“I don’t think so.”
“Anyone can play tambourine. You just hit it on your hand.”
“Yeah, well. I don’t want to be anyone.”
She shakes her head. “That isn’t what I meant.”
We’re quiet for so long. I can hear a song playing in my headphones, distorted and far away. It feels forever ago, that Dad and Pete were standing there waving, and I was pulling onto the road, confident in what was happening next. And now this trip is the beginning of nothing. We’re not going to the Archipelago or the Hilton in Amsterdam where John Lennon and Yoko Ono stayed in bed for a week to promote peace. We aren’t going to spend days in Paris, drinking coffee with my mom, or see the actual paintings that we’ve spent years studying in books.
“Why?” I ask her. “Why did you pretend that we were going to do this?”
She stays quiet, just like she did at the gas station.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I say. “Bev. You really aren’t going to answer me?”
She looks down into the water. “I’m sorry,” she whispers.
“Well, thanks,” I say.
“Please come with us,” she says. “I need you to come.”
She reaches for my hand. I don’t jerk away like last time, but I don’t hold hers back, either.
“I’ll only come if you explain it to me.”
“Okay,” she says. “I will.”
I wait.
“I can’t do it now,” she says. “But I’ll do it.”
“Before we get back home,” I say.
“All right.”
“It’s the only way,” I say.
“Okay,” she says.
We stand in the water for a few minutes longer, not saying anything, not looking at each another.
“Colby,” she finally says, “you have to find something to love.”
I don’t know how she can say that. I shake my head. Look away.
“Something else,” she says, quietly.
I turn to her but she’s looking at something far away.
So she knows.
Our school didn’t want us to get too comfortable in the areas of art we chose, so we had to take at least one class outside of our focus every semester. Our junior year, Bev and I took theater. All the drama kids wanted to act, so Bev got to be the director. I stood on the stage with the others, and Bev stood in front of us, her clipboard under her arm, looking at us as if we were her tiny sculptures, perfect objects she could pick up and place wherever she wanted.
Bev got to select the play she was going to direct. With the help of the drama teacher, this guy named Drew who was so busy being a rising star of the San Francisco theater community that he got all his sleeping done during rehearsals, she chose a contemporary farce called Melancholy Play. I played a therapist named Lorenzo who is in love with his patient, Tilly, who was played by Meg. Lorenzo is supposed to have an Italian accent and feel nothing but happiness until he falls in love with Tilly, which happens very suddenly and for no reason except for the fact that Tilly is sad and does strange things, like open his office window during their therapy session and put her hand out to feel the rain. Like I said, the play’s a farce, so when Lorenzo falls in love and makes these grand statements, I was really going for it, gesturing wildly and accentuating the accent, and grabbing for Meg, who was dodging from chair to chair, trying hard not to laugh so she wouldn’t break character.
When we finished our second run-through of the scene, Bev stood up from her seat in the middle of the theater and leaned back on the armrest. She consulted her clipboard and scribbled a note.
“Okay, Colby,” she said. “You need to channel something.”
She left her perch on the edge of a chair and walked up onto the stage where I was standing. It was a journey: past the chairs to the aisle, from the aisle to the steps, up the steps to the stage, across the stage to me. She looked at my face and then up to the ceiling, searching for the cure to my bad acting.
“You shouldn’t be that funny,” she said. “The play should be funny, but Lorenzo doesn’t know that. Lorenzo’s serious. Lorenzo is in love. So imagine being in love and confessing it.”
She stepped to the edge of the stage.
I started: “Tilly—my mother abandoned me at a sweetshop.”
That part was easy to say convincingly; the rest would be harder. The problem was that while I knew how it felt to be in love, I knew even better how it felt to hide it. Because Bev and I were best friends and that’s the way it had always been. Because every day at our school people broke up and cheated on each other and hooked up at parties and pretended not to remember anything about it the next day. Because I feared the unraveling of everything that we had become to one another from the time we were nine years old.
“Why are you telling me this?” It was Tilly’s line, but as Meg spoke I found myself looking at Bev. Her blond hair falling over her left shoulder, stopping at the curve of one of her perfect small breasts. She waited for me to continue.
I said, “Because—the heavens have cracked open—I suddenly want to tell you everything.”
The next line caught in my throat, but I turned to Meg, who was feigning Tilly’s alarm but rooting for me with her focused brown eyes, and forced it out, quieter this time, without the armor of overacting.
“I think I’m in love with you, Tilly. They say that’s what happens when you fall in love. You want to tell people things. You especially want to tell them sad things. Hidden sad things from the past. Something like: I was abandoned at a sweetshop in an unspecified European country. Tilly.”
I had always found that last part strange. Her name: not a question but a statement. A one-word sentence. But when I said it right then, it made sense. Not, Tilly? As in, Do you love me, too? But, Tilly. As in, Your name is all I that can manage to say.
Meg pranced across the stage to hug me, and I tried to recover from the feeling that I had just confessed my love for my best friend on the stage of our school theater with the drama teacher napping in the front row and the entire cast and crew watching from the seats.
There was a moment of silence when I thought for sure the world was ending.
Then Bev said, “That’s great. That was so much better.”
