I can still smell the sunscreen on my skin. And there's a salty taste lingering on my lips.

We drove so fast on the highway. The windows were rolled down and we FLEW. He wants the radio off, she wants the Fox, he wants XFM... I offer the CD from my discman, but the Protege has no CD player. So we listen to him sing annoyingly to the annoying songs, and laugh.

Parking, walking.

Long trek down the train tracks. The creosote is melting and rising off the railway ties as a cloying vapour, and I walk down the rail. Foxgloves and lupines, fireweed, buttercups. He comments that it's just like that movie, you know the one. She offers "Stand By Me?" But there are two girls and two guys, not four guys. So we pretend we are boys and lower our voices in a false tenor.

Down the cliff. Arbutus trees, peeling red bark, twisted trunks.

We are there. And I strip off my sundress and take off the floppy hat. And jump.

"She's beating us in the water! Girl in first? This is so wrong."

The rocks are covered in mussles down low and barnacles up high. It reminds me of our studies of the competition of these creatures in ecology, and I observe exactly what the textbooks describe. Funny that.

We jump. Well, just me and one boy. Apparently the water is 'freaking cold'. Higher and higher up the cliffs. I can't do the highest one. But that's OK.

I'm floating on my back. It's so much louder under the water here, most likely due to the proximity to the marina. I lazily kick over to the rock island. I just watch the ocean, the boats, and the seals. He comes out to sit with me. We talk about the gossip that I've been missing, in my antisocial world. We talk until it is parched and hot on that rock, and then dive into the current that sweeps us back to the cliffs.

Back up the hill we go, through the twisted arbutus grove, along the tracks. We disturb a lizard sunning itself on the rails.