VAMPING THE OC

The Real Chino

First Impressions

Seth checked the Range Rover's GPS. Ninety percent of the first SCEF (Seth Cohen Expeditionary Force) incursion into Chino was complete. Kirsten had finally, in the face of steady pressure from Sandy and unrelenting whining from Seth, agreed to allow Seth to volunteer in Chino. She'd done it grudgingly; however, fighting every step of the way. As part of the guerrilla campaign she'd waged against the idea, Kirsten had constantly harped on the subject of Chino's many dangers. Don't go to Chino – you'll get hurt. There's nothing but punks and hoodlums in Chino. Chino will only mean trouble for you. Stay away from the girls in Chino. Seth shook his head and forced himself to relax his grip on the steering wheel. As though he needed to worry about that last piece of motherly caution.

Parents were oblivious to the world around them; or, at least, that had been Seth's experience. From what he'd seen of his classmates' families, he thought this might qualify as a universal law. As long as he didn't introduce any grit into the smoothly running, high performance, dual carburetor engine that was the Cohen family, he might as well not be there. His mother and father had no clue what his life was like. Seth knew they loved him. He doubted, however, that they knew what sort of person their (almost a man) son was in the process of becoming.

Ninety percent. Ninety percent. Seth hummed it to the rhythm of the music coming from the car's CD. His fingers drummed it on the steering wheel. He suddenly flashed on his driving instructor's words, hands firmly on wheel and butt firmly planted on seat. He had to remember not to bounce. Ninety percent. So far, so good. No disasters, yet. Mom will be so disappointed. He didn't believe that his mother actually wanted one of her oft-repeated worst cast scenarios to befall him. He was less sure that she wasn't secretly hoping that something on a smaller scale would happen to cause him to see the error of his ways.

Part of the reason he felt sure she loved him to excess was affixed to the back of the sun visor above the driver's seat. On it she had taped a checklist of things automotive he had to do each week before driving to Chino. There were tire pressures to be checked, the gas tank to be filled, and all the car's other bodily fluids to be measured and topped off as necessary.

It had been his luck today on his way to Chino to get the same "kid" at the Chevron station that he'd gotten last week when he'd gone for his final interview at the Chino Valley YMCA. The same "kid" with the red hair gathered into a ponytail that bounced jauntily as she walked toward the truck. The same "kid" whose name Chris was neatly stitched in white on the left breast of her blue jumpsuit. A jumpsuit, he noted, that flattered her in a way that even the girls at Harbor in their Fashion Valley boutique dresses would have envied. The same "kid" with the jade green eyes that could have sucked the soul right out of him if it hadn't been for Summer. She was the one who listened without comment as he told her what he needed. Seth was glad he'd memorized his mother's checklist. He would have felt even more foolish than he already did if he'd had to flip down the visor and read the list to her.

"I know she's hot. So?" Seth glanced over irritably at the empty passenger seat. His attention; however, drifted back to watching Chris in his side mirror as she walked to the gas pump. "She's not my type."

With the gas pumping, Chris pulled the squeegee from its tank and began alternately soaping and wiping off the rear window of the Range Rover. Seth couldn't help but notice her in the rear view mirror. He watched as she stretched to reach the top of the window. As much as he wanted to he couldn't seem to take his eyes off her.

"Summer's my type!" He snapped still staring into his rear view mirror as she worked her way around the truck. "That's not funny. Summer's my soul mate. We have a connection." Seth forced himself to stop watching the girl and stared ahead with a sour expression. "She just hasn't realized it yet. Okay?"

When Chris reached the passenger window, she leaned in. "You like Rooney?"

"What?" Seth said flustered. "Oh the group." Their latest CD was in the Range Rovers's player. "Yeah, they're great."

"I thought so. I saw you singing along to the music. I like them too. You know, they're coming to LA in January." Chris paused and after considering Seth's blank expression shrugged and gestured for him to raise the window so she could finish.

"Shut up. Just shut up." Seth said through clenched teeth. "I don't take advice about women from the ectoplasmicly challenged.

