September Girls Read online

  After a while we stop bothering to keep one another straight. There is really no point. We are not happy here. We are filled with emptiness.

  But sometimes, on rare days in the sticky fog of summer, one of us will step off the boardwalk and onto the sand and turn her back to the sea and find herself sinking to her knees in astonishment at the generosity of this place: at the cool wind twisting in her yellow-green hair and the sun on her brow and the bead of sweat that forms at her widow’s peak and inches down to her lips where she licks it away and is grateful for the salt. This place that has lent us what little it has of itself with such forgiving aplomb.

  She might look down only to find a piece of sea stone, smooth and perfect, robin’s egg, and pick it up and roll it between her fingers and think: I could stay here. She might think: I could be happy here.

  That’s when she knows it’s time to go home.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  TWO

  JEFF AND I walked to the ocean in the dark, barefoot, passing the jug of vodka back and forth between us. I wasn’t used to the taste of straight booze and with every sip had to brace myself to keep from wincing.

  The ocean was a block and a half away, across the beach road and a rotting path of wooden planks that cut through the dunes. Jeff and I made small talk as we walked, him talking about his classes (he had been planning on majoring in econ but was tormented by statistics, as if I gave the slightest shit) and about some crazy-sounding girl he was trying to lose. “You sleep with some girl once, and before you know it you’re like trapped in her crazy pussy-web,” he said, nodding sagely to himself.

  I had no idea what the fuck he was talking about. “So I hear,” I said, doing my best to humor him.

  “How about you?” he asked. “You getting any action these days?”

  “Nah,” I said. “I’ve got other things on my mind, these days.”

  “I doubt it,” Jeff said. “You seem pretty hard up.”

  “Fuck you,” I said.

  “Dude,” he said. “This summer we’re gonna get you laid, bro. It’ll do you some good.”

  “I don’t see what we has to do with it,” I said. “Isn’t getting laid like something you generally do on your own?”

  “There’s your first mistake,” Jeff said. “You don’t even have the basic mechanics right.”

  I snorted.

  “Whatever,” he went on. “You should see yourself, dude. You’ve been working this like constant bitchface ever since I got back from school.” When I still didn’t respond, he punched me in the arm and laughed loudly. “Turn the motherfucking frown upside down already. What’s the point?”

  The gravel on the road was digging into my feet, and I was glad when we made it to the beach access, a boardwalk half-sunk into the sand. Jeff pulled a flashlight from the pocket of his cargo shorts and snapped it on, shining it under his chin, lighting his face up like a jack-o’-lantern. “Oooohooooohooooh!” he yodeled, trying to be spooky. “Very scary!”

  I looked at him like he was insane. Maybe he was; I once read this book about some lady who caught a case of syphilis and was certifiably nuts for years without anyone noticing.

  “Man,” he sighed. “I’m working my ass off here. You gotta give me something. I mean, anything.”

  Then we stepped off the boardwalk, past the blind of the dunes, and the ocean revealed itself to us: just unfurled as a dark and infinite ribbon curling and waving in every direction. Black sand, black water, black sky, all of it variegated in barely discernible bands, the beam of Jeff’s flashlight cutting through it all as a bright and pointless wedge. Ghostly, glowing sand crabs scurried in every direction. Jeff said nothing and neither did I, but my muscles tensed and then relaxed in surprise, and I could feel Jeff reacting similarly at my side.

  We walked down the sand together and stood in the surf, him bouncing his small light off the crests of the crashing waves. The water was freezing, but it felt okay on my ankles. I wondered if I waded in farther if it might snap me back to life. I chose not to take a step.

  “I know I’ve been a shitty brother lately,” Jeff said after a few minutes like that. He took a swig from the vodka and handed it to me. I was already feeling unsteady on my feet, but I chugged anyway. It was starting to taste kind of good.

  “Nah,” I said. “I mean, it’s okay.” It wasn’t okay, not really, but I was happy that he was finally coming clean.

  “Dude, you’re gonna be fine,” Jeff said. “It’s all gonna be fine. You know that, right? It’ll be over before you know it. You’ll be out of there so soon; you’ll put all of this year behind you and never even think about it again. It’s Dad that I worry about. I mean, that’s his life. I mean, fuck. I can’t believe her. What a bitch.”

  “She’s not a bitch,” I said. “Everyone’s got their reasons, right?”

  “It’s gonna be fine,” he said.

  “I know,” I said.

  “Step one, you gotta get yourself laid,” Jeff said. “Seventeen years old and still a virgin. No wonder you’re in such a bad mood all the time.”

  “What makes you think I’m a virgin?” I asked.

  Jeff hooted. “Look at yourself, bro.”

  Before I could ask what he meant by that a wave crashed and swirled around us. As the water receded, I started to realize exactly how drunk I was. I wobbled a little in the undertow and then was on my ass with a splash. “Fuck,” I said.

  Jeff didn’t answer. “Holy shit,” he said.

  “Dude,” I said, looking up at him. “Whatever.” But his attention was elsewhere. He had been swinging his flashlight around the water the whole time we’d been talking, but now he had stopped the fidgeting and was pointing it down the coastline. “What the fuck?” he said, practically whispering. I crawled onto my knees in the tide and turned myself around, following the beam of light down the line of the beach.

  “What?” I asked. Then I saw what he was talking about. A hundred paces off, in the shallows, was a body. A girl. She was naked. And she was lying in the tide on her back, her arms thrown at weird doll angles, her bare and smallish breasts quivering and beaded with salt water. It was as if she had just been spit out by the ocean.

  “What the fuck?” I said.

  “Hey!” Jeff shouted. The girl jerked her face toward us. So she was alive. It was hard to make out her expression, but she looked disoriented, maybe drunk. Then again, we were drunk too. I climbed to my feet, and was knocked down again as another wave hit me in the back of the knees. When I’d finally managed to stand, the girl was gone.

  Jeff shoved the flashlight into my hands and began racing toward where we’d seen her. I followed him, but it was hard running in the water. I thought I felt hands grasping at my calves, but that must have been my imagination.

  “Hey?” Jeff shouted. As a question this time. There was no answer. The girl was gone. And then I turned the flashlight up onto the shore and saw her again, hastily stumbling up the sand. She was floundering, completely naked, unsteady on her feet and tripping onto her knees every few steps, wet hair longer than I’d ever seen tumbling down her back in wild, seaweedy clumps. Despite her clumsiness, she was moving fast. I mean, really fast.

  “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

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

  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

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

  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 co
uld 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.)