"But be careful; sand is already broken but glass breaks. The shoes are for dancing, not running away."
- Francesca Lia Block
You're the one with the power, you know.
Even with Yepa in my flesh, the cold that's supposed to keep me warm, you know how to dissolve it all into a flowing, storming, docile mess. Maybe that's why you never saw her. Maybe that's why I felt perfect when I was with you.
All I do is wait and wait. Even now. I don't know what I'm waiting for until you smile at me or show up with that quirk in your hair, or call me at 2 a.m. and tell me you miss me. I don't know what I'm waiting for until I remember. Everything.
But sometimes I get so tired and angry that I feel like holding something small and fragile in my hands, so I can break it, close down on it with five fingers into my palm, like crumpling paper, smashing glass. Temporary power. Breaking something else to lessen my own breaking.
I might have broken his jaw on pure reflex alone. But between blurry blinks I saw it was just the Korean man, upon whose shoulder my head now unintentionally rested. He was shaking me awake with that stranger's touch-you-as-little-as-possible urgency.
"Oi!" he whispered in a low hoarse. "Wake up."
Jerking away from his touch, I dug my palms into eyes laced with salty cobweb sleep; a few warm tears leaked out. Maybe he didn't notice.
"Bad dream?"
"Don't worry bout it."
With the rest of the tears, I gulped down the water he handed me in a crinkled plastic bottle. His hair looked too much like the koi fish red of freshly spilled blood. Perhaps that was what kept me from believing he was attractive, even if some of the young women aboard the bus glared at my seat with envy.
"Julia? Are you okay?"
If he asked me that question one more time—
"Wake me up when we're in Los Angeles," I murmured, turning my face toward the darkness.
He'd roused me from a good dream. A good memory.
Hwoarang said he had a friend who lived "smack dab" on Venice Beach. He was right; only a strip of sidewalk separated her home from the sand and its Rastafarian skateboarders. The white stucco duplex shone blinding in the sunlight, its aquamarine-tinted windowpanes like bruises on pale flesh. I didn't want to ask what might happen to the place if a hurricane or earthquake decided to stop by.
It turned out his "friend" was a bronzed bombshell that made me look like a nun; reuniting with a long lost booty call hadn't been in the travel plans, but hey, I'd wanted spontaneity, didn't I? When Hwoarang introduced me, she needle-eyed me like a high school girl, as if I was worthy competition for her Korean mail order groom. I listened to her explain over fruity diet drinks that she owned a Capoeira school with her mentor (perhaps one of the dreadlocked loiterers I'd seen smoking pot outside the complex?) and that she had been "infamous" in Rio de Janeiro for her leg work. Judging by the look in Hwoarang's eyes, I didn't doubt this at all.
After a dinner of limp steak and broccoli, she assigned me to the tiny bedroom across the hall, where I could experience the perfect acoustics of every moan and scream from the master bedroom. Around two in the morning, I shuffled downstairs to the couch when the sounds of their lovemaking became too obnoxious to ignore. But even in the living room, enveloped in the sea-quiet of the cerulean walls, sleep avoided me. Faintly—or perhaps it was my imagination—I could still make out the soft love sounds of the redhead and our hostess; this time it made me sad.
I remembered how the blonde had made love to me, his face buried in the tangled forests of my hair as dawn melted through the slits in the blinds. I wondered if I would ever again know how it was like to have a man touch me, to have him hold me in his sleep as the warm rhythm of his heartbeat thudded against my cheek, like the crash of those waves on the California sand outside these shadowy windows.
Rising, I slipped out of the house and padded barefoot onto the beach and toward the water. Back and forth, back and forth, swallowing, sighing, a tireless dance, salted like tears. The moon, bright as sun and nine-months-belly round, gazed down at her mirror the sea, an undulating mirage of black frosted with silver. There was no wind, not even a murmur of a breath, but the water moved as if possessed.
Gasping, I submerged myself to the waist in ocean as cold as betrayal. But the night was warm and soon my shivering ceased. Something nibbled at my ankles. If I stood still and focused my eyes, I thought I saw schools of small fish dashing and chasing beneath the surface, like silver needles threading through bolts of water. Sand squelched between my toes and glued my heels to the ground as the waves tugged me toward that moving blackness.
Come with us. Come with us and learn the secrets of deep sea, the most sublime form of your snow soul.
I gazed north along the coast, where the cold, misty beaches of Washington somewhere rumbled, and wondered if he wanted to hold me too.
Sometimes I woke up so afraid I refused to move.
Sometimes I didn't realize it was she until I'd already caused so much damage an apology or afterthought gift would never suffice.
Glancing sideways at my travel companion, a toothpick between his teeth, I wondered which of us was the one in danger. Though trusting him was a precarious thing, as that sparkle in his eyes never seemed to dim, I knew that Yepa would kick in to save my ass if Hwoarang ever tried anything stupid. With that frightening—but reassuring—knowledge, I vowed to try and be more open with him; he'd been open with me, after all. Too open, in fact, or perhaps they were just masterfully crafted lies. Men were never honest after all, even when they had nothing to lose.
