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Lolly’s boss to exit the building. Marissa keeps herself entertained by rating the guys that cruise by. She has her own rating scale: each guy is assigned a letter of the alphabet. But it isn’t A to Z order—Marissa must have like a touch of autism or something, because she has this theory that some letters are sexier than others. X , she says, is the sexiest.
    F s are pretty hot, and so are R s and J s and D s. If a guy is good looking but clearly not to be trusted, he gets an S . Preppy clean-cut types get A s and B s. Bottom-of-the-barrel types are assigned P or L , depending on her mood.
    “That guy’s a full-on V ,” she tells me with a lift of her chin. I follow the trajectory of her gaze and settle on the guy she must mean: he’s one of those retro types you see every now and then, with the rolled-up jeans and tucked-in white tees. Pomade in the hair. Tats of brightly colored songbirds.
    He must feel our eyes on him because he looks back over his shoulder and smiles. Neither of us smiles back, but Marissa blows a puff of smoke in his direction before grinding out her cigarette. He shrugs, like, your loss , and laces his way through a group of the red-eyed stoner kids that cycle through Venice every summer. Last year they had a grungy terrier they took turns pulling around on a rope; this summer the dog is gone.
    Finally, Kayla the Bitch pushes through the Smoothie Shack’s glass doors, shaking a cigarette from the pack she keeps stashed in her apron pocket. She lights it quickly and slides the lighter back into her pocket, pulling out a phone and narrowing her eyes to its tiny screen as she crosses the boardwalk without looking up once. People shift their trajectories around her. She is like that—not beautiful, but everyone knows to stay the fuck out of her way.
    We wait until her head disappears into the crowd on the vast, under-watered lawn just on the other side of the boardwalk before we duck into the Smoothie Shack. Lolly is behind the counter, her cute bleached-blonde braids bobbing to the music as she works the cash register and the blenders, dodging back and forth between stations.
    “Hey, girls,” she calls. “The usual?”
    “Thanks,” we answer. The people waiting for their smoothies look distinctly annoyed that our order has been triaged to the front of the line.
    It only takes a minute for Lolly to make Marissa’s Passion Fruit and Guava and a minute more for my Berry Blended. She’s like a machine behind that counter, reaching for things without even looking first.
    It’s weird how happy she looks. I mean, it’s a shit job—blending up overpriced juice drinks, making in an hour what the total of a single order adds up to. But it doesn’t seem to bother her. She likes it—customer service, retail employment. And everyone in there likes her—even as she hands us our drinks before serving the other people who’ve waited longer, they can’t seem to help but smile back at her. A couple even shove dollar tips into the jar on the counter.
    “Hey,” says Marissa, “text us when you’re out of here. We’ll meet you.”
    “Can’t,” says Lolly. “I’m working the late shift over at Stan’s.”
    Everyone at Stan’s Barbecue knows Lolly isn’t twenty-one, and technically she’s a hostess. But hostesses make shit for tips, so Stan makes an exception for Lolly. She is cute, which never hurts; she’s a hard worker, and she never calls in sick. So he just looks the other way when she pops the tops off beers for the patrons and (very occasionally) sneaks a couple of paper-cup margaritas out the back door for me and Marissa.
    We wave good-bye to Lolly, elbow-deep in fruit detritus, and swing out of the Smoothie Shack, avoiding eye contact with Kayla the Bitch as she pushes past us, oblivious to anything but her phone’s screen.
    The day is shaping up to be nice. The June gloom has just about burned off, and it isn’t too crowded on the sand. Marissa and I wander over to the