September Girls (18 page)

I was looking around the place. I wasn’t going to criticize or anything, but I guess she could see that I thought it was pretty gross.

She rolled her eyes. “Sorry I didn’t clean up for you. Most of the other girls spend all day cleaning; they’re not about to come home from work and be neat freaks here, too. Your brother doesn’t seem to mind the mess—actually, it wouldn’t kill him to lift a finger himself. Here. Come out on the balcony. It’s the only place with any privacy.” So I stepped over a pile of clothes and through the sliding door to a tiny concrete terrace, which looked out over the parking lot. The girl who’d directed me to DeeDee was gone.

“It’s not ocean view or anything,” DeeDee said. “But at least it’s something. I try to be positive about it. A parking lot is more exciting than the ocean anyway, right? You can see everyone coming and going. What does the ocean do? Just sit there!”

“It’s cool that you get to live on your own,” I said.

“Ha,” DeeDee said. “On our own. Do you realize I sleep in a bunk bed with three other people? Two on top, two on bottom. It’s ridiculous.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Luckily Activia is small,” DeeDee said. “And she sleeps pretty soundly. It could be worse; last year I bunked with Jessamee and she was a kicker. Next year I’ll be eighteen, which hopefully means I’ll get my own bed.”

“How many people live here, anyway?” I asked.

“I dunno,” DeeDee said. “Including me? It changes sometimes. There are others all over, of course—Blair and Tressemé and them have that whole house on the bypass, and there’s Franzia and hers in Duck and some more that I don’t even really know, but in this unit it’s twelve or thirteen, depending on whether you count your brother. Of course, it changes, like, daily.”

“Where does he sleep?” I asked.

“With Kristle,” DeeDee said. “Duh. She gets her own bed ’cause she’s the oldest, but it’s causing problems. Everyone wants to know why they can’t both live at your place for now. Then Taffany could take her bed and everything would be a lot less cramped.”

I leaned over the railing and craned my neck to the sun. There was a flick of a lighter and a plume of smoke curled past my face and into the air.

“So,” I said.

“So,” she said.

“Kristle tried to do it with me,” I said.

DeeDee didn’t flinch. “I know,” she said. “She told me. Typical ho.”

“You don’t think that’s kind of fucking crazy?”

“We’re not from around here,” DeeDee said.

“That’s all you’re going to say?” I asked.

“I told you my favorite stories were the ones about hos.”

She was cool and matter-of-fact, revealing no sadness or anger or regret or anything. I could see why she smoked so much now; the cigarette was a helpful prop for looking distracted and careless. “This is just us. This is how we are.”

As much as I wanted to reject that explanation—it was sloppy and stupid—I could see that by believing it she had made it true. In that moment, the person I was looking at wasn’t the same girl who had shown herself to me in the bedroom at the party and then again in the ship on the golf course. DeeDee was gone now—she had flown off—leaving behind another girl no different from the rest of them. Beautiful and tan and radiant, but hard eyed and complacent and a little empty, too. A girl who had no idea who she was; a girl like an Eskimo who couldn’t find a single word for snow.

She stubbed out her cigarette in an overflowing ashtray and picked up a copy of
Her Place
that was lying on a deck chair. “Want to do the quiz?” she asked, folding the pages back. “This is a good one: ‘Are You In Love?’”

“Please tell me what I did wrong,” I said. “I’ll leave you alone, I promise. I just want you to tell me.” I knew I was being pathetic—that Sebastian would have probably disowned me as a friend if he had seen me behaving this way—but I was far past caring.

“Sam, I can’t explain. I’m sorry, okay? What do you want me to say?”

“I want you to say what you mean.”

“I don’t want anyone to get hurt,” she said. “I don’t want
you
to get hurt.”

“What kind of hurt are we talking? Broken arm? Traumatic brain injury? Scraped knee? I mean, it makes a difference. I’m already hurt anyway.”

