Laguna

We called it Julaugust. That bruisingly hot stretch of weeks between mid July and late August, when after a month of summer vacation, more days lay ahead somehow. Days structured around swimming pools, shifts at the grocery store, afternoon soap operas, and grape popsicles. Julaugust meant there were still sleepovers and suntans to wring out of summer. But there was a certain ennui in the vacant sky, a near desolation, as if much like the soft serve ice cream stand that appeared near Memorial Park each May only to close again in September, the world itself might be capable of both lasting forever and disappearing all at once.

Julaugust. Katie Coco coined the term during one of many days spent driving around drinking diet soda, listening to the radio, calling the movie theater to see what was playing and when. Katie Coco was the only person I knew who had actually gotten a car for her sweet sixteen. It was glossy and red as a piece of hard candy coated with spit. A convertible, the teenage symbol of nice car. I had always known she was rich—the second part of her first name was a reference to Coco Chanel, after all—but the car solidified it. 

At 3 p.m., we picked up Jeremy from his shift at a chain bagel shop. He smelled like cinnamon and yeast when he leaned in to kiss Katie Coco. There was another scent too, something earthy and foreign to me, but I knew it was familiar to her. Earlier in the summer, she’d pulled out a windbreaker from her laundry basket—the same jacket we’d all gotten at the end of soccer season—and said look here. Specks of white beneath the gold cursive lettering. I gave Jeremy a hand job, she said. We examined it together in silence, as if the pattern might reveal some great secret. Were you nervous? I asked. Later, in front of other girls, she would smirk and toss her hair, conveying an it was no big deal kind of coolness that made everyone regard her with awe. But for me, she nodded. 

I was her best friend.

***

Katie Coco’s parents had the best living room of anyone I knew—an oversized leather couch, endless pillows, a flat-screen TV, bookcases stacked with DVDs. We were midway through the second season of Alias, passing a jar of sugar-free peanut butter back and forth. Like the rest of the country, we were in the clutches of The South Beach Diet. 

Katie Coco’s dad, who often appeared with good news—snacks, an offer to drive us to the mall—stepped in to ask if we wanted chicken caesar salads for dinner.

“Yes please,” I said, already tasting the dressing he made from scratch, which was just the tiniest bit spicy. My parents never cooked.

“Whatever,” Katie Coco said. On the screen, Jennifer Garner was wearing a blue wig. That was our favorite thing about the show: the costumes, plus how hot Michael Vartan was. 

“We’re thinking of going to the beach house this weekend,” Katie Coco’s dad said.

“You and mom?”

“No, all of us. As a family. Plus Emma, of course. If you want to, Emma.”

“Sure,” I said, “My parents don’t care what I do.”

The tone of my voice was embarrassing, accidentally revealing how much I longed for the opposite. 

***

Traffic stood still on I-5. A silver ribbon of cars, baking in the heat. A Black Eyed Peas song on the radio. The air conditioning on the highest setting. Katie Coco reached into the cooler between us and withdrew a string cheese, another sanctioned food from The South Beach Diet. She had copied the book’s snack list onto a scrap of paper, placed it on the kitchen counter, and three days later the items appeared in the fridge, just like that. 

Soon enough, the outlet malls and tract homes turned into pale blue beach hotels, open-air restaurants, and cliff sides blooming with pink flowers and agave, so heavy with the abundance of plants that it seemed like they might collapse and bring a carpet of poppies and wild roses onto Highway 1. 

At the beach, we dashed in and out of the waves, daring the ocean to pull us away and then retreating in fear when the tide grabbed ahold of our ankles. Katie Coco’s dad read some science magazine—he was always reading some science magazine, it had something to do with his job—and her mom drank sparkling water. 

Later, when we settled onto the blanket beside them, she asked, “Emma, where are you thinking about applying for college?”

I palmed a handful of warm sand and let it slip through my fingers. “Orange Coast.”

“The community college?” 

“I’m going to get my associate degree here. That way I can keep working at the grocery store.” 

