Free In the Break by Jack Lopez

said, “What about Jamie?”
    “Those people are staying at the El Conquistador. Can you find it?”
    “You bet.” The town wasn’t that big. We could always get a tourist map, should it come to that.
    “He can just wait there. We can get him in the morning.” She leaned against my shoulder and promptly fell asleep.
    I sat there thinking what an odd night. I’d wanted to be withAmber forever, and here she was actually with me, and, still, everything was so strange, and the front of my face felt as
     if it weren’t even there. I remembered looking at ancient Aztecan art and thinking, How could they create that stuff? It was
     so otherworldly, their art. That was what I felt sitting in my mother’s car in the early hours of the misty Tijuana morning,
     water droplets on the windshield, obscuring my vision. It was as if we’d been transported to some other planet, an alternative
     world in which we still inhabited our earthly bodies, but those were the only remnants of the world we’d come from. Amber
     was with me. We were free of all previous social constraints for the moment, which made me excited until I thought of my parents,
     and then the excitement was replaced by dread. But I could feel Amber nestled into me, could feel her soft curves and her
     breath hot on my neck, and I was prepared to suffer the consequences for this moment.
    Starting the car and slowly pulling forward, I drove to a beach south of town with Amber cooing in her drunken state, and
     we slept together in the back of the SUV, holding each other, and I think that she too had always desired me. She must have.

CHAPTER 6
    Just below San Rafael, where the trailer park and houses were, below where my aunt had a trailer, was the surf spot called
     Puntas. The mesa simply stopped, and the cliff gave way to a miniature bay. Round rocks covered the beach, and they also formed
     a reef outside, the waves lining up in near-perfect peaks, both a right- and a left-breaking wave. Puntas was best with a
     healthy swell and a receding tide.
    You can’t see the waves breaking from the highway, but you can see the effects of the swell. Relentless lines moving toward
     the coast. Marching in a cosmic rhythm that God only knows, and that we were trying to tap into. Since there was a swell on
     this day, and it wasn’t too late, we made for more surfing. Why not? We could go to my aunt’s trailer after. I could drop
     off Jamie there, and if Amber and I drove fast, we could be back home before it was too late.
    Driving off the paved highway and onto the dirt road that wound its way over the small mesa, a dust cloud followed our car
     as we made our way to the surf spot. There was a flat area to park andcamp, and then a gully, and then a path down the cliff’s face. We parked, stretched, and made our way to the mesa’s edge.
     Except for the light wind that blew, Puntas was seemingly perfect. Tide dropping. Shoulder-to-head-high waves. Greg J. wasn’t
     down here; we were getting the good waves, the hurricane swells!
    “Yeah!” Jamie said. “Oh, my head.”
    “Moo,” I whispered. My head hurt too. When we’d picked him up at El Conquistador, he looked sort of young and forlorn, waiting
     right at the entrance. Looking nothing like the player of the night before, he still wore his sunglasses, and he looked a
     little tough, but he also looked fifteen standing there on the Tijuana street in the early morning light. When he got in the
     car he smelled like vomit; it was kind of pathetic. Amber had said nothing. I too gave him some time before I tried to tease
     him about that woman. To his credit he wouldn’t respond, wouldn’t take the bait, had said nothing about his night. Probably
     because she had chosen him, not the other way around. Or she was an old lady or something. Who knew?
    Amber hadn’t mentioned last night either, but we were all dry-mouthed and grungy and weren’t talking that much. Maybe she
     was embarrassed in front of Jamie, I