Quintin’s CD player blared down the hall. I knocked at his door, scrunching my nose at the noise rock, the grunge. He was going through a Nirvana phase, and it was making our house feel like a strange, gritty bar. Dad was often not home, and if Mom had been alive, she wouldn’t have stood for it.

Quintin strode from his room, staring at me. He’d begun to grow his eighteen-year-old beard out, making it scraggly against his crooked, sharp chin. He glared down at me. “Don’t suppose you’ve heard from Wesley, have you?”

“I just need you to turn the music down. I can’t hear myself think,” I said to him, pouting.

“Did you and Wesley get into another goddamn fight?” Quintin asked. He didn’t turn down the music, and his voice was loud and wild over it, finding the gaps in the notes.

“Jesus, Quintin, do you have to know all of my business?”

“Why can’t you just find someone else to fuck, Rem? I mean, does it have to be my best friend?”

“I’m in love with him, Quintin,” I screamed back, suddenly feeling volatile. “And he’s such a big idiot, he thinks he can just leave me after school’s out? Drive across the country on his motorbike? I wonder where he got that idea from, huh?”

“As if I told him to leave,” Quintin scoffed. “I want him here just as much as you do.”

“Fuck you. I’m going to Los Angeles, and I’m going to be something,” I said. “In fact, I’m going to go today.”

“Remy, we don't graduate for another six weeks. Good luck telling them you aren’t coming back,” Quintin snickered.

“Whatever.” I tossed my long curls behind my back and stormed down the steps, into the mushy grass outside our three-bedroom house, a few blocks from the gritty Mission District. I’d lived in San Francisco my entire life, a place of apparent “free love,” of music. But I felt stifled, uncreative within its boundaries. Unable to breathe.

A few blocks down, I found myself at the pay phone near the liquor store. I slipped some quarters in and dialed Wesley’s number. His father picked up on the second ring, sounding sour, fatigued. He was continuously harried, trying to “make his billions” in the tech industry.

“Sure. I’ll go grab him,” he grunted.

I waited, tapping my foot wildly against the pavement. The air was filled with smells of Mexican food, of baking tortillas. My stomach quaked with hunger.

Wesley’s voice on the other end sizzled in my ear. I brought my leg to one side, feeling my heartbeat begin to pattern wildly. This man. He was my everything.

Yet, he was angry. We’d burned one another with harsh words during the hour after school, both of us filled with rage and zealous fire, each of us wanting a life the other didn’t. “You’ll find someone else when you get to LA,” Sam, my best friend, always told me. “You’ll figure out that a silly high school romance is nothing more than that. Silly. Especially with someone as groundless as Wesley.”

“What is it?” Wesley demanded over the phone. “I can’t really talk right now, Rem. I’m in the middle of something.”

“Why don’t we just run away together right now?” I sputtered back. I still stirred with anger yet wanted to demand something of this world. I felt I could feel it turning too swiftly toward a reality I hadn’t chosen.

---

“What the hell are you talking about?” Wesley asked. I felt intrigue sparkling behind his voice. “Jesus, Rem, I can never really handle what you’re going to say next.”

“Take me out of this city, Wesley, or I swear to God I’ll burn it down,” I said. Tears slid down my cheeks.

Wesley paused for a long time. Tension made the air taut around me. At the liquor store door, an old man ripped the cap off a large vodka bottle and tilted it up, over his mouth. He basically doused himself with it. It felt like a moment of clarity.

“All right. Where are you?” Wesley finally asked me.

I told him.

“Stand right there. I’ll be there in twenty minutes. You got cash?”

“Maybe twenty bucks,” I said. “You better take something from your dad’s desk. A few hundreds?”

“He’ll notice.”

“He’ll notice you’re gone, too.”

Wesley knew I had a point. After hanging up, I shuffled toward the gas station on the far edge of the corner and bought a soda. It fizzled against my tongue, making me alert, alive. It was a harsh May evening, one that produced droplets of sweat along my neck. The man from the liquor store hadn’t budged much more than a few feet and continued to sip his vodka straight, staring at me.

Wesley rolled up on the motorbike minutes later, his dark blonde hair long and curled along his shoulders. Immediately, my heart burst with lust for him. Memory of our fight from the afternoon dissipated as I fell into him, wrapping my thin arms around his neck and diving against him. I felt his muscled chest against my breasts, his lips curling over mine. Love. This. This was love, I reminded myself. And maybe, like Sam said, it wasn’t going to last forever. But all we had was now. Kurt Cobain had died, Quintin had told me. But he’d loved and loved hard. “And it doesn’t matter how long you’re here,” Quintin had said. “Just that you really fucking feel while you are.”

“Where do you want me to take you?” Wesley asked, his eyes dewy, gazing at me after our kiss broke. “I’ll take you anywhere in the world.”

“Come to Los Angeles with me. We can make love on the beach. We can bicker while swimming in the waves. Come with me, Wesley. I so want us to be together. Beneath the sun.”

We whipped down the road, tearing toward Los Angeles as the sun filtered down over the ocean. I held onto him firmly, pressing my cheek into his back and gazing out at the waves as they lapped the shore. I knew that soon Quintin would notice I was gone, that I hadn’t settled in for the night. Wesley’s older brother, Hank, who still lived in the family’s large mansion, would surely notice that Wesley wasn’t at breakfast. We were sneaking away from the world that had been laid out for us, ready to charge forth on our own.

When we arrived at the beach in Santa Monica, Wesley parked the bike along the sand. We stripped our clothes from our backs and sped toward the waves, pink from sunrise. Charging into them, we held onto one another tightly, my arms wrapped tightly around Wesley’s shoulders, clinging to him. We kissed as the waves banged against us, pressing me into Wesley’s thighs.

I pressed my nose against his nose, and my heart beat wildly. I knew there was no possible way to speak of what came after this. To know if we’d return for high school graduation, or if we’d find a way to stitch together our relationship in the wake of that final ceremony.

“It doesn’t matter what happens,” I whispered to him, my eyes burning with salt. My hair dripped on either side of my shoulder, curling beneath the sun. “Because I love you right now. And right now feels a lot like forever.”