[Warning: contains crude language and direct references to substance abuse, sexual abuse, suicide, and violence but no graphic descriptions.]

He wasn’t ready for this. His afternoon in the empty, high swings in Eagle Rock Park agendaed bad-wine brooding to facilitate contemplation of whether to finish his shitpile dissertation, “California Youth in Transition,” jump off the Arroyo bridge, or do the first and then the second. Problem was, he wasn’t drunk enough to blot out that splatting sixty feet onto the rough-concrete Arroyo Seco channel would hurt. There’d be plenty of days for the spectacular swan dive to hell after the tribal savages on his diss committee ripped him five new ones at his Monday meeting.

He embraced alienated indulgence. Alcohol helped. Personal isolation augmented by writing and drinking he could accept pretty much indefinitely. What he could not accept was the finality of realizing his entire academic life’s work was derivative junk. A grotesque insult to humanity and bemused gods alike. He derived little consolation from his colleagues’ even worse academic compost.

New California kids were generating appalling statistics demolishing his scholarly papers and doctoral thesis defining “adolescent risk.” Thunderingly. He ventured radical new theory in appropriately trembling voice. Smug institutional superiors and funders dismissed his challenges derisively, with banishment from collegial forums. Wottaguy. He’d scored ostracism for admitting wrongness and trying to make it right.

He had no clue how to fix anything. He felt a powerful urge to transition to some new phase… but what, if not post-bloody splat, would that be? Would he endure current inertia until, after a long, painful tube-perforated convalescence in some beige-walled asylum, his brain gave out before heart and liver whilst his orifices dribbled away final hours on morphine drip, celestial testament to a million years of evolution?

He took another deep swig of Carlo’s finest mid-April stock and prayed for quick cardio shutdown. Celestially denied.

As he was fogging into pleasant self-pity constituting his only joy, a live adolescent showed up from god knows where. She sported some bizarre Los Angeles New World skin tone where no two people were the same color, and a shaken expression. She was holding out eleven cents like a supplicant.

Is this some dumbass cop idea of an underfunded kid-drug sting? Even LA’s finest weren’t that moronic. He blinked to make it disappear.

Oh, right, he recollected. He’d plunked down a dime and a penny on the counter for this very kid before the glaring Hmong grocery cashier down on Yosemite Drive an hour ago when her fiscal resources proved insufficient to fund godawful teenaged sugar-junk. Embarrassed by his cheapshit middle-aged wine-box purchase, he’d hurried the line along. Stop elbowing and snickering, high school brats. I know about your amphitheater-backlot wastage gatherings. I did a statistically invalid survey on adolescent post-class bingeing for my diss. I still hear my committee’s dismissive guffaws on lonely nights, like medieval dungeon echoes.

Now, this darkly pigmented girl had skipped a peer gathering to hike two miles over Eagle Rock ridges up to the park in cold-smog afternoon to find him. What was she doing here? He turned from his view of high mountain ridges and bad-brained contemplations to assess this intrusion on his afternoon of buzzed dismality.

“Nice day for skipping school.”

“I am not skipping school.” She plopped stomach-down in a swing at the other end, twisting back and forth.

This was a lie. Her assigned custody was study hall. Her sixth‑period mentor was a recovering flower‑child the same vintage as this guy. Ms. DeLaurier never took roll and was widely suspected of indulging her own three o’clock high like kids shaded in deodar cedars beyond the amphitheater.

One fine day, his post-modern fantasy rhapsodized, senescent and adolescent generations would bond. “So, why’d you hike all the way up here instead of joining the gathering fogging away this fine Friday afternoon?”

Good question, she pondered. How did he know about those? Anyway, why was she skipping a fine wastage session badly needed to deal with this very bad day? She spun in the swing. It was not because she’d have minded getting wrecked. It wasn’t to give him back his damned eleven cents. It had to do with what had happened last night in her room and this afternoon at the store.

“I’m Rhona,” she said. “You didn’t ask.”

