Authors: Elana K. Arnold
What’s funny is that the whole town was built to be like the real Venice, in Italy. It was built by, like, this eccentric millionaire who wanted basically a playground for the rich. It was just a marshland with a pretty three-mile stretch of beach, but enough money can transform anything—at least for a while. The millionaire—his name was Kinney—he had the marshland transformed into a whole network of canals. He brought over actual Italians to give gondola rides. Later, people called Venice Beach the Disneyland of its day. No shit.
But people get tired of everything, and money is fickle and water that doesn’t move enough gets fetid and disgusting. Eventually all but three of the canals were filled in, and the whole town turned into a slum.
Marissa is waiting for me in front of the Shack. She has a cigarette tucked between her lips and pulls on it in short, hard bursts, yanking it from her mouth in between each one. Marissa has a love/hate relationship with all her addictions.
“Finally. Fucking around in that storage room again?”
I don’t bother answering this. Marissa knows where I’ve been. “Long night with Sal?”
“Sal can suck it for all I care.”
Good to know where they are in their endless breakup-hookup cycle. I don’t need any details.
She gives them to me anyway. “I thought it was going to be just us, you know? Like, for a change? But as soon as we finished fucking”—she emphasizes the word for the benefit of a tourist couple walking by. Melissa takes the obligation to be the local color seriously—“his boy Blake called and cruised over. They spent the rest of the night screwing around on their phones, uploading pictures of each other and calling each other faggot.”
“Good times,” I say, only half listening. I am hungry. “Is Kayla around?”
Marissa grinds out her cigarette. “Uh-huh. She should be going on break soon.”
We wait around for Lolly’s boss to exit the building. Marissa keeps herself entertained by rating the guys that cruise by. She has her own rating scale: each guy is assigned a letter of the alphabet. But it isn’t
A
to
Z
order—Marissa must have like a touch of autism or something, because she has this theory that some letters are sexier than others.
X
, she says, is the sexiest.
F
s are pretty hot, and so are
R
s and
J
s and
D
s. If a guy is good looking but clearly not to be trusted, he gets an
S
. Preppy clean-cut types get
A
s and
B
s. Bottom-of-the-barrel types are assigned
P
or
L
, depending on her mood.
“That guy’s a full-on
V
,” she tells me with a lift of her chin. I follow the trajectory of her gaze and settle on the guy she must mean: he’s one of those retro types you see every now and then, with the rolled-up jeans and tucked-in white tees. Pomade in the hair. Tats of brightly colored songbirds.
He must feel our eyes on him because he looks back over his shoulder and smiles. Neither of us smiles back, but Marissa blows a puff of smoke in his direction before grinding out her cigarette. He shrugs, like,
your loss
, and laces his way through a group of the red-eyed stoner kids that cycle through Venice every summer. Last year they had a grungy terrier they took turns pulling around on a rope; this summer the dog is gone.
Finally, Kayla the Bitch pushes through the Smoothie Shack’s glass doors, shaking a cigarette from the pack she keeps stashed in her apron pocket. She lights it quickly and slides the lighter back into her pocket, pulling out a phone and narrowing her eyes to its tiny screen as she crosses the boardwalk without looking up once. People shift their trajectories around her. She is like that—not beautiful, but everyone knows to stay the fuck out of her way.
We wait until her head disappears into the crowd on the vast, under-watered lawn just on the other side of the boardwalk before we duck into the Smoothie Shack. Lolly is behind the counter, her cute bleached-blonde braids bobbing to the music as she works the cash register and the blenders, dodging back and forth between stations.
“Hey, girls,” she calls. “The usual?”
“Thanks,” we answer. The people waiting for their smoothies look distinctly annoyed that our order has been triaged to the front of the line.
It only takes a minute for Lolly to make Marissa’s Passion Fruit and Guava and a minute more for my Berry Blended. She’s like a machine behind that counter, reaching for things without even looking first.
It’s weird how happy she looks. I mean, it’s a shit job—blending up overpriced juice drinks, making in an hour what the total of a single order adds up to. But it doesn’t seem to bother her. She likes it—customer service, retail employment. And everyone in there likes her—even as she hands us our drinks before serving the other people who’ve waited longer, they can’t seem to help but smile back at her. A couple even shove dollar tips into the jar on the counter.
“Hey,” says Marissa, “text us when you’re out of here. We’ll meet you.”
“Can’t,” says Lolly. “I’m working the late shift over at Stan’s.”
Everyone at Stan’s Barbecue knows Lolly isn’t twenty-one, and technically she’s a hostess. But hostesses make shit for tips, so Stan makes an exception for Lolly. She is cute, which never hurts; she’s a hard worker, and she never calls in sick. So he just looks the other way when she pops the tops off beers for the patrons and (very occasionally) sneaks a couple of paper-cup margaritas out the back door for me and Marissa.
We wave good-bye to Lolly, elbow-deep in fruit detritus, and swing out of the Smoothie Shack, avoiding eye contact with Kayla the Bitch as she pushes past us, oblivious to anything but her phone’s screen.
The day is shaping up to be nice. The June gloom has just about burned off, and it isn’t too crowded on the sand. Marissa and I wander over to the playground and sink into a couple of swings, sucking back our smoothies and enjoying the sun on our necks.
“So, you hear from Felix?”
The little hairs on my arms raise up. I am mid-sip and have to fight not to choke on the mouthful of berry slush that suddenly tastes like bile.
“No,” I lie. “I doubt he’ll call again.”
“Huh,” says Marissa, watching me out of the corner of her eye as she swings gently back and forth. “Wouldn’t have figured that.”
I don’t particularly want to lie to Marissa. I just don’t want to talk about Felix.
“Didja know his name means ‘lucky’?” Marissa asks.
