Ben doesn’t see the car that follows him out of John Wayne-Orange County Airport and stays behind him all the way to Laguna.
Why should he?
That isn’t his world, he’s bummed about Chon leaving, and then O drops this bombshell:
“I threw myself at him.”
“Who?”
“Chon.”
Boom.
He’s not jealous-jealousy isn’t in Ben’s makeup-but Chon and O?
It’s huge.
But Ben is cool. Ben is always cool. “And?”
“I bounced off.”
The Wall of Chon.
“Oh.”
“Rejected. Spurned. Un requited.”
“You never hear about ‘requited love,’” Ben says, because he doesn’t know what else to say.
“ I don’t, anyway.”
“Pouting doesn’t look good on you.”
“Really?” O says. “Because I thought it did.”
A few seconds later she says, “I hate this fucking war.”
She was fourteen, watching TV that morning, stalling going to school when she saw what she thought was cheesy CGI come across the screen.
An airliner. A building.
It didn’t seem real and still doesn’t.
But Chon was already in the service by then.
A fact for which she blames herself.
Ben knows what she’s thinking.
“Don’t,” he says.
“Can’t help it.”
She can’t because she doesn’t know
It isn’t her fault
It goes back
Generations.
Laguna Beach, California 1967