“I teach.” He remained nameless. “I come here Fridays because it’s high up. I’m into views and swings and drinking bad wine and reveling in solitude after vegetating in a library all week with assorted assholes in my field who are no worse than me.”

“What’s your field, then?”

“Deranged teenagers.”

She knew how the world worked. Her high school’s social scene overlapped with 1990s unboundaried grownup institutions. Men subtly got into schoolgirls’ inferiority unsubtly to get into pants. Let the gendered signaling begin.

“I should teach that,” she shrugged, “if all you have to be is an asshole.”

How did she know about academia? he mused. “I lied. I’m in deconstructive psychology.”

Well, then. They had something in common besides lying to one another this gloomy Friday. She thought about disclosing her own psychological destructions, just to unreel her grand legend of herself, rad Rhona the stoner, freshmanic depressant, up for stranger, danger—

He jumped off the swing, shoulder‑rolled, landing next to a tattered daypack Rhona now noticed. Comical thing for an old guy to do.

He opened it, uncapped a green bottle, took a drink, and passed it her way. Perfect. Alcohol would be next. Still, her finely tuned pervdar wasn’t pingeing. She wiped off the top with her shirt. Cheapshit dry wine. AIDS couldn’t live in this. She inhaled a mouthful, winced.

“So,” he said. “What would Mommy think of you drinking lousy wine with a strange forty‑year‑old guy in an empty park during hours of mandatory public education?” He propped himself on one elbow, hairy belly breaking through beneath his shirt.

Ewww. Repulsive but harmless. “How strange?” She peered at him sideways and took a longer drink. Tasted better to a numb tongue. “If you’re an alcoholic perv, she’d yell at me for about nine seconds. Then she’d beg you to ravage her bed.”

She swallowed again, shook her head like an addled kitten. “Was gonna say, I went to a psychologist once. Was having problems at home with Mom and her man.” She brightened. “They all agreed! Girl’s seriously fucked.”

Without being obvious, he took the bottle back. He gave it one more heave, re-screwed the top, put it in his pack and rolled onto his back.

So, we’re not getting me drunk today? she puzzled. This is different.

“Let me guess,” he said, studying the hazy sky closing in gray and cold. “Just a wild, stupid guess. Mom’s alcoholic perv was coming on to you.”

Rhona sat still. Her dream, in the short-tossed hours before dawn, edged into mind. A desert, creeping like surf, swallowing neighborhoods in its path.

She cleared her head. “Three years ago, ‘Mommy’s’ boyfriend told me when he was wasted, which was always, ‘Just call me Daddy!’” She eyed his backpack. “Do you mind?” she said, getting one adequate locally‑assembled number from her shirt pocket, lighting, inhaling, gesturing to him.

“I smoked all that shit I wanted to back in the Sixties,” he waved. “I stick to liver‑rot. So, Mom’s main man. . .”

“Was always trying to do it with twelve‑year‑old me, like you said. I told Mom, like I was the household idiot. She came unglued. I got sent to the ward for a month.”

“You mean just like that?” He sat up and faced her. “This is the Nineties. They’re supposed to be believing the kid these days.”

“Not this kid,” Rhona said. “See, Mom’s smart. Told them I was a crazy doped‑out shoplifting bitch, a lying little nympho, all of which I am sometimes, except for the last one. She gave them these notes I wrote to a guy in my class I was hot for. Pretty disgusting stuff, I confess. So that proved I had all these sex fantasies about her dude, Pee-tey—” She shivered. “Gross thought. Anyway, Mom adores those types. Got a worse one now.”

“What became of old Pee-tey?”

“Dead. Drunkass driving. Smacked a Jolly‑Dayz ice cream truck New Year’s Day, doin’ one‑oh‑five down the Arroyo from the Rose Bowl. Half hour later he woulda been in the Parade. Mom—” She took another lungful. “—picks ‘em.”

“Cried much?”

“Sobbed,” she squeaked as she held in smoke. “Threw myself on his grave.” She exhaled. “Did not. Fucking hated him. Was glad they had to bury him in chunks.”

