Almost V

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I've always disliked the beach, but as I find a place to park near the north end of the boardwalk and spread my sunscreen on my legs and arms created for babies, the frail, and the elderly, I'm feeling slightly less hateful at the group of bouncy string bikinis and tropical-patterned shorts walking past me, laughing and singing as they head to the beach. There's not a soul here that I need to impress. No one to worry about accidentally bumping into. Coming out to another country is my do-over. A clean slate.

That was one reason I wanted to move out here. It wasn't just missing appa, or Eomma and Minho LLC fighting, or even the prospect of meeting V. In a strange way, the reason I don't know much about V, and vice versa, was one of my main motivations for moving.

Eomma's a divorce lawyer. (The irony.) Four years ago, when I was fifteen, Eomma took a case that ended up giving the wife custody of the couple's daughter, a girl about my age. Turned out the abandoned husband had a leak in the brain pipe. Hyungjoon Jung, out for revenge against Eomma, found our address online. This was back when my parents were still together. There was . . . an incident.

He was put in prison for a long time.

Anyway. It's a relief to have an entire ocean between me and old Hyungjoon.

So that's why our family doesn't do "public" online. No real names. No photos. No job locations. No breezy status updates with geotags or post with time stamps like, Omo, Kimberly! I'm sitting at my favorite store on Main Street, and there's a girl wearing the cutest dress! Because that's how messed-up people track you down and do bad things to you and people you care about.

I try not to be paranoid and let it ruin my life. And not everybody who wants to track somebody down is a sicko. Take, for example, what I'm doing now, looking for V. I'm no Hyungjoon Jung. The difference is intent. The difference is that Hyungjoon wanted to hurt us, and all I want to do is make sure that V is an actual human being my age, preferably of the male persuasion, and not some creep who's trying to harvest my eyeballs for weird evil science experiments. That's not stalking, it's scoping. It's protection for both of us, really - me and V. If we're meant to be, and he's the person I imagine him to be, then things will all work out fine. He'll be wonderful, and by the end of summer, we'll be crazy in love, watching Gucci: limited edition showcase at the fashion festival on the beach, and I'll have my hands all over him. Which is what I spend a lot of my free time imagining myself doing to his virtual body, the lucky boy.

However, if my scoping turns up some bad intel and this relationship looks like it might have no spark? Then I'll just disappear into the shadows, and nobody gets hurt.

See? I'm looking out for the both of us.

Shoulders loose, I slip on a pair of dark sunglasses and fall a step behind a group of beach people, using them as a shield until we hit the boardwalk, where they head straight to the beach and I go left.

The boardwalk area is just under half a mile long. The center seafront spills out onto a wide pedestrian pier, which is anchored by a Ferris Wheel at its base and capped by a wire that ferries couples in aerial airlifts to the cliffs above. And all of that is surrounded in midway games, looping roller coasters, hotels, restaurants, and bars. It's half this: laid-back California vibe, skaters, sidewalk art, comic book shops, organic tea, seagulls. And half this: bad 20th century music blasting through speakers, bells ringing, kids crying, cheap T-shirt shops, overflowing trashcans.

Whatever my feelings about what this place is, I suspect it isn't going to be easy to find V. Those suspicions only grow stronger when I move away from the Midway area and hit a stretch of retail shops near the seafront (maybe here?) and realize the scent that's been driving me crazy since yesterday isn't IHOP, it's freshly fried dough. And that's because there's an official Monterey boardwalk churro cart every twenty or thirty feet down the seafront. Churros are like long Mexican doughnut sticks that have been fried and dipped in cinnamon or, as the sign tells me, strawberry sugar. They smell like heavenly. I've never had a real churro, but halfway down the seafront, I make a decision to give up on everything: finding V, finding another job, the meaning of life. Just give me that sweet fried dough.