September Girls (19 page)

“Have some,” she said, and because I felt obligated, I cut myself off a small piece while she watched eagerly. It felt preposterous.

“I thought this was what you hated,” I said with a full mouth. “This domestic shit. You know, baking cakes and hanging streamers. I mean, I thought this was why you left.” (The cake was actually not bad, although I myself would have preferred a seven-layer dip.)

Mom shrugged. “I just wanted to be festive,” she said. “I was hoping Jeff and his friend would come. And Dad of course. But now I guess I’m kind of glad it’s just you and me. You always understood me best anyway. Happy Fourth of July!” She lifted her cigarette as if cheersing.

I almost said something, but then I just could not bring myself to. I couldn’t even think of where to begin. So I plopped myself into a plastic lawn chair and ate my mother’s sad and perfect American cake, one small bite at a time, waiting for it to get dark.

A few minutes later, she brought me a glass of chardonnay from the box she was working on and we clanked awkwardly. “To independence,” she said. Then there was a whistle from the direction of the ocean and it all started.

And sitting on the porch watching the fireworks with my drunk, tattooed, chain-smoking mother, her reclined in oblivious languor on a half-collapsing beach chaise as she sloshed at her wine and murmured unintelligible little phrases of satisfaction to herself, the rockets shot up into the black sky, and I closed my eyes until I heard the bang and then eased them open just in time to see the blue sparks burning out into smoke. For some reason all I could think about was DeeDee.

I have heard a lot of things about love. You hear different things about it, of course, depending. My personal points of reference include the opinions of Jeff and Sebastian; the insipid overheard conversations of Michelle Schwartz, who sits behind me in math class; songs by people ranging from Bruce Springsteen to Lady Gaga and everyone in between; X-Men comic books; and even the occasional short story in
The New Yorker
, as long as it’s not written by a person with an aggressively foreign-sounding name. You would think all this would count as a certain broad range of knowledge in things romantic—or rather, the stupidity of all things romantic—which is why I was surprised, watching the remnants of that very first firework, when I found myself struck by a confusing, sublime infinity, and wondered, in a sort of abstract way, if it had anything to do with DeeDee.

Okay, I don’t know anything. All I know is that as the rockets burst and faded against a blackening sky, the burning smell of Mom’s American Spirit crawled across the deck, and—bang! bang! bang!—it was DeeDee’s face that was etched onto the back of my eyelids. Her face and the way she smelled and the way she smiled and whatever. And the funny way she tilted her head when she didn’t understand something, the way that made you think perhaps she understood better than she was letting on, maybe even better than you yourself understood.

Her jittery and uncertain confidence. Her anger, and the way she thought everything was funny, even the things that made her mad.

I felt a sort of nauseated sensation, similar to the feeling in the pit of your stomach when you go down a giant waterslide. It was a feeling that was starting to become fairly old hat.

Chalk that up to whatever you’d like; I have no name for it beyond the one that is both obvious and unlikely, and I’m not going to say much more about that. All I know is that suddenly everything was really exploding in rapid fire. The fireworks were, I mean. It was the finale.

At my side, my mother let out an embarrassed hiccup and I looked over at her, and she was my mom again, my mom as I’d once known her. Somehow in the strange, unnatural Independence Day light—observed through the filter of glitter and smoke—the tattoos on her chest and arms were washed away; the various piercings and the red stripes in her hair were obscured. She was the mother she’d been before. But that implies a certain diminishment, and that’s not right either. She was more than a past echo of herself. She was something else entirely.

“Mom,” I said.

She looked over at me and seemed just as baffled as I was, as if she too was seeing a version of me that she’d forgotten all about, and faltered and then gulped before replying. “Yeah?” she said.

“Remember when you told me you’d die if you caught a firework?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Really? I told you that you’d die?”

“And your finger would explode.”

“I think you’d probably just get burned,” she said. “But I knew a guy in high school who stuck a lit firecracker where he shouldn’t have and could never use the bathroom properly again, if you know what I mean. I probably just didn’t want you to play with the things. They’re illegal in some states.”

“I know,” I said. “Obviously.”

