f o u r t e e n
Lola’s class finished close to lunchtime – I did go back home, wondering what Mikaela would be doing but when I climbed the stairs to our floor she was in Ruth and Emile’s apartment and Emile was cooking her a vegetarian steak. I managed to dodge that bullet even though Mikaela’s eyes were silently pleading but I’m not the best lunch guest and I didn’t want to be home, so I just went back to Dexter’s apartment. Lola was taking an afternoon nap, sprawled on Dexter’s bed in a shirt and her underwear. Dexter was smoking a cigarette like a movie star on the balcony so I joined him. Later Lola woke up and went off to a friend’s place. After a dinner of whipped cream sandwiches and beer, Dexter and I got bored in the apartment. Now we’re standing on Levare Avenue, which faces the beach. I’m looking towards the beach, with him beside me. I wonder what he can see.
It’s high tide. I read about tides once. Usually I don’t like it, this science stuff, but tides are cool. Apparently the moon has a gravitational field because of its mass – and yes, I knew that because I’m not that dumb – but get this – tides are basically because the water on the Earth get attracted to the Moon, because of the field and all, and it sort of rises up and tries to reach the Moon. But it can’t. The force isn’t strong enough. It never is. So the water just flops back to the Earth, crashes onto the shore. And that’s why we have waves and stuff.
It’s a little sad, I think. Maybe if we brought the moon closer somehow, all the water would just be sucked off the face of the Earth and stick to the Moon. And there’d be these huge craters on Earth with fish flopping around and all the garbage and shit in the ocean and the whales would be beached everywhere and we wouldn’t be able to save them because the world would have lost its water. And when future generations will read Moby Dick they’d call it a book about an extinct species that used to live in the sea and kids would say, “The Sea? What’s that?” and the world would change forever and Moby Dick will never be the same and I guess Herman Melville will be very sad.
“What are you thinking?” Dexter asks.
“Moby Dick,” I tell him.
“Sperm whales.”
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t know there are sperm whales around here.”
“I don’t think there are.”
He’s silent for a moment. Behind us a group of young ones speed by on their Harleys, jacked up on alcohol because it’s still fun at that age, still a novelty. By tomorrow morning they’re gonna be sizzling flesh being scraped off the tarmac by tired policemen.
“It’s very dark, isn’t it?”
It’s around eleven. It is pretty dark. We’re standing in a puddle of yellow light under the streetlight, but ahead of us are only darkness, and the sound of the waves.
“Yeah, it is,” I say.
He takes my left hand, the one dangling near his right one. First I think that maybe he’s holding it for a purpose but no, he’s just holding on to it, with his fingers tangled with mine. I think it’s the first time I’m touching him properly.
“Do you mind?”
His voice is low.
“No.”
I hold tighter because his grip is like an exhale.
Warm. Almost relieving.
I take a step off the paving, onto the soft sand of the beach. Dexter follows. We kick off our shoes, not letting go of each other. We leave them there, and walk forward again. Not many people are on the beach. In the distance I can see a couple that has erected a makeshift umbrella-shelter to protect them from public view and are cuddling behind it. The locals are pretty conservative so I guess that makes sense. Maybe they have a forbidden romance or something. Maybe years from now they’ll tell their kids about they had to carry out their courtship under a paisley-patterned umbrella late at night.
