We spent the next two hours with Jamie, using the Muni to get around and see virtually every popular site there was: Coit tower, Fisherman’s Warf, Alcatraz island. We ate at three different restaurants in the Mission District: a Mexican joint for tacos, a trendy café for Boba teas, and a bakery for lime-flavored pastries as dessert.
I still felt that whirlwind was a perfect term to describe Jamie, as well as our time with him. He had more energy than anyone I’d ever met. It came through in the way he talked: jumping around from topic to topic, striking up conversations with strangers in the streets. And it came through in the way he bustled around with me and River: running us around the city from one hot spot to the next.
Before getting back to Jamie’s neighborhood, we made a stop at Baker Beach, and finally, I felt things slow down just a little. I felt the wheels decelerate just enough for me to really take everything in. The three of us sat down in the sand and stared out at Golden Gate Bridge in the distance.
It was perfect to me. The red, majestic structure suspended over the turquoise water, bordered by the emerald bluffs. I listened to the sound of the Pacific waters crashing around us. I had been wearing my hair in a bun atop my head—not having much time to get ready when we woke up—but I let it down as we sat there, allowing the fresh breeze to whip it around my face freely. It would surely render a multitude of tangles for me to comb out later in the evening, but I didn’t care. The feeling of the salty gusts stirred a gratefulness up within me. It reminded me that I was someplace new. It reminded me that I was far away from what I had always known.
“I still like your hair best that way.”
River’s voice was muffled by the rhythmic sounds of the ocean. I turned to my left to see him eyeing my hair, and the gratefulness in me expanded even deeper. I was on this adventure with River. I had seen him only twice in the last five years, but now, here we were, sitting on a beach together in San Francisco, finally together. Finally not feeling like there were forces that would imminently wedge us apart and send us spiraling down different paths.
“You guys seen enough?” Jamie, to the right of me, hinged forward to address us both. I felt that I could look at this bridge all day, but I knew Jamie had schoolwork to get to, and I remembered how that was.
“Thanks for showing us around,” I told him. He surprised me when he responded by slinging his arm around my shoulders and giving me a sort of sitting-down-side-hug.
“My pleasure. You know, you’re lucky, Drew. If you weren’t such an attractive female, I’d be jealous hearing that I wasn’t Roma’s childhood best friend.”
I shot River a look and finally asked a question I’d been meaning to ever since I met Jamie. “What’s with the nickname? Roma?”
River started shaking his head, and Jamie exclaimed, “You’ve never heard this story? River’s never told you? It’s hands-down my favorite story, to this day.”
“It’s really not that big a deal.” River was still shaking his head. Jamie took his arm off my shoulders and rubbed his hands together.
“It happened when we were sweet little youngins,” he began. “I’m talking, like, six years old. We were in the same first grade class, River and I. We all had to complete a kind of gardening experiment that year. Everyone had to try growing a vegetable in the school’s garden and then give a presentation to the class when it was harvest time. I, personally, had a great experience. I grew carrots and rocked my presentation. See, our teacher would cut up our vegetables and give a serving to each kid. Kids like carrots, so it was easy breezy for me. But then, it was River’s turn to present. Can you guess what he grew?”
“Tomatoes.” River answered for him in a bleak tone.
“Roma tomatoes, to be precise. Well, kids don’t generally like tomatoes the way they do carrots. We all pretty much refused to eat our servings while River was presenting. River was getting rather flustered up there in front of the class while we were rejecting his produce, so you know what he did? He told everyone that tomatoes were delicious, and he took a huge, juicy bite out of one of those romas. Everyone kind of shut up then when we saw him bite into it—River was considered a leader among our peers, so it seemed that he had potentially convinced us. But then—”
“I threw up,” River stated. I twisted my neck around to him and then back to Jamie.
“He totally, massively blew chunks.” Jamie used his hands to illustrate. “Right there in front of the class. Little bits of red tomato flesh spraying out of his face.”
“Thank you for the graphic reminder.” River now had his face buried in his hands.
“That’s horrible,” I said, yet I was laughing, more at Jamie’s delivery than anything.
“It was hilarious. Little River started crying as soon as he stopped spewing tomato bits everywhere. Some of the chunks even got on a girl in the front row, and she was crying, and the boys in the class were laughing and hollering, while all the girls were freaking out. The teacher had to rush River out of the room and call his mom to come take him home for the day. And so, Roma became his nickname from then on. Which ended up only being for another year or so, because then River’s family moved away. Shame, really.”
“Thanks again, Jamie.” River had resumed a normal posture, seeming to mostly have recovered from his embarrassment. “I just love remembering that mortifying day. In such detail, too.”
“Sure thing, Roma.”
“I was never able to eat tomatoes again after that.”
“Where was this?” I asked. “Where were you guys living when this tomato fiasco went down?”
“It’s an hour away from here,” River said. “A town called Luna Buena.”
“Charming place and all, but there’s nothing quite like this city if you ask me. Alright, you guys. I really do need to get back to the house and study. Vamos.”
We got back to Jamie’s pink house twenty minutes later. As Jamie hopped up the steps to the front door, he called back to us, “Give me maybe five hours to plow through my studying, then I’ll take you guys out to some bars, okay?” Then he burst through the door.
River and I were still at the bottom of the staircase, but when I took the first step up, River remained behind me. I turned to look at him. He clearly had something on his mind, his eyes glued to the sidewalk, his jaw moving side to side.
“What’s up?” I asked him. His head shot up at me.
“Would you want to drive outside of San Francisco with me?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Right now?”
“Right now?” I repeated. I had been in this new city for less than twenty-four hours. I hadn’t expected to leave it so soon and set off on another adventure.
“Right now,” he said again. “To Luna Buena.”
Luna Buena. Where River had once lived, before I knew him. A part of his past that had always felt so unavailable to me. Until now.
“I’d love to,” I said.
River ran into the house to let Jamie know, and an hour later, we were there. It was a coastal town that looked like something out of a movie. The roads leading up to the beach were lined with small, colorful shops. Red-and-blue-striped poles rose from the sidewalks every few yards. We walked down the sidewalk, peering in through the shop windows: an art gallery of oil paintings, a child’s dream of a toy store, a trendy boardshop.