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  SEPTEMBER

  GIRLS

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

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  Also by

  BENNETT MADISON

  The Blonde of the Joke

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

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  SEPTEMBER

  GIRLS

  BENNETT MADISON

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  HarperTeen is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

  September Girls

  Copyright © 2013 by Bennett Madison

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-0-06-125563-2

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  First Edition

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  Dedication

  For Kathryn Van Wert

  SEPTEMBER

  GIRLS

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

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  ONE

  THE SUMMER FOLLOWING the winter that my mother took off into something called Women’s Land for what I could only guess would be all eternity, my father decided that there was no choice but for him to quit his despised job and take me and my brother to the beach for at least the entire summer and possibly longer. “A boy should go to the beach at least once in his life,” my father declared at the dinner table the night before our sudden departure. This edict was made in a decisive tone that I was more than familiar with by then—one that indicated he had no idea what he was talking about.

  Dad had always been prone to vapid pronouncements of this sort, but in the aftermath of my mother’s disappearance, the habit had really gotten out of control. He was constantly inventing these half-baked bromides on the spot and presenting them as fact. The most obnoxious thing about them was their tendency to land on the topic of my supposedly impending manhood: that it was time to be a man, or man up, or act like a man, et cetera, et cetera. The whole subject was creepy—with vague implications of unmentionable things involving body hair—but the most embarrassing part was basically just how meaningless it all was. As if one day you’re just a normal person, and then the next—ta-da!—a man, as if anyone would ever even notice the difference.

  Like you can just instantly transform like that. Like manhood is this distinct thing with actual markers and consequences. Well, maybe it is. But even if it is—if there is any person on this planet who actually knows what it means to be a man, anyone who could truly sum it up—I would guess my father to be among the very fucking last to have the tiniest clue.

  And anyway! Now he was suddenly saying that a boy should go to the beach. Was this supposed to mean that I’d been given a reprieve from the expectation of manhood? If so, it felt like some small victory.

  Jeff had the usual reflexive and halfhearted complaints involving his busy schedule and plans that couldn’t be rearranged. Dad’s scheme sounded fine to me. For one thing, it meant I didn’t have to bother studying for my pre-calc test, which was a task I hadn’t yet gotten started. For another thing, I was in the mood to go somewhere. Anywhere. Even if it was with my father and brother.

  Dad didn’t even bring up the fact that I would be missing the end of school. He was apparently now beyond such petty concerns. I wasn’t about to argue. I just slid away from the table and went to pack my bags.

  My father hadn’t been the same since Mom’s decampment. She’d left a few weeks after Christmas, and he’d spent the remainder of January as well as February and March in a swamp of discontent, drifting through the house silently, spending entire weekends on the couch, not looking up from his laptop, while I fended for myself and survived on a diet of Mama Celeste and Coca-Cola spiked with whiskey from the ever-dwindling liquor supply.

  Looking back, it hadn’t been so bad. There are worse things than frozen pizza.

  But by April the whiskey had run out (I tried to switch to Malibu, all that remained in the liquor cabinet, but it was disgusting), and Dad had bounced back with a vengeance. He took up activities: it seemed that if there was a tear-off sheet on a bulletin board in Starbucks he was willing to give it a try. He took piano lessons and joined a book club. He signed up for cooking class and became a charter member of a knitting circle–slash–men’s discussion group at the local library. Worst of all, he began wearing hats.

  It was disturbing and bothersome. I quickly began to long for the days when I had been able to eat my pizza unmolested without Dad insisting on sit-down dinners in which he tried to entice me into joining him for things like his Gentle Yoga class. (“It’s all chicks,” he’d explained excitedly before his first session. But I’d begged off, and when he’d come home he’d been disappointed to report that all the chicks had been pregnant, except for one chick named Nancy, who was an octogenarian and whom I already knew anyway because she’d been my piano teacher when I was very little.)

  Now Jeff was home from college, and my father, in his latest attack of enthusiasm, was taking us to the beach. All previous summers had found my family—often excluding Jeff, but always including the frumpy kindergarten teacher formerly known as my mother, now known as Artemis Something-or-Other—spending our cramped vacation weeks in various rocky, misty outposts on the dreary coast of Maine. The beach, yes, but by technicality only. This summer, Dad informed us, we would instead be traveling southward for the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Where the shore was sandy and the sun, so Dad told us, was actually sunny.