“You really shouldn’t pay attention to anything I say,” Mom said. “I usually have no idea what I’m talking about.”

“You’re my mother,” I pointed out. She just shrugged sheepishly and looked away and tossed her cigarette into the darkness.

“I love you,” I said.

I mean, I guess love is complicated. Of course I went to the party.

On the beach by the pier, they had a bonfire burning and music blaring from a pickup truck parked haphazardly in the sand. I figured on this particular night that the beach patrol chose to look the other way. There were tons of people, hundreds it seemed like, all clustered together in an unsolvable knot. Here I was. Another fucking party. I hung back on the edge, not really knowing what to do.

Kristle saw me first, and for the first time since I’d known her, there was no artifice or calculation in her expression. She looked up and met my eye and smiled, a real smile, all sincere and everything, and puckered her lips and blew me a kiss. I wondered what had changed, what had made her bring me here. I doubted I would ever really know.

Then Jeff turned around and saw me too, and at first his broad, bare shoulders clenched and he looked angry. But he brushed the hair from his eyes and shrugged half an apology before turning back to Kristle, putting his hand on her hip, and, pulling her close to him, planting a kiss on her forehead as she sank into his chest. I guessed that was as close as he was going to get to telling me everything was okay.

I hardly recognized DeeDee at first; she approached as a blurred and glowing figure, as a nimbus that slowly collected itself into the shape of her body as it got closer. Then she was standing right there in front of me and she was herself.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” I said.

“Here,” DeeDee said. “Have a sparkler. Actually, have two. Because you’re worth it.”

She handed me a couple of sparklers, unlit, and had turned to walk away when I grabbed her by the wrist.

“No way,” I said, yanking her back. She looked trapped and panicked for a second, like she was going to shove me off, but then she didn’t.

“You shouldn’t have come here,” she said. “I thought we had this all settled.”

“We didn’t settle anything,” I said. “You know that. I can’t stop thinking about you. Sorry, but it’s true.”

She sighed and looked away. “Yeah,” she said. “Same, I guess.”

“I’m very confused by you,” I told her.

“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry if I’ve been confusing. If it helps, you’re confusing too.”

There was a pop and a whistle and a cheer and a small, busted explosion over our heads.

“Oh, sure,” I said, not even really noticing the firework. “What’s confusing about me?”

“There you go being confusing again—asking questions that I can’t possibly answer.” She grimaced in frustration. “This isn’t supposed to happen to us.”

“What?” I asked. “What, exactly, is ‘this’?”

She gnawed at her thumbnail. “We’re not supposed to care,” she said.

“I really wish you would speak in the singular,” I said. “Every time you start with this
we,
I know you’re just about to say something that’s complete bullshit. Kristle and Taffany and Olay have nothing to do with you.”

“Fine,” she said. “I.
I’m
not supposed to care.”

“Care about what?” I asked. “Other people? Feelings? Who do you think you are?”

She took a deep breath. “It’s not supposed to happen to us. It’s, like, against our nature. Sorry, plural again, but sometimes the plural’s important. Like when it puts everyone at risk.”

“You keep saying that,” I said. “But I already told you. I don’t care if I get supposedly hurt. I already got hurt, so what’s the difference?”

“I wasn’t talking about you,” she said.

I stopped. “Then I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

“Yes you do,” she said. And maybe I did.

Taffany came around with a lighter. “Happy Independence Day!” she said as she lit me up. Next she waved her lighter for DeeDee, and then we were both glittering in the dark. Orange sparks shot around us in an unpredictable halo, and it didn’t even occur to me to worry about being burned.

A few yards away someone lit a Roman candle and suddenly everyone was squealing and running for safety. DeeDee and I didn’t move. We stood there with our sparklers, not saying anything, just showered in flame. The hairs on my arms were standing on end, and I could feel the summer seeping in through my pores. I was still pleasantly drunk from the box of wine I’d split with Mom.

Fuck it,
I thought. “Fuck it,” I said. At a certain point, it’s just time to be a man. Actually, no. Fuck that too. Being a man is bullshit; maybe trying to
be a man
had been the problem all along. At a certain point you just have to trust someone. Even if it’s only yourself.