“Oh, yeah?”
“Uh-huh. Latin, I think. You know, same root word as
feliz
.” She chucks her empty cup in the general direction of a trash can and starts swinging higher.
She is doing it on purpose. Baiting me. Rooting around, seeing if she can get a response. She doesn’t know what she’s looking for, but she knows me well enough to be pretty damn sure there’s something.
“What does
Sal
mean?”
“
Sal
means ‘asshole’!” Marissa yells from the very top of her swinging arc. Marissa never misses a beat.
A couple of middle-aged, I’ve-given-up-on-myself moms start giving us the stink eye, letting us know that the swings are
intended
for their slimy little offspring, not for foul-mouthed teenagers. My god, how they can even stand to live in their skins I will never understand. I mean, I know my mother is the exception, not the rule, but come
on
.
I can tell that Marissa isn’t about to give up her swing to the brats, but I stand up. “Come on,” I say. “Let’s go check out the waves.”
***
Not much is happening in the water. The sets are small, one to two feet; every now and then a wave comes in about thigh-high. The lines are mostly walled, nothing to ride.
That’s fine with me. I haven’t felt much like surfing lately.
I ditch my empty cup in a trash barrel near the biggest art wall. Today is Monday, so no one is painting. I glance over what was painted yesterday—mostly shit, in my opinion. The typical stuff—big letters, heavy shading.
I kind of hate the Venice Art Walls. I shouldn’t; I get the point of them—to give people a legal place to make their mark.
But the rules! Ugh.
The short list:
What exactly is “Restricted Content?” Basically anything they want it to be. Profanity, of course, and “gratuitous” violence, anything “too” sexy, anything about drugs or gangs or anything else they decide to deem “graphic” or “obscene.” No definitions on the website for the words
graphic
or
obscene
, of course. Nice and vague.
So it’s a forum for public art, as long as you play by the rules.
Bullshit.
Marissa knows better than to comment on anything she sees on one of the Venice Art Walls unless she wants to get an earful from me. But today she doesn’t seem to feel like yanking my chain; she looks preoccupied.
“Everything okay?” I ask.
“Mm-hmm,” she says and smiles at me. Takes my hand.
Her fingers feel warm and strong as they entwine with mine. Her hands aren’t stained and cut up; they are clean, her nails even, her skin soft. We walk up the beach a ways like that, swinging our hands comfortably between us.
Sometimes people think that Marissa and I are sisters. We’re the same height; facing each other, our foreheads, noses, mouths, and chins match up just so. I know this for a fact.
Her hair is wild like mine, waves and curls and twists, but she’s mastered the art of taming it. She’s a little more tightly packed than me; her breasts are smaller and tilted upwards; her thighs and butt and back are straight and hard from the years of ballet she did as a kid.
She would probably still be a dancer if it wasn’t for tearing her ACL. She’s healed from the surgery, and her knee works just fine now and even the scar isn’t too huge, but she developed the unfortunate habit of smoking her dad’s weed while she was recovering, and she just never got back to those dance classes. She still looks like a dancer, in the same way my mom still looks like a model. There’s something about being trained to stand in front of people, the way my mom and Marissa were. It colors everything. Whether they want to be or not, they have been trained to be looked at. They belong front and center.
(You know the term
Achilles’ heel
? Like, “He wanted to be a public speaker, but his stammer was his Achilles’ heel?” Maybe Marissa’s torn ACL is her Achilles’ heel. Sometimes I wonder if I’m my mother’s.)
I used to hassle Marissa about it, urging her to go back to ballet, but finally she said, “Look, Seph, if it were really important to me, I’d dance. Okay? So shut the fuck up.”
So I shut the fuck up. But I notice how she rises up on the balls of her feet while she’s peering out at the waves: the triangular line of her calf, her toes turned out, and the straight, smart line of her back.
I ask, “You gonna go back to Sal’s later?”
Marissa shrugs.
“I don’t know why you spend so much time with him.”
Her mouth hardens a little, and she smiles, but not in a nice way. “I guess we don’t all have
art
, Seph.”
I don’t know what to say to this. She seems pissed, but I don’t know what about. Her moods sometimes swing too quickly for me to keep up with. Sometimes I want to sculpt her and all her moods—her face, sure, but touched all over with colors, textures. Patterns and shadows and swirls.
It could be whatever went down with Sal or it could be something with her dad or maybe she really is pissed that I’ve been spending so much time in my studio. I want to ask, but I don’t think I’m ready for a big, complicated discussion. The weight of her emotions pulls like an undertow, and honestly, I don’t know if I am a strong enough swimmer right now.
Instead of asking, I squeeze her hand. It is code. When one of us squeezes the other’s hand, it means
I love you.
It means
I am here.
At first her fingers rest just the same against mine. But then she squeezes back.
I let out a breath I didn’t mean to hold.
But she isn’t going to let me off the hook that easy. “You’ve been kind of weird, Seph,” she says. “For a while now. Is there something you want to tell me? About Felix, maybe?”
There is nothing I wanted to tell Marissa about Felix. I shake my head.
She tries again. “He didn’t make you … do anything, did he? Anything you didn’t want to do?”
I remember everything.
“No,” I say. “Nothing. Nothing I didn’t want.”
Four
At eight o’clock my mother knocks on the door to my studio. I don’t hear her at first. My earbuds are in, and I am close to getting something right. I’ve got a desk lamp set up, and I’m working in front of it with this stuff that’s basically Play-Doh, but I made it upstairs in the kitchen, out of flour and cream of tartar and red food coloring. And I’m bending and stretching the lump of it in front of the light, fascinated by the shadow it casts on the concrete wall, its silhouetted fingertips elongated—clutching, spreading, grasping—this hunk of innocuous goo made horrible in the shadow it throws.