No 3: BAKER BEACH

PHOTO BY CHARLOTTE LOKEY

CHARLOTTE LOKEY

He picked me up in a prehistoric BMW. The coating on the leather seats was worn down in the shape of the ass print of its previous owner and the machine heaved whenever it went up a hill, but it was all his. 

“I had to buy it on Craigslist,” he explained, “because I don’t have my license and they get kind of wiggy about that type of thing at dealerships.”

“You don’t have your license?” I asked. 

“Well I mean, not technically,” he responded. “I could get it if I want, but my permit expired and I got too lazy to go through the whole Driver’s Ed thing again.” 

“What happens when you get pulled over and a cop asks to see it?” He glanced at me from the side and gave a half-smile. 

“Well,” he said, after a moment. “Let’s just hope that doesn’t happen.” 

Max Klein was two years older than me, a senior when I was a sophomore. We met in Spanish 2 Honors when he inexplicably decided to sit next to me on the first day of class. 

“Hola,” he said with his dopey smile. “Me llamo Max. ¿Y tú?” I remember that he held up his hand to shake, a maneuver that off-put me a little. 

His parents were rich, the founders of some obsolete tech company they sold for gobs of money in the 90s. The type of San Francisco boy who grew up with the understanding that he didn’t have to work too hard and could smoke a little too much weed and still end up alright.

He was handsome in the broody way that made naive girls swoon. He was a halfway-decent skater, a surprisingly competent pianist, and one hell of a manwhore. 

I generally tried to avoid any English-language interactions with him for reasons unclear to even myself. Not that I assumed he was trying to get with me. I just got this unease around him. This strange sense that any small act of kindness towards me was really some bizarre, guarded trick. That if I were to be anything but a frigid bitch to him, he would be able to add me to the list of girls who melted at his feet. 

He texted me out of the blue in October, just as the last heat of the Indian summer had finally melted away.

Esme!!! this is max. got ur # from Rebecca. j wanted to say hey :)

When I didn’t respond, he messaged me again. 

sorry not trying to be creepy. U just seem like a chiller lol. 

Despite myself, I responded. Even more despite myself, I actually took to liking the guy. Still, it took him two weeks to convince me to go on a date with him. 

Baker this Sunday. No excuses we goinnnnn

Max texted me when he was outside instead of knocking on my door. I expected this, despite my half-baked fantasies of him coming to my stoop and warmly embracing my mother, boyishly remarking on her youthful appearance. I accepted his picking me up while it was still light out as substantial proof he wasn’t as scummy as I thought. 

I felt my palms go all clammy as I stepped in his car. We chatted awkwardly as we coasted along the gently curving hills of the city. I didn’t know what to say to him. Not face-to-face. 

 Soon enough, he turned into the little parking lot of Baker Beach. 

“It’s a bit cold for the beach, no?” I said, looking out towards the fog spilling over the crest of the headlands across the bay. The water thrashed with agitation. 

“Esmé, the beach is always cold. It’s San Francisco,” Max said, stepping out into the fog. I followed him, caving. He popped the trunk and wrapped a fleecy polyester blanket around me. “There. Nice and cozy. Like a burrito.” 

We waddled down to the water, keeping our sneakers on so the skin of our feet wouldn’t be eaten up by the coarse sand. Max wandered for a bit, eyes tracing along the shore until suddenly he plopped himself down to the ground. 

“Here’ll do.” He produced a nugget from his coat pocket, ground it, and rolled it into a neat little joint. I watched his fingers work— finessing the paper with an ease and delicacy that almost made me blush. He placed his creation between his lips and maneuvered my hands to guard the flicker of his lighter. 

He puffed. Max took the joint between his fingers and held it to my mouth. My lips brushed against his hand as I inhaled. I felt woozy, but I couldn’t decipher whether or not it was from the weed or the fact of his nearness. 