“Sam,” she said with a grimace. Something about the disgust in her voice made me hopeful—she sounded angry again. She sounded almost like herself. But she sighed and ran her fingers through her hair. “Oh, Sam,” she said. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“I should have listened,” I said. “I never should have trusted any of you.”

The funny thing is that no matter what I said and no matter what happened, I did trust her. Even still. But there was nothing I could do except leave.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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FREEDOM

We are unable to leave this place.

At the beginning of every summer, we line the side of the road, watching the parade of minivans and SUVs arriving from beyond the causeway and wondering about where they come from. The places spelled out on their license plates in strange combinations of letters: Del-a-ware, Mary-land, Virrrrrr-ginia.

Virginia is actually not far from here but we’ve never been: our curse forbids us to leave the small network of islands that comprise our temporary home. Or should we say prison?

Elsewhere is a popular topic of conversation for us. We speculate as to what it must be like—any elsewhere, it doesn’t really matter. We long to see “Tennessee,” where we imagine beautiful girls who live in elaborate castles and spend endlessly looped hours on the chore of brushing their waist-length hair while devising fiendish and unreasonable tasks for their boyfriends (dimpled, broad shouldered) to accomplish in their tribute.

We imagine “Pennsylvania,” a land of warrior princesses, tan and sinewy and wild haired, running through forests with machetes and bows and arrows, faces streaked with dirt and war paint, killing their enemies without remorse.

“Connecticut.” A cloud city? A land of rocks and fire? We can never make up our minds. But we are jealous of the girls who climb into their cars at the end of the summer and are carried back to these faraway homes, shedding the ordinariness of what they call vacation and becoming more and more themselves again as the ocean—our ocean—recedes into abstraction. Even in the passenger seats of crowded sedans packed with beach towels and luggage, faces pressed to the glass as they float up the beach road, they are free.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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SEVENTEEN

WHEN I WAS just a little kid, on the Fourth of July, I asked my then-normal mother what would happen if a firework forgot to burn out, if all those flares just kept on falling and falling until they floated on down and tumbled onto the grass, still glittering and alive. Could you touch one. Could you catch one and keep it. Could you hold it in your pocket.

That was before. It was back when my mother had still been a kindergarten teacher, before she’d heard of Facebook and Women’s Land. And on the hill behind the middle school, the Fourth of July when I was five, Mom had warned me about the dangers of catching a stray piece of firework. “It would burn your finger off,” she’d told me. “And then your whole body would explode and then you would die. But don’t worry about it. It could never happen. They fly high and burn fast.”

I know now that what Mom told me is not precisely true. I’m not stupid, and I’ve never heard of an innocent bystander’s entire body exploding because of a wayward firework on the Fourth of July. But even so, ever since then, even now, I have to admit that fireworks scare me—not as much as they did when I was little, but enough that I find myself flinching and watching the first red flash of the rockets from behind closed lids every year. In these moments I imagine every single spark flying right for me, a billion of them swarming my body. With my eyes shut, fireworks exploding hundreds of feet over my head, I can feel myself burning.

In recent summers, I’d spent the Fourth with Sebastian and his older sister Sophie, along with whichever guy she was making time with and any other friends we had that didn’t happen to be away on vacation. We would all cluster on a blanket on the hill, sipping booze smuggled in an old Starbucks thermos, trying to ignore the residual taste of coffee, just biding our time, really. The night always started rowdy—with Sebastian throwing popcorn at other people in the crowd and Sophie being typically distant and cool—and usually ended on a note of contemplation as we all wandered off the field, not really talking, a little drunk and maybe stoned, too, depending, the lights still flickering in our corneas, all of us just happy it was summer but at the same time sad, because the moment you remember to be happy about summer is always the same moment that you remember that it will be over pretty soon.

This year Sophie and Sebastian and the usual people were summers away; Jeff had barely looked at me since the incident with Kristle a week-ish previous, and DeeDee had cast me off like an expended Gauloise. Meanwhile, my father’s quest for undiscovered metal was drawing him farther and farther down the shore and away from all of us. It was just me and Mom now.

