Every time it begins the same: the ocean, pitiless and sparkling. 

 

Today a woman with spiky black hair, a bikini top, and long shorts jogs in. The water doesn’t cling to her or beat her away as it might children or the uninitiated. She knows how to handle it. She sets the board on the surface and slips her body onto it in one swift, seamless move that flows into the round motion of her paddling. 

 

A wave rises to greet her and I can see even from the shore how her hips and shoulders tuck into her torso to leverage the tip of the board over the wave’s crest. The ridges of her spine rise like drops of condensation down her back.

 

My camera whirs softly, focuses. I snap the photo just before she dips back down over the wave: her head is tipped up, sunbeams exploding in the transparent crest, a thin veil of water spraying up before her.

 

It’s a good photo. I’ve earned a minute, so I stick my hands under my knees to warm them. The sun is just beginning to needle at my back, but not enough to heat me through. My skin is dry, tight across my face, and when I lick my lips they taste like salt. 

 

It’s a wonder I’ve lasted as many mornings here as I have, huddled in a sarape with only a coffee and my camera. The surfer, Margaret, thinks it’s a wonder that I’ve been photographing her and her friends for almost two months and haven’t been in the water any deeper than my ankles. Each time she mentions it I try to smile and tell her that it’s a photo series I’m working toward, not a surf competition. 

 

Margaret starts to paddle in front of a growing swell so I stand and pick up the camera again, fingers aching a little as I poise them over the buttons. She’s farther out this time, so I jog up to the shallows for a better angle, skirting around the shadowed sand where the tide has just been. 

 

She slides to her feet. Snap. The barrel is sneaking up behind her, propelling her away from me. Her back ankle disappears into it, her long thigh. Snap. She even abandons the wave gracefully; the sea seems to open a dark pocket for her, and she vanishes into the unreadable surface. 

 

I’m so lost in the viewfinder and Margaret’s grace that I don’t notice when the sea surges to lap at my ankles. I stumble back from the shock of cold and plunge my toes into the hot, dry sand.

 

Margaret drives me back to her place in her old yellow Bronco. A stack of faded Sex Wax air fresheners swings from the mirror. We’re heading south from Leo Carillo State Beach in Malibu and the day is depthless pale gray, taupe cliffs dropping straight from PCH down to the water. 

 

“Usually you can see Catalina from here,” she says.

 

“I went there once when I was younger,” I say. “By boat from Long Beach. I met my friend’s friend who went to high school on the island and she’d never heard of Switzerland. Like, she said, ‘What’s that?’”

 

She hums, switches lanes without turning on the blinker. “Switzerland isn’t the most important place in the world. You should take a jet ski instead of the boat. There’s a trip you won’t forget.”

 

I picture myself straddling a jet ski, my hair streaming behind me like a banner. “I don’t think I’m meant for that kind of thing.” 

 

I watch her eyes in the mirror, trying to gauge what she’s thinking, and she looks up and briefly locks her gaze on mine.

 

“Don’t be silly, baby. There’s nothing you aren’t meant for.”

 

–

 

The next morning is windless and warm, and I watch Margaret’s friend Nick jog into the ocean through my camera lens. He gets his knees high in the shallows, probably to reduce drag, but it flicks up sprays of water that splinter the low straight sunbeams. By some miracle of topography we’re on a south-facing beach, and the early light streaming in parallel to the ocean reminds me of photos I took in Death Valley at sunrise. There’s nothing to interrupt the clear, flat brightness.

 

This far into the photo series, I’ve started to recognize style in surfers. Nick’s is reckless and rougher than Margaret’s; he teeters up to the tip of his board and hangs five, a motion that transports me again to the desert and how the ravens curled their talons over dry branches. He backs into the center of the board and gets real low before kicking into a high flourish that I snap a photo of right at its zenith — his longish blond hair flung back, seawater fanned out in front of him, brilliant. 

 

Like it was nothing he cuts back over the top of the dying wave and starts to paddle out again, arms chopping up the water. It’s at least two hours before he’s tired out. After he’s already loaded his longboard into his tattered blue Chevy truck and gotten into the driver’s seat, he has to unbuckle, come back around, and open my window because I can’t figure out the crank mechanism. 