Chris finished the windows and went about completing the other tasks needed to make the Range Rover Chino ready. Her expression had slipped bank intocourteous neutral. Seth supposed that when you tended to the whims of the hyper wealthy you didn't question their requests or discourage them from wasting their money. He thought he could read in the occasional glance she gave him and in her body language, however, her real opinion of the necessity of repeating things she'd last done only six days previously. He hoped it was that and not a commentary on the lameness of his conversation and his social retardation.

The thought of having to repeat this exercise week after week for the next two months was excruciating. Part of the deal with his mother, however, was that he had to present a receipt from this station every week to prove he was keeping to their bargain. There was nothing that he could say to Chris, no explanation he could offer her, that wouldn't make him seem hopelessly pathetic. Seth would rather have this girl think he had obsessive/compulsive disorder than know the truth - his mother wouldn't let him have the keys to the car unless he completed her checklist every time. He hoped there was a merciful god in heaven because he so didn't want to have to go through this with Chris every week. He'd been sending fervent prayers heavenward since he'd caught sight of her red ponytail coming toward him this afternoon. But unless his mother relaxed her rules, he knew he'd be visiting this same Chevron station at this same time every Wednesday until his volunteering in Chino was over.

"Come again, Seth." She'd said with professional correctness when she collected his credit card slip. Seth hated the dumb smile he knew had been plastered on his face as she stepped back from the truck.

xxxxx

Ninety-five percen. His head bobbed in time to the vibrations from the car's wheels on the road. He wasn't going to let thoughts of this morning's embarrassment or anything else drag him down today. He felt psyched. Energized. His good spirits slipped when he glimpsed a flash of green in his rearview mirror.

He'd been sure Kirsten was exaggerating when she'd warned him about the dangers of car rage, freeway vigilantism, and car-jackings. They had seemed to him to be based more on the lurid tales broadcast during television sweeps months than what he'd be likely to encounter on his trips to Chino. At least, that had been his opinion until Psycho Soccer Mom showed up. That's how he thought of her and her green minivan with its Soccer Moms Kick Ass sticker. She'd added her own brand of freeway lunacy to the general dysfunction of the Southern California highway system just an onramp after the Newport Beach entrance.

Soccer Mom had gotten his attention immediately by cutting into his lane of traffic with only feet to spare between their two cars as she merged onto the freeway. Seth sourly concluded that you couldn't really call what she did a merge. It more closely resembled a game of chicken. This was a contest Seth chose to lose rather than end up in an emergency room.

With disquieting regularity, as the two vehicles raced each other across Los Angeles to Chino, Seth and Soccer Mom had intersected and interacted repeatedly. In each instance the results had skirted the edge of disastrous for Seth. For whatever reason, whether to gain a few minutes or just general perverseness, Soccer Mom had ridden his tail, passed him on the shoulder, cut in front of him without signaling, and nearly run him off the road while talking on her cellphone. Her dangerous antics had made this trip an exercise in extreme paranoia for Seth.

"I'm not getting off the freeway." Seth muttered. "She can't scare me." He scanned the lanes ahead and behind him. He thought of it as simple prudence – defensive driving. "Ha, ha, very funny," he said defensively. "I just don't want to be late to my first class. No, and I'm not afraid of getting lost if I get off the freeway either."

So Seth persevered but try as he might nothing he did seemed to separate him from Soccer Mom for long. Now with his GPS telling him that the off ramp he wanted was only two exits away he moved over early into the right hand lane and slowed down to the speed limit. He breathed a sigh of relief as he saw her bumper sticker disappear quickly into the distance. His relief vanished when a fender bender at the next off ramp found him pulling up alongside of her in the slow moving traffic edging around the accident. Don't make eye contact – don't make eye contact. That was his mantra. His exit was next. When he reached that exit, he'd be done with her.

His concentration was shattered by the unexpected sound of a horn to his left. A rush of green accompanied this sound as the minivan from hell swerved into Seth's lane. The cruise control disengaged as he braked sharply. Right hand turn signal flashing, the minivan raced him for the off ramp. As he worked to avoid hitting her, he wondered if he was about to be rear-ended. A glance into the rearview mirror relieved him of that concern. The car behind him had miraculously been following at the correct distance and so missed him as the Range Rover began its looping descent off the freeway.

