ONE
Up until the afternoon Penny Brockaway dumped me in the middle of Echo Park Lake, I didn’t believe in fate.
Before you start conjuring visions of me in a zippered body bag sinking to the bottom of that filthy water, I mean to say she dumped me, as in she broke up with me, as in she took my heart and stomped on it while wearing a pair of those clunky boots she liked, and then she got behind the wheel of her SUV and she drove over it before picking up what flattened pieces were left and tossing them in the compost bin.
We took out one of those little pedal boats.
I did all the pedaling.
We’d heard about the boats from her best friend Vanessa, who’d told Penny you could take boats into the middle of Echo Park Lake and doesn’t that sound romantic? To be out in the middle of a lake with the person you love?
It didn’t sound all that great to me, but Penny wanted to do it, and doing anything with Penny was romantic. Watching her brush her hair. Or tie her shoe. Or blow a bubble with her blue sugar-free gum. I didn’t need to be in a boat in the middle of some fake lake to feel all warm and fuzzy about Penny. I was just as happy sitting on the back steps of her house watching her three-legged dog try to outrun the sprinklers. Or keeping her company while she babysat her fat little brother, Ben.
But she wanted to go on those goddamn boats. I should have just said no, but I didn’t. And then it took us four months to find a Saturday afternoon we could drive out to Echo Park, and we finally did, and when we got there we had to wait forty-five minutes for a boat, and we finally got a red one, and we climbed in and I pedaled us out to the middle of the lake, and that’s when she said, “Riv,” followed by a big sigh and a longing look back at the dock, where I’d paid some teenager in a stupid vest twenty bucks for the privilege of renting the boat on which my girlfriend was about to dump me. “I just can’t do this anymore.”
The funny thing is, I thought: But I’ve done all the pedaling.
What happened next is sort of a blur. Some people talk about having an out-of-body experience in moments of tragedy, like they’re somewhere up in the clouds looking down at a miniature version of themselves. Some people describe feeling like they’re underwater, where everything moves in a distorted slow motion. Me? My body turned to ice and my head caught on fire. Like I was some reject superhero with totally useless, self-harming powers.
She obviously said more. She must have. But for however many minutes--or maybe it was hours, because it was like the sun shifted, the light out on the water changed--for whatever time passed between when she said I can’t do this anymore and It’s just that you aren’t really . . . the kind of person I think I deserve, I didn’t hear a thing. And I don’t think whatever she said is living somewhere hidden inside me, like those little black boxes on airplanes that record all the critical data, because I’ve searched deep. I’ve practically meditated on it, and all I come back with is silence.
“What kind of person do you deserve, Pen?” I wish I’d asked this in a deep voice, with maybe an Argentinean accent, something manly, instead of croaking it like a frog. Something was happening to me that made it hard to speak.
“Someone . . . I don’t know. . . .” She looked back at the dock again. Was it that guy in the vest? Was that who she felt she deserved? Someone who sold tickets for “romantic” pedal boats where love goes to die? “Someone . . . with more interest in stuff.”
“Interest in stuff.”
“Just more . . . I don’t know . . . more . . .” Usually Penny was smart and quick and funny. So I knew she was struggling, which felt good, I guess, because it was clear she hadn’t spent time rehearsing what she wanted to say, so I could hold on to the hope that she was acting on an impulse.
“More . . . ?”
“Riv, stop making this so hard on me.”
I wish we’d taken a rowboat. I’d have dropped the oars. Then we could have sat out in the middle of Echo Park Lake forever, or at least until she realized she was making a terrible mistake.
But then she started to pedal. Slowly. Like she was hoping I wouldn’t notice, except that when she moved her pedals, mine moved too, they were connected. Simpatico. Just like we used to be.
The dock and the idiot in the vest were drawing nearer. I’d paid for a full hour. We’d been gone fifteen minutes.
