IGNORE ALIEN ORDERS.
At the edge of the letters is a pair of bare, suntanned feet, facing my black high-tops. I look up and see the obnoxiously beautiful girl from the ice cream shop, grinning at me.
“Hey, Betty!”
I frown. “My name isn’t Betty.”
“Oh, I’m pretty sure it’s Betty.”
I scowl. Then it hits me. I’m not sure if it’s relief or disappointment. “Did you leave that postcard in the screen door?”
“Well, I’m the one standing at Ignore Alien Orders at ten o’clock. Actually you’re a little bit late.”
She’s still smiling. She’s the kind of pretty that makes you feel like she’s making fun of you, just by looking at you and smiling. I’ve seen girls like her before, at every school I’ve been to. But never quite so much as this girl.
“I was just going to the grocery store,” I say.
“You didn’t come out to meet me?”
“No. I didn’t even know these words were here in the sidewalk.”
She frowns. “I was sure you’d have seen the words. You seem like the shoe-gazer type.”
“I’ve only been here for one day.”
“Oh. That explains why I didn’t meet you earlier.”
I look down at the words. “What does it mean?”
“It means ignore alien orders! Don’t listen to what the little green men say. Bossy little devils.”
“Did you write it?”
She shakes her head. “It’s been here since forever. According to the Big Kahuna. He lives right over there.” She points to a bungalow across the street. It’s aqua blue with a surfboard leaning against the wall on the front porch.
“Well, excuse me,” I say. “I have to get groceries.” I begin walking.
“I have to get groceries too!” She follows alongside. “But we should ride our skateboards.”
I stop, and turn to her. “Why are you doing this?”
Her smile disappears, and she looks maybe a little hurt. Like maybe there’s more to her than just being impossibly happy all the time.
“I thought we could be summer friends,” she says. “That’s how it’s supposed to work with visitors. You come to Ocean Park and get to see the sights, and I get to see you.”
I feel something strange, light. Like my stomach is smiling. But I furrow my brow. “I don’t have a skateboard.”
She smiles. “Then we’ll walk.”
I frown. “Why are you smiling?”
“Because we’re going to the grocery store! And because you look so cool made up like a punk-rock corpse doll.”
I’m almost certain she’s making fun of me, so I don’t say thank you. But maybe I smile a very little bit, just in case she meant it.
I start again down the sidewalk, and she walks beside me.
It’s strange having her next to me. Except for Fern I haven’t walked beside someone my age in forever. And Mom put an end to that. So I focus on the screen in my hand, looking at the line between here and there, looking up every few seconds at what we pass.
“You don’t need the map app,” the girl says. “This neighborhood is home for me. I know where everything is.”
I look her up and down, like I’ve just noticed she’s wearing a bikini bottom and a strange swimsuit top that has short sleeves. And nothing else.
“Are they gonna let you in the store like that?”
She makes a screwy face, like my question is absurd. “Of course,” she says. “This is Dogtown.”
I have no idea what this means, as I studied the map carefully before we came, looking for potential hazards, and never saw Dogtown anywhere. And I’m pretty sure it’s not a good idea for me to be accompanying a girl who doesn’t even have a pocket to hold a key or a hundred-dollar bill.
In spite of this, we continue down Fourth Street, in and out of the shade of overhead trees.
“That’s where I live,” she says, pointing to a blue house with meticulous landscaping. “In that two-story thing that used to be the garage in back.”
We pass a school. It seems strange that there are schools here, that this place holds real lives and not just vacation lives.
The sidewalk is narrow and covered in places by mushy berries and strange nutty things that have fallen from the trees above. I’m glad that I’m the one wearing shoes and she’s the one who’s barefoot.
Birds chirp and sing, but no dogs bark. The houses are old and pretty, and very near the sidewalk. The yards are small.
“So, where do you come from?” she asks.
I preferred the sound of her bare feet on the sidewalk. “Just . . . back in the Midwest.” It’s probably not smart to tell barefoot, strangely cheerful girls your home address.
“What it’s like there?” she asks.
I sigh, at least inwardly. Small talk kills me. I’m not very big on big talk, either.
“Gross in summer. Cold in winter. Jack-o’-lanterns in fall. Bees in spring.”
“That’s like a poem,” she says.
I shiver. I think I might possibly have metrophobia. That’s the fear of poems.
“Left here on Rose,” she says. We turn down the street, which has less shade, and small businesses like a yoga studio and a Mexican restaurant. “Anyway,” she continues, “it’s pretty nice here all the time. It rains some in winter. There’s May Gray and June Gloom. It’s warmest in September and October when the Santa Ana winds come from the desert, like summer is draining into the ocean.”
I shiver again, ’cause that sounded even more like a poem.
“July might be the perfect month. The days are long and the sun is warm, so you can always dry off after surfing or boogie boarding. The temperatures stay in the sixties and seventies all month long.”
Next she’ll probably give me a surf report.
“You don’t have many glassy days in July, but the waves can be pretty consistently good. There won’t be much more than the occasional nug south of Santa Barbara for the next few days. If you want epic waves, you gotta get up early for dawn patrol.”
She stops and looks me up and down. “You surf?”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“No waves on the Great Lakes?”
“Not for me.”
“Well. Then I’ll teach you.”
Now I smile, because that’s definitely not going to happen.
“What are the boys like in the Midwest?”
I shrug. “They’re okay. Probably not as cute as the surfer boys here.”
“The surfer boys are nice to look at,” she says. “And to talk shredding with.” She quickly bends to pick up a big, shiny leaf, which she hands to me. “But I kinda have a weakness for the nerdy boys who hang out at the library.”
I hold the stem of the leaf, twirling it as we walk.
We come upon a section of sidewalk covered in broken green glass.
“Litterbugs!” she exclaims. “Usually the sidewalks are all tidy except for the fruit that keeps falling. Which explains my bare feet.”
Cars roll by on Rose. The girl looks around.
“I’ve got an idea!” she says. “I’ll hitch a ride on your kicks!”