September Girls Read online

  “Sea of Love” is a song I’ve always hated, but now, with Kristle singing it, it was something entirely different from the song I knew. Her voice was thin and wispy but had a deeper timbre than I’d anticipated, hollow and insubstantial but with a vulnerability that was haunting. It wasn’t at all what I had expected. The audience had been wasted and raucous when she’d stepped up, but within seconds they were utterly silent, mesmerized by the spell she was casting.

  Without looking over to his spot next to me, I felt something in Jeff change. I felt whatever last bit of himself he’d been holding on to leave him. He was hers now.

  The sound that was coming out of her mouth was unearthly and far away. We were all hers, sort of.

  And then I found my mind drifting over the ocean, suspended over the waves as Kristle’s song echoed out into the distance, into infinity. It was empty and black, so big that it was a little scary.

  Then, in my mind, I saw DeeDee. She was walking down the shore alone, coming slowly toward me and into view, her flip-flops dangling from her fingers as she dragged her toes in the sand.

  I wondered where she was going. I wondered where she had been. I wondered whether she was thinking about me, and why, in this moment, my mind had turned to her. She was barely there at first, shimmery and foggy—just a cloud of blond hair—but as she got closer she became more and more herself. I’d always thought of all the Girls as looking pretty much the same, but as I watched her approaching, Kristle’s song still slow and mellow in my head, DeeDee looked nothing like the rest of them. I just couldn’t put my finger on the exact differences.

  It was just about then that I heard another voice, and I was back in my stool at the bar, watching Kristle sing. Kristle was no longer alone: somehow DeeDee was up on the stage too, hunched over, leaning in close to the single microphone with her sister like she had hummed out of a gap in the guitars and just materialized, already singing. Their voices wove in and out of each other’s, the same but different, and for a while it was impossible to know whose was whose.

  The audience was silent, everyone in the bar staring at them, but DeeDee was concentrating only on the song, adding layers and layers onto Kristle’s melody until Kristle receded into the background and DeeDee was the only one I could hear. It had lost all resemblance to the original tune, and then I didn’t know what the song was anymore at all. All I knew was that it was beautiful, that DeeDee was beautiful.

  And even though she wasn’t looking in my direction—even though I’d thought of her only in passing since the night of Kristle’s party—I had a certain feeling that she was singing only for me.

  When the song ended I’d expected the crowd to disperse, as shocked and dazed by what they’d just seen as I was. But Jimmy just introduced another song and things rolled right on.

  I found her outside the bar a few minutes later. DeeDee was smoking on the wooden patio that looked out over a muddy patch of grass. She was leaning out over the railing, swaying her hips in time to the song coming from inside, and when she heard me behind her, she looked up and smiled wordlessly.

  “You’re a pretty good singer,” I said. “You should go on American Idol or something.”

  “Yeah, well,” she said. “I don’t think that’s a very realistic goal. Or whatever. Actually that show makes me sort of sad.”

  “Me too,” I said. “It’s depressing as fuck; I hate it.”

  “I liked hearing you sing,” she said, dragging on her cigarette with a half smile like she was challenging me to try to figure out whether she was joking or not.

  “You saw me?” I asked.

  “Duh. Of course I saw. You were pretty good. Most guys are afraid to choose something like that; they’re worried it’ll make them look too sensitive or something.” She shrugged. “You surprised me I guess.”

  I decided not to tell her that song hadn’t been my idea or that I’d always thought James Taylor seemed like kind of an asshole.

  “Okay, cool,” I said. “Sensitive boys doing karaoke make you happy. Check. What else?”

  She laughed. She was still laughing as she stood up on her toes and leaned in to kiss me.

  The kiss was drunk and smiling and only lasted a few seconds. “That does,” she said. Then she was gone.

  “James Taylor,” Jeff said when I went back inside a few minutes later. “Works every fuckin’ time. Don’t say you never learned anything from your big brother. By the way, you have lipstick all over your face.”

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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  THE KNIFE

  We have learned that we are beautiful.

  All of us. We are all beautiful. To those who may read this: we are more beautiful. No matter how beautiful you are, we are more. We just are. It’s just the truth. We are the most beautiful. No one has ever told us otherwise.

  We say this with no pride at all. We say it, maybe, with a little sadness. Our beauty is a gift that we have had no choice but to accept. We would have been happy with another gift—say, a gift certificate to the outlet mall in Duck. Or a Camaro. (Red, please.) But we were not offered either of those gifts. We were offered only beauty. We took it and we use it. It’s nothing special. It’s how we survive.