When Seth arrived at the traffic signal at the bottom of the ramp, he found himself side by side with the green minivan once more. He got his first good look at its driver then and saw a pleasant looking matronly type who could have been a schoolteacher. The woman's whole attention was fixed, however, on the traffic coming from her left. She was concentrating, with all the intensity of a cat outside a mouse hole, waiting for any break in the traffic that would allow her to make her right turn. She frowned as no opening appeared and the traffic signal stayed red. Her attention strayed then out of frustration to the car beside her and she registered, for the first time, the black Range Rover also waiting at the light. Raising her eyes higher she made eye contact with Seth. Completely unprepared for that, Seth did the first thing that popped into his mind and gave a friendly wave to Psycho Soccer Mom. At that moment, the oncoming traffic began to thin out and with a curl of her lip she returned her own one-fingered salute and sped off.

After the insanity of the freeway trip, Seth found driving on the streets of a still unfamiliar Chino, during rush hour, relaxing. The truth about his first trip to Chino on his first official day on the job would definitely have to be sanitized. The truth wasn't something he could share with the parental units. The remainder of the short trip to Edison Avenue where the Chino Valley YMCA was located passed with merciful uneventfulness.

Seth pulled up outside the Y with lots of time to spare before his first class. He immediately began to search for a parking spot. This too had been covered in his mother's meticulous directions. His instructions were to park only in a lighted lot with an attendant on duty. It was here; however, that Kirsten's carefully thought out plan for keeping Seth safe began to fail. There were no spots available in any of the lots in the vicinity of the YMCA that met all of her requirements. After his third trip around the Y looking, Seth made an executive decision. He would have to violate this one rule in order to get to his first class on time.

He resolved to simply take the closest parking space to the Y he could find. He saw several on-street spaces in his cruise down Edison before he spotted the perfect space. It was almost directly in front of the YMCA and under a street light. The police station was four blocks north of this spot and Chino's city hall was two blocks south of it. How could his mother complain about him parking on the street here?

It wasn't an absolutely perfect spot from his personal point of view, however. It would require him to parallel park. Seth couldn't recall having had to use that particular skill since his driving test. It was so not a Newport kind of thing.

"I am keeping a positive attitude," he insisted as he neared the space. "Damn, wouldn't you know that there'd have to be a witness to my humiliation?"

Sitting on a bench, directly in front of the parking space he'd selected, was a guy smoking a cigarette. The thought came to Seth. Doesn't he know that that stuff can kill him? The guy was dressed in boots, black jeans, and a white wifebeater. He lounged on the bench, his arms stretched across the back of the bench watching, with an air of indifference, the world go by.

Seth was struck by two conflicting emotions as he brought the Range Rover to a stop, its nose even with the driver's window of the car parked in front of his intended spot. The first feeling was envy at how totally cool the dude looked sitting there. This was quickly followed by apprehension because he reminded Seth of all the school and camp bullies who had ever terrorized him. Not as well dressed as the Newport variety of bully he was familiar with, Seth's spidey-sense nevertheless gave off pulses that caused his stomach to tighten more than even the thought of parallel parking.

"I am cool!" Seth fumed. "If it's so easy, let's see you do it." Seth groaned and closed his eyes. God, I wonder if he saw me talking to myself? Seth took a deep breath, released it, cranked the wheel hard to the right, and shifted into reverse. It worked just like his driving instructor said it would. He'd always assumed that passing that section of his driving test had been a fluke. But, here he was sitting parked in the Range Rover on the main street of Chino, California, after an effortless piece of parallel parking. Seth Cohen felt good about himself. It was an unfamiliar feeling.

Seth hit the unlock button on his remote as he climbed out of the truck. There were four boxes of computer manuals and software in the back that he'd conned his folks into buying for the computer lab. He hadn't given any thought to the weight of the boxes before. He'd assumed that he'd get a parking space in the YMCA's lot. Now, looking at the basketball courts and landscaping that separated the Y from the street, he guessed he'd have to make several trips.