So I dropped the sparklers to my side and kissed DeeDee. Summer and sparks and smoke curled around us into a cocoon, and then we were the only ones at the party. Everything had gone silent and she kissed me right back.

That night, DeeDee and I left the party together but stayed on the beach, wandered down the shore until we couldn’t hear the music or the shouting.

We didn’t do anything, really. We sat by the ocean, idly gathering sand in our fists to let it slip through our fingers, tossing it at the glowing sand crabs that scuttled toward us in the blackness of everything. Just talking some stupid shit, or not talking, or whatever, our legs barely grazing each other’s. And right before it was light out we fell asleep right there, faces buried in the sand, our breathing even with the roll of the waves, bathing suits riding low on our hips. I dreamed of other summers and of beaches that I had not yet traveled to.

I was someone transformed and new, unknowable and strange. Maybe not a man, but not the boy I had come here as, either. Even in the sand, even in my sleep, I knew he was gone.

And summer was leaving too; that’s the summer thing. The Fourth of July is over before the fireworks have time to burn themselves into memories. So you just stand there with your sparkler, eyeing it as it sputters in your hand, all dumb and sunburned and sad but also happy, knowing that sometimes you have to take one last salty breath and make it worth it.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

.....................................................................

EIGHTEEN

AFTER THE FOURTH of July we started going to Ursula’s most nights. Jeff and I would chug a couple of beers on the porch and then walk over together, or Kristle and DeeDee would spin by after their shift and pick us up and we’d all head out—Jeff and Kristle walking a few paces behind as DeeDee skipped on ahead, laughing and talking to me nonstop as I tried to keep up with her.

I didn’t even know what DeeDee was talking about half the time. She’d be going on about some article she had read in
Her Place
or some asshole at the restaurant who’d wanted prime rib or a book one of the girls who worked as maids had brought home after it had been left behind in one of the houses. I’d just listen to her and be happy.

DeeDee was different from how I’d thought she was when I met her. She was different, honestly, from how I’d thought she was a week ago or yesterday. She kept surprising me with herself. Sometimes I got the impression that she was surprised too.

Ever since the Fourth of July—since DeeDee had resigned herself to my continued presence—I’d seen her every day. She would come over and watch TV, or I’d hang out in the Fisherman’s Net while she worked and she would come sit with me when she got the chance, or we would sit on the beach even though she hated it, or when we were up early, we’d walk up to the McDonald’s on the bypass and get breakfast sandwiches, sometimes with Kristle and occasionally Jeff.

We played lots of cards. We assembled a jigsaw puzzle. We played Scrabble.

DeeDee was better at Scrabble than you would expect for someone who claimed not to speak English; she was judicious with her letters and knew all the tricky words like
za
and
qi
and was ruthless enough to play them when necessary. She was kind when she won, which was always. One time I looked down at the board and noticed that all her words were sad, and we didn’t play Scrabble again after that.

Sometimes we would stay up till like three in the morning on the porch, just talking. She would smoke a thousand cigarettes and I would get a little drunk and then, when it was really late, she would amble off down the street into the dark, her smoke trailing behind her.

She never took me back to that cove. I started to wonder if it had ever even existed. She never took me back to Nalgene’s pirate ship either. We hadn’t kissed since the Fourth of July. It’s not that I didn’t want to, but there was a new, invisible barrier between us. I didn’t know where it had come from, and I didn’t ask.

Taffany was the bartender at Ursula’s on Mondays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. She was usually grumpy because she never had any customers, but she would give us free drinks anyway and when you’d try to pay, she would throw the money back at you and roll her eyes like she was all offended or something. When she was in a rare good mood, she was something else; she’d have Nalgene put some Prince on the jukebox, and then she’d ignore everyone while she freaked out, dancing alone, shimmying and jumping and tossing her hair and doing little backbends over the bar, mouthing the words to “Raspberry Beret” or whatever while everyone stopped what we were doing to stare. When the song ended, she’d just sweep her hair out of her face, and she’d head over to the cash register, punch in a few numbers, and let it clang open only to slam it back shut, a little smirk the only thing indicating she even remembered her dance.