September Girls Read online

  “Shit, man,” Jeff said. “This is gonna be good.” I had my doubts but I’d already made up my mind not to be a complete dishrag. I just smiled and nodded.

  Jeff became one with the party as soon as we stepped inside. He surveyed the scene, gave me a quick punch in the shoulder—“You’ll be okay, right, bro?”—and then was gone. The place was filled, mostly with men. Or boys I guess. Or man-boys. All of the above really, because it was all kinds of guys: fratty guys in oxfords and white baseball caps, long-haired sun-leathered beach dudes, wan and dazed-looking out-of-towner preppies in boat shoes and popped collars who looked like they had gotten lost on their way to somewhere else. There was even a clutch of dad-aged dudes standing in the corner sucking down beers and watching the scene from the sidelines, looking hell of creepy.

  The Girls were here too, obviously, but they were outnumbered. It was clearly the way they liked it. It was Kristle’s party, after all, and her guest list. The Girls were scattered throughout the place, each one holding court individually as the center of her own tiny universe. They were vamping and tossing their hair and shotgunning beers, shimmying their hips to the music, smoking cigarettes with calculated carelessness, while the guys circled them and ogled and competed for their attention. It only took a second of casual eavesdropping to tune in to the stupid jokes the guys were all telling in some dumb competition for the Girls’ fakey, too-loud laughter.

  The only people who seemed at all out of place (besides me of course) were the few, scattered normal girls—girls with mousy hair and unremarkable scowls who had surmisably not been invited themselves but had simply been dragged along by their oblivious boyfriends. These girls were standing at the fringes of clusters with their arms folded, staring at the ceiling, looking unhappy. Well, at least I wasn’t one of them. At least I could blend in, sort of.

  I cast around, hoping to see someone I recognized, but I did not. I don’t know who I was hoping for. It’s not like there was any reason I would know a single person here except for Kristle herself, and even that was a stretch. Maybe I had some outlandish fantasy that Sasha Swain or any one of my friends from school—even Sebastian!—would just pop out of nowhere, all Dude, what are you doing here? You didn’t tell me you were coming to this too. It’s crazy, right? Look at all these hos! But no. Of course that was totally impossible.

  I resigned myself to the fact that I was on my own and pushed my way through the packed crowd of happy, drunk strangers, heading first for the kitchen to grab a beer from the island and then out through the sliding glass doors onto the wraparound porch, where I looked out over the beach and the ocean and sipped slowly. I hoped that no one would notice me standing there all alone. It was embarrassing.

  I was alone. I just was. I had been alone for months. I had made a hobby of it.

  As lonely as I was, I ignored the Girls who approached me. I’d gotten used to it by then. They’d wander up and stare at me for a few seconds, sometimes openly and sometimes with mild subtlety, but either way they’d go away if I didn’t say anything.

  It seems stupid that I didn’t say anything, but for some reason I just felt like talking to strangers would make me feel even lonelier than I already was.

  So a half hour later I was still standing by myself, considering the waves with my now warm and nearly empty Bud in hand, while the crowd around me jostled and chugged and laughed some more. Some shit song was thrumming from the stereo inside, but you could barely make out what it was over the noise.

  Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves thoroughly except me. I wondered if I had been this way forever. Had I always been this big of an asshole or if it was a new development? I mean, I guess it was new. There was a time when I enjoyed Budweiser. There was even a time when I enjoyed Beyoncé. I just couldn’t remember when that time was.

  I was just considering leaving—fuck Jeff—when I found a hand on my elbow. I didn’t turn around. Then I felt breasts against my back, and breath in my ear. It smelled like Malibu. A strand of blond hair curled over my shoulder and tickled my chest through the V-neck of my T-shirt, and then a pair of arms wrapped around me from behind. “Hey,” a voice whispered. There was that accent. Where did it come from, anyway? It sure as fuck wasn’t French. It was Kristle. “You always this antisocial?” she breathed.

  “Usually,” I said, still without turning.

  She untangled herself and moved in next to me. She lit a cigarette and offered me one but I turned it down.

