September Girls Read online

  “Who’s he? Like in my case? Aren’t I the he?”

  “Just imagine yourself as someone else. Imagine yourself as someone very stupid. That’s what I always do anyway. It’s the only way it works.” And she began to read aloud. I tried my hardest to pay attention but it was very difficult. “‘It’s Valentine’s Day and your hubby’s working late. When he comes home, he brings you A, a dozen red roses; B, a string of diamonds; C—’ Hey, are you listening?”

  It was true that I’d already lost my train of thought. As she’d been reading, DeeDee’s voice had started to cave in until it was unintelligible. Now it was all I could do to remember her name.

  “Oh my God, you’re fucked up!” DeeDee tossed the magazine aside. “You didn’t smoke one of Kristle’s joints did you?”

  I shrugged.

  “For fuck’s sake. Never smoke Kristle’s weed! It’s the first rule of everything. You’re lucky you’re not a girl—you’d have wound up the child bride of some underworld demon ages ago. If anyone ever offers you a pomegranate in his fiery hell-lair just say no, okay? Jeez.”

  I felt a line of nervous sweat forming at my brow. “Wait, what’s wrong with Kristle’s weed? What’s going to happen?”

  “Nothing! I mean, it’s just really strong,” DeeDee said. “Kristle’s a total pothead. Her shit will mess you up. She never thinks to warn anyone; I think she actually does it on purpose. Just try to think about something totally neutral and you’ll be fine. Here, actually, lie down.”

  So I lay down next to her on my back and looked at the ceiling, which was suddenly very interesting.

  A few minutes later I was feeling slightly better and I turned on my side to face DeeDee. She didn’t move.

  The small bedroom was filled with smoke and my eyes were stinging. She was reclining next to me, just burning away. The weak light from the lamp on the bedside table clouded with the smoke around her head in a wobbly yellow nimbus. She’d closed her eyes and stretched out, like she had forgotten I was there, but she wasn’t asleep. She had a private smile on her face. It all amused her.

  I suddenly wanted, more than anything, to kiss her.

  I wanted to kiss her to say, you know, I get it. To say, I see how funny and fucked up it all is too.

  Instead of kissing her I stood. “I guess I should go now,” I said, hoping she would stop me.

  She didn’t say anything, but she opened her eyes again and looked at me. I could not interpret her half smile, her slippery gaze. Her languid, curious stretch.

  “Hey,” she said. I saw several thoughts crossing her face all at once, and I could tell she was about to say one thing and then changed her mind and said something else. “Have fun at the party.”

  I knew I could stay if I wanted to. And I did want to. I wanted a lot of things, but sometimes it’s harder than you would think to take what you want.

  “See ya,” I said, and left the room.

  When I went upstairs, the men were mostly gone and had taken their disgruntled girlfriends with them. It was pretty much only the Girls who were left now, crowded around the kitchen island and jammed together on the couches, intense in their silence, the stereo now blasting Lady Gaga. As they noticed me, a roomful of blond heads all swiveled in my direction in eerie synchronicity.

  I looked at them. They looked back at me, expectant. No one said anything.

  I moved for the sliding doors that led onto the porch, feeling uncomfortable, but before I was halfway across the room I heard another door opening and turned to see Jeff stepping out of it, disheveled and guilty-looking with Kristle right behind him.

  “You ready to go, bro?” Jeff asked, without looking me in the eye. “Looks like the party’s kinda shutting down.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m ready to go.” We left.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  MAGIC

  We have been searching for an enchanted mirror.

  Where we come from, it’s redundant to talk about enchanted mirrors, as all mirrors are enchanted. Around here, enchanted mirrors are scarce. We’re not from around here. But you’re probably starting to understand that.

  The truth is that none of us remember ever finding an enchanted mirror in this dried-out place. There are rumors, yes; some of the older girls think they recall hearing stories. Was it Brenda who discovered one that time? Or was it Kelly? And where was it again? How could we forget something so important?

