OCEAN BEACH

Everything is colored clear. The sky masks itself with fog, but the ocean shines a pristine shade of silver. The least blue, most beautiful ocean you could come close to seeing without touching.  Pale beige dunes stack up into mountains over the years, with iceberg plants crawling in and out of the sand like snakes.  If you held your tongue out you could taste the air. It stretches on for miles, taking up the entire Western side of San Francisco, melting its way into the sunnier more photogenic beaches down in Southern California.

Then there is Nicole; the worst influence I've ever known. Not necessarily because she engaged in terribly risky behavior, but just that she was so toxic of a girl. Her hair was a neon-honey hue, and her skin tanned to a mellow shade of sun-kissed perfection. I hate making eye-contact with other people, and she's probably the reason why. Staring into her wildly clear brown eyes would shatter whatever confidence anyone could hold onto. The way her eyes slanted and her lips curled gave her a very cat-like appearance, deceitful in nature and aesthetically alluring. Her face was impossibly at the same time both round and chiseled. Freckles dotted in a line stretched from cheek to cheek across the bridge of her nose, like each dot was placed with specific coordinates in mind.

We were the exact same height, had almost the exact same body despite the skin she wore and the feline features of her face. But I would compare myself to her often —very frequently. That was just another way she infiltrated her thinking into my life; I didn't used to care about my appearance until I met her. Nicole was obsessed with the way she looked. Half out of vanity, half out of self-deprecation. Sometimes she would spend hours on end in front of the mirror, studying herself, studying her beauty, studying her flaws.

"I care about my appearance so much, it's not even funny. More than anything," she once told me.

"What about, like, people?" I asked.

"What about people?"

I don't know how we became friends. I think I was first drawn to her out of admiration of her charisma. Some people say you should treat every person like they're the most important person in the world, but Nicole's personality completely reversed this. Her specialty was making people feel like the shittiest version of themselves. She wasn't mean per se, but she couldn't see the value in others' feelings.

Nicole and I used to spend our Snow Days at the beach. Well, they were actually school power outages but that's what we called them because they were the closest thing to a Snow Day we'd ever get, and they happened so often. She parked her car where we left our backpacks and shoes, and we brought our Swedish fish with us to the shore. I remember walking along the beach for hours, but it never really felt like a beach. There's nothing romantic about it, nothing summer like about it. But it's ours. We sat on the side of a dune, cold but happy, looking out to the ocean sitting across from us.

The way the sand, the water, the fog, the sky all blend together is so surreal, like a bleak dream.

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Nicole's home was one of the pale houses facing Ocean Beach, with only the dunes and a narrow strip of Highway 1 standing in the way between it and the water. I looked up at the door's arch where mistletoe dangled by a slice of scotch tape. I hadn't thought about it until then, but my parents used to buy mistletoe, too. I don't know when they stopped. When they would kiss, no one wanted to be there; not even them. My father's one arm around her looked awkward, like a distant relative squeezing in a child for an undesired hug. When their faces became neighbors, his lips would pucker with strain and she would keep her mouth sealed in a sore smile.