 

Personal space doesn’t seem to exist to him; he soaks the right half of my sweatshirt with his damp wetsuit, wedged between me and the open door, before he turns back and smiles hugely at me. He looks so freckled and goofy and I smile back.

 

We listen to Sublime on the way to Margaret’s place, each of us with a breakfast burrito. For once I actually hear the lyrics of “Wrong Way” and I’m a little disturbed that it’s about a child prostitute and no one has seemed to care since 1997. I ask Nick about it.

 

“That’s what they’re saying, though, dude,” he replies. He swivels his whole head around to look at me, totally ignoring the road and gesticulating with one hand. “It’s the wrong way. Everything is totally twisted. The guy singing is just doing what he can in a wrong world.”

 

I think that there’s more the speaker of the song could be doing than staring at the child prostitute and taking her “to the can,” but Nick is bopping his head to the beat and finally focusing on the road, so I don’t say anything. He drops me off and dials the music even louder as he rumbles away. On the porch I Google “wrong way,” and all that comes up are articles about deadly car accidents. I turn my phone off.

 

Inside, Margaret is doing dishes by hand in her little blue kitchen. Her dark hair is sticking up in a dozen directions and she’s wearing boxers with a short-cropped tank top, humming to some Brazilian music I don’t know.

 

She spots me and smiles, turning down the music. “Hi baby. How was it with Nick?”

 

I step up beside her and start drying. “Good. He’s photogenic.” Her dish towels have little yellow-centered daisies embroidered on them. “I feel like I know what shredding is now.”

 

That earns a bright laugh. “He’s a little mental, yeah. He’ll get thrown around like he’s in a washing machine and pop up a full minute later, totally cool and, like, euphoric.”

 

She’s handing me clean dishes faster than I can dry them. “He said the weirdest thing about a Sublime song, though. That much time underwater has to do something to your head,” I say. I try to glance at her to check her reaction, but I’m blinded by the low sun through the window behind her. By the time I blink her face into focus, she’s winking at me, handing me a bowl.

 

–

 

Margaret is hosting a party that night, and because I’m living with her, I have to attend. I don’t mind so much. I like being carried away into the surfers’ boldness, their easy openness. Blond people start to trickle in around eleven, and by midnight, they’re hanging off of couch arms, pressed up against her walls, and perched on her kitchen counter. Everyone is athletic and easygoing. Limp joints, like little crooked fingers, make their way around. 

 

Bree, who I photographed a few weeks ago, steers me into a ring by the TV. “This is Jeanie,” she says, hooking a hard arm around my neck. I try to relax my shoulder muscles. “The talent of a generation. She’s going to bring back the surf rag.”

 

I laugh loudly, because I’m three beers in and confident and I like being around these happy, pretty people. “I just stand there and take pictures.”

 

Bree leans into the ring and whispers, breath hot on my cheek: “She’s going to come surf with us tonight.”

 

I laugh again, but the tanned faces are grinning at me wide and white enough that I hesitate. “It’s like one. The beaches are closed.”

 

Something cold makes contact with my neck and I turn — Margaret, pressing a Corona into my flushed skin, a lime wedge already shoved down its neck. She takes a place on my other side, an arm around my waist, and says into my ear: “Get in the car.”

 

–

 

Leo Carillo again, opaque and sparkling. I’ve never been scared of the ocean until now. It’s unbearably loud, the way I’d imagine the roaring inside a nuclear plant’s cooling tower — a massive scale of noise, an infinite mass of shifting vapor, an incomprehensible churning of power. The wetsuit Margaret lent me does little for the cold. I stop when I’m up to my knees.

 

Margaret just touches my back. “Come on.” 

 

The moon hangs heavy in the sky. “I won’t,” I say, but I keep trudging away, trying to lift my mind out of the frigidness. I set the board down and heave myself on, flexing and pushing my toes against the waxy tail end, trying to remember Margaret’s crash course. Duck dive. Pop up. Stay low. Balance. Come on. 

 

I paddle. I probably look like shark food from below. I glide over a few small, unbroken swells with no problem, even though my breath stutters each time I catch a bit of lift at the top. 

 

I come down over a swell and glance up. A real wave rears up over me, dark and bristling with foam, as tall as a man. My arms tremble at the edges of the board, I suck in all the breath I can hold, I try to shove my board down, and I dive.

