Caleb also happened to have the best hiding places for tag. One night I followed him when Jenny started counting and everyone scattered. A lot of the kids were lone-wolf types in tag, but Caleb didn’t mind me coming along. I trailed him all the way out to the edge of the bluff, where he seemed to drop through an invisible door. When I followed him, I saw he’d found a small, perfect crow’s-nest perch in a cypress tree. The forked branches held his weight, the whole tree embedded like a magician’s trick into the side of the cliff. It was a genius spot, and also forbidden feeling. Technically we were out over the edge, but protected too—sort of. The limbs beneath us were just the right shape and size for two scrawny kids. The branches just bushy enough to conceal us—a cloaking device so effective that when Jenny ran up and looked right at the tree, her face spotlit and lemon yellow in the cone of her small flashlight, she moved on and kept searching.

All of this was still new and foreign to me, the night games and laughing bands of neighborhood friends: childhood. Caleb and I grinned at each other, self-satisfied, because we’d already won the game. Every game we might ever play. The night seemed to stretch out in every direction, made for kids like us, invincible—immortal—while far out on the bluff, Jenny shouted names, hoping to send someone running. We watched her for a long time, her torch bobbing and dipping through the black bunchgrasses, until finally the light she made was smaller than a pinpoint.

—

Back then, Will had a crush on Jenny, but everyone did. There wasn’t a prettier or nicer girl in town. She had straight white teeth, like a breath-mint commercial, coppery freckles over the bridge of her nose, and long, brown hair that swung side to side when she walked. She had a beautiful singing voice too, high and haunting, like Joni Mitchell’s. She’d play her guitar on bonfire nights, feet buried in wet sand, while other kids passed stolen beer around, only half listening. But I couldn’t look away.

One night she sang a tune she’d written called “Goodnight, California,” about a girl who feels so empty and lost she walks out into the sea and never returns. Don’t look for me, I’m no one, the lyrics went.

On the beach, in red-gold firelight, she called up a feeling of such intimacy, as if I was actually watching her alone in her room, her body rounded over her guitar, all of her words about loneliness. In real life, Jenny never came across that way, but I knew that didn’t mean anything. Any surface could hide sadness just beneath.