My parents need me around, I almost said.

“She’s going to transfer to a four-year school,” Katie Coco interjected. And I wished she hadn’t.

I drew a circle in the sand, erased it, started over. 

“That makes sense for you,” Katie Coco’s mom said. 

I pulled a Twizzler from the bag of beach snacks. It was warm and gummy. 

“Katie Coco, did you work on your Georgetown essay this week?” she asked.

“Uh-huh.” 

This was a lie. She’d gone to Jeremy’s house on the night she was supposed to write it. His parents were out of town, and his older brother was in his room with his own girlfriend. I gave Jeremy a blow job, she’d texted me. I swallowed and it didn’t taste bad. Just kind of warm. 

I hated thinking about her at Georgetown. Hated thinking about myself taking English comp at a community college, putting clearance stickers on dented cans of pinto beans in between classes.

The tide was coming in. Sleek surfer boys made their way to the water. On the sand, shirtless runners navigated through umbrellas and coolers. 

“That one’s shorts are so tiny,” I said to Katie Coco. 

“Oh my god, you can almost see the outline of his dick.” 

She would meet guys like that in college, I imagined. Close cropped blonde hair, straight teeth, beautiful shoulders. 

“I bet he’s circumcised,” Katie Coco said. “Most guys are. Do you think it’s weird that Jeremy isn’t? I mean, that’s like the first penis I’ve ever seen, unless you count the flasher at the park that time.” 

“Not weird.”

“Like, I assume I’ll see normal ones in college, right?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I was getting hot, so I went to the water again. I put my head underneath, letting the ocean fill my ears.

***

That evening, summer squash and sirloin steak on the grill as the sun went down. Katie Coco’s parents poured white wine from a glass carafe for themselves and procured diet soda from the fridge for us, and then wine for us. Just a little splash, Katie Coco’s dad said with a wink. He poured it liberally into her glass. When I outstretched my own, he lowered the bottle and then hesitated, met my eyes, began to speak and then said nothing, instead just smiled the smile that someone does when they pity you, and poured. My heart broke; I knew the question he had almost asked me before realizing it didn’t matter: Would your parents be okay with you having wine? 

I hated him in that moment, meeting his gaze as the tangerine sun burned the Pacific horizon. Hated him so much it probably showed on my face. He looked away, set the bottle down, and then said, “Have some more steak.” 

The seagulls shrieked, hurtling their bodies over the ocean. Endless pairs of lovers kissed on the sand. A warm wind picked up. Katie Coco’s dad pointed out dolphins breaking the waves, but I couldn’t see them. After the wine and the steak and the vegetables, he brought out strawberry shortcake. 

“A nice fresh summer dessert,” he said. I took out my cell phone, thought about calling my parents, or at least texting them, but I didn’t.

“I can’t have it,” Katie Coco told him. “South Beach Diet. Dad, you know that.”

“Not even the strawberries?” her mother asked.

“Especially not the strawberries.” 

They apologized to her, both of them looking truly sorry. 

“I’ll have some,” I said.

They cut me a big slice and I ate it. And then another, until I was full.

***

We laid on top of the sheets, side by side in the soft dark. An oscillating fan pushed the air over our bodies in steady waves. Katie Coco fidgeted, turning onto her stomach and then her side, sighing. Jeremy hadn’t called, hadn’t even texted. When she’d brought it up after dinner, her mother said, “You’ll meet someone better at Georgetown.”

Two days earlier, he’d texted her thinking about your wet pussy.

We’d deliberated over how to respond, finally settling on a coy, oh really? 

No response.

Katie Coco kicked at the blankets. “I should have texted him the other thing. The thing about his cock.”

“So text him.” 

She turned the fan up a setting. “I hate this fan.”

Yeah, your parents should have bought a beach house with better air conditioning, I thought. It was the first time I’d ever stopped myself from saying what I wanted to say to her. Lying there in the dark, thinking about my parents nodding off on their corduroy couch—their pills, their forgotten TV dinners—Katie Coco’s problems seemed luxurious to me. A mother who wanted her to apply to Georgetown. A father who made her strawberry shortcake even though she was on a diet. A beach house in Laguna that was a little bit stuffy on an otherwise perfect California night. 

