Page 48 of The Summer of Everything

Wes doesn’t know much about Springsteen except that, when Calvin maneuvered through the kitchen, singing while working through new recipes to roll out at the restaurant, his phone always rested on the counter, playing Springsteen. Wes loved hiding around the corner, listening as Calvin tried to imitate Bruce’s growl about being born to run. He loved the smell of herbs and the sizzle of oil and the music.

As the man’s broken voice hits a peak, Wes’s heartthump-thumpsto the melody. It’s the magic of Venice. Every night’s a free show. Everyone walks around here with their issues on display like an exhibit. It’s a gallery of scars.

Out of tune but willing, the crowd joins the man on the chorus. Wes does too, only softer. Something clogs his throat. He doesn’t want to overanalyze it.

After dropping five dollars in the basket at the man’s feet, Wes follows the progression of the crowd down the boardwalk. On his phone, “Scar Tissue” kicks in with its dulcet guitar riff. He walks along the bike path toward rock walls decorated in colorful graffiti. Sand dirties his lemon-yellow Pumas as he treads to the oceanfront skate park.

Venice Skatepark is this legendary structure built on the sand with two shallow bowls, one for amateurs and one for the fearless, along with rails, stairs, and platforms where skaters test new tricks. The ledge surrounding the main bowl is always crowded with burnouts and slackers and friends. Inside the bowl, people glide and wipe out equally.

Wes finds prime space near the railings. Phones are out everywhere, capturing the best tricks and epic fails. Too scared to scuff up their equipment, kids with new boards and shoes bullshit around the edges. But the homegrown, adrenaline-hungry talent swoop in, merciless, willing to risk more damage to their boards or scars on their bodies to impress anyone watching. These are the ones without any money or any fucks to give.

One boy, long and lean, with a mop of curly blond hair, hits a sick kickflip, then rockets into the bowl with enough force to soar his board over a parked bicycle on the other side. He lands perfectly.

The fans erupt.

“Sweet pink boxers, Colton!” yells a guy from Wes’s side.

Colton, lip-piercing glinting, flips his friend off. He tugs down his T-shirt in a losing effort with his sagging jeans.

Another boy, Latinx with a buzzcut, his clean board exposing his inexperience, drops in, then instantly wipes out.

“Holy shit.”

“Wow. That just happened.”

Nearby, a pack of girls in flannel shirts with cigarettes and sneers, and whisper to each other. One of them yells, “Come on, Juan! You got this.”

Juan, dusting himself off as he stands, smiles through defeat. But he grabs his board, climbs the bowl, and goes again. Wes respects his moxie. He didn’t lie down and give up. Wes, on the other hand, would’ve still been down there, waiting for an ambulance or Nico to rescue him.

Unlike Wes and all these rookies who stole their moves from YouTube videos, Nico’s a natural on a board. Sure-footed and brave, he’s more than earned the respect of everyone around here, from the newest to the crews that have grown older but no less ambitious about their craft. There are a few jealous, racist assholes who call Nico “basic Mexican trash,” but he’s above feeding their ignorance. He just carries on the way Mr. Alvarez taught him to.

“Call me Martín,” Mr. Alvarez would insist in his kind voice.

Wes never could. It’s weird because Wes has exactly zero problems calling his mom Savannah in public.

“Sure thing, Mr. Alvarez,” Wes would always say as Mr. Alvarez laughed.

He misses Mr. Alvarez’s laugh, nasal and high like Nico’s. Nico has his dad’s strong jaw and narrow shoulders too.

It’s been almost three years since his death. He’d always walk into a room smelling of weird chemicals that made Wes want to gag. He’d kiss Mrs. Alvarez on the temple and whisper something in Spanish, and she’d always warn him to wash his hands before going to pick up one of Nico’s twin sisters. It was a joke. Mr. Alvarez was the most hygienic person Wes’s ever known.

“I don’t get it,” whispered Nico two nights after his father died. “He was so careful. So clean. It’s unreal, dude. Like… how?”

Wes still doesn’t know. No one sat him down and explained what happened in the laboratory that morning. Nico never talks about it. “Freak accident,” Leo muttered over breakfast one morning while their parents whispered in the hallway.

Wes remembers sleeping on Nico’s bedroom floor for a week after the funeral. Not because Nico asked him to. Wes just needed to be close, fingertips away from his best friend. It felt as if he couldn’t do anything else to help Nico.

There’s no manual for how to help someone you love deal with death and grief, at least none that Wes has found.

It’s messy. It’s lonely. It’s gone today, then back tomorrow. No amount of hugs and prayers and “are you okay?” fixes grief. To be honest, Wes doesn’t think grief is something to be “fixed” or “get over.” It’s there for a reason.

A short burst of wind descends upon the skatepark. Wes is wearing his dad’s old, blue UCLA hoodie. He tugs the zipper higher, then shoves his hands into the front pockets. He pries himself away from the carnage of two more skaters wiping out on the smooth bottom of the bowl.

The Strand, a bike trail that runs along the shoreline, is lit marigold by the industrial lights towering higher than the palms. Wes follows the path toward Santa Monica. On his left, a group of college-aged kids spread blankets across the beach. The flashlights on their phones move like dancing stars as they search through coolers.

In a year, maybe that’ll be Wes? Coming home on the weekends with Ella to spend a day at the beach after they visit Mrs. Rossi and the bookstore. Because, in a year, the bookstore will still be around. Maybe he can coordinate those trips with Nico’s planned bimonthly visits to his family.

Someone’s Labrador is parked on the edge of the sand with its tail wagging.

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