September Girls (3 page)

“Stop,” Jeff called after her, not that loud anymore, knowing that it was pointless. Either she couldn’t hear or she didn’t want to. “Wait!” he said.

I had stopped running and was just staring at the girl, who was crawling now. I’m embarrassed to admit that Jeff had been right: before that night I’d never seen a naked girl other than on the internet.

This was not at all how I had imagined it; I mean I’m not sure if it even counted. The girl was paper thin and ghost white. The lines of her body were indistinct and out of focus. She tried once more to stand and fell and then gave up and was on her hands and knees again, skittering away. Or maybe it was more of a slither.

Jeff splashed out of the water and made a line for her, but although it seemed impossible—in his golden adolescence, Jeff had been captain of the track team—she was somehow outpacing him in her crab crawl. Before he was even halfway up the sand, the girl had disappeared into the tall grass of the dunes and was gone. Really gone.

I moved the flashlight back to my brother and saw him standing in the sand, arms outstretched in midmotion. He stood there like that for a second, totally still, and then fell back onto his ass in defeat, running his hands through his hair.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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FIRST

First we are alone. First we are naked. At first, walking is nearly impossible. It remains difficult. We have problems with our feet. They are always aching. Our shoes often have blood in them. We are covetous of the Others’ high heels, especially the shiny, patent-leather kind. We can only wear flats.

First we are alone. We’re not sure how we find one another, but we do. Then we are still alone, but in the way sardines are alone.

We are given clothes. The first thing we learn is how to balance plates in the crooks of our elbows. We learn to walk without wincing. We learn to take only small amounts from the register. We learn to smoke Gauloises—even though we will never master their pronunciation.

We learn the small pleasures of this place: press-on nails and eye makeup and hair dye, Chinese slippers with sequins and little embroidered flowers. Wine coolers and soap operas. We don’t like meat, but we have a weakness for french fries. Not to mention french tips.

We like shiny things. Not only because they remind us of home but because if something’s shiny enough it will sometimes offer up a reflection. We collect things that sparkle and hide them in places we’ll forget to look.

The first thing we forget is ourselves. People think we’re vain because we’re always looking in mirrors; they don’t understand that we are just searching for clues. We never find any. We don’t know the first thing.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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THREE

THE GIRLS WERE everywhere here. They were behind the registers. They were stocking shelves and smoking in the parking lot of the roadside trinket shop I stopped in for sunglasses. They were at gas stations, pumping gas into broken-down minivans. They were wearing halter tops and cutoffs and sweatpants and old oversized T-shirts and flip-flops, rolling unwieldy carts of cleaning supplies along the road from beach house to beach house, struggling to keep their carts’ wheels from catching on the crumbly pavement, stopping to adjust their tube tops every few feet. They were on the beach, in the sand on their stomachs side by side, faces planted in towels, fingertips grazing fingertips, and tendrils of yellow hair curling into each other.

They were beautiful.

Although I’m normally not an early riser, on the first day at the beach I had somehow woken up before either my dad or Jeff, just after the sun. Something about the weather must have roused me. I had decided to take a walk, and now I was alone at the edge of the water as it came and went. The sun was hot and high in the sky and it felt good.

It felt good just to be alone, especially after the previous day’s cramped and endless journey. I consider myself a sociable person, but sometimes I feel best being sociable with myself. I guess that’s why I enjoy masturbation.

The girls were everywhere, but I tried not to look at them. Not because I’m polite, but because there was something about them that kind of creeped me out. They were too much.

There was just something about them. There were so many of them; they were everywhere, and every one of them could have been sisters—all with hair somewhere on a spectrum that ranged from blond to blondest, all with full, glossy lips and eyes that floated an inch in front of their faces, suspended in deep pools of liquid liner. They traveled in pairs and threesomes, and they seemed to move as parts of a strange beach machine. Tossing their hair in slo-mo unison, drifting easily back and forth into one another’s space as if exchanging bodies.

They were just kind of weird. They reminded me of the clusters of jellyfish I’d spotted floating in the swells.

But they were also really hot. Fuck, I mean really hot. I did my best to pretend they weren’t there.

In the heat of the early morning, the beach had changed from the night before. In sunlight it was just different. Whereas last night the shore had seemed stingy in its infinity, it was now open and welcoming and sort of cozy—a little tacky, but in a way that made it unassuming and familiar, even overtaken as it was by these beautiful, otherworldly girls. It was a fat, cheerful aunt in an appliquéd sweater and dangly wooden earrings, all
Every time I see you, you’ve gotten more handsome!

And then I’d feel eyes on the back of my neck, and even in the heat I would shiver.

I wasn’t totally sure if I remembered the night before. I mean, I remembered it, but had it been real? I was undecided. With the ten o’clock sun beating down on my back as I walked along the shoreline, wet sand squishing between my toes, I felt the girl in the surf receding back into the waves, growing more and more indistinct in my memory, more and more imaginary. Sea foam.

I wasn’t walking anywhere in particular. I mean, it was the beach—you could only go one way or the other. So I had picked an arbitrary point on the horizon and was walking toward it. Just to have a destination, any destination. It had started as just a coral-pink spot in the distance, and after a half hour of walking that spot was only just beginning to come into focus as a beachfront hotel on a cliff of sand. If I closed my left eye and held my fingers up to judge it, it was about an inch tall.

I started to think of it as if it belonged to me. I could put it in the pocket of my bathing suit and walk away.

A pair of girls walked past me, giggling, leading with their chests. Their legs were long and smooth and tan, and they were each dangling a pair of flip-flops from their fingers and tossing their hair over and over, to one shoulder then the next, and then again. One was young and blond, the other a few years older and a few shades blonder. Even though I tried not to stare, I couldn’t help catch the eye of the blonder one, and I swear I’m 50 percent sure she looked right back and smiled.

