“Apparently.”

Jen introduced Belle Becket to her shrink almost twenty years ago, when Belle began hitting the crack, living in flops, then the downtown alleys, then in the Laguna Canyon brush, really letting go. Belle had seen the psychiatrist, irregularly, for a year, on Jen’s dime, then vanished from Laguna without a word. Five years later she was back, panhandling on the Main Beach boardwalk, scrounging food from the Coast Highway cafes and fast-food joints and dumpsters, marginally cleaning herself up in the tourist rinse-off showers.

Belle Becket, an incorrigible beauty, a once loyal—if troubled—friend, a hot surfer, had returned home a hollowed shell.

Not unlike the scoured abalone halves on the table here, Jen thinks, lifting an all-green sea-glass bracelet from one. She gets five twenties from the wallet in her shoulder bag, sets them in the mason jar.

“Short or long?” The standard opening.

“Do what you do, Belle. Look at me and tell me what you see.”

To Jen, the most surprising part of this arrangement—this crust of a friendship going back to when Jen and Belle were ten years old, in fourth grade together at Top of the World Elementary—is that they still understand each other, still get what makes the other tick.

She wonders how fifteen-plus years of silence, Belle’s mental illness, and brief monthly visits have allowed them to know each other this well. Or, Jen thinks now, as she has thought many times before: Is it just each other’s limits we know so well?

Perhaps not surprisingly, Belle Becket is a very good fortune-teller. She can read a mood in a second, and creep into the future on it.

She moves the lamp for room and takes Jen’s hands in her rough and dirty ones. Stares at Jen with her dark, heavily made-up racoon-style eyes.

“I see your waves, of course. Always waves.”

“The Monsters of Mavericks is coming up.”

“I feel something different is happening inside you. Your mind is cluttered and your blood is unsettled. Does this have to do with the contest?”

“Yeah. I’m competing for the first time since John.”

“Oh, girl. When did you decide this?”

“Six months ago.”

“Why?”

“I’m trying to whup the fear. About what happened. There’s anger, too. And regret. They’re all mixed up and stormy.”

“Like those big waves.”

Silence then, Belle’s rough hands warm on Jen’s on the table in the sun.

“I see a picture now,” says Belle. “A still picture of a future day. Dark mountains of water. A gray sky with rain. I see you on a large wave. Your orange-and-black wetsuit and helmet. Your orange-and-black board. You have just let go of the tow rope and Casey is speeding away on the jet ski. You must see this picture often—”

“Almost every night. I don’t know what happens. If I make the wave or not.”

“You will make the wave if you can see it happen. You will ride that wave only if you let it break in your mind.”

“Will I wipe out on the rocks?”

“Show us. Close your eyes, Jen. Open yourself to this dream, this day that hasn’t happened yet. It is real. Be there. Let Casey tow you. Watch it happen. Give me a film, Jen, not a picture. See.”

“I see black. Nothing beyond.”

“You don’t want to see beyond. Let the black go.”

For a long moment Jen can’t free the wave from its black wrapper.

But then, the black wave turns into blue-green ocean, with a sleek speedboat bobbing at rest.

“Jen, what is this? Something disturbing happened on the water. Not far from here. Recently, but not a wave.”

Jen pictures Jimmy Wu and Polo in their gleaming Cigarette boat.

“Pirates,” she says. “They threatened to kill Casey’s dog. They threatened to burn down the Barrel.”

“They will not kill Casey’s dog,” whispers Belle. “They will try to burn down the Barrel. I see the Barrel bar now, just as you do. A woman argues with Casey. I don’t think they know each other.”

“Bette Wu.”

“Yes, Bette. I saw this Bette Wu on the beach here in Laguna,” says Belle. “Below Heisler Park. Posing in fashion clothes. Reclining on the rocks. Sleek like a seal, glossy black hair.”

“When?”

“I don’t know, Jen. But you know me, and you know my cosmic reality—tomorrow, yesterday, today—all the same.”

Jen opens her eyes and Belle does likewise. Her racoon eyes are sloppily drawn and the exhaustion Jen sees in them always follows a psychic excursion into their pasts, presents, and futures.

“I know this is hard work for you,” says Jen. She pulls her hand from Belle’s, patting the sun-wrinkled skin lightly.

“It’s always been,” says Belle. “Other people’s emotions and thoughts get mixed into my own. It frightens me when I can’t tell them apart. Even someone I’ve never met. But especially someone I’ve known so well and so long, who has powerful vibrations. Your past haunts and confuses me.”

“Have you ever been betrayed, Belle?”

Belle studies Jen sidelong and hard, a suspicious racoon.

“Never. I’ve felt love and loyalty from my friends and family all my life. They’ve been angry and afraid of me. Ashamed and confused. But they never betrayed me. Have you been?”

“No, the same.”

Belle points a jagged-nailed forefinger into the air between them. “I see your words here in the space between us—‘no, the same.’ They’re bright, lemon yellow. They wobble and fade. This is the color of a lie.”

Which Jen continues. “If I was betrayed I didn’t know it.”

“So much happens to us that we never see. Or admit to seeing.”

Jen holds Belle’s gaze again, detects a lack of sanity in her flat gray eyes, her botched makeup, her mane of filthy hair. Replaces all that with the memory of the beautiful girl she’d known and loved and hugged and argued and rode waves with. Nothing kicks you harder than time, she thinks.

“There I am,” says Belle. “As you see me.”

Another long look shared, eye to eye.