September Girls (30 page)

She kisses me.

“I love you,” she says. All this time, we thought she had been powerless. But she was just holding back, letting us find our own way.

Magic is full of loopholes; one might say it’s all loopholes. All curses have more than one way out. There’s always a back door. I found it. I stepped through the mirror.

I am going somewhere else now. I don’t know where. I don’t know how long it will take. When I get there, I will be something else. But I will never forget my name.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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TWENTY-SEVEN

I FOUND DEEDEE on the pier. She knew I would look for her there. I walked out to where she was sitting, halfway out into the ocean, her feet dangling off the edge. The night was black and cloudless and there was a breeze. Her back was to me. Her hair was tangled with stars.

“So did you do it?” she asked without moving as I neared her.

“No,” I said. I sat down next to her and she turned her face to me. It was dark and bitter; she had been crying.

“You fuck!” she said. “You piece of shit. You guys are good for exactly one thing, and you can’t even make yourself useful when it counts.” It would have hurt my feelings except that she didn’t sound like she meant it. She was trying to summon her old anger and it wasn’t coming to her. “I told you to fucking do it,” she said. “I fucking fucking told you. If you loved me you would have done it.”

“I mean, I wanted to,” I said.

“I knew you wouldn’t,” DeeDee said. “I knew she wouldn’t, too.”

“Yeah,” I said. “She wouldn’t. I would have. I was totally ready.”

DeeDee rolled her eyes. “I should have known. Men!” Even now, even this. She couldn’t bring herself to be really mad, but she was still able to find it funny.

We both started laughing, and then we were laughing so hard that we couldn’t stop. I put my arm around her, and then we collapsed on our backs onto the wooden pier, still cracking up.

“So she’s gone, huh?” she asked when we were out of breath.

“I guess she is,” I said. “Whatever that really means. It’s not like I have a lot of experience dealing with this. With, you know, magic or whatever.”

“Damn. She was one crazy bitch. She was pretty much the best.”

“I’m going to miss her too,” I said. “She’s really nothing like I thought she was.”

“I know,” DeeDee said. “She’s nothing like anyone could think. I mean, she taught me basically everything. I don’t know what I would have done without her. She was the closest thing I had to a mother.” She caught herself and sat up. “What did she say to you anyway?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Just good-bye.” I thought about telling her about the voice I’d heard in my head as Kristle had waded into the water. She deserved to know. But it was something between Kristle and me. Kristle deserved to have her last secret. Something that was just hers.

DeeDee left it. She pulled her fist through her hair. She arched her back, stretching her arms to the sky, stretched her fingers until they looked like they were scraping the moon. They were translucent; you could see right through the tips of them and out into space.

“Look what I found,” she said. She turned and picked up something next to her, something she’d had with her on the pier all along, a small back box with a retracted metal antenna. “It was in the sand; I tripped over it when I was coming here. It’s a radio. You never see these anymore. It’s always a surprise what you end up finding on the beach. Sometimes it’s just a weird shell; sometimes it’s a radio. Or something else.”

I took it from her and fiddled with the knobs. It felt odd in my hands, mechanical and old-fashioned, like something from a long-ago beach. “Does it work?”

Before she could answer, I flipped it on and it began to buzz. At first all that came out was static, but I pulled the antenna out and then music was coming in perfectly clear. It hovered above the roar of the waves. It was like nothing I’d ever heard on any radio in the past, nothing like I’d ever heard before, actually. It was barely music at all: it had no melody or rhythm or lyrics or instruments, but it was music anyway, the most perfect music I’d ever heard, being broadcast from someplace very far away. It sounded like it was coming from the other end of the universe, traveling all the way here just for us at this moment. It was the same song Kristle and DeeDee had sung together that night at the karaoke bar.

“I guess it works,” DeeDee said. “You’d think the batteries would be dead by now. Like I say, you never know what you’re going to find around here.”

