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  And to see gray whales, too. I’m not shitting on gray whales. They’re great.

  Just…smaller, you know?

  You know.

  Anyway, we’d seen the whales before, so we barely looked at the ocean as we picked our way across the marsh, up the bluff trail, through the rip in the busted-ass hurricane fence, and up to the End. We called it the End, but it wasn’t a name, really, it was just a fact: where we ended up. It was where the trail stopped, so we stopped, too.

  We didn’t know there was more. We had to be shown.

  The End was a jawbone of rock hooked out over the surf, and the park service had bolted on this rusty iron afterthought of a safety railing. There was always dog shit at the End, always in precisely the same spot. Somebody came here to gaze wistfully off the edge of the earth while his/her teacup Doberman did its filthy business.

  From there, the world just dropped away, and you felt pretty alone and pretty excited, and maybe even a little scared, and you suddenly understood why the old mapmakers drew monsters in the water past the parts they knew.

  That’s where we were at ten till five one afternoon, probably staring at dog shit, making dumb jokes, when we heard it for the first time: the call to adventure.

  “What’s past the dog shit?”

  (So it wasn’t exactly “Call me Ishmael.”)

  Drew and I turned at exactly the same time, like a comedy team.

  And there she was. A girl. She looked older. And also ageless. She went on: “Just more dog shit? Or is there a way down?”

  Drew and I hadn’t done a lot of talking to girls. Definitely not in the wild.

  Drew spoke first. He said, “Hey.”

  The girl was looking at me, though, when she said, “You gentlemen wanna be accessories to a victimless crime?”

  I had no idea what she was talking about. But yes, I did. On gut instinct alone. I wanted to be an accessory to anything and everything she had in mind.

  She was taller than both of us then, and a year-plus older, we’d find out. Darker, too, with deeper-than-olive skin, slashes of it visible through her ratty Raiders jersey and torn board shorts. She was drenched, and smelled like ocean, which was weird, because there was no beach access here, forty feet above the shore. Yet here she was, dripping brine, hair that deep iridescent blue-black with the Superman sheen. But hers was wild, sparkling with salt, over eyes as green as an angry two-day bruise.

  I think I was trying to classify her, and failing, when she walked right by me and climbed over the guardrail, like a goddamned crazy person.

  “Did you ever look? Like, look-look?”

  What I finally said, when I found my mouth again, probably qualifies for the Worst Opening Line Hall of Shame:

  “But there’s a guardrail.”

  The girl laughed. And leaned out over the chasm.

  Drew and I simul-gasped, a pair of stroller moms. The girl took no notice. She was studying the cliffs below. “Uh-huh,” she said. “Yep. That’ll work.”

  In that moment, I knew two things:

  This girl is a lunatic, and

  I will follow her anywhere.

  Drew moved toward her. Grabbed the railing with one hand, extended the other in the crazy girl’s direction. “Here,” he said, in a voice that sounded two thousand years older than Drew. I remember watching him reach for her and thinking, Drew’s brave Drew’s brave Drew’s brave.

  “You should come back.”

  The green-eyed girl looked at him, confused. Not worried. Just confused.

  Then she saw Drew’s hand. Then she saw me.

  I was holding on to Drew. Bracing him. I’d done it on pure reflex…but was trying to play it off, like this was something we did all the time: offering human chains to wayward girls with dysfunctional self-preservation instincts.

  We must’ve looked so serious.

  She didn’t laugh. She just kind of noted it, like a primatologist watching chimps—a touching if peculiar display of concern—and then she took Drew’s hand—

  —and shook it. And grinned. Like they’d just struck a deal. Then she saluted. And dropped—

  —gasps from the stroller moms—

  —about two and a half feet.

  There was a ledge. A nice wide one, curling down to the beach, almost like a perfect switchback. It’d been there all along. We’d never looked.

  The green-eyed girl was already feeling her way along the rock face.

  “If there’s this much,” the wonderful crazy person said, “then there’s more.”

  * * *

  —

  And that was Monica. And nothing was ever the same.

