By the second round, they had hit it off with a couple at the pool table, who invited them for a game. The Chans won easily, drank their winnings, and opened up the next game. Two loud, cheerful advertising executives stepped in. They proved to be decent players. Mayling valiantly held her game, but Nelson didn’t take his drink well and was getting sloppy. They took their defeat in good humor, and Mayling bought herself and the victors a round of drinks, while Nelson leaned into the bar with his head in his hands.

“Bad influence, you,” he groaned.

“Feather-ass lightweight, you,” said Mayling. “Let’s get you some air.”

It was chillier on the beach than they’d expected, but it had the desired effect, stinging Nelson into alertness and quickening his movements. Soon he was skipping and jumping along the water’s edge in an effort to keep warm. In the bluish, half-moon glow, against the crashing waves, he resembled some feral creature performing a nocturnal mating dance.

“Over there!” said Nelson, marching towards a bonfire in the distance. “I need to get warm.”

The small group that was congregated around the fire looked to Mayling like a collection of dreadlocks and homemade sweaters. Everyone was talking and laughing as one of them strummed a guitar, and a glass pipe about the size of a baby’s arm was slowly making its way around the circle. Nelson asked them for a hit. He held up the takeout bag. “Trade you for some duck?”

It turned out that no one in the group ate meat, but they were a friendly bunch. Someone pulled out beers from a cooler and invited Nelson and Mayling to join them. Mayling passed on the pipe, but collected both the beers and sat down in an awkward cross-legged position. Nelson had found a place on the other side of the circle and was deep in conversation with a bearded man who was drumming on a pair of bongos without much commitment.

Guess we’ll be here a while, thought Mayling.

She drank one beer. She drank the other beer. Then she stuck the empty cans in the sand and started pushing cold handfuls of sand around them until they were almost covered, resulting in a knobby mound with two holes peeping out at the top. She drew a smiley mouth underneath with her finger and said to it, “What are you smiling at?”