“Look,” she said as her pedaling hit its stride. She bit her upper lip in that way I found totally adorable. Penny never wore lip gloss like all the other girls. Why try to improve on perfection? “You don’t reflect. You don’t think about things. You just follow along and do what you think you’re supposed to. You don’t even try to understand yourself and your issues, because, you know, River, you do have issues--”
“I love you, Penny.”
“I know you love me. I’m pretty clear on that.”
“I mean, I really, really love you.”
“That’s sweet, but--”
“That’s sweet?”
“Let’s just--”
“Is this because of Vanessa? Because I think when she told you about going out on a lake with someone you love, she meant you and her.”
“You’re crazy.”
“I am. About you.” I wish I hadn’t said that. God, it was so tacky. Right out of one of those crap romantic comedies Penny made me watch.
She rolled her eyes. I wasn’t even looking at her, I couldn’t bear to, but I knew she rolled her eyes. As she pedaled us up to the dock, the kid in the vest called out, “Toss me the rope.”
I clenched it in my fists.
“Let him have the rope, River.”
“No.”
“He needs the rope to pull us in.”
“No.”
“Whatever,” she said as she stepped out of the boat. She had to lunge to bridge the distance. She grabbed the arm of the kid in the vest as I sat alone in the boat with the rope in my hands.
“Come on, River.”
“No.”
I didn’t know what I was doing or why, but I’d made up my mind somehow. I wasn’t getting out of that boat.
“I want to go now.”
“So go.”
“We’re in Echo Park. How are you going to get home?”
“I’ll take the bus.”
“Very funny.”
“I mean it.”
“You’ve never taken the bus in your life.”
“So?”
She sighed and threw a look at the kid in the vest, like: What am I supposed to do with this guy?
“Fine,” she said, digging in her purse for her car keys and then dangling them in front of her. “I’m leaving now. Last call for a ride home.”
“Pass.”
“Good-bye, River. Good luck with . . .” She gestured to the lake. “. . . everything.”
TWO
I’m not proud to admit that I never bothered to get my driver’s license.
Most kids who grow up in LA start dreaming of driving as soon as they’re old enough to dream. But when I turned sixteen, I didn’t go to the DMV like everyone else, and then I turned seventeen and it sort of became a thing: I was the guy who didn’t have a license. Why? Well, I never needed one. I fell in love with Penny Brockaway when we were fifteen and then she turned sixteen a month before I did, and she got her license like everybody else, so I didn’t need to know how to drive, because I had her, until the day I found myself stuck in the middle of Echo Park Lake, thirteen freeway miles away from home. It turned out to be only ten miles on surface streets, 10.2 to be precise, which I learned because I walked all 10.2 of them.
I had a phone. There were people I could have called. Mom. Or Leonard, though I knew he was at work. I could have called Will or Luke or Maggie; they’d have relished the opportunity to drive me home from a breakup with Penny. Hell, I could have called a taxi. But I didn’t want to face anyone, not even some cabdriver I’d never have to see again in all my life.
I finally threw the kid the rope, and I got out of that boat, and he told me I owed him another twenty bucks because I’d cut into my second hour just sitting there thinking, and I reached into my wallet and gave it to him, because I couldn’t bear failing to meet anyone else’s expectations.
I set out on foot. I won’t lie to you--I had no idea where I was going. I had never been to Echo Park. I rarely went east of Fairfax.
I am not, nor was I ever, a member of the Boy Scouts of America or anything, yet I somehow knew that west was toward the sun, which had begun a lazy descent. This day was going to take its time ending.
I walked through Filipinotown, Thai Town, Koreatown. Past shops selling bright plastic buckets and flowered umbrellas and silk pajamas and spices and fish and radios and futons. I didn’t stop for noodles or dumplings or shave ice. I couldn’t remember when or what I’d eaten last: typically I had a monster appetite, so it was saying something that I didn’t buy so much as a Boba tea.
Finally, on a particularly dreary stretch of midcity Pico Boulevard, I started to lose it, thinking about my haircut. We’d gone to the Rudy’s in Venice, just last week, and Penny’d told the guy who cut my hair, Jasper, I think his name was, exactly what to do. Keep it shaggy. Take some off the back; he looks like he’s got a mullet. She had her hand on my neck when she said that, and she was running her fingers through the back of my hair, pulling on it a little to illustrate her point.