  It was ten minutes later, when we were, no kidding, halfway down the cliff face, sneakers squealing and slipping on the rocks, before I even thought to ask where or what this alleged “more” was.

  “This rock we’re on?” Monica said. “You can’t tell from here, but from out there? Looks like a sea monster. Right now, we’re about mid-snout.”

  Drew and I, clinging to the cliffside like terrified baby possums, looked at each other. From out there? Out where? From the ocean? The ocean past the cliff was always on the boil, torn up by two crooked jetties and this batshit skeleton of hidden reefs. Huge waves stumbled in drunk from three different directions and swung nasty haymakers at each other. Where the jetties nearly touched, all that chaos balled itself into a single fist—a vicious-looking wedge wave—and punched the cove right in the mouth, over and over, never hitting it exactly the same way. But always hitting. Hard.

  “You were…out there?” Drew’s jaw dangled like its catch was broken.

  “Well,” said Monica, “I got close. Swam out and had a look.”

  She gestured casually down at the chasm, at the chompy jaws of Satan’s Cuisinart.

  “I mean, I haven’t ridden it.”

  Ridden?

  “Yet,” she added.

  I looked at it again. It wasn’t surf, it was puree.

  My talent for stupid remarks at ridiculous moments revealed itself again. “Are you a…a trained surfer?”

  She laughed. And free-dropped again.

  A better question might’ve been, Why are we following you? But I’m glad we never asked it. We might’ve missed out on the next six years.

  “I was out there”—she gestured vaguely toward the churn—“and I saw a bird fly out.” She calculated her next jump. “In, then out. And again.” Another drop to the next shelf. We followed her lead. “It’s got a nest here. Cormorant, I think. Big seabird. So whatever’s there, it’s, like, spacious. And sheltered. Pretty cool, probably.”

  And guess what? It was all those things. And more.

  BoB.

  Belly of the Beach.

  That’s what we ended up calling it: our secret, sacred sea cove, with its jewel-bright tide pools and its domed cavern notched in red rock thirty feet down the cliff face, not two feet above the waterline at high tide, the entrance hidden behind a sandstone tusk. There was a nice little beach, too, a carpet of golden sand ground extra soft and fine by the Sawtooth. (That’s what the old kahunas called the monster wedge wave we’d seen out beyond the cove.) The Sawtooth had been chewing every stone and shell and fish skeleton to powder for however many jillion eons, and we got here just in time to walk on the perfect beach it made for us, the gentle sweepings of all those little bones. Technically, BoB was made of death, I guess, a hundred million years of finely milled death. But it felt so alive.

  I was happy just being there, just being one of three who knew this place.

  In the cave, there was this long tongue of rock to sit on. Three could sit comfortably, for hours, talking about basically nothing.

  Which we did. For six years.

  We had rules. The place was secret, for one. It had to b
e. To find a place like this and not keep it secret? Would be just wrong, somehow. We had rules, because why risk chaos? All three of us had lost something, or someone, to chaos. Now we’d found something precious, right next door to chaos. We needed to protect it. So we made a Plan. A Plan, which was really just a promise to each other: that BoB was ours, and we were BoB’s, pure and simple. All other plans, all the later drafts, flowed from that one Plan. I built my first bonfire at BoB. Sipped my first beer there, experimentally, disappointedly. (It was Rolling Rock.) I read all of Tolkien there, even the frickin’ Silmarillion, under Monica’s watchful nerdship.

  And I fell in love at BoB. With the best and wrongest person. In violation of the Plan, of the promise.

  So yes, it was the end of the world, and the greatest place on earth, and it was also in biking distance of our subdivision, had been all our lives. We’d never have known it was there, if Monica hadn’t dared us.

  It was also where Monica spent most of her nonschool time. She never went home. For reasons she didn’t talk about, and didn’t need to.

  We had whales to watch. Down here, they seemed very, very close.

  “There’s no place safer,” Monica liked to say, “than inside a sea monster.”