We smoked the rest of the joint as the sun dipped below the horizon, turning the sky into the musky purple of a bad bruise. Max told a meandering story about a roadtrip with his father through Humboldt. He told me about how he and his dad fought incessantly at home, but on that trip they hiked for hours in silence through the redwoods and felt okay for a moment. The fog rolled in and thoroughly covered us with its dew. I was too stoned to really notice until Max pointed out how the hair at the nape of my neck had turned to ringlets. 

“It happens when it gets cold like this,” I said. “My mom said it was an Irish thing. You know, they said when Irish people left home during the famine or whatever, they tried to find places that reminded them of home. Which is why so many came to SF, or whatever. ‘Cause it looks like Ireland.” 

“I didn’t know that,” he said. He put on a puzzled expression. “My mom’s from the Philippines and my dad’s from Germany. I’ve been to both and they’re nothing like here.” 

“I don’t think any place is like here. Not really.”

“Aside from Ireland.”

“Yeah. Aside from Ireland.”

We went back to his car, but neither of us really wanted to go home quite yet. So we lingered in the dark playing songs for each other. I hated most of what he played. He loved croony white guys singing about the girls they treated like shit and obscure European avant-pop from the 90s. Or at least he really wanted me to think he loved them. I bobbed my head politely to the beat, waiting for my turn on aux. 

A couple songs in, he put on “Dance Yrself Clean.” I told him that this was the first song he played that was actually good. 

“Wait, do you listen to LCD Soundsystem?” he said, ignoring my dig. 

“Yeah,” I said.

“Like you actually listen to them listen to them?” 

“Is there a way to fake listen to music?” I laughed, which made him laugh. We grew quiet, waiting for the song to reach its peak. I drew a smiley face with my pointer finger in the condensation that had collected on the windows. Two dots and a big swoopy mouth cut through the fog. 

“You’re a cool chick, Esmé,” Max finally said. I nodded, not knowing how exactly to respond. 

His eyes flickered between my eyes and my lips, so I leaned in a bit closer. We hovered for a moment, breathing in eachothers’ air. Suddenly, he closed the gap, pressing his mouth against mine. I inhaled. 

I didn’t really know what to do, so I just kind of moved my mouth open and closed like a puppet. His lips were softer than I expected they would. He tasted like menthol and sleep. Max stuck his tongue inside my mouth, wiggling it like a little worm. I was reminded of a fun fact I saw on the back of a piece of bubble gum— how the tongue was the strongest muscle in the human body. 

“Is everything okay?” he asked when I broke away for a moment, brows knitted together with a perfunctory type of concern.

I nodded and climbed over the center console and into the back seat of a car. Taken over by a particular kind of boldness. 

“Shit,” he said, smiling. He followed me back, pushing me down to the seat so he hovered above me. He pulled my shirt off, then my bra, then my pants. He kept his clothes on, but kissed me so deeply I didn’t seem to notice. 

I let him put his fingers inside of me. Poke around aimlessly for a little while. It didn’t feel good, but it didn’t really feel bad either. So I let him prod me, like a child in the touch pool of an aquarium stroking the tense flesh of a sea star.

He looked down at me, hair falling around his face kind of like a halo. His face was so close that I could taste the heat of his breath. 

“That feel good?” he whispered. 

“Sure,” I said, even though the only sensation I could focus on was that of the seat buckle pressing into the flesh of my right hip. 

He pulled out his fingers and propped himself up on his elbows. 

“Es, are you on birth control?” he asked. 

“Not yet,” I said, telling the truth. 

“Fuck,” he groaned. “I hate using condoms.” 

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry?”

“It’s okay, I guess,” he responded. He pulled his t-shirt over his head. 

Undressed, Max looked scrawny and pale. Rib bones poked through his milky, freckle-dotted skin.  Aside from a few sparse, dark hairs, his chest was smooth. I reached up and pressed my the back of my hands against his skin. He shivered at the coldness of them. 

Max reached into his back pocket and grabbed a condom. He pulled down his pants to his upper thighs and bent down to me, kissing the side of my neck. 