And we ran the scene again, from the beginning until the end.
Meg drives.
I sit by myself in the back bench seat and stare out the window. A piece of tape unsticks from the side of one of Meg’s boxes. I push it back down, use her bass case as a pillow, and try to fall asleep. When I close my eyes I picture Bev’s small blue-walled room emptied of all of her stuff. Then I see mine, full of everything but her.
The bus is quiet for a long time, and then Meg’s playlist resumes, and after a while, they start to talk. I hear pages turning and Bev reading, “Voice and movement. Playwriting. Method acting.”
Meg says, “How will I choose!”
“Take playwriting,” Bev says. “I’m taking it first semester. Let’s write plays and produce them over the summer. We can cast each other.”
“Only if you direct me again,” Meg says. “You’re the best director I’ve ever worked with.”
I don’t want to hear Bev talking about this, getting so excited over the things that I thought neither of us were that into. So I sit up, assuming that they’ll move on to other topics of conversation if they don’t think that I’m sleeping.
I see Bev catch my reflection in the rearview mirror and she slips the catalog off her lap. For a while they talk about nothing, and then Meg stops talking altogether and focuses on the road.
Which is a good thing, because the drive gets a little perilous. The Northern California coast has to be the most amazing place I’ve ever seen but it’s also terrifying. One moment, I’m thinking Oh my god: the cliffs, the ocean, the wildflowers, the hills—nothing could be better than this. And then the next, I’m wondering why there isn’t a rail on the side of the road, realizing that if Meg steered us a little too zealously around a curve,
we would be plunging over the cliff, into the ocean, and that would be the end of all of us. I close my eyes and almost feel it: the denial and then the dread, falling away from the future I had every intention of reaching.
Eventually, the earth evens out, the road widens. We drive past Mendocino, a perfect postcard town overlooking the ocean, everything neat and colorful. And then, all of a sudden, the trees disappear, everything turns gray, and a sign welcomes us to Fort Bragg.
“Whoa,” Meg says. “What happened?”
Alexa says, “Maybe we’re just in the outskirts or something. I’m sure it will get better.”
Bev’s staring out the window, but in that spaced-out way that means she isn’t really looking at anything.
Maybe she’s changing her mind.
Alexa directs Meg off the main road, past a tattoo parlor and a few bars and an unfortunate number of boarded-up buildings. At the end of a block, we spot the red Bianchi Motel sign rising over the roofs of the surrounding stores and houses.
“This is kind of weird,” she says, “but we don’t actually check in at the motel. We check in at the store across the street.”
We get out of the bus. Across the street is another red sign: Bianchi Market. Next to the motel is the Bianchi Laundromat. All three of the Bianchi’s businesses look a little rough. Bars on windows, peeling paint. Instead of flashing on and off, the neon vacancy sign above the motel winces and sparks.
Alexa frowns. “It looked okay on the website.”
“We didn’t expect luxury,” I say. “This’ll be fine.”
“Yeah,” Bev says. “It’s just a place to crash, right?”
Alexa nods, like she’s trying to convince herself. “And it’s close to the venue, The Basement. It’s just a few blocks away.”
We walk single-file into the market. An R & B song from before we were born crackles through boom-box speakers. Everything is coated in dust. An older woman with faded tattoos laughs loudly with a customer. Her name tag says Peggy, and I wonder if she’s a Bianchi.
Alexa strolls past Peggy, over to a girl at the far end of the counter.
“You checking in?” the girl asks, and Alexa says yes.
We crowd around the counter as the girl goes over the rules. She’s probably our age, maybe a year or two older, but it’s hard to tell because she looks nothing like us. She’s wearing baggy jeans and thick black eyeliner and her hair is pulled back into a ponytail so tight it must be painful.
She sets a laminated paper on the counter for us to read.
NO SMOKING (THIS INCLUDES MARIJUANA!)
NO GUESTS
NO LOUD MUSIC AFTER 10 P.M.
NO SHOUTING OR YELLING
THIS IS A FAMILY PLACE. IF YOU DISOBEY THE RULES WE WILL CALL THE POLICE!!!
“Okay,” Meg says, clearly offended. “Got it.” She turns to the rest of us. “We should unpack our stuff and then go somewhere.”
Alexa checks her watch. “We only have until eight before we have to check in for the show.”
“That leaves some time, though,” I say. “We should do something.”
Even though Fort Bragg doesn’t seem to be the most vibrant town, I don’t want to go sit around the motel room, trying to avoid eye contact with Bev. And this is our trip, the first trip any of us have ever taken on our own, with our own money and our own schedule to follow and our own decisions to make.
“So what is there to do around here?” Bev asks.
The girl shrugs. “J.T.’s doesn’t card. Or there’s Glass Beach.”
She looks around, sees the older woman still engrossed in her conversation, and says, “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but I wouldn’t unpack if I were you. Your stuff’s definitely safer in the car.”
Meg raises her eyebrows.
“Okay,” she says. “Well, thanks for letting us know.”
We turn to leave and then I remember the photo plan from this morning, when we were crossing the bridge and my future was still something recognizable. I stop halfway down an aisle—in front of a few dusty flashlights and a camouflage-print umbrella—and say, “Hey, we’re supposed to get a picture of her.”