  “Happy birthday,” I said. No harm in being polite.

  “Thanks,” she said. She hoisted her beer can with an amiable raise of the eyebrows and a smile, and we clanked, cheersing.

  “So how old are you?” I asked. “Or is that rude to ask?”

  “Oh—it’s not really my birthday,” she said. “My birthday’s at the end of the summer. I just like to have my party at the beginning. The end of the summer’s always so depressing. Who wants to have a party when summer’s about to end? What’s fun about that?”

  “I guess nothing,” I said, even though it seemed stupid. I could understand throwing a birthday party a few days or even a few weeks before your actual birthday, but jumping the gun by months was a little aggressive. “So how old will you be on your actual birthday then?” I asked.

  “Twenty-one,” Kristle said, sighing a big cloud of smoke into the night. I watched it curl away in the moonlight, toward the water. “Legal and everything. I don’t want to talk about it, okay?” she said. Even though the cigarette was barely started, Kristle tossed it off the porch without bothering to stub it out. “These things’ll fuckin’ kill you.” And she reached into her bra and pulled out a metal Altoids case, which she flipped open to reveal a neat row of perfectly wrapped joints. “A birthday present,” she said, smirking and plucking one from the tray. “I forget from who. Splitsies?”

  “Sure,” I said. She tossed her hair, placed the joint between her lips, and lit it.

  “Where’d your brother go?” Kristle took a deep drag and held it, then passed to me.

  “Good fuckin’ question,” I said. I inhaled. The joint was already soggy from Kristle’s lip gloss. Hold it. Burn. Breathe. “He’s like what you would call unreliable.”

  “Uh-oh,” Kristle said. “I know the type. But fuck him.”

  She reached out a finger and dragged her long, red nail from my shoulder down my chest, swaying her hips as she did it. Her eyes were burning: green with gold rings around the pupils. I tried to look away but I found that I could not. I instantly had a raging boner.

  “You seem like you could be pretty unreliable yourself,” she said.

  “Well,” I said. “I’m not. Sorry.”

  “So modest.” She took another puff from the joint, holding my gaze as she handed it back to me.

  I knew I shouldn’t have another hit, but I couldn’t see any way of turning it down. So I sucked.

  “Thanks,” I said after a brief coughing fit.

  Kristle was casually half dancing to the beat of a song coming from inside. I studied her.

  She was beautiful. I mean, she was beautiful but she wasn’t: she was both beautiful and ugly at the same time. Her face changed the longer you looked at it, and the more you looked at it the more you couldn’t put all the pieces together. Just as it was starting to make sense, it all fell apart. She was a page in a book in a dream where you can’t read.

  And she was saying something, but I didn’t speak the language anymore. All I could focus on was her lips, her eyes, her large and jagged nose. The landscape of her bare collarbone.

  I started to feel dizzy. And then Kristle’s hands were on my waist and she was kissing my neck. Then her hands were on my ass and her warm tongue was in my mouth. I mean my tongue was in her mouth. I mean both. She pushed me up against the railing, and before I knew what was happening, my hand was on her breast as she nibbled at the corner of my lips. I guess people were probably watching us, but I didn’t even consider it at the time. I was gone. I was flying with
cement feet.

  “Do you want to go upstairs?” Kristle whispered in my ear.

  I didn’t know what to say. I’m not sure if I was capable of speech at that point anyway—I might not have been capable of reciting the alphabet. But I was reaching for something that resembled yes when I opened my eyes and saw my brother standing not ten feet away, staring through the crowd. His mouth screwed to one side, brow furrowed, nostrils flaring—more hurt than angry, I thought, but mostly just shocked. He was standing all alone.

  “What the fuck?” Jeff said. Kristle let go of me and turned around.

  “That’s my little brother,” Jeff said, speaking of course to Kristle but in a tone of voice that made it sound like he was talking to himself. “He’s fucking fifteen,” he said, then paused to consider it for a second. “Sixteen,” he muttered. “He’s fucking sixteen.”

  “Seventeen,” I managed to say.

