On the corner of Potter and Correas, there’s the most prime empty lot I’ve ever seen. I’m serious. It’s just sitting there. Thousands of square feet of level dirt and weeds, not too rough, not too manicured. No one monitors it and the neighbors don’t complain. There’s hardly any litter, either, cause it’s smack dab in the middle of the suburbs and everyone’s got their own trash cans. It’s the perfect field for six teenagers to build a skate park.

It started when Max and I biked to Poplar Beach. We hadn’t been in a while, ‘cause usually it’s way closer to go to Surfer’s, but even with the “no parking” banners there’s been too much traffic there lately and we wanted to go somewhere more secluded. Joke’s on us – Kelly Avenue was packed with tourists too, so we just started cruising around the side streets, laughing at all the folks trying to find parking and getting spit on by the Andreottis’ weirdass llama who’s got to be fifty years old at this point. After a while, we got bored and trekked inland. That’s when we saw it.

The most perfect goddamn field on the coast.

Max and I just kinda stared at it for a while. We couldn’t believe it. How had no one built anything on it yet? It was just sitting there. Empty. Ready to be transformed. It’s like this field was made just for us. 

“Who do you think owns it?” Max asked.

“I don’t know, man,” I said. “But they’re sure as hell not doing anything with it.”

Right then and there, we became the kings of that lot on Potter. That weekend, we recruited Manny to the cause and told Max’s parents we were taking his brother to Ocean View Park. The park had been closed since the whole shit-on-the-slide debacle, but they didn’t have to know that. Manny’s a good dude and knows a ton of skaters on the coast – his girlfriend’s the one who did that half-pipe mural – so we thought it’d be best to get his opinion.

I don’t know how, but the field was almost better than when we first saw it. No one was there. No furniture, no weird discards, even the three plastic bags we picked up were relatively clean. It was sunnier that day, and all the plants just felt greener, the rocks less jagged, the “no trespassing” signs less threatening. As soon as we arrived, all the beachgoers with their strollers and coolers started steering clear of the thing, like they knew it was ours.

“Whoa,” Manny breathed.

“Isn’t it sick?” I said. “I’m thinking we can put up a ramp by the stop sign, bring your old trampoline and set it up by the fence.”

While Max and I grinned with pride and Max’s brother drove his bike in circles around the intersection, Manny took his time inspecting the place. He paced the perimeter, crouching down and feeling the dirt with his fingertips every few yards. He ran his hand along the wood of the fence that separated the property from a long blue house with a white Prius out front, tapping his knuckles against any plank that seemed wobbly. At the end of his circuit, he stepped off the curb onto the street and then back up again, back and forth, judging the height of the cement.

“No sidewalk,” he said.

Max frowned. “Is that a problem?”

“Nah,” Manny clarified. “It’s great. It means people won’t get too close.”

“There’s, like, no cars around here either,” I added. “No one bothering us.”

We looked at each other. Max mirrored my smile. Then, looking over at Manny, he said, “What’s the verdict?”

Manny smirked. “I think I gotta go find my old trampoline.”

•••

Soon enough, a whole group of us started hanging at the lot regularly. We dug a hole and used the dirt to make a ramp that we took turns biking off of into the road. One of Max’s friends brought a couple of lawn chairs and just sat in them for hours sipping Max’s brother’s Capri Suns. Manny’s trampoline was bigger than I remembered and could fit multiple people on it at once, so Max and I started holding competitions for who could get the other to fall on his ass first. Manny’s girlfriend drew up plans to tag up parts of the wall and had already primed some different spots with white paint. Sometimes she’d bring her old Chevy Astro with a dog in the back and play music. The tourists avoided us and the locals didn’t care.

Or at least, not for a week or two.

One Tuesday afternoon, I borrowed some of Manny’s girlfriend’s paint. She wasn’t there, but she’d left a can of purple behind and I figured she wouldn’t notice. It was just Max and me and his lawn chair friend. We took turns writing our names at the bottom of one of the un-primed stretches of fence. 

“Hey – excuse me. Hello. Hey,” someone said.

I whipped around. “Uh – yeah? Hi.” The stranger was a middle-aged woman wearing a windbreaker, sunglasses and a dark baseball hat with her arms folded and her shoulders hunched. It was seventy degrees Fahrenheit. I couldn’t tell if she was smiling or just squinting. I could see her teeth, though – they were straight but yellowing. She needed chapstick.

