The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup by Susan Orlean

weren’t exactly sure what she was implying and they didn’t brood about it. They hardly talked about her. She was like some unassailable force. We walked past the pavilions. “The men at this beach are so sexist,” Lilia said, glaring at a guy swinging a boom box. “It’s really different from Hana. Here they’re always, you know, staring, and saying, ‘Oh, here come the
giiiirls,
’ and ‘Oh, hello,
ladies,
’ and stuff. For us white girls, us haoles, I think they really like to be gross.
So
gross. I’m serious.”
    “Hey, the waves look pretty sick,” Theresa said. She watched a man drop in on one and then whip around against it. She whistled and said, “Whoooa, look at that sick snap! That was so rad, dude! That was the sickest snap I’ve seen in
ages
! Did you see that?”
    They were gone in an instant. A moment later, two blond heads popped up in the black swells, and then they were up on their boards and away.
    DINNER AT MATT’S : tons of barbecued chicken, loaves of garlic bread, more loaves of garlic bread. Annie Kinoshita brought four quarts of ice cream out of the freezer, lined them up on the kitchen counter, and watched them disappear. Annie was fair, fine-boned, and imperturbable. She used to be a surfer “with hair down to her frickin’ butt,” according to Theresa. Now she was busy with her baby and with overseeing the open-door policy she and Matt maintained in their house. That night, another surfer girl, Elise Garrigue, and a fourteen-year-old boy, Cheyne Magnusson, had come over for dinner and were going to sleep over, too. Cheyne was one of the best young surfers on the island. His father, Tony, was a professional skateboarder. Cheyne was the only boy who regularly crashed at Matt and Annie’s. He and the girls had the Platonic ideal of a platonic relationship. “Hell, these wenches are
virgins,
” Annie said to me, cracking up. “These wenches don’t want anything to do with that kind of nastiness.”
    “Shut up, haole,” Theresa said.
    “I was going to show these virgins a picture of Chaz’s head coming out when I was in labor,” Annie yelled, “and they’re all, ‘No, no, no,
don’t
!’ ”
    “Yeah, she’s all, ‘Look at this grossness!’ ” Theresa said. “And we’re all, ‘Shut up, fool.’ ”
    “Duh,” Lilia said. “Like we’d even want to see a picture like that.”
    The next day was the preliminary round of the Quicksilver HASA Competition, the fourth of eight HASA competitions on Maui leading to the state championships and then the nationals. It was a two-day competition—preliminaries on Saturday, finals on Sunday. In theory, the girls should have gone to bed early because they had to get up at five, but that was just a theory. They pillow-fought for an hour, watched
Sabrina, the Teenage Witch
and
Boy Meets World
and another episode of
Sabrina,
then watched a couple of Kelly Slater surfing videos, had another pillow fight, ate a few bowls of cereal, then watched
Fear of a Black Hat,
a movie spoofing the rap music world that they had seen so many times they could recite most of the dialogue by heart. Only Elise fell asleep at a decent hour. She happened to be French and perhaps had overdosed on American pop culture earlier than the rest. Elise sort of blew in to Hawaii with the trade winds: She and her mother had left France and were planning to move to Tahiti, stopped on Maui en route, and never left. It was a classic Hawaiian tale. No one comes here for ordinary reasons in ordinary ways. They run away to Maui from places like Maryland or Nevada or anyplace they picture themselves earthbound, landlocked, stuck. They live in salvaged boxcars or huts or sagging shacks just to be near the waves. Here, they can see watery boundlessness everywhere they turn, and all things are fluid and impermanent. I don’t know what time it was when the kids finally went to sleep because I was on the living room floor with my jacket over my head for insulation. When