  Jeff didn’t hear me. “What the fuck are you doing?” He wasn’t actually making eye contact with me or with Kristle but instead was looking sideways toward the ocean.

  Kristle seemed unsteady, flailing. She pulled her fingers through her hair, tucked a strand behind her ear.

  I could see that I had no choice but to walk away. So that’s what I did: I walked away, and as I did, the chatter on the deck stopped abruptly and everyone stared at me. I stumbled and almost fell as I reached to push the sliding doors open, but I recovered myself just in time and stepped inside, over the prone body of a passed-out meathead, back into the party where things had turned uncomfortably wild. The floor was littered with beer cans and there was another guy nearly passed out on the crappy couch, drooling and mumbling to himself. At the kitchen island people were slamming shots and screaming, led by a raucous blonde wearing nothing but a red string bikini and a baseball cap with her ponytail pulled through the back. She was counting off shots as glassy-eyed dudes chugged. “Five!” she shouted. “Can I get six?”

  I tried to focus, to modulate my breathing. I tried to pretend I was watching this all on television. I just needed some space.

  I just needed to sit by myself and not think about anything. So I padded away from the crowd, down the dark, carpeted stairs into the sandy depths of the house. In the downstairs living room, things were quieter, sort of. The light was dim; on the couch, a girl in gold, lace-up sandals was straddling the lap of a sandy-haired guy who looked about my age, practically sucking his face off.

  I didn’t want to stare, but I couldn’t not. The boy seemed to sense me watching, and he peered out from behind the girl, meeting my eyes with his. He looked blissful and content, drugged, and I turned away and opened the first door I could find. I hoped it would lead to a dark and quiet bathroom where I could lie down on cold tiles and take a nap.

  The door did not lead to a bathroom. Instead, I found myself on the threshold of a sparse bedroom, decorated in beachy floral with a fake ficus in the corner and a busted, tiny two-dial television on a dirty wicker chest of drawers. A girl was sprawled on the twin bed nearer to the window reading Her Place and listening to her iPod. It took me a second to realize that it was DeeDee: The girl I’d met on our second day here. The girl from the pier.

  She looked up from her magazine and took her headphones out of her ears. She didn’t seem surprised to see me. “Hey, you,” she said.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I was looking for the bathroom.”

  “I’ve read this same issue of this same awful magazine three times,” she grumbled, tossing the magazine aside. She touched her fingers to the wall behind her and arched her back, stretching casually.

  “I’d never heard of it before we got here,” I said. “But it seems like it’s everywhere now.”

  “Yeah, well. It was probably put on this island specifically to torment me.” She gestured at me with a blue package of cigarettes. “Want one?”

  “No thanks,” I said.

  “I mean, look how depressing this is.” She showed me the cover. It did indeed look idiotic. The photo was of a woman I didn’t recognize as a celebrity. She was holding a plate of cookies and tossing her hair with a psychotic grin.

  DeeDee read a cover line aloud: “‘Ten Steps to the Old You! Rediscover the Gal You Used to Be!’” Then another: “‘Snack Happy: Slim Your Waist by Improving Your Attitude!’ Give me a fucking break. Who reads this? Besides me I mean. Just once I’d like to find a rental stocked with The Complete Works of Shakespeare. Almost anything would be better than this shit. Not that much better, but every little thing counts when you’re working on your English.”

  It seemed like her English was fine, unplaceable accent aside, but I didn’t question it. I lingered at the threshold, not sure if I should leave her alone or what. Of course I’d wanted to be alone but now I sort of didn’t. I couldn’t move. It seemed important to be with her now.

  DeeDee’s eyes glittered with a private joke as she lit her cigarette. I had the weird, impossible feeling that I already knew her. That I had been here before.

  “You can come in, you know” she said. “I’m just hanging out. I could use the company.”

  “People are, like, practically having sex out there,” I said. I don’t know why I felt the need to say it. “Like right in the open and everything. Well, not full sex, but . . .”

  “Typical,” DeeDee said. She rolled her eyes extravagantly and then laughed. “Well then come in already!” So I stepped into the room, closed the door behind me, and sat down on the edge of the bed.

