The tech takeover had begun before Mitty moved in. She was used to the reality of surf spots teeming with millionaire tenderfoots, their ordinary brown hair eagerly doused with lemon juice. The way they paddled toward barreling waves in the middle of a thunderstorm, then retreated to their freshly built homes on the edges of eroding cliffs. Brazen and brilliant and believing that nothing could kill them. When Mitty arrived, she was less familiar with the time that Bethel yearned for, a previous century that Mitty, like most teenagers, associated with the stories that elderly people insisted on telling, stale and memorized. She often confused her decades, not entirely sure how the forties felt any different from the fifties beyond some vague sense that World War II and the James Dean craze didn’t overlap.