar and she sat with her knees up into her chest, painting her toenails a dark purple. Her short blond hair was matted against her scalp in thick chunks. Either she had used tons of product to get it that way or she was desperately in need of a shower.
Tyler asked if they knew Micah, and I showed them the picture. The guy continued to play a song in minor chords, which made the two of them seem even more pathetic. The girl looked at the photo with mild interest, yet said they didn’t know him. She went back to painting her nails, but shifted her foot, knocking over the bottle, spilling purple onto their blanket.
We walked away before she could decide it was our fault.
“Those two weren’t homeless,” I said.
“Probably not.”
“Neither was the guy before.”
“Nope.”
“Am I missing something? Is this the new rage? Pretend you’re homeless to score a couple bucks?” It pissed me off. The inauthenticity of it.
Tyler shrugged. “Maybe they’re bored.”
“Then be bored. Don’t pretend you’re something you’re not.”
“Maybe they’re protesting.”
“With mp3s and iPods?”
He laughed. “The people gotta have their music.”
“Look, Tyler, I’m sure you know what you’re doing, but—”
“I know what I’m doing.”
“Yes, but do you really think these people would know Micah? They don’t seem his type.”
Tyler stopped in front of a liquor store. “Maybe not the last two, but the first guy was high on something. I need a pack. You coming in?”
I shook my head. He went inside while I waited on the sidewalk. Though it was still early and overcast, I reached into my backpack and pulled out my sunscreen. I applied some on my face and arms. I could have used more color, but I tended to burn rather than tan. Micah was the opposite. Every summer his skin would get a nice golden brown.
Looking up and down the street, I decided Ocean Beach, at least the downtown section, was not what I considered beautiful. Everything was small and pushed together with no space to breathe. The buildings looked as if they needed a new paint job to cover the graffiti and to remind themselves of what color they were supposed to be. The cracked pavement collected scraps of paper and trash.
There was also a smell. It smelled like wet wool or stale bread. It smelled like a bad habit. I tried to make out the salty ocean water through the thic
k of it, but all I came up with was the smell of cat piss. But there was something else. Drugs. I could smell drugs everywhere.
I suddenly wondered if the person who had sent me the e-mail was secretly watching us and getting off on it. I had a sick feeling that it was all some big joke. Maybe there was no mystery person. Maybe it was someone from school, someone who wanted to hurt me. Keith’s face cut through my thoughts. No, it wasn’t his style. Total public humiliation, slander, cruelty, I had come to find that those were his weapons of choice.
He talks about you the most. That’s got to mean something, right? If the person behind the e-mail was real, he could have at least told us where to find Micah. Although if Micah really was homeless, he’d probably be moving from place to place. Maybe he was crashing at someone’s apartment or at a shelter, though I imagined him alone, curled into a ball on a cold cement sidewalk.
I should have come right away. Why did I wait? The answer buried itself deeper, which meant I wasn’t ready for it.
Music played loudly next door at Hodad’s, a restaurant claiming to have “The World’s Best Burger! Under 99 billion sold!” Really? In OB? How did they know they made the world’s best burger? What about China or Italy or even Canada? It looked cool inside, though. Old license plates from all over the country hung on the walls, and a line of people had already formed outside. Three men drank beers at the bar. They wore leather biker vests and their opened button-down shirts revealed bellies that hung over their waistbands. Old tattoos, symbols of their long-faded youth, stretched across skin that had expanded with age. This was probably why tattoos were best on leaner body parts, like ankles and feet. Their hair stood up straight in one-inch spikes. One woman stood next to them in a blue bikini top that barely held in her fake boobs. She threw her head back and laughed a little too loudly at something that had been said.
Two of the men looked in my direction. Trying to be polite, I smiled back through the window. One of them motioned for me to come over. Gross. I quickly dropped my eyes. I didn’t have any daddy issues and wasn’t about to give them the time of day. I wished Tyler would hurry.
A few moments later, Tyler emerged from the store and opened a pack of cigarettes. I waited while he removed one, watching his strange ritual. He licked both ends before he put the correct one in his mouth. It reminded me of old movies and how they were always tapping the cigarette against something. Everyone smoked in the black-and-whites. Katharine Hepburn always held a cigarette loosely in her painted fingertips. I couldn’t imagine Bogart without a cigarette in Casablanca. Somehow it was sexy then.
Tyler lit his cigarette, took a puff, and released the smoke. I coughed. Today it wasn’t so sexy.
“Sorry. Some habits are hard to break.” He smiled, revealing his dimples again. I had never really noticed how great his smile was, which made me uneasy. I was a sucker for a great smile.
“Ready?” I asked.
I walked close to him as we passed Hodad’s. One man whistled while the others laughed.
“Making friends?” Tyler asked.
“Shut up,” I said. I wanted to get as far away from those men as I could. I felt dirty being there.
“Relax,” he said. “You’re stressing. You want?” He held out the cigarette between two fingers.
“I don’t smoke.” Which was partly a lie and partly true. I should have said I didn’t smoke in public. I kept a pack of cigarettes in my top dresser drawer underneath my panties, and sometimes smoked late at night near the window in my bedroom when I was feeling rebellious.
“Too bad.”
“I’m not planning to die of lung cancer when I’m forty-two.” I said the words more harshly than I intended, and cringed inside. I could be such a hypocrite.
“You should do something to release all that tension. Why don’t you go run a few blocks?” He chuckled. Removing his hat, Tyler ran his hands through his hair, then pulled his hat back on his head again.