  “You’re not into the party?” I asked.

  “I’m so over these parties,” DeeDee said. “It was fun at first, but it gets old. Maybe it was never fun. I can’t even remember anymore.”

  “So like, they throw these parties all the time?”

  She sighed a sigh that was both cheerful and annoyed. “You don’t even know,” she said. “Every week it’s another one. Sometimes another three, at least at the start of the summer. What else is there to do here, I guess. No one else really likes them either but they won’t admit it. It’s what we do; how can we not like it? At least I’m honest about it. Usually I just find a bedroom to hang out in by myself and read or whatever, but these rental places have the worst books. That’s how I get stuck reading the same issue of Her Place over and over. I already got sick of the Bible, which is the one other thing they always have. That and mystery novels set at the beach. The Haunted Boardwalk and things like that.”

  “I’ve never read the Bible,” I said. “I didn’t know anyone actually read it.”

  “Well I did,” she said. “Three times. It seems like it’s going to be a real drag, and some parts really suck, but it actually has some good sections. I like the parts about hos, even if they always come to a bad end. Eat a fucking apple, you’re a ho. Open a box, you’re a ho. Some guy looks at you: turn to stone, ho. See you later, ho. It’s always the same. The best one is Lilith—also a ho, but a different kind of ho. She went and got her own little thing going, and for that she gets to be an eternal demon queen, lucky her. No one likes a ho. Except when they do, which, obviously, is most of the time. Doesn’t make a difference; she always gets hers eventually.”

  Maybe DeeDee’s English wasn’t so good after all, since I had no clue what the hell she was talking about. Maybe I was making up the whole conversation. It’s true that I was stoned out of my mind. Either way, I nodded, trying to appear wise.

  “Is all that really in the Bible?”

  “No. Some of it. Well, the ho with the apple at least.”

  “I never thought of her as a ho.”

  “Think again.”

  There was an awkward pause while I tried to figure out what I was supposed to say next. “Well I guess I’ll go find the bathroom now.”

  “No,” she said. “Stay. Sorry. I’m just—never mind. I mean, I’m joking you know. Not to mention sort of drunk. Joking’s one of those things that you need a good command of the language to pull off; sometimes it comes out wrong. Did you meet Fiesta yet?”


  “Who’s Fiesta?”

  “Just some ho. But not enough of one I guess. More the Lilith type I suppose. She’s actually pretty great. It’s her going away party. I’m going to miss her.”

  I didn’t think to ask where she was going. Later I would wish I had. “I thought it was Kristle’s party.”

  “Kristle thinks every party is hers.” She rolled her eyes again, but she was smiling. “That’s her charm.” Then she looked at me knowingly and cocked her head, this time in amiable appraisal. “Let me guess,” she said. “She tried to do it with you already?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You could say that.” I hadn’t completely thought of it like that myself, but once DeeDee put it that way . . .

  “God,” DeeDee said, reaching for an ashtray and stubbing out her cigarette. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. “Kristle can be so ridiculous. But who knows what I’d do without her. Total ho, by the way—not that I’m judging; I actually like hos myself. Maybe I am one—I barely know what counts anymore. Being blond certainly never helped anyone’s case. Hey, want to do the quiz?” She fished a pencil from a hidden place in her tangled hair.

  “Are you always like this?” I asked.

  She squinted at me. “Like what?”

  “Like so direct, I guess. Or something.”

  A troubled look crossed her face. I’d hurt her feelings. “All I asked is if you wanted to do the quiz,” she said. “What’s so crazy about that?”

  “Oh,” I said, still unsure how much of this was really happening. “Okay. Quiz time then.”

  She cleared her throat and folded back the magazine. “Cool,” she said. “Ready? Sit.” She patted the edge of the bed and I perched on it dutifully. I folded my hands in my lap and then realized that was stupid, so I let them fall to my sides, but that didn’t feel right either so I folded them again. “The quiz is ‘How Does He Really See You?’” DeeDee announced.