Infandous (18 page)

The first one I see out in the world is on a stop sign not far from my apartment.

People start making copies of their own and drawing their own, too, and soon I see them everywhere—on the back of bus seats, on the Jack in the Box drive-thru sign, on the bottom of this kid’s skateboard, on the swing set down by the art wall.

It becomes a Venice Beach “thing”—something locals get, like an inside joke, and something tourists
want
to get. It becomes cool. Magical.

Riley’s happy as a fairy godmother whose girl made it to the ball, and Jordan doesn’t have anything else to do but stay late at the shop, since my mom’s still not talking to him. So he keeps cranking out the boards, glassed in all different colors—green and blue and yellow, but the best seller is red, red, red.

And I get three percent of each board sold.

One day, Riley’s in the shop, totaling up receipts, when I slip through the door. He looks up at me and grins.

“Hey, hon,” he says. For some reason it doesn’t bother me when he calls me that. “What the hell does it mean, anyway?”

At first I think he’s asking me some deep philosophical question. “The wolf? I guess—”

“No, no. The word. What does it mean?”

“
Infandous?
”

He nods.

“It means something that’s too terrible to be spoken aloud,” I tell him, “but it’s kind of obsolete. No one really uses it anymore.”

Riley taps the thick stack of receipts against the edge of the counter and grins. “It must be experiencing a renaissance.”

I shrug. “I guess.”

“People buy whatever everyone else is buying,” he says. “People are sheep.”

Not all of them,
I think.

***

I can’t believe I’m doing it, but I find myself trying to convince Mom to give Jordan another chance.

“He’s a good guy, Mom, really he is.”

We’re cruising through the secondhand shop on the corner of Broadway and Electric. I can tell she’s starting to feel better because she has an armful of blouses to try on. I’ve got an old blue lamp with broken wiring, on sale for a dollar. I’m going to break it up and use the pieces in a sculpture.

“I never said he wasn’t a good guy, baby.” She moves on to the jeans.

“So why won’t you call him back?”

Turning away from the rack, she looks at me. “Because I need more than for him to be a good guy. Good isn’t enough.”

“It’s a start,” I say.

She smiles, kind of sad. “I think I’m a little old to be satisfied with a ‘start.’”

It’s the first time I’ve ever heard her call herself old.

***

When the report card from summer school arrives, neither one of us is surprised to see the
F
printed next to my name.

“Jarvis Crandall always was a douche,” she says and kisses my hair.

***

Summer is winding into fall according to the calendar, but it’s the hottest it’s been all year. Even at the beach it’s over ninety, and the sand shimmers and looks like it might melt to glass.

I’m not a regular surfer—or a particularly good one—but when we’ve sold the fiftieth board with an INFANDOUS stencil, Jordan offers to give me the fifty-first, for free.

I don’t have to think about it before I shake my head. “I’ve had enough of that wolf,” I say. “I don’t need to see him out in the water.”

“Well, then, how about another board? One of the used ones?”

So I wander over and look at the boards. I’m not a total beginner anymore, and I’d like something a little more streamlined than my heavy, dinged-up Mini Mal, but I don’t really know enough to make an educated decision. Then I realize I’ve got a surfing expert right behind me, so I turn to Jordan. “Well?” I say. “What do
you
think?”

He grins and comes over, pushing his hair back in that way he does when he’s thinking about something. “How tall are you?”

“Almost five six.”

He nods.

“And you can pop up, right, no problem?”

I’m a little irritated. “Yeah, Jordan, I’m not a
complete
beginner.”

He’s too focused to hear my tone. He says, “You’ll want something with more maneuverability. I’ve seen that boat you surf. Any one of these”—he pulls three boards free from the rack—“will open up the world for you. They’re all technically still a little long, but the extra couple of inches will give you more power out in the water when you’re paddling. That way you can save your energy for the ride.”

A couple of teenage guys come into the store, and Jordan leaves me to examine the boards. They’re all freaking miracles compared to mine. One of them, a Semi-Fish, is glassed in greens and blues with a long, busty mermaid on its underside.