How do you go from caressing the ends of someone’s hair to dumping him in Echo Park Lake in the span of a week?
What had happened was hitting me with the force of an earthquake, but not one of those minor ones LA gets where you sometimes have to pretend you felt it.
It was right at that moment, when I was about to fall apart, in the middle of the empty sidewalk, which had probably never seen a pedestrian, as the sun finally disappeared in front of me and there was nothing left to guide my way, that I saw it.
The sign.
Painted black and fading on a tattered white awning:
a second chance.
Like Vegas or Times Square, a big, bright, flashing neon sign, that’s how I saw it--a sign, beckoning me: Hey, you! River Anthony Dean! Seventeen-year-old nobody without a license or a girlfriend! Over here! This way!
Now I understood why I’d held on to that rope, why I wouldn’t step out of that boat, why I wouldn’t take Penny’s offer of a ride home, why I didn’t stop for noodles or dumplings or shave ice. I needed to arrive on this block at this moment and see a second chance shining like a beacon in my darkness.
This sign was put here for me.
I stood underneath the awning and faced a pair of dirty glass doors with a piece of paper taped to one of them:
HERE: Is where you belong.
THIS: Is where change begins.
NOW: Is the time.
COME ON IN.
I walked through an empty reception area to another set of doors and pushed through those, continuing to feel a pull toward something important. Something with the power to right the course of my catastrophic afternoon.
I found myself in a large windowless room with a circle of metal folding chairs and about a dozen people. Their heads swung around in unison.
“Welcome,” said a man in a white collarless button-down, the kind worn by poets or pirates. “Pull up a chair.”
I did.
“Introduce yourself.”
“I’m River.”
“Hi, River,” said the man. “Tell us why you’re here.”
“Um . . .” I swallowed hard. I didn’t want a return of the frog. “Well . . . I guess I have issues. Like, I don’t think enough about things? And my life is . . . kinda ruined.” I stopped. Swallowed again. My mouth was so dry. Why didn’t I buy that Boba tea? “And then I . . . I saw the sign. You know, on the building? And, well, I just . . . I need a second chance.”
All the people in the circle, most of them about my age except for the Poet/Pirate, did a strange motion, something like a hang-loose, a shaking of the hand back and forth in my direction with the pinky aimed at me and the thumb aimed at themselves.
“That means we feel a connection,” explained the Poet/Pirate. “We’re connecting what you’re saying to something true inside ourselves.” He smiled at me and held my gaze for just long enough to make me a little uncomfortable; then he turned to the kid sitting next to him. This kid was big--shaved head, plaid shirt, thick neck--the kind of kid who looked like he’d steal your lunch money right before hot-wiring your car. “Go on, Mason. You were telling us about what happened this week.”
“Okay, so yeah, there I was, like, in the Starbucks after school. Everyone was going, so I figured I’d just go along but I wouldn’t get anything. And then everyone was buying Caramel Flan Frappuccinos and they looked so good. But they have like a gajillion calories. And then I see that there’s a light Caramel Flan Frappuccino that has only like a hundred and forty calories and zero fat so I get one, and it tastes exactly like it has only a hundred and forty calories and zero grams of fat. And I finish it in thirty seconds and I go to order a real one, because now I have the taste for it, and the guy’s like What can I get you? And I open my mouth to say A Caramel Flan Frappuccino, dickwad, but I hear myself say: A glass of water, please. It’s not like I didn’t think about going into the bathroom and puking, but then . . . I didn’t. I only made myself throw up once this week. That’s not perfect, but I’m pretty proud of that.”
“You should be,” said the Poet/Pirate. “I know I’m proud of you.” He was slight, practically swimming in that collarless shirt, with longish brown hair Penny would have made him trim in the back, a wispy goatee it was unclear he’d fully committed to, and reddish cheeks. He spoke with the hint of a lisp.
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