“Maybe we should go swimming,” I heard myself say.

“What? At night?”

“Yeah, why not? We’ve always talked about skinny dipping.”

“I don’t know. I feel fat. I don’t want to be naked.”

“You’re not fat,” I said. “And besides, it’s just me and we’re going to be in the dark.” 

Katie Coco sat up and turned on the bedside lamp. “We can’t let my parents hear us. I’m serious. My mom will be so mad.”

I don’t think she will, I said to myself, doing it again—not telling her what I was thinking. 

In the coming months, I would do this more and more until there was less and less to say to her, but tonight I wanted to be close to her, so I resisted it. I wanted us to have this together, even if she was right and her mom did get angry. I would take the blame, I decided then, if it happened. I could already see myself standing in the cool white kitchen, eyes downcast as I explained that it had been my idea. Their forgiveness would hurt. It would come easy because they didn’t love me.

Katie Coco handed me a towel. “We should sneak some more of their wine when we get back. Fill it with water so they don’t know.”

“Ha,” I said. “Now you’re talking.”

We tiptoed through the kitchen and, once outside, collapsed in laughter. I could smell blooming jasmine, sea air. Katie Coco smiled in the moonlight. Unprompted, she said, “Whatever. Fuck Jeremy.” 

***

The waves were thunderous, but we couldn’t see them. We stood on the sand in the dark. I began to undress. As our eyes adjusted to the light, I saw her avert her gaze even though she’d seen me naked or half-naked a hundred times before—when we were kids, in dressing rooms at the mall. 

“Maybe I should look at some east coast schools,” I said. 

“Like community colleges on the east coast?”

“I guess. If you get into Georgetown I could go somewhere kind of close at least.”

She didn’t say anything. I finished undressing and stood naked, my clothes in a pile at my feet. My skin burned with embarrassment, even though the ocean breeze was soft and cool. 

When Katie Coco took her clothes off, she folded them in a neat pile on top of her towel. Without warning, she started running towards the invisible sea, dissolving completely into darkness before my eyes. I ran after her, down the dark shore and into the ocean. The water was turbulent and icy, which always shocked me. I didn’t swim in the Pacific enough to know it well; I only got to go when Katie Coco’s parents took me. If she left, how would I see it? I pushed through, letting it pull me towards her. We swam out further, until our feet could barely touch, until I said, “Okay, that’s far enough.” And then we stood, the surface of the ocean just above our breasts. Hers were bigger than mine by a lot—34D versus 34A—and each year for her birthday she begged her parents for a breast reduction. When you’re eighteen, they said. 

“This was a good idea,” Katie Coco said. “It’s not so bad when you get used to it.”

The waves came and went, picking us up, putting us down. Overhead, the southern California smog cleared and the stars came out. 

“I wish I lived here,” I said.

We swam in a little bit. Katie Coco crouched so that the water would conceal her body. I did the same, but it wasn’t an instinct. I looked to the shore, picking out silhouettes of tall palm trees, lights of houses twinkling on the hillside, shadows of cars driving the coast. And then I saw them. The beach had been empty before, but suddenly there were people standing where we’d dropped our clothes. I could hear their voices each time the ocean quieted.

“Katie, do you see—”

“Yep. Do you think they see us?”

There were three of them on the beach. Low voices. The confident stance of college guys. 

“They’re probably just drunk and walking around, goofing off,” I said. Through the dim light, we saw them examining our clothes. Then they walked to the shoreline, having figured out the situation. 

“Hey,” one of them called out. “Hey, you girls.”

We stood silently in the water. 

“Hey, you girls. We know you’re naked in there.” 

They paced back in forth, apparitions on the sand, stalking us. 

“You’re gonna want to come out at some point. You can’t stay in there forever.”