He slapped the parched polo grass. “Let me understand this. You told Mom the love of her sheets was grabbing at your twelve‑year‑old ass, you got sent to the doc, did your thirty days, and now it’s happening again?”

“As in, happened last night,” Rhona said. “Mom’s new guy, he’s always remarking on my boobs, such as they are, trying to walk in on me in the bathroom, getting handsy, shit like that.” She shrugged. “Nothing new in my little house in the neighborhood. ‘Cept this guy’s evil. Last night, I was asleep, felt something grab me. I woke up, my shirt was being ripped off. Really rough. He was holding me down hard, getting a hand down there. He reeked.”

She paused. “I screamed. He goes, ‘Cooze, shut up.’ Like that, real soft and mean. I saw a knife in his belt. If Mom hadn’t stumbled in and turned on the light—”

She breathed sweet smoke. “Of course, he lied,” she said. “Said he was just playin’, no big thing. At five in the morning in her little daughter’s bed? What fucktard mother would buy that? But you gotta understand Mom, she lives on her own rock in space. She ate his lies up. So-o-oo, this morning I stuff my daypack, I drop it out my window, crawl out an’ hide it in the bushes by the park. Mom uses her purse as a pillow these days, so I don’t have money. Went to school, went to the store, met you, here I am. The complete mini-series starring Rhona.”

She gazed at the sun, a dim orange ball nestled in dusky smog. She ripped out a rainbow shoestring, put her head in her hands, trembled. He touched his fingertips against hers. “Been a great life,” she whispered. “Be a fucking shame to die now.”

An hour later, after swallowing a couple of greasy specimens from a fajita stand on the fabled boulevard, they sat in his two-room third-floor loft under slanting eaves as rain pounded. She felt better, less light, less panicked, a little embarrassed about crying.

He leaned back against his bed.he sat on a molting bedroll he’d unrolled for her, eyeing the debris. A pile of Statistical Abstract of California had already caved in on her.

“See, when I was twelve—” She giggled. “—many, many years ago, was my free love year. I had this see-through blouse I wore to school all the time. No bra. I even wore it to the Pasadena Art Museum. But I had nothing to see, see? It was all like that, free love in my head, bad notes I wrote. Anyway, I was thirteen, decided okay, so much for my free love year, this is my drug year. Trouble megashit. Two, three busts, possession, shoplifting, skipping school, bad attitude . . .”

She flopped on her other elbow, expression all eyes. “So, I got to meet all the counselors, social folks, probation guys. They locked me up. Nobody ever asks my opinion. They’ve all decided how little Rhony is. What I think—” She paused. “Now that I’m old—big fifteen last week, not that anyone noticed—is, what’s gonna happen now?”

He sat, wordless. His midlife mind-rut of solitude, going-nowhere academic stagnation, and Carlo’s finest mid-April stock was generating no good answers. He felt an uneasy stirring, like a bad swimmer caught in a riptide seeing the familiar shoreline recede. What am I getting myself into?

“What scares me,” Rhona went on in rising agitation that failed to calm his unease, “I fucking hate everything. I hate men, my mom, I hate myself, I just fucking hate the world.” She stopped gesturing to grip his surprised hand between hers. “Plus, what scares me really bad,” she said, black eyes depthless and wide, “Mom’s new guy isn’t your grope-ass drunk like old Petey an’ the crowd. Last night wasn’t just a little feel-up-the-kid scene. He’d hurt me. He’d kill me.”

They sat quietly, listening to wind off the foothills. Last night’s dream flooded her mind, dry dunes sifting over flagstones, dark figures murmuring in burned trees.

“Dad‑types rip your clothes off, try to stab you,” he grimaced. Bad wine had bubbled down; bad Sixties mantra was bubbling up. The textbooks were no good. “Mom cares more about knifer-rapists than her daughter, you get slammed, lied about, caged up by a bunch of social-jerkers and psycho-jailists who’re supposed to protect you. That’s the plan to make you Orange Blossom Queen?”