 

For a moment everything is burning, the cold and my lungs and my salty eyes. Bubbles stream against my back. The invisible hands of the currents yank at me, at the board. For a moment I can’t see my hands or board in front of me, I can’t see the surface in any direction but from above — the cold, glittering look of the surface, sealed over me, traceless. 

 

I knock my feet down. The nose breaks out of the water and my head with it. I gasp for cold air, fumbling to wipe the salt water from my eyes without letting go of the board. 

 

Before I can recover there’s another wave, descending on me like a vulture with huge dark wings, and it’s all I can do to turtle dive — roll onto my back and hope my board doesn’t let me drown.

 

I yell for Margaret when I surface, hair plastered to my face, at least a cupful of water down my throat. She sounds my name back.

 

“How do I get in?” I shout, trying to at once trace the sound of her voice behind me and watch for oncoming waves. “I’m not doing this.”

 

“You can,” she says, disembodied. “That next one is you. Turn around. Paddle, come on.” 

 

That could be anyone, I think. The beach, the cliffs, the moon, just something with a voice that sounds like Margaret. The ocean could have picked up her accent and dissolved it, carried what I know as Margaret — black hair, sports bra, raspy voice — and released its latent sound into the cold wind, back to me. A lure. 

 

I listen anyway. I hold on to it: Come on. So I wait for an unbroken wave to pass, then extend my leg awkwardly and rotate my board 180 degrees. Margaret’s silhouette comes into focus, a soft line on her board that blends with the curves of the waves. So she was there. She sticks her thumb up silently. 

 

I paddle. My arms begin to burn. The wave is catching up, boiling up behind me with the force of a jet engine. The shore is getting closer, faster, and my board is starting up a thin white wake.

 

I press the heels of my palms into the board, whole body tensing, and push up — slowly, it’s more vinyasa than it is pop-up, but the wave is giving me a little leeway, a sigh of extra time to set my back foot down, my front, and lift my torso away from my bent knees.

 

The board is tilting forward, and the acceleration of the wave threatens to knock me over so I shift a little onto my heels, which seems right. Each movement’s effect is amplified exponentially. The wave isn’t as tall as I thought — it only comes up to my waist — but I can feel its power thrumming even through the board the same way I’ve felt the shifting muscles of horses under the skin. It’s electric, the whipping air, the silver flush to everything, Margaret’s friends yelling. 

 

I lean forward, into the speed. Dumbly I think: the ocean is so huge. This wave is so powerful but I’m only grazing the barest edge of the sea’s hugeness. It’s not a scary thought. When it’s over, I fall back into the wave like it’s a bed, like I’ve won.

 

–

 

My reward for surfing, as it turns out, is more beer. Nick lights a small fire and we huddle around it with blankets and wet hair, listening to the wood crackle. We’re out of limes. Everyone is thawing, drunk, and a little high from the surfing, if not the joints.

 

We’re loud. I throw my whole head back to laugh up at the sky when Margaret’s cartwheel fails halfway, and Nick’s screeches scare away the birds when I tell him a story about my Connecticut mother’s first time smoking. For the first time I can remember I’m at ease, like there was a coin flipped in my stomach that’s been spinning around itself for years and just now settled.

 

Nick has had at least four beers and half a joint at the fire alone, but I’m practically meditating as he blasts us back down PCH. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I came out of the water and everything was lighter than before, and hours later gravity still hasn’t settled its mantle back over me. I could crank open the Chevy window and hang my whole torso out of it, or light a trash can on fire, or sleep under a bridge, and nothing would have consequences.

 

I fall asleep on the couch, two other surfers tangled on the carpet next to me. The world is still swaying from the beers. I don’t dream, and when I wake, the sun is just about to come up. The sky is dark, a little bruised around the horizon. 

 

I don’t check the time. The whole place is breathing deeply. I pick up my backpack, step over the surfers, and go lightly down the stairs to Margaret’s quiver of boards in the garage, all mounted on wall racks. I take the one she lent me last night, with thin blue stripes down the middle, the crosshatched pattern of wax smudged from my feet. 

 

There’s a bicycle down there too, with a rack for the side. I strap the board onto the side of the bike, press the garage door button, and listen to the gears groan, watch the sliver of daylight underneath grow to a band, to a full bright rectangle. When the door is open I pass through it, out to sea, unhesitatingly dissolved.