On the beach, the Girls still stared at me as they passed, smirking and twisting their hair around their fingers, but now I didn’t look back. I knew it was a game to which I didn’t know the rules. None of them approached me.

I’d nearly forgotten that the Fourth of July was even happening. I barely knew it was July at all. I hadn’t been invited anywhere and I had gone back to sleeping late, past the point of any parade, so it sort of slipped my mind. Yes, I’d noticed the beach was extra-crowded with an alarming number of people in star-spangled bikinis on the morning of the day that turned out to be the Fourth, but somehow it didn’t register with me that it was a holiday or anything.

I wouldn’t have been that interested anyway. My only patriotism was to the beach of my own on which I had somehow found myself. And even that I was sort of ambivalent about.

But then, in the late afternoon, Kristle appeared to remind me of the holiday just as I had stepped from the wooden outdoor shower and was wrapping a towel around my waist.

“Listen,” she said, materializing from behind the Volvo—not flinching a bit at my nearly naked body or my surprised glare. “We’re having a party. Tonight.”

“Uh-huh,” was all I could say.

“You should come,” she said.

“Yeah, sure,” I said. I had by then stopped caring what her motives were and had decided to just think of her as a crazy person who should be avoided if possible and humored if she did happen to cross your path.

“Just come,” she said. “Don’t be an idiot.” Then she softened: “Look. I didn’t tell Jeff I was inviting you. I didn’t tell anyone, actually. But you should come. It’s on the beach tonight, by the pier, after the fireworks. I know DeeDee’ll be happy if you come. And your brother will get over it.”

Somewhere off in the distance a radio was playing that song about being “proud to be an American.” It suddenly occurred to me that Kristle’s shorts were starred and striped; only then did I realize the date.

“Don’t you know the Fourth of July is a holiday about America?” I asked. “You guys aren’t even from here. You shouldn’t, like, be allowed to have a party. It’s unpatriotic. How would you like it if I threw a party for Trotsky’s birthday or whatever?”

She looked at me blankly and I couldn’t exactly blame her. I didn’t really even know who Trotsky was. “Oh please,” she said. “Just trust me. Come. I mean, I know you have absolutely no reason to trust me. But trust me anyway.” Then she was gone.

“Happy Fourth of July,” she called over her shoulder from wherever she had disappeared to.

A few hours later I was still lost in indecision as to whether I would take her up on it. I was in my bedroom on top of the sand-crusted comforter, flipping through an ancient copy of
Her Place
that I’d found under the couch. The quiz was “Are You Worth It?” but I decided I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer and was instead about to read my horoscope when I smelled smoke. My mother was in the doorway with a lit cigarette. When I looked away, she knocked on the doorjamb. “Hey there,” she said.

“I can’t believe you’re smoking in the house,” I said. “Does Dad know you’re smoking in the house?”

“He said it was okay,” she said uncertainly. “Anyway, he’s not the boss. I’m my own woman.”

“They’re going to keep the deposit,” I said. “Who would smoke in a rental, anyway?”

“Come on,” she said. “Don’t be such a grump. It’s the Fourth of July. Come and watch the fireworks with me.”

I grunted and looked up from the horoscope only long enough to roll my eyes. But a minute later I could sense her still standing there and I looked up again, and she hadn’t budged from the doorway, holding her still-burning cig at her chest, where it had grown an inch-long totem of ash.

“Please?” she asked. “I’ll be lonely all by myself.” And even with everything, I couldn’t help but relent. (This is the main difference between a mother and a father—a father’s patheticness is just pathetic, while a mother’s can almost always move one to sympathy or at least acquiescence.) I gave in. I stood without a word, tossed my magazine to the floor, and followed her out to the deck with the very distant ocean view, which she had decorated for last-minute festivities: it was done up in red-white-and-blue streamers and those little flags and everything. She’d made a cake, and it was sitting on a small plastic table, painstakingly decorated with white icing for stripes and stars, strawberries for the red, and blueberries for the blue. Mom shoved a plastic plate and fork into my hand.