September Girls (27 page)

“Should we do something?” I asked DeeDee.

DeeDee just shook her head and put a finger to her lips. She placed a gentle hand on my knee:
Be still. Watch.

After a few minutes, the girl got up again, wavering a little, and then steadied herself. She was naked and skeletal, and if I hadn’t known, I would have had a hard time deciding whether she was a young girl or an old lady. Or even whether she was human at all. She limped slowly forward, putting one foot uncertainly in front of the other, her arms tentatively stretched to her sides, then tripped again. And again she stood.

“What will happen to her?” I asked. “We should help her before she goes wandering naked up the highway.”

“Someone’ll find her,” DeeDee said. “One of us will take her in. Or, I mean, she could wander into the street and get hit by a car, or be murdered or whatever. Or anything. But nothing can help that. It’s not our place to interfere. This is the way it’s supposed to go. She won’t even remember this soon.”

“Do you remember?” I asked.

“Not really,” she said. “Little bits. I remember being cold. I remember feeling wet; I had never felt wetness before and it was weird, like seeing a new color for the first time. But the first thing I really remember is Kristle finding me. I was hiding behind the Dumpster at the Fisherman’s Net, and she was throwing out the trash at the end of her shift.”

“What did she do?”

“She took me inside and wrapped me in a towel from the gift shop and let me use her lip gloss and gave me some tomato bisque and a magazine to read while she closed up. I couldn’t read yet—that took me a few days—but I looked at the pictures. I thought Beyoncé was the most beautiful person I’d ever seen. Then she brought me home and helped me fix my hair.”

“Were you scared?”

“I don’t know,” DeeDee said after thinking about it for a minute. “I don’t know what I was.”

The girl was still moving forward. As she got closer, I could see that she was grimacing in pain.

“Her feet hurt,” DeeDee said, explaining the pained expression. “It never goes away, but it’s the worst at first. This one’s strong, though. I can tell. She’s mad—look how pissed off she is. She’s going to be a real handful. I hope she doesn’t end up working at the restaurant—we’ve had those types before; it always ends with a customer getting a drink poured over his head.”

The girl had finally given up on trying to walk. She collapsed to her hands and knees, defeated, and began to crawl. She was faster like that. We watched her.

“She’s not quite here yet,” DeeDee said. “She’s still changing. She’s still part of
there.
”

“Do you ever get here? I mean, totally become part of here? Are you ever totally transformed?”

“Don’t ask me things I can’t answer, babe,” DeeDee said. Her voice was small and quiet. She wasn’t touching me anymore; she had her hands folded in her lap. She was slumped toward the ocean.

The girl was gone now, off for whatever life waited for her. And DeeDee was elsewhere too, staring into the distance with oceans in her eyes.

“You could go home,” I said. My voice cracked a little, but I wasn’t really embarrassed by that sort of thing with DeeDee anymore. “You know you could go back. You can break the curse whenever you want. I’m right here.”

She didn’t answer me.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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SEPTEMBER GIRLS

When the season is over—when the tourists have all gone home and half the shops are boarded up—we remain behind. We are the same but diminished. Time begins to move at an uneven clip, sometimes racing forward, sometimes slowing almost to a standstill.

September feels strange; we go to bed early and develop a perpetual sour taste in our mouths. In October our skin turns grayish and our shoulders begin to feel sore at the smallest exertion. By November the gold rings around our pupils have faded. We walk around half-asleep; we double our cigarette consumption. Our hair becomes limp and knotted.

Now our knife is dull.

Even television ceases to interest us. We leave it on in the background anyway. We stop speaking to one another, although we might nod politely every now and then as we slump side by side on the couch after a long day.

Language, always hard to hold, is now liquid slipping through our fingers.

We are unbothered by all this. In fact, we luxuriate in our malaise, taking sick pleasure in the empty feeling in our stomachs, the rawness of our cuticles, the dark circles under our eyes. It pleases us when we run our fingers through our hair and come away grasping a thick clump.