We lay back together and just listened. After a few minutes I felt a warmth moving through my body, my muscles rippling like water from my toes to my chest to my fingers and then out again and back. It was sort of like the time Sebastian got supposedly really good weed from this person named King Koopa in exchange for a binder full of Ms. Smith’s quizzes from last year (she never changed them) and we accidentally smoked too much of it and spent an hour with MTV on in the background while we tried to say the alphabet to each other, except that DeeDee and I weren’t talking at all. We were just listening.

And then I had this sudden urge to jump in the water and start swimming, to swim out past where the marathon runners could run, out past where the ocean dropped off with the horizon, swim out into space and keep going, arm over arm, kicking, breathing.

I was almost about to do it. I could feel my toes scraping the water. It felt like home. I was just about to push off when DeeDee grabbed my hand and sat back up, pulling me with her.

“So you’re going home soon, huh?” she said. “You have to be, right? You can’t stay here forever.”

The music was still playing, but it felt distant now. Buried. It felt like music from another room.

“Yeah,” I said. “No one’s said anything, exactly, but I get the sense. This morning I saw the keys sitting on the table in the kitchen and I could tell they wanted someone to pick them up. I passed the car in the driveway on the way to the beach and it was like an animal that had been tied up for too long. I know that sounds stupid. But I think you’re basically right.”

“I don’t know what to say,” she said. “I wish you would stay. But I know you can’t.”

“I have to ask you something,” I said. “It’s important.”

“Okay,” she said. “Go for it, I guess.”

“Is this real?” I asked.

DeeDee laughed. “What’s reality, dude? That seems like a bigger question than I can answer. That’s some serious graduate-level philosophy shit, don’t you think?”

“What I mean is, like, is this part of the spell? Is this really how I feel or is it, like, you know . . . magic?”

“You mean do you like me because I put some kind of ancient love spell on you?”

“On karaoke night. When you and Kristle were singing. That was when you did it, right? It was like a siren song or whatever. Right?”

She hooted. “Sam. Is it that impossible that I’m just really good at karaoke?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It seems pretty spooky in retrospect. It seems like something was going on.”

DeeDee sighed. “Would you believe me if I said I don’t really know?”

I shrugged.

“Well believe it,” she said. “Because I don’t. It’s possible. I’m pretty sure that we can do things we don’t even know about. How could we not? Does it really matter though?”

Of course it mattered. Didn’t it matter?

Oh, fuck it.

I was ready. We both were. This had been inevitable, of course, but it came to me that there was no way it could have actually happened until now.

I wasn’t thinking about the curse anymore. Everything that had happened this summer was gone, over for good. All I was thinking about was how much I wanted to know who she was. I wanted to finally understand her. I wanted her to understand me. Not that I understood myself. Maybe I thought she could help.

I was taking my shirt off. I was untying the halter of DeeDee’s dress. She stood and turned her back to me and let it drop to her ankles and looked out at the ocean before facing me again.

Naked in front of me, on the pier, she looked surprisingly shy, but she didn’t cover herself. I should have been shy too, but I wasn’t.

“There are so many things that don’t matter,” she was saying.
Is this real?
I had asked. But naked, she looked realer than ever; she was not magic. At that moment, she wasn’t a mermaid. She was real; she was a girl; she was flawed and singular and more beautiful than I could have possibly imagined.

“Isn’t that what all of this has been?” she asked, sinking down next to me. “Just sifting through all the different things that don’t matter, tossing them aside and trying to figure out what we’re actually left with?”

“What are we left with?”

“This,” she said. She touched my face and made a circle with her thumb, letting it drift over my lips.

“I’m going to miss you,” I said, and I touched her side and moved on top of her as she leaned back. She was very warm. I kissed her neck. “I mean, a lot.”

“Same,” she said. “I’m going to miss you so much. But I don’t want this to be sad. I don’t want it to be about missing. It’s not about good-bye, or about magic, or about anything else that doesn’t matter. I just want it to be exactly what it is.”

