Evvy Spied on Surfers

flash fiction — TW for sexual abuse of a child

Evvy was driving the ocean side of Highway 1 along the cliffs at Big Sur, fifty years old and feeling it in her neck and hip. It was difficult to keep her eyes off the Pacific. The wave was at sixteen feet. Evvy could imagine her Toyota flying over the edge, could feel that soaring death as if it were in progress, yet found it impossible not to gaze at the young men taking turns riding the twenty-foot waves. Past the break line, clumps of them lounged on their boards, their black wet suits bruising the ocean’s surface as if it were a soft knee. Others sat on their boards, arrogant cowboys. Evvy had been snooping on them for a decade.

She pulled over, parking near a white BMW that shined like a rental. As she hauled 177 pounds of herself out of her car, three boys alighted from the BMW and approached. One wore his polo shirt over his neon-blue wetsuit. The other two were zipped to the neck, also in neon. They each removed their $200 sunglasses before neon-blue addressed her, Ma’am, and asked for “assistance” in finding the path to the beach. In their light drawl, Evvy heard Virginia, heard old money. She’d spent her seventh grade year at a private school founded in eighteen-hundred-and-so-and-so, filled with boys whose breeding didn’t prevent them from gazing knowingly and with desire at the blisters on a seventh grader’s mouth caused by the banana the older girls made her go down on, the night before classes started.

At fifty, it was still not often that Evvy felt no fear…