Alexa looks back at the girl, then shakes her head. The bells on her headband chime and she smiles a tight, nervous smile that means she wants to leave.
“I don’t know if she likes us,” she whispers.
Meg adds, “That list was kind of rude.”
“It wasn’t her list,” I say. “And sure she liked us. She warned us about the room.”
Bev has the camera around her arm, so Meg and Alexa look at her for the final decision.
“We’re taking photos of everyone, right?” I say.
She’s studying the girl, the surroundings, as if she’s imagining the way the photograph might turn out.
“Let’s go,” she finally says, and with this decision, abandons another good plan.
We drive by J.T.’s first. It’s on a side road and so shabby I would assume it was condemned if we hadn’t just been told to go there.
“That man has bad vibes,” Alexa says about a guy leaning up against the door. He sees us checking out the bar and sneers.
“Glass Beach, then,” I say, and everyone nods their assent.
So we drive a few blocks down the main road and turn where a small sign tells us to turn, and park the car and walk toward the water, Bev’s camera over her shoulder. Tall grasses and flowers grow through a barbed-wire fence on one side of the trail, and when the fence ends, the path opens to a rocky area above the water. We look over the edge. Not far below us, groups of people are spread out by the water, but instead of lying on towels and sitting in beach chairs, everyone is digging in the sand.
“What’s going on?” Meg asks. “This is weird.”
We hike down to find out. Once we’re with the rest of the people, we discover that the sand isn’t only sand. Instead, we stand on millions of smooth, small pieces of beach glass.
Alexa scoops a handful and holds the glass in her palm for us to see—brown, green, blue, and white.
“This is amazing. The pieces are everywhere.”
“Yeah,” Meg says. “But that’s not what everyone’s looking for.”
All around us, people are pushing the beach glass aside, searching for something buried deeper.
“I’ll find out,” Meg says, and takes a few steps over to where a little boy is hunched beside a rock with a red shovel.
“What is everyone digging for?” she asks him.
“Junk,” the kid says without looking up.
“Junk,” Meg tells us, as if this illuminates something.
Meanwhile, a short distance away, Alexa has started digging. Meg asks Bev to use the camera, and Bev takes it off of her shoulder, hands it over, and leaves to walk along the edge of the water, picking up pieces of driftwood. Soon she comes back toward me with her arms full.
“Can I have the keys?” she asks.
I hand them to her, and when she grabs them some wood falls out of her arms. I ignore her for a little while, but it takes too much effort to stare out at the water as if I don’t notice her picking up and dropping the wood, so I stop faking aloofness and take some wood out of her arms. We start up the path to the van together.
“This is perfect for carving,” she says.
Bev takes things from real life and makes them small. Three-inch-tall people, centimeter-long books, every detail precise and perfect. Her senior project was the whole school: every student, every teacher, every classroom. People were touched. For weeks they crowded around the display in the library, because there they were. Even if they had never even spoken to Bev, never even had a class with her, they were there somewhere, standing or sitting in their usual spots, looking like themselves in their signature glasses or boots, some small detail that made them recognizable. Our high school was different than other schools—no football team, no cheerleaders—but like any place there were kids who were noticed and kids who weren’t. Bev was definitely noticed. A
nd then, there was her project, sitting in the library, saying, Yes, I notice you, too.
As we walk up to the car Bev tries to talk to me as if everything’s fine. She tells me that driftwood is great for the bigger pieces because it’s so soft and because it’s gray, a color that works well for walls and floors.
“If I’d had this to make the theater out of, it would have been so much better,” she says. “I wouldn’t have made that gash in the side from digging too hard.”
In Bev’s version of the school’s theater, Alexa and Meg and a few other people were onstage, holding scripts. I was across campus in the drawing studio, standing at an easel. Bev was two classrooms away, working on a miniature version of her miniature campus.
I unlock the passenger door and we let the wood tumble out of our arms and onto the seat. Bev picks up a piece I was carrying.
“I’m gonna use this one to carve the bus,” she says.
She looks at me.
She waits. Probably to see if I’m going to talk about this with her. If I’m going to pretend that things are okay. But I don’t know how I can have a conversation with her about anything until I know why she lied to me for so many months.
“Do you want to tell me now?” I ask.
She shakes her head. No. We turn back to the water.
Meg runs up to greet us when we get back to the beach.
“We’re finding it!” she tells us.
“Finding what?” I ask.
“The junk,” she says. “It’s everywhere. Come look at my stash. Here’s your camera back. I got some good shots.”
She leads us down the beach and shows us what she’s dug up: a plastic green army man, a doorknob, a rubber boot.
“Alexa’s thing is the best,” Meg says. “Show them.”
Alexa beams, holds up a harmonica.
“Isn’t this amazing?” she says. “Someone used to make music with this. How did it get here?”
I take the harmonica from Alexa’s hand. All of the little openings for air are filled with mud and sand.
“Do you think it’ll work?” I ask.
Alexa nods. “I’ll clean it out,” she says.
When I hand it back to her, she cups it in her hands like it’s something precious.