Lillian is maybe eighteen, a fresh-faced cute kid, blond and suntanned, a lively innocent interest in things.… Her mother and Jim’s mother and Abe’s mother are stalwarts of the tiny church they all attended as kids; the mothers are still into it, Abe and Jim have fallen away like the rest of civilization, Lillian … perhaps in that transition zone, who knows. Shit, Abe thinks guiltily, she shouldn’t be at a party like this! But that almost makes him laugh. Who is he, anyway? He realizes he’s holding the eyedropper sort of hidden, and thinks he’s probably insulting her by being condescending to her youth. Besides, they lid out in second grade these days. He offers it to her. “No thanks,” she says, “it just makes me dizzy.”

He laughs. “Good for you.” He lids a drip, laughs again. “Shit, what are you doing here? Last I saw you you were about thirteen, weren’t you?”

“Probably. But, you know, it doesn’t last.”

He cracks up. “No, I guess not.”

“I probably know more than you think I do.”

Utterly transparent come-on in her eyes as she sidles up to him, so girlish that he wonders if it’s actually a sophisticated come-on in clever disguise. He laughs and sees she’s hurt, instant contraction back into herself as when you touch a sea anemone, ah, clearly she knows just as little as he suspected she did, maybe less. A girl, really. “You shouldn’t be here,” he says.

“Don’t you worry about me.” She sniffs disdainfully. “We’re leaving soon to go to my friend Marsha’s to spend the night anyway.”

Jesus. “Good, good. How are your folks?”

“Fine, really.”

“Say hello to them for me.” Lillian agrees and with a last winsome over-the-shoulder smile she’s off with her buddies. Abe remembers the girlish come-on and cracks up. Maybe she had in mind a first kiss from this handsome dashing old acquaintance, an older man no lie. A nice kid, truly; Sandy’s seems definitely the wrong place for her, and he’s glad to see her and her young friends giggling together out the door, the brave exploration into the den of sin completed.

He’s even gladder half an hour later when Tash is pulled dripping from the Jacuzzi, naked and totally lidded. Giggling young women, friends of Angela’s that Sandy calls the Tustin Trollops, maneuver Tashi onto the surfboard surrogate and urge him to ride some video waves for them, which he does with a perfect stoned grace, unaware of anything but the video wave, a Pipeline beauty twenty feet tall and stretching off into eternity. “Whoah,” says Tash from deep in his own tube. Erica, Tash’s ally, watches him with a look of sharp disapproval; Abe laughs at her.