I ducked beneath the surface, feeling the pulse of the ocean pound my eardrums. I came up for air and it was salty, sticky on my mouth. “I don’t know what to do,” Katie Coco said. The boys laughed. Their voices were inaudible, but I could tell from the tone that they were egging each other on.

“We can wait,” I said.

We did. They kept shouting, brandishing our clothes and taunting us, laughing. Maybe they meant no harm, but I didn’t know anything about men like them. Men getting business degrees from UC schools, I imagined. College boys, drunk at night, summering in Laguna, at their parents’ houses.

“We’re not going anywhere,” they said. “You better come out.”

Beneath the surface of the Pacific, Katie Coco reached for my hand. She said nothing. Her fingers trembled. 

“They’re bluffing,” I said.

In the water beside us, something heavy hit the surface. “What the fuck? Are they throwing rocks?” 

They were. I could see them scooping up stones from the beach and hurtling them towards us as they continued to yell. They landed around us, one by one, ricocheting and splashing, until a crack. “Fuck,” Katie Coco said. “I think one hit me.”

“It hit you? Where did it hit you?” 

“In the head. Emma, it hit me right in the head, what the fuck.” She began to whimper, and then weep.

Instinctively, I put my arms around her, like I’d done so many times before, holding her as the water rushed around us. She touched her hand to her temple. “I think it’s bleeding.” I tried to feel it with my fingers, but her whole face was wet. She didn’t flinch when I touched the spot they’d stuck, so I figured that was a good thing, at least. 

I could protect her, I decided. I could show her I was a part of this. “We’ve gotta go,” I said, squeezing her hand. I pulled her towards the beach, first swimming against the tide and then walking, shouting at the men on the shore who were now retreating, “You assholes hit my friend in the head. I’m gonna fucking kill you.” When we reached the sand I kept holding onto Katie Coco’s fingers, even though she could walk. Through the haze of my periphery, I could see her pick up her towel and wrap it around herself, but I didn’t care; I stood naked. I trembled, my blood hot with anger. I picked up rocks from the ground and started chucking them hard in fast succession at the shapes of the men. I screamed. 

“Emma, what are you doing?” Katie Coco said.

I hurled rock after rock. “You motherfuckers.”

“Emma, stop.”

But I couldn’t.

It was the kind of violence I think people always assumed must have been going on in my home, but if they knew the truth they’d know it was much quieter, much sadder. Two junkies who had given up. Silence, lethargy, the end before the end. A total lack of anything. My hands were heavy with fury as I launched stones through the night air. I threw them so hard that for a moment I was sure they would catapult across the beach and shatter the windows of Katie Coco’s pristine vacation home. How I wanted to shatter those windows, to leave a mark, even a temporary one, on a place that was not my own. The boys ran, laughing cruelly, cursing me—not Katie Coco, me—and I was so full of spite it didn’t hurt me, not yet. When they were gone, I stood panting, realizing how badly I wanted them to come back, how much I wanted to hurt them. 

“Put some clothes on, please,” Katie Coco said, her voice soft like a child’s and full of fear.

I found my towel and covered myself. “Sorry.”

We walked to the house without speaking, and when we got inside, we went straight to the bathroom and turned on the light. The skin was broken on her temple. Blood in the shape of an asterisk. Faint lines.

“It’s not as bad as I thought it would be,” she said, but I thought it looked awful. I swear the longer we stood there, I could see the pinball-sized bump forming beneath her skin right before my eyes. 

“How do you feel?” I asked. My own head was throbbing, my ears ringing with the reverberations of my own screams. 

She leaned forward towards the mirror, examining herself, touching the side of her head lightly with her fingertips. She winced. When I tried to reach out to examine the wound, she pulled away. 

“What was that?” she asked, turning to face me. She crossed her arms. 

“Those guys were drunk and being assholes.”

“No, you. What were you doing? I’ve never seen anyone act like that before.”

“I was sticking up for you.”