We find ourselves on the beach more often than usual now, wrapped in scarves and sweaters, staring out at the gray and choppy ocean, the sky the color of our curling smoke.

We don’t spend much time mourning the loss of those who have gone. We know it’s the natural order of things, and anyway, it makes the beds less crowded. For now we can sleep alone.

Our feet are the worst in February, so in March we buy new shoes. By now the old shoes are so stained with blood that they are beyond use.

And then in April we feel a prickling in our cheeks and chest. In May certain facts begin to dawn on us all over again. We might be struck by a sudden, unexpected memory of one of our departed sisters. We might be visited by a forbidden glimpse of love.

Summer is coming; we can feel it. The sensation is not unlike waking up from a hungover sleep—we feel groggy but restless. We get dizzy easily and have to be careful when we stand.

We know that the first of the new girls will arrive around Memorial Day. We are all born in the summer.

It would be tempting to suspect that we are summer’s children. We are not. Our mother is the Deepness. Our father is the Endlessness. Summer is what we have made.

And once it’s here, it certainly couldn’t get by without us. After all, who but us would change the sheets in the beach cottages?

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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TWENTY-FIVE

WE WERE STILL at the beach. I’d stopped asking my father if we were ever going home. I figured I didn’t really want to know.

August in the suburbs is one thing: the yellowing lawns and sprinklers that spray you like warm sweat when you pass them on the way up the block, the scattered and picked-over back-to-school displays at CVS that remind you of an abandoned funeral. That humid loneliness—the feeling that the world is out of town forever even when you know most everyone’s just holed up in their bedrooms smoking thin and solitary joints, avoiding both summer reading lists and phone calls.

Under the hum of the central AC, you sit in your underwear, wrapped in a blanket with a bowl of soggy cereal curdling at your side and some dumb Spanish soap opera on TV even though you don’t like or even understand soap operas and you don’t speak Spanish. You decide to get out of the house, so you walk to the park where you plan on lying by the narrow, toxic creek that borders the bike path, where you intend to stare up at the unwavering leaves on the trees to enjoy them, knowing that soon they’ll be yellow, then red, then brown, then shaking and gone. On the way there you pass by the high school, your feet already blistering because you didn’t wear socks, and you get a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach.

In August, in the suburbs, life crawls by at an alarming pace. I know from past summers. You are both too hot and too cold. And as bored and depressed as you are, and as shitty as August is, you know you have to enjoy it while it lasts, because soon it’s all over. So you pour another bowl of cereal, even though the bowls are piling up around you and it’s starting to sort of smell. Maybe there will be something besides a soap opera on TV today.

That was August in the suburbs. I sort of missed it—just the familiar, bored dread. Because August at the beach was different. Especially at this beach, which felt precariously balanced at the edge of the world. I was starting to wonder if my family and I would be the next Lost Colony, if someone might soon show up at our cottage to find it empty and us gone without a trace. A pencil resting by the half-completed daily crossword in the local paper, a hot dog cooked and uneaten, still in the skillet. Kidnapped by Indians. If I might look down at my hands one day and find myself staring straight through to the floor.

The CVS here at the beach was putting up its back-to-school displays all right, but they were pristine and orderly, untouched—a barely noticed formality dictated by some corporate office, because surely no one went to school here. There were no lawns, no sprinklers, no central air, and the television in my room was so old that it didn’t really work. It definitely didn’t get Univision.

The feeling was different here too: it was the novel dread of the unknown rather than the familiar dread of the familiar.

DeeDee and I spent days wandering the beach together, just walking. When we couldn’t walk anymore, we’d lie down in the sand, curled in each other, and just sleep.

It was the nineteenth, and Kristle was having another birthday party. She was twenty-one again, for real this time. This party wasn’t going to be any big thing like the last one; she seemed too depressed by her impending old age to bother with a gala affair. It was just going to be us and her and DeeDee and a few of the Girls at Ursula’s.

