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of happened. Instead, he got his face shot off.
    The wind eked in the window seals, and the car shook. What scared me most was the crying part of Sam had been cauterized already. He was a living scar.
    All my life I’d met people bearing wounds far deeper than my own. I’d thought California would change me, heal me, free me from attracting all that. And now I’d flagged it down and climbed in a car with it.
    We rounded the curve into Dana Point.
    The car lunged up to a light. It shuddered and died. I jammed my skinny arm through the window slot, slick as a length of licorice, and yanked the door open. I didn’t so much jump from the car as eject myself out on the roadside slope. The effort launched me downward, sliding. Over gravel and scrub oak, rocks scraping my shins.
    I could hear Sam crank the dead VW back up to a stunted idle, its ragged engine coughing. I scrambled up the gravel incline, losinga flip-flop in the process, hollering as if somebody at the light might take notice. I raised my head and bawled for some driver to see me, hear me.
    He was calling my name, looking like a guy ditched by his prom date—sweaty and short and like his feelings were hurt. The light changed. Horns. I sprinted across the yellow line before oncoming traffic to the other side of the road. Sam hollered over, Hey, you forgot your pocketbook.
    I was sprinting so shards of rock got embedded in one foot. Even then I was doubting my instincts. Maybe he was harmless.
    By the time the shakes hit, I was speed-walking with a single flip-flop along the road’s shoulder, a kind of inner earthquake starting in my middle—a shaking that spread outward and nearly buckled me.
    At a fish joint famous for not letting the beach-weary use its facilities, I rushed past counter traffic to the bathroom. Soon as I locked the door, I hunched over the sink, washing my unstable limbs with brown paper towels and pink soap as if they belonged to some patient I was paid to tend. The shaking receded like a tide.
    Sometime after that—maybe even the next day—I stopped smoking pot, stopped going to the beach. Sam had spooked from me the notion that the hippies I’d once revered were benevolent characters identifiable by roach clips and tie dye. Plus, the crash pad my friends and I had rented had gotten too raggedy for any girl to stand. The sink stayed piled with scabby dishes from when I’d cooked everybody spaghetti a month before. When you hit the light switch at night, the roaches didn’t even run anymore. Yet night after night the guys lazed around puffing weed and telling dick jokes. When they headed to the beach, I’d lose myself down the valley of a book or scribble longhand on loose pages that I stashed under my sleeping bag.
    College was the thing. I’d scammed my way into that small midwestern school too good for me, but then I’d put it on hold as too square. Now it looked like an escape from flagging down another satanic hobo, or it was suddenly an excuse to read nonstop. I longed for its library walled with books, a desk with gooseneck lamp, a bulletin board.
    Taking my collect call, Mother agreed—her life’s goal being college for perpetuity. She phoned the school’s financial officer, who promised as much in work and loans as I needed. I was sweltering inside the open accordion door of a phone booth.
    You’ve tried it your daddy’s way, Mother said.
    How is this Daddy’s way? Daddy wants me to stay home and hone my pool game.
    Yeah, but the T-shirt factory job, the whole working-class-hero pose. Who knows, maybe you’ll meet some suave intellectual….
    I told her the phone was making my face sweat, but she’d already relaunched into her plan to auction off my unemployable ass to some husband as if I were chattel. She sketched for me an artsy, wire-rimmed guy with a wardrobe of turtlenecks, a shiny car unmarred by the blurring circle of the sanding machine. Which hunk of whimsy failed to account for the fact that I’d bolt like