I run my fingers along the curve of her waist, the flare of her scaled hips.

She’s pretty, but I don’t choose that board. I pick one that’s an inch or so longer; I like what Jordan said about the extra paddling power of a longer board. The power to break away.

The board I choose is blue gray and sleek, no graphic except a slim pinstripe down its middle. It’s a tri-fin like my old board.

Jordan nods his approval. “Solid choice,” he says. “I shaped that one. And if you don’t ding it up too much out there, you can trade it in for another when you get really good.” He grins. “Employee privilege.”

***

At home I grab a towel and slather on sunscreen. Out of habit, I pull my wetsuit from the closet too. I always wear it when I surf—it’s kind of a security blanket in addition to a source of warmth. Its thickness protects against sharp rocks and my own fins when I get dumped and roll in the surf and lose sight of which way is up.

But I know the water will be extra warm today, and it sounds good, the thought of the water and the sky right on my skin, so I shove the wetsuit back into the closet and head to the beach.

The waves are stronger than I expect them to be—head-high, most of them, and some of them much bigger. And the beach is crowded with bodies on the sand and surfers in the water, all of them faceless from my vantage point on the edge of the water. Waves lap my toes, my ankles, as if an invitation, asking me to come home.

I fasten my leash to my right ankle and hop-jump through the foam and out into the undulating sea. Then I throw the board into the water and slide belly-down onto it, paddling hard just in time to ride up and over the first breaking wave.

I paddle farther out and then another wave is upon me, this one too big to go over, so I angle the nose of the board down and take a deep breath and duck-dive.

The board is great, cutting clean through the water, and I hold it tight to my chest and breathe out through my nose to keep the ocean from filling me. I pop up on the other side and shake my head like a fish, like a dog, like a seal.

I’m grinning now, and I paddle again with strong, steady strokes until I’m out past the break. Then I sit up, straddling the board and looking around.

It’s a fine day. The kind of day for staying. Even though there are a bunch of guys out here, somehow I find myself with a relatively clear space around me. I take a minute to stretch before the next set rolls in.

I link my fingers and pull my arms up over my head, stretch from side to side and enjoy the feeling of my rib cage expanding, my muscles loosening and warming as the sun dries my back.

“Seph!” I hear, and I shade my eyes with my hand and follow the voice to find Marissa.

There she is, waving at me, not a hundred yards away. I wave back and think to myself,
Isn’t that the way it goes. A whole wide ocean and still people find each other.

I level my gaze on the white-bright reflection of sun on water and wait for my wave to come. It’s big and well formed, and I know that if I turn now and paddle I can catch it, and no one else is in position to go for it, so I ignore its size and drop to my belly and paddle like hell.

I know I’ve caught it just right when the power of the swell catches me from behind, pushing my board both higher and forward with a roar of water. I power out three more hard strokes and then grip the board’s rails and pop up, my feet springing forward, toes gripping the waxed surface. My knees are bent and I lean forward with the motion of the wave and then I’m standing, each of my muscles awake and aware and working. I carve to the left, and the wave and I are dancing. I think I forget to breathe, but it’s like I don’t need to, it’s like the wave and the sun fill me up.

Then the wave tapers and fades and breaks white all around me, but I don’t drop back to my belly. I keep standing as the board slows and sinks until it gets too wobbly, and then I dive off and I open my eyes underwater to watch the light filter through the salt and sand.

It’s perfect under the water. I grab a fistful of sand and rub it between my hands. For a second I wonder if I could maybe live down here, if I could be a mermaid like my mother. I think, maybe it would be better that way—easier—if my legs would cleave into a tail, banishing the possibility and problems. I could swim and twirl underwater, and I could be swift and beautiful and untouchable.

But my lungs are burning now, and above me on the surface my board bobs, the leash that connects me to it pulling on my ankle, calling me back to the world.