“Can I ask what you’re up to?” she said carefully.

Max stood up with his back straight. “Hi ma’am! We’re just playing. Such a nice day out, you know?” Classic teacher’s pet.

“I see,” she noted. “Well, this lot is private property.”

“Oh sure,” he returned, cracking his neck. “I’m sure no one minds a few kids just taking a quick rest on a bike ride, right?”

The woman closed her mouth. I was glad to not be staring at her teeth. “I see you out here all the time, you know. Not sure I’d call it ‘a quick rest.’”

“Are you serious?” I started to say, as Max cut me off with a nervous laugh and a “We didn’t mean to cause any harm by it, ma’am.”

She frowned then. Properly frowned. Then she said, “There are kids here. People live around here. You’re upsetting the neighbors. Do you not see the signs? You can’t just hang out here.”

I nearly jumped at that, but Max’s hand shot out and grabbed my wrist, his fingernails digging into the skin. His smile was plastered wide on his face. “Of course! We’ll get out of your hair,” he said. The woman just stood on the road with her arms crossed.

“Come on, man. Let’s go,” Max muttered to me. I couldn’t stop staring at the woman’s dry lips. Tugging my arm, Max repeated himself. “Come on. Drop it. Let’s just go.”

I let him drag me away. As I turned, I noticed the lawn chair friend putting his phone back in his pocket. He looked up, face blank, and walked quickly with us to pack up the trampoline.

“This is my lot,” the woman said as we brought the trampoline back to where our bikes were lying on the curb. “I don’t want to see you hanging around it again.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” I breathed.

“What did you just say?” she snapped. Then her back snapped back and she went flying ten feet.

A dark green Chevy Astro barreled over her and screeched to a stop. Max and Max’s friend and I were silent. Manny’s girlfriend threw open the door, hopped out, and froze with her hand on the door handle. She took in a heavy, shuddering breath.

Max’s friend stared at her.

Max stared at the feet sticking out from under the car.

I stared at the dent in the hood. It was deep.

Max’s friend started talking first. “I just thought – we couldn’t carry it – you have a – a trampoline’s really big for three people, you know? And we needed – shit – I didn’t mean – you got here so fast –”

Manny’s girlfriend let out another long breath. “I was at Andreotti’s,” she said.

“Shit,” Max’s friend repeated.

I didn’t say anything. I just locked eyes with the elderly man holding an envelope in a driveway two houses down. I couldn’t move.

He stared at me. The other three just breathed. Then the man put an arthritic finger to his lips, slowly, then lowered it, slowly, and turned around. He walked in a calm rhythm to the door of the house, turned the knob, and shuffled inside.

Still staring at the door of the house, I suddenly noticed I could feel the roof of my mouth again. “Let’s go,” I said, turning back to my friends.

All three stared at me. Then Manny’s girlfriend nodded. Max looked at her with his eyebrows raised. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s get going.”

•••

I’m not joking, it’s seriously the perfect field. We’ve been hanging out there all summer and no one’s bothered us after those first weeks. When we’re there, it feels like nothing can touch us. Not the weirdly clean plastic bags, or the glares from the tourists, or the flyers that read “missing” blowing across the lot from time to time. Max’s friend somehow found another lawn chair, if you can believe it, and now I sit in one with my feet up on the seat of another, watching as he shows Max’s brother how to do a somersault on the trampoline.

Manny’s girlfriend – ex-girlfriend, I should say, she broke up with him a few months ago – stopped painting the fence and now it’s just got splotches of white primer on a third of the slats. It doesn’t look that weird, though, and it makes the whole place feel energetic to me. She still comes around sometimes with a used Lexus LS. I think it’s her mom’s.

Max doesn’t like to hang out here much anymore, though. It “feels hella weird,” he says. We usually bike to Surfer’s Beach instead and take turns filming each other on the half-pipe. Today Max is here, though, pacing along the curb, chewing his fingernails and watching his little brother.

“You good, man?” his friend calls over.

“Yeah,” he replies quickly. “Just watching.”

I look at him and smile. “We really lucked out with this field, huh?”

He stops walking and glances at the upturned dirt by the back fence, rubbing his neck. For a while he’s pretty quiet.

“Sure, yeah,” he says eventually. “It’s a great field.”