I hug my knees and stare up at him. “I don’t know why you think so badly of yourself, Alan. You seem like a nice guy to me.”

Alan is quiet all the way back to the house. It’s really odd, but I feel comfortable in his quiet. The morning has just started to come alive and the beach has the pleasant hush and slow stirring of sunrise. I find my UGGs where I left them at the bottom of the stairs, and I pull them on and begin the long climb back up to the house.

I cross the patio and go into the empty kitchen. Alan surprises me. I thought he would head off to the pool house, but he follows me. The clock says 6 a.m. Even Maria isn’t awake yet. I stop in the center and look at Alan. I’m not exactly sure how to end this. It has been an unexpected kind of night. I wait for him.

“It’s been a pleasure spending the night with you, Christian Parker.”

I nod, wide-eyed. “It’s been a pleasure spending the night with you, Alan.”

I step back from him. His face is washed with seriousness again. I feel the need to say something. Anything. “It’s going to be OK. You do know that, don’t you?”

His black eyes do a quiet search of my face and he starts to shake his head. “Such a trite thing to say. Only it sounds so real and believable when you say it.”

He’s waiting for me to leave and I can tell by his expression that he wants this over. I gaze at him. I don’t want this to be the end. And I don’t want to make a fool of myself.

“Everyone may be angry with you, Alan, but it’s morning and I don’t hate you. According to you that’s improvement. Learn to appreciate the small improvements. Isn’t that what they teach in recovery?”

Alan smiles. I’ve amused him. Good. “If you knew me you wouldn’t call that small.”

I make a face at him. “There you go again thinking badly of yourself.”

He lifts a strand of hair from my face. “There you go again not realizing how beautiful you are.”

He takes a half-step back from me. We were standing so close and I didn’t even notice it. I want him to kiss me again, but he won’t. We are back in my dad’s kitchen, and I feel strange, out of place, and really curious to know what it would feel like to have him kiss me a second time.

Alan waits for me to leave first. I can feel him watching as I disappear into the hall.

* * *

“Where have you been all night?”

Rene must have stirred in her sleep. She hates to be alone at night. She’s afraid of the dark, but won’t admit it.

“On the beach,” I say nonchalantly.

She rolls over and pulls the quilt more tightly around her. “Doing what?”

“If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.”

Her eyes drift closed. “Tell me later. Don’t wake me until it’s time to go to the airport.”

I stare at my room. The house is quiet. I am too wired to sleep. Wired and weak. I should lie down for an hour before I have to get ready to go to the airport.

I drop before my suitcase and rummage for my journal. I’ve been keeping it forever. I put the date on a page. I am not going to write about Alan Manzone. It’s not that type of journal. It’s not that dear diary type shit that Eliza and her mob probably have carefully tucked beneath their mattresses. I write about nothing, fragments of dreams, random thoughts, poetry, but mostly just fragments of nothing. Disconnected pieces that aren’t meant to make sense or say anything.

I begin to rapidly write. Tonight, though, it is a whole thought and one that is strangely significant to me. So I write quickly before I forget. Rene can be so profound at times. It is why we are friends. We don’t think or feel like the other girls. Our dreams are not happy. We feel strange and disconnected from people. The world doesn’t make sense to us. We don’t make sense to us. And the future, it is there and I can’t see it and I don’t know why, but it makes me a mess and only more disconnected from the world.

Did I get the words right? I look them over again: “We are the generation of nothing. There is no war. There is no grand social struggle. There is no political wrong to right. There is nothing. We have everything we want and nothing we need. Even the music isn’t good. We live in empty houses. We have too much time to think of ourselves. It would be better for there to be a little strife than to be a generation with too much time to think only of ourselves.”

I reread the entire quote. I stare at it. Is this why I am the way I am?

Chapter Four

Rene throws her everything bag onto the concrete.

“Crap! What are we supposed to do now?”

Rene is cranky and hung-over.

“We wait,” I say calmly. “They said only a short delay because of the fog. Maybe an hour. We’ll be on our plane in an hour.”

“Yeah, right. They’re backed up. We’ll take off late. We’ll miss our connection in LA, and we won’t reach New York until forever.” She stares at the airport terminal in frustration. “What are we supposed to do here to amuse ourselves?”

The Santa Barbara Airport terminal is a tiny Spanish style structure with white stucco, red tile roof and tile floor. It isn’t really sectioned in any way. The boarding area is merely roped off from the lobby that acts as central location for ticketing, baggage and security check. You can see the interior ticket counter from the front curb. There is only one restaurant and one store within. There is very rarely ever a crowd. Never any excitement. So Santa Barbara and the morning has gone badly. Rene is feeling miserable from partying the night before, Maria took us to the airport instead of Jack, and thick morning fog has delayed all the planes.

I sink on the concrete bench. “We could count the cars as they pass.”

Rene gives a disgruntled laugh. “There are no cars, Chrissie.”

She is fidgety and irritable. I’m selfishly pleased she is so out-of-sorts. By the time she woke, she forgot to ask the details of where I was last night. Another secret I don’t want to share with Rene. If I share it, she’ll pick it apart minute by minute in her hyper-analytical way until she has pointed out every mistake I made in my encounter with Alan Manzone.

“We can go upstairs to the restaurant,” I offer.

“If I eat I’ll throw up.”

She looks around the terminal again. Her eyes fix on Steve.

“Hey, Stevie, anything fun happen here lately?”

Steve the Valet looks up from his wooden valet stand. It’s really bitchy, but that’s what we call him: Steve the Valet. We’ve never asked his last name. And it must be a boring job and he probably makes no tips. How many people could possibly want their bags carried when you can see the drop-off counter from the curb? He’s worked here forever even though he is only in his early twenties. Rene likes to pass the minutes annoying poor Steve while we’re stuck waiting.

Rene sashays over to him. “Anything interesting in your world of airport curb convenience?”

That was snotty. Steve just shrugs. He’s a nice guy. I don’t know why Rene is always so mean to him. We ran into him one night downtown in a club. Rene has been rude to him ever since.

Steve looks at me. “John Travolta flew in last week. He’s a pretty cool guy. Do you know him, Chrissie?”

I shake my head. Steve thinks that everyone famous knows everyone famous, and it was a subtle put down toward Rene, to look pass her and talk to me.

Steve starts to arrange his baggage tickets. He’s trying to ignore Rene. She leans into him at the valet stand. “Hey, how’d you like to go into the luggage sort area and have a little fun, Steve? It’s not like you’re going to miss a tip.”

“There is one hell of a Lear jet parked on the private strip,” Steve says only to me. “Been waiting to take off all morning. It must belong to someone who is somebody. If you go upstairs to the restaurant and get a table on the terrace you should be able to see who it is when they arrive.”