I smile. I like that he doesn’t take money from her. Not that she can’t afford to pay someone to help her. She’s sitting in the tallest house in what’s probably the nicest neighborhood on this peninsula. It’s not the most modern. It’s actually kind of dated, but it has character. It feels lived in, unlike a lot of these other houses that are rent-ready and identical. “I really like your house,” I say, looking around. “What do you call this level?”
“The stilt level,” she says. She points above her head. “We consider that the first floor.”
I glance around at the other houses. Some of them have enclosed their stilt levels. Some have made them parking spaces. I like Marjorie’s. She’s got a tiki bar, a picnic table and a couple of hammocks hanging between some of the stilts.
“Some people like to turn their stilt levels into extra rooms,” she says. “The new idiots next door enclosed an entire guest room on their stilt level. Not too bright, but they didn’t want my opinion. They’ll figure it out soon enough. Some days the ocean is our neighbor, but some days the ocean is our roommate.” She motions for me to come closer. “Here. Take these.” She hands me a gallon-sized bag of shelled pecans.
“You don’t have to give me these,” I say, trying to hand them back to her.
She waves me away. “Keep them. I have too many.”
I have no idea what I’m going to do with a pound of pecans. I’ll give them to Alana, I guess. “Thank you.”
Marjorie nods her head at the dog. “Have you named him yet?”
“No.”
“You should call him Pepper Jack Cheese.”
I laugh. “Why?”
“Why not?”
I look down at the dog. He doesn’t look like a piece of cheese. I’m not sure any dog looks like cheese. “Pepper Jack,” I say, trying the name out on him. “Do you feel like a Pepper Jack?”
“Pepper Jack Cheese,” Marjorie corrects. “He deserves the full name.”
I like Marjorie. She’s odd. “Thanks for the pecans.” I look down at the dog. “Let’s go home, Pepper Jack Cheese.”
ELEVEN
I went to a small elementary school. That’s where I met Natalie. It was only a few blocks from my house and it was small enough that there was only one teacher per grade. Your clique was the grade you were in. In elementary school, no one cared about money because we were too young to really know better.
Junior high and high school were different. They were much larger campuses, and by that age, money defined your clique. Unless you were exceptionally pretty. Or, in Zackary Henderson’s case, famous on YouTube. He wasn’t rich, but his social media status landed him in the rich crowd. Followers are considered a more valuable currency than cash to a lot of people my age.
I came from the worst part of town and everyone knew it. The kids in my neighborhood who were just as poor as me slowly began to dwindle. A lot of them followed in the same sad footsteps as their parents, turning to drugs. I never felt part of that crowd because I did whatever I could to be the exact opposite of my mother and the people like her.
It didn’t matter at school, though. Natalie was my only friend until I joined the volleyball team as a freshman. A few of the girls on the team accepted me, especially after I became the best one on the team, but most of them resented me. They still treated me like I was less than them. And it wasn’t necessarily typical bullying. No name-calling, or being shoved around in the hallways. I think I might have been too intimidating to some of them to be bullied.
I would have fought back and they knew it.
It was more that I was avoided. Ignored. I was never included in anything. I’m sure a lot of that had to do with the fact that I was one of the few in my school who had no cell phone, no laptop, no home phone. No means of connecting outside of school hours, and that can be socially detrimental for anyone these days. Or maybe that’s just my way of excusing being excluded for the better part of six years.
It’s hard not to grow bitter when you spend so much time alone. It’s especially hard not to grow bitter at class systems and people with money, because the richer they were, the more it seemed I didn’t exist to them.
Which is why being here on this beach with the type of people I’m sure I would have been invisible to in high school is hard for me. I want to believe Sara would have treated me the same as she does now had I known her in high school. The more I get to know her, the less I see her as someone who would be intentionally shitty to anyone.