  Once, Nalgene thought she found one in a dressing room at the outlet mall, but it was a false alarm. We sent a delegation to investigate, and it was finally decided that it was just one of those mirrors that makes you look skinnier than normal—which isn’t enchanting at all. It’s just a way of trying to trick you into buying jeans. Everyone was annoyed with Nalgene for weeks after, but she’s not the brightest among us and has always been insecure about her weight, so we eventually forgave her.

  We avoid calling them magic mirrors because we don’t believe in magic. Enchantment—okay, fine. Maybe. Magic is what our father commands. We don’t want to give him the satisfaction of believing in him.

  We barely know what we believe. Even though we don’t believe in it, we suspect we might have certain magics at our own disposal. Silly magic, nothing useful, but magic nonetheless. We try not to think about that.

  Our father is the Endlessness. Our mother is the Deepness. Our brothers are Speed and Calm. (Calm is easier to get along with, but he can be dull.) We don’t know who we are.

  That’s why we need that mirror. If only we could find one. Well, it might not solve everything, but it would make things more straightforward.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  SIX

  “COME ON,” JEFF said as I was emptying the dishes after dinner a few nights after Kristle’s birthday. Or was it Fiesta’s going away party? And did anyone have a normal name around here? “Get your ass in gear, little bro.”

  It took me longer than it should have to decide which exact flavor of disgusted look to shoot at him, but after a few seconds I settled on mortified, could vomit and was pretty satisfied with that choice. “I don’t karaoke,” I said flatly. “It’s, like, one of my basic guiding principles in life. I don’t dump in public bathrooms and I don’t do karaoke. Fact.”

  “Oh no,” Jeff said. He stepped behind me, turned off the sink, and closed the dishwasher, then took me firmly by the shoulders and pointed me to the door. “No way. You’re not getting away with that. Fact. No brother of mine’s going to get away with not doing karaoke. It’s like saying you don’t believe in love.”

  “I thought you were the one who didn’t believe in love. Weren’t you basically telling me that the first night we got here?”

  “Dude,” he said disbelievingly. “Dude! Me? I believe in love. I just think it’s not for everyone. Karaoke, on the other hand, can be enjoyed by all. Including you. It’ll change your fuckin’ life, little brother. Come on. Let’s go.” He slapped my back, yanked the door open, and shoved me out into the dark.

  I had become aware of Jeff’s burgeoning proclivity for drunken, musical showboating in crummy bars based on a few cursory investigations into his Facebook profile, where the last year’s worth of photos often depicted him frozen in time with his face contorted into pop histrionics, his eyes always glazed and unfocused, a glowing blue screen hovering around his shoulder. At first it had seemed out of character for him to have developed such an extravagantly lame habit, but then I thought about it a little more and realized that, no, it was pretty much totally something he would be into.

  He had shoved me down the steps and halfway across the driveway when it became certain that there was no way I was getting out of this. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll go, but I’m not singing.”

/>   “Everyone says that their first time,” he said. “We’ll see.”

  Kristle was waiting for us on the beach road. There was a small part of me that was hoping she’d bring DeeDee, but she was alone. Her eyes went to me first, mild boredom briefly flickering into something else, but then she looked at my brother. I had no idea what she was thinking. “Hey, boys,” she said. “I hope you’ve been warming up your vocal chords.”

  Jeff did a falsetto yodel into the night and the two of them headed off ahead of me, his arm around her waist. I decided to follow.

  Ursula’s was packed when we got there, mostly with locals, but there were a few tourists and some of the Girls too. I looked around, sifting through their faces, but none of them were DeeDee. So I thumped down onto a stool at the bar, where a Girl I thought I recognized was tending. Without waiting for my order, she handed me a can of Budweiser, the tab already popped. I moved for my wallet but she waved me off. It was just as well because I was pretty sure I didn’t have any cash on me.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Don’t thank me. Underage boys drink free tonight,” she said. “Just Bud, though—don’t start bugging me for piña colada this, tequila sunrise that. This isn’t Cocktail, okay? And anyone who sings ‘Kokomo’ gets kicked out. House policy.”