Jeff had been listless and quiet all day, or actually for the last week when I really thought about it. I found him on the back deck as the sun was going down, smoking a cigarette.

Jeff had dressed up for the party, sort of. He had an oxford shirt tucked into his jeans and his hair slicked back in a way that gave him a Dennis the Menace-y look.

“What?” he said testily when he saw me looking him up and down, suppressing a smirk. “You never heard of looking nice?”

“Wanna head over now?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said, stubbing his cigarette into the rail. “Sure. Why not. Let’s go.” And we started out down the steps and into the street on the now-familiar path to the bar.

At the end of the block, as we were about to turn out onto the beach road, I was inexplicably moved to look over my shoulder, back at our cottage. Mom had come outside and was watching us go, and as she saw me turn, she grinned and waved good-bye. I smiled and waved back and Jeff swiveled to see who it was, and then he was waving too.

DeeDee wasn’t at the bar yet when we got there. Kristle had said she was “running late,” which wasn’t like her—they were never running late. They had no concept of late. But there it was. A drink somehow materialized in front of Jeff and he slid in next to Kristle at a table, and I went to the bar, where Taffany sidled up to me from the other side.

I wished I had gotten to know Taffany better. I had always liked her; I liked how her hair was always messier than the others’, her eye makeup always a little smudged. She applied her lip liner haphazardly, and the outline sometimes seemed to bear little relation to the actual shape of her lips. Sometimes she kind of smelled. From time to time she was moved to dance alone.

“What can I get you tonight?” she asked, tossing her hair offhandedly. Fuck it.

“Just a beer, I guess,” I said.

“Nah.” Taffany plopped two shot glasses down and got to work pulling out bottle after bottle, constructing some concoction in a shaker with perfunctory speed. “It’s a
Cocktail
night,” she said. “One Kokomo coming up. My secret recipe.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“So when are you guys going home?” she asked. “Summer’s almost over, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“I don’t know. Never? Tomorrow? I really have no actual clue.”

“Must be nice,” Taffany said. “Not a fuckin’ care in the world.”

“What are you talking about? I have a fuckin’ care. I have so many fuckin’ cares. You don’t even know.” But it occurred to me that I was actually pretty happy. It had crept up on me, but now that I noticed it, I realized that it was the first time I’d been recognizably happy since at least when my mother left and probably before.

Taffany laughed and seemed about to say something before she stopped herself. She poured the booze from the metal shaker into the shot glasses, sloshing a little onto the bar. The elixir was pink and translucent and, oddly bubbly. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m just being a bitch. Don’t mind me or anything. I’m just sad about Kristle, I guess.”

“Why?” I asked. “It’s her birthday. Why is that supposed to be sad? Aren’t people supposed to be happy to turn twenty-one? You can, like, drink and everything
.
”

Taffany looked me up and down. “We aren’t people,” she said coldly. “You know that.”

“What?” I asked. “I mean, it’s just a birthday. Why’s everyone acting like it’s the end of the world?

Taffany seemed taken aback. “You really don’t know,” she said. “Do you really not know?”

“Know what?” I asked.

Instead of answering me, Taffany raised a glass and nodded at the one still on the bar, and I picked it up and raised it and we clanked. Taffany smiled a wistful smile. “You’re a good guy,” she said. “You really are, Sam. Cheers.”

She threw back her drink and I did too. It was the weirdest thing I’d ever tasted; it tasted like grass and mint and salt, with only the faintest burn of alcohol. It tasted like summer. Well, mostly. It tasted like the end of summer. Taffany was wiping her mouth with the back of her hand and I did the same. When she took it away, her chin was shiny with smeared lip gloss.

“Well,” she said, and turned to walk away.

“No,” I said. “What? They told me—I thought they told me everything. What don’t I know?”