  It stru
ck me as slightly odd that Dad was so set on yet another beach as, for some unknown reason, he can’t actually swim. But I didn’t ask questions. It wasn’t any weirder than yoga.

  When I stumbled down the stairs at five o’clock the next morning, still groggy and sour-breathed, I found Dad waiting by the door, already in his bathing suit and sunglasses, sitting in a folding beach chair, sipping from a thermos and reading a James Patterson paperback. Due to both his wild-eyed smile and the coffee-tinged scent of BO that wafted off him, I suspected he’d been up all night making preparations. “You ready to go, Tiger?” he asked, looking up eagerly.

  I didn’t answer him. My name is Sam. The first thing you should know about me is that I don’t answer to Tiger.

  Several hours later we were sitting in traffic on I-95 in the old Honda Accord, because my mother had naturally chosen the Volvo to abscond with. I was trying to ignore Jeff’s theatrical groans from the backseat. He had been out all night drinking with long-lost high school friends and was now curled up fetal and hungover with his face in a pillow, acting like a total baby in the customary way of older brothers. Next to me, my father was maddeningly oblivious to the gridlock as he whistled tunelessly, pausing every hour or so to make some remark about how now that our family was “all men” we could fart and scratch our balls without fear of female persecution.

  Comments such as these were inevitably followed by loud farts.

  My brother had managed to miss out on all the drama of the previous months by being away at Amherst. In fact, my mother hadn’t even said good-bye to him. (Her good-bye to me had been perfunctory and inadequate, but I gave her some meager credit for bothering.) And although Jeff had been naturally shocked to learn of the developments that had taken place in his absence, I didn’t gather that he was particularly upset by any of it. I guess he’d just been happy not to have to deal. After, Jeff called only infrequently to check in from school and seemed to avoid asking for any actual details on the situation for fear that they might prove unpleasant or—worse—demand action on his part. He ended every one of our exchanges with the same rushed and insincere “Hang in there, bro,” and click—then I was on my own again.

  For hours on the way to the beach, Jeff snored and moaned fitfully while my dad honked and hummed and cursed traffic and strained to lure me into excruciating conversation, asking me about girls and school and needling me to try out for the track team in September and whatever whatever whatever. Fuck you, Jeff, I thought. My brother, having already managed to ignore the trouble of the year, was hanging on to ignorance for a few more precious hours. What a dick.

  I know I must sound terrible myself—brittle and fussy and totally lacking in sympathy and complain, complain, complain. But I was at the end of my patience. Cut me some fucking slack.

  At a certain point, after we’d been traveling for hours, I actually considered getting out of the car and just walking. Just taking off past the Dairy Queens and Waffle Houses and roadside farm stands and whimsically named convenience stores and pushing my way through the ribbons of trees bordering the roads toward an unfamiliar home. Perhaps I’d take a job as a carpenter or a welder. Something with my hands at any rate.

  If I wanted, I could have left Jeff and Dad to fend for themselves. It would have been exactly what they deserved. Just step out of the car and wander an undeviating line until I found a different version of myself waiting for me, bright and open, with an all-new life.

  I came so close to doing it. But just as I was about to unlatch the door, my eyes drifted over to my father, whose infuriating mask of cheerfulness had melted into one of collapsed resignation. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw Jeff in the back, scratching his belly under his T-shirt, his eyes sleep-damp and oblivious, and I took pity on them. Because God fucking knows how they would ever have survived on their own. They needed me.

  Eventually the traffic cleared up, and soon we were crossing the causeway; then we hit the beach road and finally it was evening and we were crawling our way through strings of vacation developments full of stilted pastel “cottages” that looked large enough to house armies, or at least—judging by the Lexus SUVs in the driveways—shitloads of rich shitheads and their horrible shithead children. Every now and then we’d notice long-legged blondes in bikinis and short shorts ambling along the shoulder of the road, hauling beach chairs and canvas bags, hair still salty and purple in the twilight, and Dad would elbow me and say, “Didn’t I tell you this place was gonna be great?” and I would ignore him, although not without taking notice myself.

  As the numbers on the mileposts rose, the houses shrank and their electric paint jobs faded to silvery gray. It was getting dark out. Finally, we pulled into a cul-de-sac marked by a sign that read SEASHELL SHOALS.

