Almost V

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Whatever he was going to say, he seems to think better of it and clams up. I wonder if it had to with all the drunken smack talk Rm was saying at the bonfire. About that girl they mentioned outside Deja Vu, Jennie.

"Anyway, I'm sorry about all that," he says. "I'll go talk to him tomorrow when he's sobered up. No use seeing him tonight. It'll just turn into a fistfight. Always does. And who knows, maybe he got arrested this time. Might do him some good."

I don't know what to say to that. I can't imagine having a best friend you hate. That's messed up.

"It smells like you in here," I say after a long moment.

"It does?" The steering wheel on his van is large. I just noticed. Also, the seat is giant thing that goes across the whole front of the van. And they're tiny stickers of sea creatures.

"Lavender," I say. "You always smell like lavender." Then, because it's dark in the van, and because I'm wiped out from the panic and my guard is down, I add, "You always smell good."

"Sex Wax."

"What?" I sit up straighter. 

He reaches down to the floorboard and tosses what looks like a plastic-wrapped bar of soap. I hold it up to the window to see the label in the streetlight. "Mr. Boyd's Sex Wax," I read.

"You rub it on the deck of your board," he explains. "For traction. You know, so you don't fall off while surfing." I sniff it. That's the smell, all right.

"I bet your feet smells heavenly."

"You don't have a foot fetish thing, do you?" his asks playfully.

"I didn't before, but now? Who knows."

The tires of the van off the road onto the gravelly shoulder, and he cuts the wheel sharply to steer back onto the pavement. "Oops."

We chuckle, both embarrassed.

I toss the wax onto the floorboard. "Well, another mystery solved."

"Not a big one. Let's get back to yours." He turns down a small road on the edge of town. This must be the way Anna suggested. "I remember you mentioning something about not liking movies with guns in them when you were with Mark in the video store."

Ugh. This again. I hug myself and look out the window, but there's nothing but houses and it's dark outside. "Man, you really did hear everything that morning, didn't you?"

"pretty much. What happened? I mean, I did tell you about the whole shark incident, and I barely knew you then."

"yeah, but you're all open and talkative. You probably tell everyone that story."

"I actually don't." His head turns toward me, and I see his eyes flick in my direction. "People at school know better than to ask me."

And I didn't.

"Look, I'm not going to force you to talk about something," he says. "I'm not a shrink. But if you want to, I'm a good listener. No judgment. Sometimes it's better to get it out. It festers and gets weird when you bottle it up. I don't know why, but it does. Just speaking from personal experience."

I don't say anything for a long while. We just ride in silence together through the dark streets, silhouettes of mountains rising on one side of the town, the ocean spreading out on the other. Then I tell him some of it. About eomma taking the Joon divorce case when I was fifteen. About her winning it for the wife, about the custody she got for the wife's daughter.

And about Joon Hyungjoon.

"He started harassing eomma online," I say. "That's how it started. He'd post nasty comments on her social media. When she didn't respond, he started stalking appa, and then me. I didn't even know who he was. He just started showing up after school a lot, hanging outside where the parents carpool. I thought he was one of my friends' fathers, or something.