She regarded me like a stranger. “It was pretty weird,” she said. And then she snickered.  The sound she made was just like the laughter of the men on the beach. It was the acknowledgment of a chasm I’d been trying unsuccessfully to bridge. A line between us. It was a fridge full of groceries, a beach house, a college essay, a family. It was directed at me. 

“What am I going to tell my parents?” Katie Coco asked.

“Tell them you fell.”

“They’ll never believe that.”

A stray fly buzzed on the windowpane. A fan whirred. 

“I’m sorry I acted like that,” I said. 

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she responded, turning away from me.

We skipped the wine we had promised to drink and went to bed. She didn’t complain about the heat; she didn’t say anything. It was not seismic, but something had shifted. A crack that had always existed was apparent now. It was widening, but I didn’t know it yet.

Years later—long after she left and I stayed—I would find myself in the same grocery store break room I’d known in high school, or at a chain restaurant with an unremarkable man from a dating app, telling the story of the first and last time I ever went skinny dipping. It would become one of my go-to stories, a story I would change until it sounded funny or brave, until it was a story about friendship and nothing else. In the story, the bump on Katie Coco’s temple stayed, a small, hardened lump linked to an adventure between two girls. It would stay throughout the summer, senior year high school, the following summer, and many summers after that. Summers we spent together. In the story, anyway. 

“She still has the bump,” I would tell people, as if I’d just come back from having margaritas with her. As if it hadn’t been ten years since we’d spoken. As if she hadn’t gone to Georgetown and then med school. As if I had been her maid of honor instead of a distant acquaintance scrolling through photos of her wedding from a bathroom stall in my hometown. 

Years later—long after the hey girl I’m gonna be in CA let’s hang xoxo texts became less frequent before stopping altogether—I would see her exiting a coffee shop as I was parking my car. I would be thinking about my parents, wondering if they needed groceries, if I would have time to check on them after work. I wouldn’t be wondering what it would be like to be cared for by them, the way Katie Coco’s parents had always cared for her. And she would appear, walking alongside a woman from the wedding photos. A friend from med school, black hair, black sunglasses, the posture of someone who did a lot of yoga. Come to California for the weekend with me, I would imagine Katie Coco saying to her, my parents have a great beach house in Laguna. I would turn away, telling myself I was sparing us both from having to force smiles and hihowareyous, when in reality, I was just sparing myself from her reaction to me. 

***

When I arrived home from Laguna, the front door was unlocked as it often was, the screen still torn from Spotty, our Dalmatian who had run away when I was in seventh grade. It had been my dad’s fault; he’d left the door unlocked that day too and Spotty had pushed it open, run out into the dead grass, towards the pavement, the road to somewhere else. He’s gone and it’s because of you, I told my dad as I drew pictures of Spotty by hand to hang around the neighborhood. The next day he came home drunk, cradling a tiny husky in his arms, a terrified white cloud. Someone had left the dog unattended outside of a bar, he explained. What bar? I asked. You should put the dog back. He started laughing. Can’t remember. But it’s ours now. He set the dog down on the dirty living room floor and we both watched as it squatted and pooped. It would be my responsibility, I knew, to clean it up.

“Mom? Dad?” I called out as I stepped into the house. 

The unattended TV played an infomercial for a mesh belt that was supposed to tone abs. The living room was empty: an entire pepperoni pizza on the coffee table, an overflowing ashtray, a pair of jeans discarded on the floor, a smell like something somewhere was rotting. They were in the bedroom, the shades drawn, their labored snoring indicating deep sleep. I stood in the doorway watching them breathe, thinking of the snails we’d had when I was a kid. Their giant terrarium in the living room, their damp scent, their twitching tentacles, their faint trails of mucus. I’d invited classmates over after school one day and they’d looked at the snails not with wonder, but with horror, like why don’t you have something normal like a guinea pig. Afterwards I took the snails outside one by one, cradling them in my palms and setting them down in a neighbor’s garden. My parents never noticed they were gone, even though the terrarium was empty. The truth was, I missed the snails, and I cried a lot when I realized they were never coming back.