  This end of the beach had seen better days. The house Dad pulled up to was modest—small and dune-brown and worn—and the sand here looked somehow dirtier than usual, although I know that’s a stupid thing to say about sand, which is of course basically just dirt to start with.

  “Here we are,” Dad said. “Our little piece of heaven!” It was always unclear when he was being sarcastic, or it would have been if I hadn’t known he had no capacity for sarcasm. At any rate, crappy as our house was, it seemed to be the jewel of the cul-de-sac, as the stilted houses on either side of it appeared unoccupied and near to collapse. We had arrived.

  We got out of the car without unpacking the trunk and climbed the rickety wooden steps to the front door, which opened into a dingy but serviceable family room. I wasn’t any more impressed by the inside than I had been by the outside.

  The place was all wicker furniture that seemed like it might fall apart if you sat on it, and everything (I mean everything) was plastered with seashells that I could only assume were fake. There was a lamp made out of seashells and another one made out of red wicker. The wood paneling on the walls was (upon inspection) cardboard, and the wall-to-wall carpet that covered every inch of floor was crunchy with sand. The whole place smelled like Lysol mixed with something both mildewy and fishy. It was basically a dump.

  Dad plopped onto the couch in the family room, and as soon as I’d dropped my backpack next to a tacky watercolor of a seagull by the kitchen island, he was snoring loudly, his knees pulled to his chest like a little kid, his sunglasses smushed against his forehead. Jeff looked over at me and raised his eyebrows. “Poor guy,” he said. I just snorted.

  “Give the guy a break,” Jeff said. “He’s had a rough time. You know that.”

  “Yeah, well,” I said. “You haven’t had to live with him.”

  Jeff unzipped his bag and pulled out a plastic jug of cheapo-looking vodka, which he wiggled at me, grinning. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go look at the ocean. Might as well, right?”

  “Man, I just want to go to bed,” I said. I was exhausted. I wanted to jerk off and fall asleep. (Although I obviously didn’t say that.)

  “Come on,” Jeff said. “Don’t be such a little bitch.”

  How could I refuse an invitation like that?

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  HOME

  None of us remember our home anymore except to know that it’s very far away—and to know that when we were home, we were happy. This is not our home. This could never be our home. We have been here as long as we can remember.

  We remember our mother, but only a little. We remember that she was beautiful and patient. We remember that we loved her. We have been told that she was a whore, although we can’t remember who told us that, and we often find ourselves arguing over the true definition of whore.

  Sometimes language confuses us. We search for words and find only shells and sea glass. We search for comb and find fork.

  We’re all afraid of the water. There is an endlessness about it that frightens us, and we know what’s down there. (We have a hard time remembering, but w
e know.) From time to time—afraid or not—we meet late at night on a dark and moonlit beach and strip our clothes off and lounge naked in the tide in orderly rows, not speaking to each other, feeling the freezing cold water lapping at our hip bones and breasts. We stare at stars and pretend they’re jellyfish. We don’t remember the word for jellyfish.

  We’re too frightened to swim. None of us know how to swim, and we know that if any one of us ventured into the water past her thighs she would drown. It happened to Donna, although only one or two of us remember Donna. Sometimes the rest of us wonder if she was ever even real. But it happened to her. We are sure of it.

  In the warmth of the sun we are often too frightened to even look at the ocean’s horizon. When we venture onto the sand in daylight, we try to keep our eyes on the dunes.

  We work as waitresses, checkout girls, hotel maids. We’ve grown accustomed to the burn of ammonia in the back of our throats. We have grown accustomed to sleeping two to a bunk and stepping over one another on our way to the refrigerator in the mornings. None of us like each other very much anymore. There’s too much at stake for friendship. Sisterhood is dangerous.

  We are sisters anyway. Yes, we dislike one another, but at least we are comfortable together. We protect one another. We feel uneasy amid the Others: women who speak to us with suspicious contempt and men whose eyes sting like chlorine. We like the boys, but they’re few and far between, and they always bring trouble with them—often in the form of older brothers. We hate the girls most of all.

  We come and go. Every summer there are more of us; every summer some of us are gone. We barely remember the ones who disappear. Donna becomes Kelly—or was it Brenda?