he had an ongoing fantasy that he looked like Ryan O'Neal, Park could not have chosen a more inaccurate model. Sturdy and wiry from hours of surfing, he was nevertheless short and pale. And with lips rosy to the point of appearing touched up, and a mop of hair as black as his coal eyes, he was closer to a member of the Vienna Boys' Choir than a movie star. He was not handsome, but a lot of girls - Shani included - thought he was a doll.
The absence of his picture in the annual was no real mystery. He had been the yearbook editor-in-chief.
The thought of some jerk scribbling on his face, he had confided, had been unbearable.
"You read it to me, Park," Flynn answered. "Your happiest memory was going into the womb."
"I was speaking for my father, there," Park grinned.
"Who else's did you read?" Shani asked. She was flattered - she was in seventh heaven - that he'd taken special note of her, but already she was worrying about the competition.
Again he hesitated. "Robin Carlton's."
They had handed in the information for the captions before Robin's accident. Robin's ambition had been to become a doctor and join the Peace Corps and help poor people. The conversation went out of the window right there. Shani decided she would tell Flynn why she wanted to be a psychiatrist when he told her why he had come to Santa Barbara.
Her reasons weren't complicated, just confusing. In school, there was no specific subject that fascinated her. She did well in all of her classes, largely because her mother was strict, but biology and history or literature just couldn't compete with real, live people. She loved to study her friends, try to understand their motivations, their hopes and fears. Lunch in the crowded, talkative quad was her favourite period.
This is why she wanted to study the mind. Perhaps she was trying to figure out herself through others.
Maybe she relied too much upon others. Sometimes, it seemed, she had no internal anchor, nothing that couldn't be blown away by the cruelties of the world. She needed those around her, though she saw faults in all of them. Except for, perhaps, Robin, who wouldn't always be there...
Ten bumpy minutes later, they came to Lena's road which was nothing but a dirt path scarcely wide enough for Sol's van. However, it was flat. Making a right on to the road, heading west in the direction of the hidden ocean with the potholes behind her, Shani accelerated sharply.
"Don't lose sight of Sol," Park warned. "Those cans don't put out enough pressure to keep a tyre up for long."
"If he doesn't show up ten minutes after we get there," Shani said, "I can always go back for him. I want some breathing space there so I can talk to Lena, ask her to lay off Kerry."
"You'd have more of a chance of success if you prayed for rain," Park said, noting the trail of dust they were stirring up. He added absently: "If it did rain here, the Carlton Castle would be an island. No one would be able to get in and out with the mud."
They sighted the house twenty minutes later. Mr. Carlton was not one for pinching pennies, and he had spared nothing on his resort home. Shani had forgotten the number of rooms Lena had said it contained, but she remembered having laughed at the size of the number. Largely panelled on the outside with redwood, the mansion itself was a haphazard three storeys of spaciously windowed boxes bolted precariously to one another, as if the architect had been fretting over a drawer full of incomplete Rubik's cubes while designing it - very modern. In this heat, the practicality of twin chimneys at opposite ends was hard to imagine. Tall, prickly cacti guarded the long white driveway, and shady trees that couldn't have done all their growing since the house had been built, cooled the front porch and roof. Off to the left, separated from the house proper by fifty yards, was a carport and garage housing a boat and two foreign cars. However, it was the ocean beyond that was the real visual treat, six-foot green glassy waves sliding on to a white carpet of sand that would be their class mattress for the next couple of nights. Park and his surfboard must be in bliss. The waves were sufficient to rip off any bikini bottom, but Shani was having