  “Okay,” I said, taking a long chug. “I don’t really know what any of that stuff is anyway. I saw you at Kristle’s party, right?”

  “Probably,” she said. “I was there. But I’ve been told that we all look the same. So it could have been someone else, too.”

  “I’m Sam,” I said.

  “Taffany,” she said with a hurried smile, turning to fuss with a rag over a bunch of glasses. “So what are you singing tonight?”

  “I don’t sing.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Oh, sure,” she said. “One of those.” And she slid a big book across the bar to me. The song list. “Everyone sings here,” she said. “Even me. And I really don’t sing, all right? Just remember—no ‘Kokomo.’”

  I shrugged and started looking through the book, but I had barely made it through the first page (10,000 Maniacs; 3 Doors Down; 4 Non Blondes; 5th Dimension, The) when there was a screech of feedback and then a voice over the PA. “Jeff? Do we have Jeff here? Let’s get Jeff up here to start the night off with a bang!” I groaned, registering a rustling in the corner of the room, and then my brother was bounding through the crowd to the makeshift stage near the back. I swiveled my stool around to see a leathery guy with a tidal wave of gray hair handing him the microphone. Jeff was clutching a frozen drink with a pink umbrella in his free hand and he began to pogo maniacally, sloshing it everywhere, until the host raised a warning finger at him. Chastened, Jeff lifted his drink to the crowd and the microphone to his mouth.

  “Who here believes?” he asked breathily. There was a smattering of unenthusiastic applause. “This one’s for my little brother!” he shouted, and then, more quietly, added, offhand, “Who could believe a little more. In something—I don’t really know what.” At that, he launched into an earnest, caterwauling rendition of “Don’t Stop Believin’.”

  “Of course,” I heard Taffany mutter. “Just once in my life I want one of these assholes to surprise me by singing something other than ‘Don’t Stop Believin’.’”

  “That’s my brother,” I said apologetically.

  Taffany looked sympathetic.

  I glanced down at the beer in my hands and tried to focus in on it, hoping that it would suddenly develop a new fascinating aspect to distract me. The alternative—paying attention to my brother’s performance—was too unbearable to contemplate. But as hard as I stared, the beer remained boring. When Jeff was at the part of that song that he had decided called for earsplitting screeching, Taffany winced and slid me another Bud even though the first one was only half-empty.

  “Your brother does this a lot, huh?” she asked as he was doing his post-performance victory lap, high-fiving everyone in the audience who could be bullied into it. “I guess he’s the type.”

  “Apparently,” I said.

  “Jimmy’s gonna get sick of him fast,” she said.

  “Jimmy?” I asked.

  “The host. That’s Janice over there.” She pointed to a portly, frosted-haired woman stuffed into a coral-pink halter dress, who was standing behind the sound equipment and fiddling with the knobs. “His wife. They’ve been doing this for years. They don’t appreciate showboaters.”

  Jeff punctuated this with a high-pitched yowl and took a bow before surrendering the mic back to a scowling Jimmy.

  I didn’t budge from my stool at the bar. Taffany kept the beer coming, chatting me up distractedly. The terrible singing kept coming too, but it wasn’t that hard to ignore—not counting the point in the evening when Janice herself abandoned her post at the sound board to perform a bizarre rendition of a song I somehow knew to be from the Broadway musical Les Misérables.

  Taffany paid no attention; she was obviously used to it all. As Janice and the rest of them sang, she gave me tips for successful karaoke: no songs over four and a half minutes; no Meatloaf; nothing too obscure, they won’t get it. I couldn’t tell if she liked me or if she would pretty much have the same basic conversation with anyone at all, but I didn’t care. At least she was talking to me.

