‘Well, if you’re only here for one night, as a local girl I should show you more of Santa Cruz than this delightful bar, come on,’ she says.
With that, Lauren slips off her barstool, and we are out of the door.
Chapter 2
Outside the Blue Lagoon, there’s a group of people milling, smoking cigarettes. There are two hippy-looking girls in colourful skirts and two surfer dudes, one with long blond dreads. We walk down the tree-lined street, and pass restaurants and bars, and Lauren points out a couple of places. Nodding at a diner called Zachary’s, she says they have pancakes to die for. Next to it a vintage clothes store called Moon Zoom. Lauren pauses, and we look in through the window.
‘We went to Burning Man a couple of years back, and we bought everything from this place. We all looked amazing, you know, in a seventies kind of way,’ she says.
We walk on and away from the pulse of downtown, past a Walgreens, and through a more residential neighbourhood. Ahead, the outline of tall palm trees lines the street that runs along the edge of the beach. We walk by the pier and onto the sand until the ocean laps near our feet.
‘So, what’s the plan? Are you going to do the solo road trip?’
‘If I don’t keep going, it will be like admitting defeat. If nothing else I’ll have a good road trip story to tell,’ I say.
After Santa Cruz, we were going east to Yosemite National Park, and then north to Lake Tahoe. Reno for one night of gambling was next followed by Sacramento and San Francisco before flying home. Even if I am doing the drive on my own, I get to do it in the rich golden yellow of the Californian sunshine.
‘I did it when I moved here for college. You get to choose all of the music, where to stop and the route. I did nine states coast-to-coast from Georgia, through the south and west, to California. I loved it.’
As we walk along the wide beach, I ask her more about her road trip. It is more of a life story than anything else, and it’s all heartbreak and country music. It’s the story of how Lauren drove west from Georgia to attend the University of California Santa Cruz when she was eighteen, with almost everything she owned stuffed into her car. She had lived with her aunt, who she barely knew and liked even less, after her parents had been killed in a car accident when she was fifteen.
‘I couldn’t wait to get away; my aunt meant well, but she never had any children, and her love was the church. Me not so much, I was the surprise and the disappointing teenage child she never wanted. We were both happy when I left. It’s been five years, and I’ve never been back,’ she says.
‘Isn’t it odd, never going back home?’ I ask.
Lauren pauses and shakes her head slowly. There’s something there, in that slow head shake, and I’m not quite sure what. It might be a note of sadness. A minor chord softly played, as if her mind is catching on a memory as it slides over a faded image.
‘Places are so much about people, aren’t they? Home was full of ghosts for me and empty buildings.’
‘When you put it like that,’ I say, and I find myself moved. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been.
‘There’s no one to go back for, and I’m happy here as I try to work out what I do with a major in English Literature while waiting tables. I think, shockingly, the answer might be waiting tables in Santa Cruz,’ she says, and she laughs.
I love her laugh. It’s pretty perfect. There are some people that you want to throw your arms around when you hear them laugh, and Lauren is one of them.
‘Alternatively, you get up on stage,’ I say.
‘Yeah, but you haven’t heard me sing yet.’
‘I’m betting you have a great voice,’ I say.
‘Is this the part where you tell me you’d “love to hear me sing”?’ she says, smiling, as we stop by the water’s edge. ‘I’ve never heard that line before.’
I drop my mouth open and throw my arms out in mock protest, and Lauren gives me a big smile.
‘Besides you’re right, I do have a great voice. Come on, this is my favourite part of the beach,’ she says.
The warm summer Californian night breeze blows, and the lights from the edge of the city illuminate the water’s edge and make the dark sea sparkle like the cosmos above.
‘This is the part where you tell me the rest of your story. What’s your deal?’ Lauren asks me.
It’s the ‘how much baggage do you have?’ question. For ages, I’ve been telling myself, and other people, about ‘not being in a good place right now’ and that ‘it’s complicated’. It isn’t though. I got my heart broken by this girl, and it has taken me a long time to get over it. I tell Lauren this, who claps her hands together in delight. To be honest, this wasn’t the reaction I was expecting.
‘You are Wailing Break-Up Guy! Damn. I owe Josie five bucks. When you sang that song we made a bet,’ she says.
‘I never thought about it, but yeah, I’ve probably been waiting a long time to do that, to sing that song. To let it out, it’s cathartic,’ I say.
We leave the beach and head back towards town. Having told me about her family, Lauren wants to hear about mine. I tell her about my mother, who is a doctor. She likes to ring me up and ask me, in a not-so-roundabout way, when I’ll be getting on with my life. She doesn’t see being a freelance journalist as a real job. While she never