  That’s how we started Whailing.

  * * *

  —

  “I couldn’t love youuuuuu,” Drew caterwauled, “aaany beeeetterrrrr! I love you just the waaaay you aaaaa­aaaaa­aaaarrrrr­rrrrr­re-ruh!”

  Drew held the last note as long as he could, looking for a fluke, a spout, anything. You only win Whailing if a whale breaches during your verse. Combining the Zen of whale-watching with the screech of karaoke, it barely met the definition of game, and P.S., none of us could really sing. The real object of Whailing was to irritate the other players until they picked you up and dumped you in the ocean.

  Monica was reigning champ. She had serious lungs and always sang “Honesty,” which is a real milking machine of a slow ballad, horrifically extendable.

  Drew nearly collapsed trying to hold that last note. He finally had to take a knee, gasping, his terrible serenade declined by whalekind.

  “Whaddaya think Coach Guthridge would say if he knew you were skipping practice…for this? On game day?”

  A jolt of very real worry arced across Drew’s face. Then the broad smile unfurled again and caught the wind. “Coach Gut? He’d be down. He’s, what, fifty? Old people love them some Joel. These whales do, too, you’ll see. Whales are old as shit, Will.”

  I laughed. He laughed. We were ten again.

  But…I could look in the mirror and be ten again.

  Well-meaning middle-aged women still approached me at the mall and asked, “Where’s your mother? Are you lost?” (Sometimes that made me so mad, I answered honestly.)

  That’s why I had my own plans for tonight. Plans I hadn’t shared with my blood brother, who’d skipped practice and changed his plans—plans he didn’t take or make lightly—all for me. There’s no other way to say it: I was betraying him. Maybe not fatally. Maybe just a little. Just technically. An asterisk, really. No big deal.

  Except that, till now, there’d been no asterisks between us.

  Thunk, thunk.

  Two books hit the sand, and then THUNK: the Asterisk herself.

  Monica Alegria Bailarín.

  “Gentlemen,” said Monica, picking up her books and heading toward the cave for her board and wet suit, her sword and shield. I couldn’t see the book covers, but lately Monica always traveled with two beat-to-hell paperbacks from her two preferred categories of lit: People Are Garbage, and People Are Flaming Garbage, Beautiful to Behold but Only from a Safe Distance.

  “Thought you had practice, Spesh?” Monica kicked off her Keds and vanished into the cave.

  “Thought you had history first period,” Drew called back.

  “I did, I did,” came Monica’s voice, ringing off the cave dome. “And then, suddenly, halfway there, I just didn’t. Because, guys, look at this day!”

  “It’s San Diego,” I said. “This is every day.”

  “Wrong,” said Mon, emerging in her battered wet suit, so many patches it looked like a map of Conflictistan, with her second-least-beat-to-shit surfboard under her arm. “This is a special day. Today, William of Daughtry, you become a man. American-style. Sixteen! Car mitzvah!”

  “Did you just say car mitzvah?”

  Monica took a bow. “Speaking of which: what was that beautiful blue blob of white privilege I saw parked on the access road? Looked suspiciously unbikelike.”

  “We call it the Yacht.” Drew grinned like he’d invented sugar.

  “He calls it the Yacht,” I corrected.

  “Short for Fiat?” Monica rolled it around gravely. “Mmm. That’s terrible.”

  “Oh, but car mitzvah is genius.”

  “It is genius.”

  “I thought ‘the Yacht’ was very clever,” said Drew, “for a meathead athlete.”

  “I think,” said Monica, heading for the water, “that meathead athletes should be held to higher standards. And one day, God willing, America will have its first meathead-athlete poet laureate.”

  “How about surf-bum history skippers? What kinda standards for them?”

  “Sorry, WHAT?” called Monica, paddling out.

  “They get to just drop a car mitzvah and take a bow?”

  “I can’t hear you over the MONSTER WAVE I am about to BEND with MY MIND.”