“I don’t want any hickies. I have to see my mom like right after this.”

“I wouldn’t,” he said, between kissed. “Promise.” He didn’t move his head. 

I wasn’t expecting the sharpness of the pain, the feeling like being peeled apart. I kept waiting for something to shift, for the pain to melt into pleasure— or at least something like it. When the pain didn’t leave, I screwed my eyes shut, bracing. 

As an effort to distract myself, I focused my attention to the rhythmic pulse of the waves crashing onto the beach. They sounded a little like haggard breaths.  

Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale. 

Max was wordless until the end, when he pulled out and saw the small puddle of blood that had pooled around my thighs. 

“What the fuck,” he said. It was more of a statement than a question. I didn’t know what to say, so I just pulled up my underwear and looked down at my feet. 

“Are you on your period or something?” he said. I blinked and shook my head no. He looked at me uneasily. “Are you a virgin?” 

“No,” I lied. “I don’t know what happened. Maybe it was my depression meds or something? I’ve heard they can dry you out and make it easier to bleed?” I saw his face soften. I don’t know if he believed me.

“Listen,” he said gently. “Don’t worry about it, ok?” He kissed my forehead and wrapped his arms around me. My body felt warm with gratefulness.

I cleaned myself and the car seat with a McDonald’s napkin Max managed to scrounge from his glove box and redressed. The ride back was silent. He dropped me back at my front door without getting out of the car. I waved to him from my stoop as he drove away. It was too dark to see if he waved back, so I let myself assume that he did. 

I took a shower so hot my skin turned red and splotchy and then crawled into bed. 

Really had a fun time tonight! I texted him. 

np, he responded a few minutes later. 

That night, I let myself drift asleep to the idea of him. I was still drowsy from his touch. 

~

A week later, my friend Molly told me as we were waiting in line for lunch that Max had slept with some other girl. Molly said her name was Lila and showed me her Instagram on her cracked iPhone. 

 Lila looked like a thinner, slightly more boring version of me. She had wide set doe eyes and wore a lot of highlighter. Mousy brown hair but a nice smile. 

“You’re way hotter than her,” Molly said. “Men are literally so dumb.”

I shrugged.

“He was bad in bed anyway,” I said, handing her phone back. As if I even knew what it meant to be good in bed. As if we even did it in a bed at all. 

Molly gave me a look, somewhere between sympathy and disappointment at my patheticness. 

“I don’t care, Molly. Really. It was just a hookup.”

I don’t care, I decided. The revelation was liberating, almost euphorically so. Max was a scumbag, a player, a douchebag, a loser. A one-time fling who had no reason to waste any more of my precious mental real estate. 

Besides, I thought. It’s not like I even have a claim to him anyway. We went on one date, if you could even really call it that. Things come and go. Who was I to try to hold on to someone who clearly didn’t want me?

I didn’t care even as I sat cross legged on my bed that day after school combing the internet for evidence that this Lila girl was the inferior specimen I suspected she was. 

I didn’t care as I looked through her tagged posts, halfway hoping to find some unflattering shot of her at homecoming or a braces-clad post from eighth grade. Some fixed point I could use to dispel my anxieties, to prove the inanity in Max’s choice to be with her. 

I didn’t care so much so that I imagined him sitting with his friends one day, a couple weeks or months from now. Max would be ruminating about how unfulfilling Lila was emotionally, how much he missed me. His friends would sigh, then give an unwavering look of dismay.

Max, they would say. You really blew it, dude. And Max would be embarrassed, because he knew it was true. 

I imagined him texting me, late at night, telling me how much he regretted the way he treated me. Or swiping up to respond to one of my definitely-not-targeted-story posts of his favorite song. And I imagined leaving him on opened. Letting him sweat it out. Because who was he to decide the terms of our relationship? 

No— I would be the one in control. 

I would be the one who simply doesn’t give a damn. 

I stared at the ceiling, making a mental list of all the traits I hated about him but ignored when I was trying to make myself like him. 

Bad grades. 