  After a while she got distracted by the other customers and left me to my own devices and I just sat there, chilling out alone, sometimes tuning in to whoever was singing, some of whom weren’t completely terrible, and other times just drifting into whatever thought occurred to me. More and more of the Girls began to trickle in as the night went on. Some of them tripped the same mild feeling of recognition I’d had when I’d seen Taffany behind the bar, but there was still no DeeDee. Not that I was keeping track, exactly. I hadn’t seen her since the night of the party, and I wasn’t really expecting to see her again. I just wouldn’t have totally minded if I did is all.

  At a certain point during a grizzled local’s drunken train-wreck performance of “Ruby Tuesday,” Jeff plopped himself in the stool next to me. “So what are you going to sing, bro?” he asked. He raised an eyebrow and gave me a big wink.

  “Dude, shut up,” I said. “I told you I’m not singing.” But he was already scribbling new numbers on slips of paper, evidently planning his next showstopper.

  I didn’t think about it at all until a half hour later, when I heard my name being called. “Sam? Where’s my good man Sam?” It was Jimmy. Everyone in the room began to look around. I tried to sink as low in my seat as I could, but I felt a hand on my back.

  “Over here,” Jeff called out. He pushed me from my stool. “We’ve got a winner!”

  I looked over my shoulder and shot him the most deadly glare I could muster. “Dude, go,” he whispered. “Don’t worry. I picked a good song for you. You’ll be fantastic.”

  “I’m going to fucking kill you,” I whispered back, but knew I had no choice. I pushed through the crowd, took the mic from Jimmy, and tried not to shake too much as I awaited whatever fate was about to befall me. The music started to play. I recognized the song.

  There I was. What else could I do but sing? “‘Just yesterday morning they let me know you were gone . . .’”

  It was “Fire and Rain,” a song my dad had played a million times in the Volvo on family trips, while my mom crooned along in an off-key warble from the passenger’s seat and Jeff occupied himself giving me noogies and wet willies, the dusty smell of the AC filling the car, the sun streaming through the windows, and the scenery whizzing by. I hadn’t heard it in years—I’d never been a fan, and who was this Suzanne person anyway?—but as soon as the first line was out of my mouth I didn’t have to think about it at all, the words came to me without having to follow the bouncing ball on the screen. I could almost hear my mom’s voice under mine in a broken harmony, could almost hear my dad’s reedy whistle as he weaved in and out of traffic. We were all back in that car again, all of us speeding off toward some destin
ation: my grandmother’s house or Hershey Park or camping or somewhere else, anywhere.

  Wherever it was we were going, it was a place where we would still be a family. Like we already were; like we always would be. Until someday—now—we weren’t.

  My turn was over almost before I’d really known it had begun, and when I looked up, I was surprised to see that the audience was still there and that they were all applauding for me. I had been good. Or at least they were doing a good job of humoring me. I handed the microphone back to Jimmy and stepped aside. It felt like I was stepping into my own body after having been gone from myself for a while.

  When I took my seat at the bar, Jeff was looking at me with bemused admiration. “Told you, buddy,” he said. “You’re a natural. Now to pick the next one . . .”

  “Fat fucking chance,” I said. But I picked up the book and started flipping through it anyway.

  “And now,” Jimmy was saying a few minutes later, after a rousing performance of “Like a Virgin” by two recently divorced moms from Philadelphia, “the lovely Miss Kristle’s going to sing us one of my favorite tunes.” Every single person in the room was drunk now, and even I found myself cheering wildly along with them as Kristle emerged from the crush. Jimmy fastened the microphone onto the stand.

  I was surprised at how tiny she looked; she seemed to shrink as she stepped onto the stage, like Alice in Wonderland walking through a doll-sized door. The stand was too high for her, the microphone pointing to her forehead, and as she struggled to adjust it, her eyes darted around the room. She had a shy, barely-there smile on her face. “Hi, everyone,” she said, looking down at her feet. The strings came in.