I let him pick all the restaurants, let him talk and talk until his throat hoarsened and only forced him into the bookstores when he was too tired or too bored to protest. I forced Sherman Alexie, Tom Chiarella, and Cormac McCarthy on him—"I don't read"; "They're manly and funny"; "I. Don't. Read"; "What, you're not manly and funny?"; "Gimme those"—and we'd discuss O'Brien and Silko, Murakami and Morrison, even flipped through Playboy and Cosmopolitan—"So where is the G-spot?"—anything literary or quasi-literary that would keep his mind off the journey. Declaring that the man had attention deficit disorder was an understatement. But I could tell he was trying his hardest to digest my literary junk food.
The blonde was never like this. His ocean eyes would stare straight into mine, wander off the walls when he became excited, and we'd talk about books and films until night drove us into one another's arms, two idealistic, naive artist-writers pursuing the wrong careers.
Hwoarang squinted through an Esquire magazinefeature, and when he wouldn't put it down, I knew we'd hit the jackpot.
"You do know I'm only putting up with this book worm stuff 'cause I like you, right?" he grumbled.
"You shouldn't like me." He had no idea how sincere I was when I said that.
"Well I do. You remind me of the boys back home."
"I'm glad you find me manly."
"Consider it the best compliment you'll ever get."
"Not likely."
"Someone thinks they're hot shit."
I laughed. It felt awkward to laugh, but it spread like a disease when Hwoarang flashed me a ridiculous grin.
But during a different excursion to the bookstore I asked Hwoarang if his parents had ever read to him as a child. When he ignored me for the rest of the day I never asked about his family again—or lack thereof. Well, at least I discovered what he and the blonde shared in common.
When I was thirteen-years-old, Michelle wouldn't let me hike in the canyons by myself. She plowed through her motherly spiel, said the coyotes might get me, or that I might get heat stroke and collapse in some remote plateau and spirits knew if Ma and Cora could get help in time. I knew these lands better than I knew how to inflict a wound with my fist. But, ever the obedient one, even when I was angry enough to break something expensive, I sat outside on the porch like I had during Gabriel's twenty-first birthday and brooded in silence. Sometimes I read. Sometimes I just stared out into the sky and waited for the rage to ebb away. When I was angry I always chose to be alone, not because I was afraid Yepa might emerge—Michelle could take her on any day—but because silence always listened. Silence always understood.
When I turned fifteen, when Mom finally let me wander, I would listen to that silence and hear it listening to me back. It was a pregnant silence, round and filled with life, a constant, comforting friend that instilled peace and allowed for mining deep thoughts.
But this silence, on this road, the redhead beside me skimming his magazine with lightning-fire eyes, was so eerily deafening that I looked forward to the old woman-elevator music the bus driver played sometimes. I didn't want to listen to those deep thoughts, to those locked away feelings, hovering and buzzing in my head like a trapped fly trying to zigzag its way out of a room.
"You still haven't told me what happened to you," Hwoarang said suddenly, the magazine rolled up into a tube and shoved haphazardly under the seat.
"You haven't either," I stalled.
"Don't try and pull that. I'm in the States 'cause a friend of mine has my bike in Seattle. There. Refreshed your memory. Now, why are you here?"
"What are you, a journalist? Cop in disguise?" I smirked, only half joking.
"No, but I can be just as much of a hardass."
Scoffing, I glanced out the bus window, wishing for some reason that we were back on Venice Beach so I could feel those waves on my flesh. Instead, we were getting closer to Washington every day.
"You don't wanna know who I am," I finally said.
"Pretty sure I do. Come on, Jules. We're far away from the shit that happened to us. What, is it 'cause of some boy? Did some boy break your heart? Were you abused as a child?"
Then again, he really could be a blunt bastard when he wanted to be.
"I'll tell you a joke. Then will you shut up?"
"If it's funny, I will."
"This one's really funny."
"Then shoot."
I looked back into his brown-black eyes, into the nest of red bangs. What's done is done. Keeping secrets doesn't change anything, least of all you.
"An Indian girl walks into a bar. She kills four men when they try to rape her. She enjoys hurting them. And then she leaves."
When I didn't elaborate further, Hwoarang spent several seconds trying to decide if I was being serious. Shock, incredulity, and finally, disbelief, crossed his face.
"What kind of joke is that?" he finally smirked, albeit nervously.
Then the quiet settled in. Night burrowed its way into the bus cabin. An hour slid by.
"You're serious," he murmured later.
"You said I was a bad liar, didn't you?"
Another half hour.
"The assholes had it coming," he added."It was self-defense."
"I wish I could believe that."
"You're not a bad person, Julia. That's what I believe."
He leaned toward me then and somehow, in one slow, smooth motion, managed to find my mouth with his. It was like a feather across my lips. I accepted the affection like I would a gift, a small parcel whose packaging and shape didn't mean much, but was a symbol of a bond; I didn't kiss back, and he didn't push for more.
I never did tell Hwoarang about the blonde.