He checked the parking meter and dropped in two quarters. That would get him past five o'clock when parking became free on the street. His parking had been excellent and so there was no rational reason for him to feel either uncomfortable or defensive about his driving or anything else for that matter. He only knew that an appeal to logic wasn't working on the snakes crawling around inside of stomach. In the presence of guys who radiated self-confidence like the blond kid on the bench, he'd never feel relaxed. In his heart of hearts, he knew that he'd always find some way to screw up and confirm to this guy that he was a dork.

As he walked to the rear of the truck, Seth glanced as casually as he could at the guy on the bench. He was chagrined to see that his spectator wore a frown and was shaking his head slowly. Self-consciously he looked at the Range Rover. It was the proper distance from the curb and from the cars ahead of and behind it. He could see nothing that would explain this reaction. The kid was playing some kind of mind game with him. Seth resolved to ignore him and his opinion.

Pulling one of the bankers boxes out of the rear of the truck Seth balanced it on the bumper and held it in place with his knee as he closed the hatch and hit the lock on his remote. Trying for casual, he hoisted the box with as much nonchalance as he could muster. He had to walk past the bench on the way to the Y and Seth hoped that his watcher wouldn't notice the difficulty he was having with the box. As Seth passed him, the boy looked up and caught Seth's eye.

"You shouldn't park there."

"Why?" Seth asked defensively. "I don't see any fire hydrants, no-parking signs, or any special parking restrictions. The spot looks good to me." He was determined not to be intimidated. He had a chance for a new start in Chino. He refused to fall back into the old patterns. He didn't have time for whatever problem this guy had. Besides, the box was heavy and he had three more to get to the computer lab.

"It's not a good spot," the kid repeated as he flicked his cigarette into the street. He reached for the backpack sitting beside him on the bench and pulled a red ball from its outside pocket. Leaning forward, his elbows resting on his knees, the kid stared at his left hand as he began kneading the ball. He looked up at Seth through sandy blond hair that hung down into his eyes. "It's not a safe spot for that car.

Seth's irritation and impatience were increasing as the box grew steadily heavier in his hands. He rested the box on a metal trash receptacle next to the bench. "I get it," he said angrily. "If I pay you money, you'll make sure that nothing happens to my car while it's parked here. Just like in TJ. It's not going to happen, buddy."

The kid on the bench said nothing. He only continued to watch Seth and to squeeze the ball. His blue eyes held Seth's. They gave nothing away.

Surprised that he'd neither confirmed nor denied his accusation, Seth frowned. "If that's not it, then what? Why's this a bad spot?"

The boy answered Seth's question with a question. "How long are you going to park here?"

"Four, maybe five hours," Seth answered.

"In about an hour your car will be the only one left on this block. I'd move it if I were you."

Seth looked around him at the busy street and the businesses open along it. It made no sense to him. His confusion must have shown on his face.

"Everything around here closes at 6:00 p.m. The neighborhood's deserted then."

"Even so, I'm under a street light and the police station is just up the street. Why should I worry," Seth asked?

The kid shrugged and turned his attention back to the ball in his hand. "Suit yourself."

There was something - Seth wasn't sure what - but he believed this stranger. The problem was he'd already spent almost an hour looking for an off-street parking space and hadn't found one. "Where would you suggest I move? All the lots are full around here. I've looked."

The blond kid with the very blue eyes gave him a knowing look and nodded. "Yeah, but you got here too early. The lots start emptying out a little after 5:00 p.m. All, that is, except for the one by the Y. It stays full until they close at 10:00 p.m. I can show you where to park or I can give you directions. Whichever." Looking at the box balanced on the refuse container and then at Seth, he asked, "Do you have many of those?"

"Four."

"None of the lots I can show you will be as close as this to the Y. Do you want some help?" The ball disappeared back into the guy's backpack. He got to his feet without waiting for Seth's answer and slipped into his backpack. He stood at ease in front of Seth, waiting for an answer, his left hand still opening and closing.

