Suicide and Keg Stands - Chapter 17

We'd met the owners of the Solar Café and they had a hard time believing that we'd drive out there every weekend. The Solar was owned by a hippy turned rocket scientist turned café owner named Roger and his wife Nancy. Roger had opened the Solar for something to do in retirement. "It's boring." He'd say. "I'm supposed to just sit around the house all day staring at Nancy? This way at least we have something to do all day."

Sarah and I liked to go in after the lunch rush, when it was quiet. Nancy would sit at the counter and tell us stories from when she was younger. She'd been a surfer before she met Roger and traveled the world just looking for great places to surf.

"No one knew what surfing was then. There were only a couple hundred of us and we all knew each other. You could fly to Hawaii and you'd see the same people you'd surfed with all up and down the coast. It was like a family. You'd ask them where they were staying and they'd invite you to crash with them." She paused. "There were some mornings, we'd be driving to the beach and see all these people leaving for work with their carefully manicured lawns and their neat little houses. We felt like we were getting away with something. We were so afraid that someone would figure out what we were doing, that we were really happy and come shut it down somehow. It was an great time to be alive."

We'd begun to feel like locals.

At the end of spring break, Sarah was forced to choose and ultimately moved in with her father. Neither of them were at that apartment much. He worked late and began traveling for work, which he had never done in the past. At least that's what he told Sarah. She didn't care as she spent most of her time on campus hanging out in my dorm room. At first she didn't stay over much, it was awkward with Ryan there. Then Ryan started seeing a girl who had her own bedroom in a house off campus and Sarah stayed over more and more. She was usually there when I would get out of class and we'd hang out all afternoon. In a lot of ways it didn't feel like anything had changed. We still saw each other all the time.

That quarter we continued to go to the Seaside most weekends. Like some kids went home for the weekends, we'd drive to the Seaside to hangout with Jean and walk along the beach. It got to the point where most people thought we were going home for the weekend and we didn't do anything to convince them otherwise. I was happy to have something that was ours. It felt like we'd discovered something no one else had. We'd both worked out our schedule so we didn't have Friday classes. Thursday afternoons we couldn't wait to get out of town.

"I don't think Sarah is going to class." Ryan said one evening. Sarah was on her way over, we were going to grab some dinner.

"I know she's here a lot. I'll say something to her. It's just that she's living with her dad and it's not going that well."

"No. I don't care if she's here. You know that. I don't think she's going to her classes this quarter. At all. When I get home in the morning she's usually sleeping and when I leave for class she's still sleeping. And if I get back before you, she'll be here watching TV or reading. You gotta say something to her or she's going to fail her classes. They'll going to kick her out of school."

"They're not going to kick her out of school. She probably just has weird schedule."

"I'm telling you ... Have you seen her go to class? Or study?" He asked but I just looked at him. "Ok. Have you heard her bitch about her classes? Even once? Who doesn't bitch about their classes?"

"She just stressed about her parents."

"Just say something. If she is, then what does it matter? And if she isn't, I don't know man. She's going to get in trouble."

"Alright. I'll say something to her about it." I said. A few minutes later Sarah knocked on the door.

"Hey." Ryan said.

"Hey." She said.

"Are you sure you want to go out? You look tired." I asked her.

"Yeah. I just didn't sleep all that well last night. My dad was up until four or five with one of his bimbos."

"Is this the one he brought home last week?"

"No, this one was a flight attendant he met on the flight back from Spain."

"Didn't he just come back from Spain?"

"Yep, they shared a cab."

"Creepy."

"I know, right? It's not like they're divorced, they're just separated. And some of them that he brings back he's known for years. It makes me wonder if he was fucking around."

"Wow."

"I don't even know why I care. It's not like she's any better. It's so depressing to learn how fucked up your parents really are."

I never asked her about her classes. I didn't know how to bring it up or what I would say. It never seemed to be the right time. She was upset a lot of the time, fighting with her dad and I thought that school would work itself out when her and her father learned how to live together.

Things continued to get worse for her. When her father was around they fought nonstop.

"He expects me to do all the house work. I'm not the maid. He'll have his friends over all night and there'll be dirty wine glasses and beer bottles and take out containers all over the place. Then when he gets home from work he'll start yelling 'why isn't this cleaned up? You don't do anything all day, you could at least clean this place up it looks like shit in here'. I'm so sick of it."

Most of the time though he wasn't around though and that might have been worse. As much as they fought, it was worse when she felt abandoned by him. He'd be gone part of the week almost every week. He'd never tell her he was going out of town, he'd just wouldn't come home for a few days and then, she'd get home from school or wake up in the morning and he'd be there, like nothing unusual had happened.