Maybe I was kidding myself. On the other hand, it’s not like it would be totally out of the question.

I can say without too much ego that I am attractive enough (aside from being on the pale and skinny side), but usually feel more awkward than handsome. I’m never sure of how I’m supposed to move. How to put one foot in front of the other without looking like I’m about trip over myself. For most people I’ve been told this is easy, but for me it all requires a certain amount of thought, a certain amount of intention. This morning at the beach was different. I felt the muscles in my shoulders pumping with blood. I felt ocean in my eyelashes and a heaviness in my dick. I felt strong and solid, more myself—the best version of myself, I mean—than I had in a while.

I’m not always as bad as I’ve made myself sound. I’m told I can be funny and at least up until recently have generally done a decent job of keeping my sourness to myself. I believe I have—at a minimum—the normal measure of social skill. It all seems to count for little anyway.

Well, no, it all counts for something, I guess. While Jeff had been annoyingly accurate in his speculation about the state of my innocence, I
had
had some small successes in that department in the last year—though unfortunately none that involved actual sex or anything even close. The most notable of these triumphs was when I’d succeeded in groping Sasha Swain’s chest through her deliberately slutty
Alice in Wonderland
costume during a drunken make-out session at Ryan McIntire’s Halloween party, much to the approval of my friend Sebastian, who had been encouraging me for some time to touch a boob.

It could have gone further if not for the fact that we’d been interrupted by Sasha’s horrible friend Missy Taylor. And although Sasha had remained obviously into me in the weeks following the party—texting me nonstop and leaving long and pointless handwritten notes in my locker—I’d quickly decided that she was annoying and not even all that hot.

Sebastian said it didn’t matter whether she was hot or not, that she was just a “starter,” and a “solid seven” anyway, but pursuing it any further seemed like way too much of a pain in the ass. So I basically let the whole thing slide, which resulted in Sasha thinking I was an irredeemable dick and left me feeling unexpectedly sad. Then January had rolled around and I’d had other things on my mind, and Sebastian started dating Alexis Taylor, who was legendary for her blow jobs—legendary, I guess, just for the fact that she gave them at all, or at least supposedly had given one, once, to Jason Jamison—and it was all forgotten.

Maybe this all seems like a digression or even a case of protesting too much, but the point is that I have touched a breast and that I liked it.

When I finally got to the pink hotel I’d been aiming for, the beach had turned gloomy. The sun, which had been strong all morning, had by then become obscured by clouds, and the water took on a tone of muddiness against the damp gray sand. The hotel itself, which had appeared majestic and opulent as I’d made my way toward it, was depressing up close: the pink paint was peeling and dirty. It was nothing like the palace I’d anticipated.

Now that I’d reached the place I’d been traveling toward for hours I didn’t know what else to do, so I plopped myself in the surf and dug for squirming baby sand crabs, picking them from the muck and tossing them into the water as far as I could, which was not very. I thought about Sasha Swain and wondered if she still liked me. I thought about Sebastian and Alexis and wondered if he’d gotten her to give him a BJ yet. (She had given him an HJ a couple weeks before school ended, so I figured the answer was probably yes.)

I considered the future: what school would be like next year if we ever went back home, where I should apply to college, and whether I could guilt Dad into buying me a car now that the Volvo was gone. I considered the horizon. I wondered if I would ever see my mother again.

I found that any prediction was beyond me other than to know that, for the summer, I would be at the beach. The future was clear and placid up to September and then dropped off instantly like ocean at the edge of a flat earth.

I wondered if the earth was flat—and if so, where did the water go when it tumbled off the edge?

I mean, I’m not an idiot. I’m ninety-nine percent convinced that the world is not flat. But I believe you can’t be sure of anything until you’ve seen it with your own two eyes. And maybe it’s just the limitations of photography, but I’ve seen those pictures of the earth from outer space and it looks flat as a quarter to me.

There was a couple frolicking a few yards away—a guy and a girl–who were probably a few years older than me. The girl was blond and tan like all the other girls around here and was wearing a skimpy red bikini wedged up the crack of her ass, and the guy was muscled and golden-haired, kicking water at her and chasing her as she squealed and feinted. It seemed fake and all for show, but I guess it’s the kind of fakery that’s sort of nice if you happen to be a participant in it.

As I pretended not to watch, he tackled her onto the wet sand and pushed himself on top of her, kissing her neck and shoulders and finally, her nose and then her lips. I was close enough to see their wet, pink tongues moving in and out of their mouths. The muscles in the guy’s back were straining as he ground his hips against hers; his biceps were veiny and popping. For some reason I felt very sad. Maybe it just made me lonely.

I decided to head for home. By the time I was halfway back I could already feel a sunburn forming on my neck, and by the time I was walking up the stairs to the house it was stinging like a bitch. I had forgotten sunblock.

Dad, in a tight-lipped prissy way that was unusual for him these days, was annoyed that I’d gone off for so long. He was hungry for lunch.

“So why didn’t you get lunch?” I asked, to which he replied, “We were waiting for you so we could get lunch
together
.”

Jeff was on the couch, flipping through a newspaper, looking smug. He somehow seemed to have gotten two shades tanner overnight. “Don’t worry about it, bro,” he said. “Dad and I needed some time to catch up anyway.” He gave me a beatific smile.

So we got in the car and drove off to some random restaurant that Dad insisted on going to because he had supposedly read about it on the internet. “Everything’s different down here,” he said. “You won’t believe what the french fries taste like. It will blow your mind!”

“Fuck yeah,” Jeff said, but even he seemed fatigued in his enthusiasm.

“This is going to be a summer you’ll never forget!” Dad promised, somewhat desperately.