Seth answered without ever questioning the offer. "Thanks. That sounds like a plan." He unlocked the rear hatch again and handed his helper a box. Relocking the truck he retrieved the box from where he'd left it balanced on a trash receptacle. Seth noted enviously how easily the stranger stood holding his box. Determined not to look like a wimp in front of him, he picked up his own box. Seth wondered in what heretofore undiscovered corner of his psyche this competitive macho behavior had been hiding. He hated it and wished it would crawl back into its hole. Seth nodded to the stranger and kept pace with him as they walked toward the Y.

"My name's Seth - Seth Cohen. Sorry I can't shake." Seth said indicating with a nod their boxes. The kid nodded but didn't offer any comment. "So who am I getting a hernia with this evening?" Seth asked sarcastically.

"Ryan."

"Well, Ryan, thanks a lot. These are going to the computer lab on the first floor. Do you know where that is?"

"Yeah. I'm going to be sitting there all evening. I'm taking two classes."

"Cool. I'm the one teaching them." He was suddenly afraid that maybe Ryan wouldn't think so and Seth really hoped he'd think it was cool. "That's cool, right?" He'd never before had anyone like Ryan talk to him like he wasn't something revolting floating on top of a stagnant pond. He knew he thought that was definitely cool. Maybe Chino would be a new start for him.

"Yeah, it's cool." Ryan gave him a sidelong look. "Do you know what you're doing? I've invested $50 in this."

It came as something of a shock to Seth to think that people had actually paid money to take his classes and expected value for their money. "Don't have a clue." Seth said with a laugh. At Ryan's sharp look he hastened to add. "Just kidding. I got my first computer when I was five. The director of the center only wanted intro classes in their new lab, at first. I can handle that. I hope you won't be bored."

"Weren't many computers at my old school and I never got much time on them. It won't be boring."

"Where'd you graduate? I'm still doing hard time at Harbor School out in Newport. It doesn't seem like my senior year will ever get here. Mom wants me to go to college at UCLA, to be close to home, or Berkeley, where they went. Dad says I should listen to my heart and do what it calls me to do. But, then he gets all sentimental and starts hugging." Seth shivered. "Me, I want to go back East. Get away from this whole California scene." Ryan's amused expression brought Seth up short as he realized what he was doing. "Sorry, man, I tend to babble. If I talk too much tell me. Do you think that could be a problem in class? I've been worrying that it could be a problem in class; but I couldn't think of a way to know if it was happening. Maybe you could help me out? If I lose it in class you could like sneeze or something. That would be our private signal that I'd gone into babble mode and needed to gear back." Seth looked over at his companion. Ryan had stopped and was staring at him. Unnerved by the seriousness of his expression Seth gave a little laugh. "Not inspiring a whole lot of confidence in the student, I see."

"Didn't graduate." Ryan turned back toward the Y and began to walk. "Senseless babble, you can count on it." Seth watched as his helper released his grip on the box's handles and slipped his arms around it, his left hand clinched into a fist. "I can cough," Ryan offered.

"Good contribution. Coughing is good. I've got tissues in one of these boxes if you need like props. We're getting into the cold and flu season. Never can be too careful about spreading germs."

Ryan paused again. His head cocked to one side he gave Seth an appraising look. "Not so much." A smile slowly lighted up his face.

It was like all the lights in Chino had been turned on for Seth Cohen. Later he realized that they'd just turned the lights on for the basketball courts but with or without pyrotechnics he knew he had a friend. "Oh, the strong silent type, the stereotypical laconic westerner." Ryan coughed loudly.

The boys arrived at the entrance to the Y and Seth hit the handicap entrance button with his elbow. As they waited for the door to open, Seth's smile turned into a broad grin as he took in the look of irritation on Ryan's face. "Dude, you would so go crazy at my house; although you and my mom would have some things in common."

"Hey, do you like video games?" Seth asked as he led the way to the lab. "I brought this great new game with me to fill in the dead time. We could, like, try it out after we get the lab set up if you wanted. It's called Grand Theft Auto."

AN: The next chapter Bienvenidos a Chino, Puto will be up 2/7.

AN2: The OC and its characters belong to Josh Schwartz and his various corporations and corporate masters, not me.