I remained quiet. I didn’t want to fight with him. The clouds didn’t look as if they were going to break anytime soon, and the gloom dampened my mood, making it feel like the trip was going to be a lost cause. “Maybe this was a mistake.” I tossed my empty coffee cup at a trash bin at the corner, but of course I missed, because I’m a terrible shot. I picked it up off the sidewalk and threw it angrily into the bin.
“Look. We have the whole day. It’s beautiful out.” Tyler looked up at the sky. “Well, it’ll be beautiful once this burns off. It’s supposed to be a perfect seventy-eight degrees. We’ll take our time. Ask everyone we see. It’ll be a good start.”
“What if we don’t find him?” I asked.
Tyler took another drag on his cigarette before answering. “The first time we came down here was sophomore year with Big Eddie and Sylvester. Remember those guys?”
I nodded, glad he was talking to me so I didn’t have to obsess about Micah for a few moments. “Where are they now?”
“Sylvester’s working at his dad’s car shop. Don’t know about Big Eddie. He’s probably up the coast somewhere. Anyway, we had surfed all day by the pier.” He pointed up ahead, and I could see the long, thin pier in the distance. “And the waves were totally going off. Micah was pissed because he hadn’t caught one all morning. We all did, except him.
“Finally, I saw him up on a huge wave and about to go off the lip when wham! He ate it.
“We were like, ‘Dude!’ But he didn’t come up right away. We had to pull him out of the water. He’d hit the floor and his forehead was bleeding.”
Tyler paused to take another smoke. “Man, he was fearless. I’ll always remember his stupid face, happy because he surfed so hard that his board broke in two.”
“He was always getting hurt,” I said. “Did he ever tell you how he got that chip on his front tooth?”
“Surfing, right?”
“No,” I laughed, remembering. “He was in, like, fourth grade or something and out doing tricks on his bike. He was pretty good. We had this BMX track by our house where he used to practice. One day when he was coming home, there was this huge rottweiler. Micah’s scared of dogs, so he was watching the dog and peddling as fast as he could to get away from it. He didn’t see the parked car in front of him. He hit it and flew over the front end of his bike, landing face first on the asphalt. He came home crying with a bloody mouth.”
“Ouch.”
“He needed stitches and everything.”
I laughed at the memory, but sobered up quickly, aware that Tyler and I were sifting through our memories of Micah, sharing bits and pieces, as if we were coming together to eulogize one already dead.
On our way to the ocean, we asked a couple more people if they knew Micah, and I was struck by how alike everyone looked: wrapped in dull, muted colors and dirt, stringy long hair or clumped dreads, discarded children of the 1960s flower people. Most of them carried backpacks or satchels, some of which were expensive brands. Many were musicians. Everyone smelled like pot. None of them was Micah.
The street ended and deposited itself into a large parking lot. Now it smelled of human urine, as if someone had marked his territory. I tried not to gag. To the right, another road led to the sand and a lifeguard station. Thankfully, Tyler headed in that direction.
The sandy part of the beach was smaller than I expected and only sprinkled with people. It wasn’t the busy place I imagined it would become later in the day. Tyler took off his black Chuck Taylor’s and started walking across the sand. I did the same with my flip-flops, holding them loosely in my left hand. The sand felt cool between my toes. I knew it would burn in the afternoon sun.
We walked by a man who lay on his back, covered with an old orange blanket. Next to him, a shopping cart and a beat-up bike stood guard. Shopping bags were tied to the handlebars, and the loose plastic rustled in the breeze. He stirred as if the wind had warned him of our presence. Then we carefully stepped around a couple of girls who were tanning. One lay on her back, the other on her front with her top untie
d so she wouldn’t get lines. I had always wanted to do that. Tan lines were so annoying, but I never had the guts.
I wondered why Tyler was bringing us so far down the beach. It seemed to me that we’d have our best chances on the mainland, but I followed him to the break line, past the lifeguard station to where the water met the sand.
Tyler bent to roll up the bottoms of his jeans so they wouldn’t get wet. I jumped back from the frigid water. It was definitely colder on the beach. My choice of a cute tank top and jean shorts now seemed a bad idea.
He looked over at the pier. “Guys are still out there.” He meant the small showing of surfers clustered near the pier.
“He’s not here,” I said. I pulled my hoodie out of my backpack, put it on, and the inside instantly warmed my goose bumps. In the distance, the sun tried to break through the gray fog that still clouded the beach city.
“Well, he’s not out surfing, but you didn’t expect that, did you?” Tyler stood facing the ocean and closed his eyes.
I didn’t know what to expect, I thought.
Movement caught my attention. A young woman sat digging in the sand with a little boy. She pointed toward the water, and the boy ran to the shoreline with a red bucket. He waited for the tide to come in, then scooped up some ocean and ran back to his mother, dumping the water into a large hole. The mother began molding the wet sand. I imagined it felt rough and cold in her fingers.
“He could be at this one place.”
“Where?” I kept my eyes on the mother and child. The boy had ruined her sculpture by pushing it over with his hands. He jumped up and down, clearly excited by the destruction he had caused. Instead of getting angry, she smiled. Micah had loved to do that with my creations when we were kids, but after I’d had a good cry and he’d had a good laugh, he always helped me rebuild whatever it was.
“On the other side of the pier. It’s where the—where certain types of people hang out.”
The mother took the little boy’s hands and pulled him into a bear hug.
