Dark Night

Dinner with John

After I came in from the surf, I was beat and had had enough of the sun, so I packed up. Nobody else was ready to come back who had gotten a ride to the beach, so I returned my surfboard and walked to my car, blessing Grandpa again for it and the freedom it gave me. I was happy to see that John seemed to be having a good time.

This had been my first time in the ocean and I was surprised how itchy I was when I had nothing to distract me from the sensation. The salt and sand made me want to scratch. When I got back home, I took a shower and slathered on the glorious deep conditioning hair masque and let it work its magic for an hour, during which time I relaxed in the nice coolness of my room and drank a lot of water. Despite my attention to sunscreen and the beach umbrella, I'd still gotten a little pink, and I scowled. More eyedrops to soothe my eyes helped and I kept the room dim. Future outings to the beach would have to occur not around peak UV times. One of my neighbors recommended coconut oil for my dry skin and let me use hers; my usual body lotion just wasn't cutting it. After I rinsed the masque out of my hair, I kept the door to my room closed and rested. The actual surfing wasn't hard but the water was an ever changing surface, unlike the concrete in a skate park, and that had been a real exertion. I went to dinner with people from the floor and afterward, all the RAs from our dorm had set up a treasure hunt to help us get acquainted with the campus and each other, so we divided into groups that had people from each floor in it and went to work. It was fun; we went over quite a lot of campus and took pictures of our group in various places as proof. When we got back, I had a lot of new photos on my phone and every participant received a prize pack; the RAs had done a lot of work and gotten local sponsors, so there were really nice goodies; a yellow plastic cup with the name of the dorm in blue, a bag of popcorn, some candy, a little pamphlet that could be tucked into a bookbag that contained student resource contact information including the number to call to get an escort home at night from campus buildings if you felt unsafe, and a laminated campus map. When I got back to the room, I could tell that Serafina had been there; her beach bag was on the floor, but she was absent. I spent some time uploading selected photos to Instagram, including some that had been taken on the beach. Arthur had taken a couple of me in the surf and shared them with me; I put them up too. I was really beat and went to sleep early.

And slept in. These were the last couple of days of total freedom; on Monday classes would start and those would be stressful in ways I couldn't know yet. Serafina and I went to brunch and talked about yesterday; the main group had stayed until dusk and she'd had a great time, then her carpool had stopped at In-N-Out for burgers. She'd gotten back and cleaned up, then went to a party with a few of them. She had a date that evening with one of the boys, Carlos. All the girls on the beach had noticed him; he was tall, built, had a fantastic smile, seemed really nice. Smart, too; but then there weren't a lot of dumb people at the school.

"So what's up with John?" she asked, efficiently mixing up an enormous salad. "He seems nice, but kind of reserved."

"We were friends in high school," I said. "He trained with my brother--"

"Wait, he's a skater too?" She thought for a minute. "Oh, god, he's that John Tang?" Amused, I nodded. "Have you seen his gold medal? Oh, of course you did, there was that interview and he's your friend." She shook her head, exasperated with herself. "Is it nice?"

"Really nice," I confirmed. "Nice and weighty and shiny."

"So tell me more."

"Well, he was my best friend, his little brother is awesome, taught me how to skateboard. Then we started dating toward the end of the school year. Retirement from skating has been kind of hard on him, so he came down early to the city to figure things out, he's got a set of grandparents here. I'm not quite sure how things are between us, but we're having dinner tonight to catch up."