“There’s never been a fucking plan!” Rhona resisted the urge to scream. “Monday this happens, Tuesday that happens, dot dot dot, so sorry to bring up this bummer shit, Mommy, but your lover-man grabbed my ass and tried to cut me up—”

“I get it,” he interrupted. “So, what’re you gonna do? About the guy from hell, the mom, life?” He took another swallow. “An essay question. Take your sweetass time.”

“I don’t need time,” she said. “Murder him with a rusty razor. Who cares about Mom—she doesn’t care about me. Maybe someday I’ll be the shrink that saves kids. Right now, only thing I can think of is running away. Squat on the Boulevard. Do what I have to.”

She put her head in her hands. “I am so scared.”

He rested big hands on her shoulders, without thinking. He opened his mouth to form some kind of reply not coming to mind.

Fortunately, she interrupted. “Enough of my shit. Now, I want some answers. You, I don’t get. You’re a loner type who wants to drink his life away. ‘K, that part I do get. Now, you meet me. I know what I am. I’m one big crap-mess that never ends. Why didn’t you just walk, hell, run, the fuck away from my ass?”

Do what I have to. His mind reverberated. What she said.

“Rhona, what do you think I was doing in the park when you strolled up?”

She closed her eyes, reeled back the scene, affected zombie zone. “You were sprawled in a swing. You had a dirty daypack with a green bottle sticking out. No, I noticed that later. What I noticed right then was you looked so damn… I donno. Beyond everything.”

“‘Beyond’? Go there!”

“Like if you had a gun…”

“Yes!” He shouted. “Technically, my preferred method is jumping off a bridge. Spend my last seconds on this mortal coil flying, final splat, leave the full-body technicolor for the ingrates to clean up. What you couldn’t see was that I’m chickenshit, years away from ever doing anything that actually hurts. That’s why the bottle and paper, to get me through another day, as if finishing my dumbass dissertation was going to move the world the tiniest millimeter.”

“Wow,” Rhona whispered, touching his hand, eyes glistening with sarcasm. “I get it. Your life is so hard, there in your university. I feel so bad for you.”

“You ever drop acid?” she asked in Sixties-speak, ferreting vital hairbrush from daypack, threshing away. “I did, once,” she said, not waiting for his answer. “Scared crap out of me. Saw this desert sandstorm howling, burning up trees, cracking walls, leaving bodies lying around like they’d been there a hundred years. An’ there were these . . . things outside, dark dead things, making noises like. . .” She shook her head. “Went on forever. Anyway, when I got done screaming, Xany and girlfriends told me acid’s rad, I’d just had a bad trip. But I know it wasn’t that. It was letting my mind say something scary to me. Does that sound weird?”

“No. Yes.”

“Yesterday I had a couple flashbacks. Something about knowing Mom didn’t want me, an’ getting raped, dropping acid, seeing the desert rolling over everything, all that shit.” She was spinning the brush around and catching it as she spoke. “So maybe you kids, with that war, being hated, doing all those drugs and free love and radical things, maybe you scare yourselves now when you remember it. Maybe that’s why you’re scared of us.”

He plopped on the coffee table. He gazed past her, lost in time out of mind.

“No!” Rhona banged on. “I don’t trust the fucked‑up establishment, whatever you call it, one fucking bit to help a kid like me! Did you?”

He took the brush out of her hand and brushed her hair. She shrugged and closed her eyes in the crimson glow of the sun sinking in evanescent smog.

“Yeah, that’s us,” he murmured. “Flower child withered. Hippie morphed into Yuppie. New Age is Screw Age. My generation started right. But we lost it. Your generation has to fix this.”

She twirled a finger in her coffee, squealed ouch. “Why don’t you adopt me? Is that such a bad plan?”

“Yes. No.”

Six hours ago, he would have demurred. Girl, don’t be an idiot. Social services would never approve a single middle-aged man adopting a fifteen-year-old girl. I could be Manson II’s Lord of the Pit, for all they know.

Or… The application stared at him. Roll the dice, academic imposter, runaway girl, state of California. The terrifying 21st century bears down. Trouble coming every day.

He knew what to do.