I kissed her forehead and kissed her breast. I had always wondered how you were supposed to actually do this, but I knew what to do. “I feel like I’ve always known you,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “Same.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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TWENTY-EIGHT

THE DAMP, HEAVY blanket of air that had been draped over all of us since the hurricane was starting to lift. Even on the sunniest days, there was a new coolness everywhere I went. The skin on the backs of my arms tingled with it whenever I stepped outside. The beach was carefully knitting itself into something different, something both lighter and darker, something ocean blue that smelled of smoke and patchouli.

It had been a week since Kristle’s birthday, and although I hadn’t seen DeeDee since then, I still had this feeling that she was around somewhere, lingering in the air, changing with the weather. I knew that I shouldn’t go looking for her now. She would find me when she found me. I was sure she would, but I also accepted the possibility that when it happened I might not recognize her anymore.

I’d stopped my long walks on the beach, stopped swimming, stopped mostly everything. I spent most of my time watching TV now. I didn’t have the energy to do anything else. It wasn’t that I was depressed. I was just resting.

Jeff and I hadn’t really talked to each other about what had happened to Kristle. We hadn’t actually talked about anything. I was giving him space. He had become obsessed with the Housewives and spent entire days parked in front of the TV, immersing himself in their petty dramas. If it hadn’t been for the happy smile on his face as Jilly and Bethenny bickered over flowers and Sherée tried to pull out Kim’s extensions, I would have tried to get him to snap out of it. But I knew it reminded him of her, so I left him alone.

One afternoon I was lying on the porch when my father and mother came wandering out and announced their intention for us to finally leave. “Pack your stuff,” my dad said. “We’re out of here tomorrow.”

“Why?” I asked. “Why now?”

“Summer’s over,” Mom said, snapping her fingers cheerfully at her sides. She looked over at my dad. “Time to go home.”

“All good things come to an end, Tiger,” Dad said, smiling too.

I decided he could call me Tiger if he wanted to. He would grow out of it eventually.

As I stuffed my clothes into my bag a few hours later, I thought of the boy I’d met outside the 7-Eleven, the kid with the shattered, haunted look on his face. I understood him now, knew what had happened to him to make him like that. I had mostly stopped wearing shoes myself. Whatever had happened to him was different from what had happened to me, even if we had both gotten caught up in the same curse. He had never found the mirror, I don’t think, and I’m pretty sure that had made some small difference.

But it wasn’t just the mirror. The boy at the 7-Eleven had never found DeeDee, either. I had to think she and I were different not because of any curses or enchanted items or magic spells, but just because of who we were. Who we had made each other and who we would still become.

I did a quick sweep around my room, wondering if I had forgotten anything, when I saw it lying in the corner next to the bedside table: the white, ribbed tank top DeeDee had been wearing the day I’d met her.

I walked over to it, opened it up, and put it up to my face and breathed it in. It smelled like salt water and summer. It smelled like her, of course. After a few moments I was tempted to take another breath, just keep smelling her as long as I could, but instead I balled it up and shoved it into my bag on my bed, into the farthest crevice underneath my dirty old socks and underwear and junk. I knew I’d forget about it there, but that maybe I’d find it again someday when it really counted.

I went to the ocean by myself.

All I could think about that night was how different it was from the first one on the beach, when Jeff and I had come down here together with our handle of vodka and our flashlight and we’d seen the girl in the surf, back when Jeff had seemed like the biggest douche bag who would never understand anything. That night, the shore had been pitch-black and mysterious and infinite and empty, empty, empty. Tonight there was a full moon, and it was bright enough to map the shades of delineation between the silvery-purple sky and the silvery-black ocean and the silvery-white crashing of the waves and the silvery-silver of the sand. Tonight, I wondered again who that girl had actually been. I wondered who DeeDee had been when she’d first arrived here, what she had been thinking as she’d stumbled up to the dunes.