“This is good for you,” he says in a softer voice, squeezing my shoulders. He’s still in his CPA long sleeves and tie, not in one of his geeky 1980s sci-fi T-shirts, so he looks like more of a responsible adult at the moment. And I don’t ever remember him being this decisive and firm. It’s weird, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. It’s making me a little emotional. “I know you don’t believe me now, but you will. Sometimes you have to endure painful things to realize that you’re a whole lot stronger than you think.”

Ugh. He’s so earnest. I know he’s talking about what he went through in the divorce, and that makes me uncomfortable. I blow out the long, deep sigh of a girl defeated and duck out of his kind fatherly grip in one smooth movement, instantly feeling relief.

Once I have time to think things over rationally, I understand where he’s coming from . . . in theory. If the point of me sticking it out at the Cave is because I need to be bringing in my own paycheck and showing him that I can be responsible, I’ll just have to tough it out somehow. Figure out a way to see as little of Porter Roth as possible.

I might be an evader, but I suppose I’m no quitter. It’s just a summer job anyway, right? That’s what I tell myself.

Besides, I have other things to think about.

The next morning, I break out a map of Coronado Cove the second Dad’s car has rumbled out of earshot. Time to do a little detective work. The Cave didn’t schedule me for my first real shift until tomorrow, so at least I have one day of respite before I’m forced to start serving my jail term. I’d already messaged Alex, but he doesn’t answer right away. I’m wondering if that’s because he’s at the day job. During the school year, he only works the day job after school, and every once in a while on the weekends. But now that it’s summer, he said he’s working there pretty much every morning, and clocking in at another job later.

My stomach goes haywire just thinking about it.

This is what I know about Alex’s day job: I know that it’s a family business, and that he hates it. I know that the business is on the beach, because he’s said that he can see the waves from the window. I also know that there’s a counter, so obviously it’s a retail business. A retail shop on the boardwalk. That narrows it to. . . I dunno, about several hundred stores? But two details that may help me pin him down are ones that seemed unimportant when he first mentioned them. First: He complains that the scent of cinnamon constantly makes him hungry because a churro cart is nearby. Second: He feeds a stray beach cat that suns itself outside the shop and answers to the name Sam-I-Am.

Not a lot, but it’s a start.

After studying the map, I strap on my scooter helmet and head down Gold Avenue toward the northern end of the boardwalk—opposite the Cavern Palace, a mile or so away. Sunshine’s burning through the morning fog, the air smells like pancakes and ocean. The beach is already bustling with people. Locals and tourists, freaks and geeks. They throng the boardwalk like ants on a picnic. The water’s too nippy for swimming, but that doesn’t stop people from lining the sand with blankets and towels. Everyone’s ready to worship the sun.

I’ve always disliked the beach, but as I find a place to park near the north end of the boardwalk and slather my vitamin-D-deficient legs and arms with mega-super-sensitive sunblock created for babies, the frail, and the elderly, I’m feeling slightly less hateful at the horde of bouncy string bikinis and tropical-patterned board shorts jostling past me, laughing and singing as they file toward the sand. There’s not a soul here that I need to impress. No one to worry about accidentally bumping into. Coming out west is my do-over. A clean slate.

That was one reason I wanted to move out here. It wasn’t just missing my dad, or Mom and Nate LLC fighting, or even the prospect of meeting Alex. In a strange way, the reason I don’t know much about Alex, and vice versa, was one of my main incentives for moving.

Mom’s a divorce lawyer. (Oh, the irony.) Four years ago, when I was fourteen, Mom took a case that ended up giving the wife full custody of the couple’s daughter, a girl about my age. Turned out the jilted husband had a leak in the ol’ brain pipe. Greg Grumbacher, hell-bent for revenge against my mother, found our address online. This was back when my folks were still together. There was . . . an incident.

He was put in prison for a very long time.

Anyway. It’s a relief to have an entire country between me and old Greg.

So that’s why our family doesn’t do “public” online. No real names. No photos. No alma maters or job locations. No breezy status updates with geotags or posts with time stamps like, Oh my gawd, Stacey! I’m sitting at my fav tea shop on 9th, and there’s a girl wearing the cutest dress! Because that’s how messed-up people track you down and do bad things to you and people you care about.

I try not to be paranoid and let it ruin my life. And not everybody who wants to track somebody down is a sicko. Take, for instance, what I’m doing now, looking for Alex. I’m no Greg Grumbacher. The difference is intent. The difference is that Greg wanted to hurt us, and all I want to do is make sure that Alex is an actual human being my age, preferably of the male persuasion, and not some creep who’s trying to harvest my eyeballs for weird, evil laboratory experiments. That’s not stalking, it’s scoping. It’s protection for both of us, really—me and Alex. If we’re meant to be, and he’s the person I imagine him to be, then things will all work out fine. He’ll be wonderful, and by the end of the summer, we’ll be crazy in love, watching North by Northwest at the film festival on the beach, and I’ll have my hands all over him. Which is what I spend a lot of my free time imagining myself doing to his virtual body, the lucky boy.

However, if my scoping turns up some bad intel and this relationship looks like it might have more fizzle than pop? Then I’ll just disappear into the shadows, and nobody gets hurt.

See? I’m looking out for the two of us.

Shoulders loose, I slip on a pair of dark sunglasses and fall in step behind a herd of beach bunnies, using them as a shield until we hit the boardwalk, where they head straight to the beach and I go left.

The boardwalk area is just under half a mile long. A center promenade spills out onto a wide pedestrian pier, which is anchored by a Ferris wheel at its base and capped by a wire that ferries couples in aerial chairlifts to the cliffs above. And all of that is enveloped in midway games, looping roller coasters, hotels, restaurants, and bars. It’s half this: laid-back California vibe, skaters, sidewalk art, comic book shops, organic tea, seagulls. And half this: bad 1980s music blasting through tinny speakers, schlocky Tilt-A-Whirls, bells dinging, kids crying, cheap T-shirt shops, overflowing trash cans.

Whatever my feelings about what this place is, I suspect it isn’t going to be easy to find Alex. Those suspicions only grow stronger when I veer away from the Midway area and hit a stretch of retail shops near the promenade (maybe here?) and realize the scent that’s been driving me crazy since yesterday isn’t the Pancake Shack, it’s freshly fried dough. And that’s because there’s an official Coronado Cove boardwalk churro cart every twenty or thirty feet down the promenade. Churros are like long Mexican doughnut sticks that have been fried and dipped in cinnamon or, as the sign tells me, strawberry sugar. They smell like God’s footprints. I’ve never had a real churro, but halfway down the promenade, I make a decision to give up on everything: finding Alex, finding another job, the meaning of life. Just give me that sweet fried dough.