Bad teeth. 

Acne-ridden. 

Chews with mouth open. 

No license. 

Addicted to nicotine (and possibly pills).

Weighs less than I do. 

Vitriol flooded my system, pumped through my veins. I felt satisfied. Then, without warning, my cloud of disdain was invaded by a rush of all the other, little things.

I remembered the curl of his nose, the smell of his cologne, his lopsided smile, how he always told me I was the prettiest girl at my school. His admittedly dorky habit of collecting rocks, his nightly calls to his older sister, his busted-up, hand-me-down Nike Dunks that he couldn’t help but wear every day. I remembered how one night, when he was still trying to convince me to go out with him, he sent me a video of him playing the piano. It was a Vince Guarladi song, the one that plays in A Charlie Brown Christmas when they light their little tree. I remembered his hands, how delicate they looked as they moved along the keys. His face, scrunched slightly in concentration, reflected in the varnish of the instrument. 

I scrolled back through our texts logs, all the way to the top. As I scrolled through our relationship, I tried desperately not to notice the increasing brevity in his responses or the increasing desperation in mine. How I was the one who asked all the questions, how each of his subsequent answers were blunter than the one before.

He tried to let me down easy, I thought. I just chose not to notice. I felt a bit sick. 

At around 11:30 that night I crept downstairs to make myself a gin and tonic so I could roll around on my floor and listen to Simon and Garfunkel and acquiesce to my pathetic loneliness without the inhibition of sobriety. I filled a rocks glass halfway up with ice and poured my mother’s alcohol until the cubes floated. A little lime and a little tonic, et voila. 

I tried to sip my cocktail at first, but the acrid fumes from the gin made me gag, so I pinched my nose and downed the glass in two large gulps. I felt the warmth travel down my spine and into the pit in my stomach. 

I grabbed a bag of peanut butter pretzels and waddled back upstairs. I laid down on my carpet and closed my eyes as the world began to swell and flow around me. Fluid rushed against my ear drums and so I laced my fingers through the polyester shag and took a deep breath. I placed a pretzel nugget in my mouth and held it there until my saliva turned it to mush. Then, I swallowed it whole. 

Around midnight, I texted him.

I dont knwo why your so mean to me :(((

I watched the screen for five minutes, waiting for three dots to appear. When they didn’t I typed another message. 

I cant believce you fucked some other whore. 

I stared at the blinking cursor, contemplating how the tone might be perceived. Too harsh, I decided after a moment. I deleted the text and contemplated my pivot. 

How’s Lila?

I sent the message and waited. Tears welled in my eyes, but I blinked them away. It felt like too concrete an expression of my defeat. It felt almost dysphoric. That after all the time he spent desperate to convince me to go out with him, I was the one who ended up screwed over. 

I imagined him with Lila, lying in bed on some rainy afternoon. Soft light, even softer duvet. Swathed in the warmth of each other's arms, whispering sweet nothings. My mind conjured up a collection of these vignettes: museum dates, dinner parties, school dances. All the things I think I always knew deep down he never would have done with me. I could dismiss a hook-up. But I couldn’t shake the betrayal I felt at these moments of intimacy, even if they technically were hypothetical. 

My phone dinged. A message from Max: 

Bruh. Chill. 

I stared down at my phone. Another ding. 

I thot u weren’t looking for commitment? 

~

Baker Beach was cold this time of night, but I didn’t care. The beach is always cold, it’s San Francisco. I kicked off my shoes and dug my toes into the sand. My teeth chattered involuntarily. I closed my eyes and pulled in a breath of salt and fog so deep into my lungs that I felt like I was choking. 

I moved noiselessly to the shore, stumbling slightly over the pits that had been dug out by industrious children earlier that day. The water licked up against my ankles, so cold it was nearly shocking. Each receding wave felt like a beacon. It coaxed me nearer. I felt the sea rush to my knees, then my waist, then my neck. I could feel, somewhere deep in my bones, that the sea wanted me. 

I let it have me.