***

I shouldn’t be surprised when Felix walks into the shop less than a week later. Haven’t I learned yet how small my part of the world is and how it folds in on itself ever smaller? It’s like this one diagram I remember from geometry, not the summer class but the one I took last year. A tesseract. It’s a shape with four dimensions, a concept that I still have difficulty really understanding—probably part of the reason I failed the class. I looked it up on Wikipedia and found this 3-D projection. Rendered in three dimensions, a tesseract is a cube inside another cube with all the corners of the interior cube connected to the corners of the outer cube. But that’s not the whole thing; it moves, in a steady, wavelike rhythm, the inner cube pushing out of the outer cube, being birthed or breaking free, and then the outer cube becomes the inner cube. Then
it
breaks free, the whole thing a cycle, over and over again. I stared at that little animated drawing for what seemed like forever, watching the cubes rotate, each time trying to break free but never managing it, always pulled back to their roots.

So I’m not really surprised when Felix walks through the door of Riley Wilson Boards. He and I are like that tesseract, whether or not I want to be, whether or not
he
wants to be.

He’s surprised, though, to see me there, behind the counter. The shop is busy, and it takes him a minute before his eyes land on me, so I have a moment to steel myself before recognition crosses his face.

Jordan’s talking to a couple of girls—tourists who seem to think he’s cute—about surfboard rentals. I can tell just from the way they stand that if he wanted to, he could totally nail any one of them. One of them trills, “If I rent a board, does it come with a personal lesson from
you?
”

My boards form a semicircle around the front of the store, the repeating image of the wolf head like a drumbeat.

Felix’s surprise at seeing me there changes to an easy smile. “Annie,” he says, “Hi!”

I swallow. I speak. “Hey.”

Maybe Jordan knows me pretty well by now, because he seems to sense my dis-ease, and he breaks away from the girls and hovers, just far enough away.

“What are you doing here?” Felix asks, which is a pretty stupid question seeing as how I’m sitting behind the counter.

“I work here.”

“Right,” he says, “To pay all those college bills?”

There’s this moment when I could say, “Uh-huh,” and then excuse myself and let Jordan help him with whatever he came in for. I could let him call me Annie. But then the moment passes, and it occurs to me—the word I’ve chosen,
infandous
, is like a self-fulfilling prophecy, like how Oedipus left home to try to escape the soothsayer’s prediction, but the more he ran away, the faster he ran into the arms of his own inescapable fate. I think of the looping motion of the tesseract and the pounding freedom of the waves, and I find that I’m done running.

I hear myself say, “I’m not Annie.”

His brow furrows.

My palms are slick with sweat. My stomach roils with sick. But I say it. I say the words. “I’m not Annie. I am Sephora Golding. You knew my mother once.”

A moment of blankness passes first, his last moment before he understands what I mean. Then it flashes across his face—all of it—confusion and disbelief and horror and pain as his eyes roam my face, seeing everything now—my mother’s coppery hair, his own curls upon my head, and more—the way I looked spread across his hotel room bed, the way the duvet puffed up around me, the way I moved against him.

A sound comes out of him, a horrible sound, and he looks around the shop for escape maybe or for different answers, but all around him it’s as if there are mirrors—the repeating wolf heads and the word—
INFANDOUS
,
INFANDOUS
,
INFANDOUS
.

He stumbles into one of the boards, like he’s been blinded by my words. His hand thrashes out and knocks it over and it hits the board next to it and that one crashes down too. For a minute the store is filled with the cacophony of one board and then the next and then the next toppling down, like dominoes, like secrets.

He drops his face into his hands and shakes his head and then, finally, he leaves, running into the Dutch door in his haste and fumbling with the handle for a long moment before at last it turns and opens and then he is gone.

It is terrible, all of it. His face, that recognition—anagnorisis, again—and the collapsing of the boards. The sound of them. The look on Jordan’s face and the way the tourist girls whisper and stare. I’ve imagined how I would feel in this moment. Triumphant. Relieved at halving the burden, sharing the weight of my truth.

But felling a wolf is a terrible thing. Especially when inside the wolf suit is a person. Maybe a shitty person or a flawed person. Maybe not a person you want to know. But a person just the same.