“Whatever.”
“Hey, hey,” Pothan said. “He didn’t want her to get attached. That’s fine, dude. You should’ve done the same thing with Laila.”
Even in the dim light, I saw Ken’s ears turn red. This sophomore girl Laila had stopped responding to Ken’s texts, and Pothan kept harping on it. Pothan was like a wolf—he’d find your weak point and attack it, again and again, until you showed your belly.
“Dude,” I said. “Lay off about that.”
“Look,” Ken said, “Laila was crazy.”
“Crazy for your dick, until you effed it up.”
My phone flashed. Dave had texted: his shift was ending. I wrote that I was in the car with Pothan and Ken, watching them try to psychologically dominate each other. It’d be fascinating to create a video game that modeled how guys spend their time testing out weak points, pushing and pulling and slapping and wrestling, to see who’s in charge and who isn’t. Normally Pothan was on top, but Ken had been trying him lately. I was a year younger and usually wasn’t part of the contest, but my trying to get Pothan to stop making fun of Ken had put Ken in competition with me—when you protect someone, you’re sort of saying you’re better than them—so he started in on Avani again.
“You were scared,” Ken said. “You were like a dude who’s harpooned a whale. You want to reel her in, but you can’t.”
I said, “The whale’s your mom, right?”
Pothan whooped, and I popped the door, saying I needed to piss.
I staggered off into the dunes, with Pothan and Ken running and shouting behind me. I found a cactus and pissed facing them, because they’d been known to try to hit me with their spray.
Avani’s immense gray SUV bounced over the curb and lurched into the parking lot. The car stopped at the far corner, and an unearthly blue lit up the interior. All three girls in the car were hunched over their phones.
Fierce winds blew off the sea, and as families streamed away from the boardwalk, I saw, here and there, groups of kids moving purposefully toward the beach. When night fell, the real fun started.
I wiped my hands on my jeans, and I watched Avani’s car, thinking about those three girls—she always came with her friends Carrie and Jessie—sitting in its cool black interior, and my heart lurched. Maybe Pothan was right. Maybe I was hung up on Avani, but the thought of her didn’t make me angry or ashamed or sad. Instead, whenever she showed up, I became purely, immensely happy.
My phone lit with a text.
Avani: We’re here. Where are you guys?
Abandoning Ken and Pothan, I walked toward her car.
The door slid open, and Jessie shouted, “Nandan! Thank God!”
Avani’s voice: “I told you he was here.”
Jessie gave me an awkward one-armed hug. The moment I was in, I pulled the door closed, sealing myself inside. Jessie’s dirty-blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she was in a puffy vest and hiking boots and jeans. I flashed her a smile.
“Hey,” I said. “What’s up?”
“So are the guys really here?”
“Yeah, sorry about the lake house, by the way.”
I instantly knew that mentioning it had been a mistake. I’d suggested a dozen times that Avani invite us to the lake house, and now she’d done it and we hadn’t come. Avani ignored my apology.
“Where are they?” she said.
Avani was a shadowy figure in the driver’s seat. Her keys hung around her wrist, attached to a bracelet, and her eyes, despite the setting sun, were veiled by sunglasses.
“Uhh, they’re peeing in the dunes.”
“Why?” Carrie said. “Aren’t there bathrooms?”
I paused for a second. “Actually there are. That’s a really good question.”
“That’s gross,” Jessie said. “Why do those guys do that? Pee on the dunes for no reason? Isn’t that bad for the environment?”
“Yessssss,” I said. “These are great questions.”
“Please,” Avani said. “Nandan’s probably peed out there a hundred times. He’s no different from the rest. You are way too easy on him, Jess.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I said. “Too mean.”
Ever since we had stopped hooking up, Avani had taken to lashing out in this same way, always implying I was just as shallow and immature as all the other guys.
I didn’t get it, but I also didn’t hate it. All my life people had been like, Oh, Nandan, you’re different. You’re deeper. You’re more sensitive. Now at least one person was saying the opposite, and it felt nice. Maybe that showed just how much I had changed in the past year.
Carrie turned around in her seat. “What’s up, dude?”
She was a tiny brown-skinned Vietnamese girl with bobbed hair and a fierce attitude. Right now she wore slacks and black boots and a wool halter-top deal underneath a huge windbreaker.
Avani, on the other hand, had long, wild black hair and seemed to have dressed according to a completely different color scheme: she was in white pants, a yellow T-shirt, and a tan leather jacket—all accentuated by the many-colored bracelets on her right wrist.
Avani hopped out and opened the trunk. As I joined her around back, she said: “What’s going on? What are we doing?”
“Here’s the thing.” I put two hands together as if I were praying. “I don’t know that there’s a very well-formulated plan.”
“God.”
One school really shouldn’t hold both an Avani and a Pothan. It creates conflict. She was grabbing blankets and chairs—all the little stuff that guys forget—and meanwhile Pothan rolled up and, assessing the situation in a split second, leaned on Jessie, asking her what was going on, distracting her from Avani’s orders. They fought a tug-of-war—Avani gave commands; Pothan ignored or laughed at them—and I came up next to Avani, giving her a conspiratorial smile.
“Hey,” I said. “Let me take something.”
“Great.”
She dropped a duffel bag into my arms and told me to find a spot on the beach and turned without checking to see if I’d heard. She gave a nod to Carrie, and some silent communication passed between them. Carrie walked off a little ways and made a call. I imagined the two of them as CIA agents, supervising the cleanup from some covert operation, and a weak smile hit my lips.
Avani had enveloped me in silence. So long as I held her duffel, I wasn’t a part of this group—in their minds I was already gone—and none of the girls paid any attention to me.
Pothan told me to drop that shit and come with him to buy more beer.
“No, I’ll, uhh, I’ll do this.”
“Seriously, dude. What is wrong with you? It’s over.”
I carried the duffel bag to the other side of the rocks, where the waves, now in low tide, had left behind hundreds of yards of mucky-soft sands. I opened the duffel, got out the blankets, and laid them on a dry patch of sand, next to a firepit. In the distance, about a hundred yards away, another group of kids was clustered around a bonfire. Up on the cliffs, silent cars pulsed through the curves of Highway 1.
I texted Avani, saying I’d found a good spot. Then I saw a message from Dave.