  She was paddling toward the Sawtooth, all snarling foam today. The Sawtooth was never nice, but today it seemed especially irritable—indigestion from some far-off Pacific cyclone, I guess.

  We both knew she wouldn’t go all the way. That she’d pause, mid-cove, like she always did. Straddle her board and just study the tangle of mindless murder. And then…she’d settle for the ankle biters closer to shore, the Sawtooth’s scraps and leavings.

  Still, Drew said, “She…won’t.” With this wisp of a question mark, this tiny squiggle of worry. He said it every time she paddled out. I’m not sure he even knew he was saying it.

  I wasn’t worried. I knew she wouldn’t. Not today. Not ever.

  “There are two waves you don’t get to surf,” Monica always said. “Yesterday’s, the one you missed, the one you weren’t in time for. And tomorrow’s, the one you keep in front of you, the one that dares you.”

  The Sawtooth was always tomorrow’s wave for Monica. It was berserk, barely a wave at all, no pattern or math, just gnashing violence. Guess wrong, and you’d get held under and raked over the cheese grater of rock reefs that was BoB’s red carpet. The Sawtooth was no murder virgin. Monica’d poked around, found some obits. Dead kahunas from the ’50s. From before the guardrail. That’s why it was actually (shh, don’t tell) illegal to surf here.

  Monica always had one eye on the Tooth—and one eye on what she once called the Madwoman Theory. She liked to keep people guessing. Liked a little churn. Churn meant an underdog had a chance.

  Drew, on the other hand, did not like churn. Drew did not surf. Drew barely swam in the cove, which was a bathtub. Drew, though he didn’t talk about it, had a Water Problem. “Most plans aren’t water-resistant,” went another Monica maxim, “but all water is plan-resistant.” And Drew liked plans.

  By plans, I mean: if you popped the hood on Drew’s head, you’d see an octagonal table with eight little Drews around it, debating the pros and cons of eight different scenarios, then throwing a ninth into the mix, just to be safe. He had plans within plans, plans that Legoed neatly into any number of potential futures, plans for college, career, and beyond—and all of these plans featured the three of us, together, hanging out at BoB our entire lives. Now, technically, we all made those plans, and we all liked the idea of never losing each other, but Drew? Actually gamed out the scenarios that’d keep us safely enBoB’d fore
ver. He didn’t share them in real time or force them down anybody’s throat, but if you casually asked him what he thought? You’d receive a detailed presentation, with footnotes.

  When Drew looked at water, he saw long odds. Broken rules. Plans dashed, ass up and skewered on reef jags. He and Monica were about as polar opposite as two people can be, and I was somewhere in the middle, refereeing, making the chemistry work. That was my niche, that was my place.

  It wasn’t enough. Not anymore.

  I picked up one of the books Monica’d left on the sand, felt its shifty old spine squidge a little in my hand, read the title—Leviathan—and just enough old-timey speak in headache typeface to know it was not my jam. Drew kicked a pink nugget of beach glass into a tide pool, where it disturbed some delicate tiny creature, something that wriggled away from the ripples and would probably be dead by lunch.

  “She’s gonna fail history,” fretted Drew. “Irvine’s not gonna love that.”

  “Irvine’s not the be-all, end-all, man.”

  “Irvine’s got the BFA she wants.”

  “Irvine’s got a BFA,” I corrected, “for sure.”

  Drew got the drift.

  “Okay, okay,” he said, scratching his scalp three times fast, claws out, scritchscritchscritch, the way he did when he admitted an own goal. “I’ll relax. Nobody’s asking my opinion. I just…y’know.”

  “I know.”

  And I did. I knew Drew’s Risk board of alt-futures as well as Drew did, all the scenarios he’d drawn up for us. How he’d get the full ride at UCSD, how Monica’d teach surf camp for work-study at Irvine, how I’d intern at the Scripps Research Institute and become the next E. O. Wilson. And we’d all spend our weekends at BoB. Like always. Perfect.

  A little too perfect, maybe, a little too romantic, and even Drew knew that, but still: how beautiful was this thing we had, the three of us?