  Nothing special: where we come from everyone is beautiful, and each one of us is equally beautiful. (Except our mother, who is a different story.) Where we come from, beauty is so ordinary that it’s meaningless. Beauty is so meaningless that there’s not even a word for it. (Well—except when it comes to our mother. But no one talks about her.)

  Since we have no word for beauty, we use the closest word we have. We call it the knife.

  Our beauty is only our knife. Our beauty is our only knife. It’s just a knife: rusty blade, ordinary handle. But it’s sharp. It does its thing. Nothing special.

  When is nothing special the most important thing? When it’s the only thing. Where we come from, beauty is so ordinary that we don’t even know we are beautiful. It is only after we arrive here that we begin to understand the knife that we clutch.

  We crawl onto land naked. We learn which clothes to wear. We learn how to do our makeup, how to style our hair. How to toss it with sexiness that appears unconsidered. The women think we’re tacky, but we’re not interested in the opinions of women anymore. We learned long ago how unimportant the opinions of women are. We are here because our mother could not protect us. We are here because our father had an “opinion.”

  So. We learn how to use our breasts, our asses, our eyelashes, our lips. We learn how to get what we want.

  No. Not what we want. We never get what we want, do we?

  We learn how to get what we need.

  We crawl onto land naked. We learn to use our breasts (large but not cartoonish), our asses (heart shaped, unblemished), our eyelashes (impossibly long), our lips (smirking, exotic, and always, always glossy). We learn how to dance, how to flirt. How to toss our hair and slam shots and play pool (we are exceptional pool players, but we know it’s best to lose on purpose) and how to talk about football. We learn to fuck, yes, but it doesn’t take long to figure out that it’s almost never the fucking that gets you anywhere. It’s the not fucking. Except in certain and very specific circumstances. Thrust, parry, thrust, thrust, kill. How are we to survive?

  We learn quickly.

  Rather, most of us learn. There are those of us who take a while to figure things out. There are those of us who never quite get it. And now and then there is a girl who is certain (certain!) of her skill until the moment she’s gutted by her own blade.

  “I leave you with only one thing,” our father tells us—so we have been told—just before he casts us out. “I allow you your knife,” he says.

  A knife is sometimes a tool. A knife is sometimes a weapon. You can eat off a knife if you don’t have a fork or spoon. A knife can be used as a mirror, in a pinch. And if you’re lost in the w
oods, a knife is helpful for marking your path on tree trunks. But what the hell good is a knife, really?

  Never trust a gift from your fuckface father.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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  SEVEN

  I WAS STARTING to lose track of time. The longer we stayed at the beach, the more impossible it became to figure out how long we’d been here. It could have been a month or two, or we could have gotten here just yesterday. Who knows. And while I could have tried to figure it out, the point is that it didn’t matter. Days of the week had become so unknown to me that if someone had asked me to recite them all from a list, I probably would’ve pronounced Wednesday without dropping the n. Wed-niz-day. What’s that again? When had Kristle’s party been? When had we gone to Ursula’s?

  “Summer” had superseded all other designations. What day is it? What month is it? Tell me the day of the week. The president of the United States. My answer to all those questions would have been basically the same: It’s summer. It’s summer. It’s summer. And How should I know? It’s summer.

  For the first time in my life, I was starting to get a tan.

  Sometimes I’d fall asleep in the sand and wake up barely remembering who I was, feeling both infinite and blank, nothing more than the sum of my sore biceps and sun-reddened hair and the salt in my ears and the sand in my ass, and end up just stumbling down the beach totally unfettered, without any purpose.

  Jeff, on the other hand, had found his purpose for sure. The purpose’s name was Kristle. They’d been inseparable ever since karaoke night: she was at the house constantly during the day, eating all our food and lying on the porch (sometimes topless, facedown with her bikini strings puddled at her sides), smoking endless cigarettes and waltzing inside when she was bored of tanning to plop herself in front of the TV even when it was perfectly obvious that I myself was just about to settle in to watch The Price is Right.

  Jeff was her shadow. He was usually draped over her as she watched TV—overnight, he had become tolerant of those shows about housewives—and always seemed to be twirling her hair absentmindedly around his finger or rubbing her leg, or else staring at her from across the couch with a goofy and hunch-shouldered grin that I’d never seen on him before. This was so unlike him as to be somewhat disturbing; he had clearly entangled himself in the dire pussy-web he’d warned me about on our first night here. I had to say I was disappointed in him, if only for abandoning his own repulsive principles in such casual fashion.

  Jeff was obviously smitten, but Kristle was harder to figure out. The way she looked at him was different from the way he looked at her. I’d catch him in a rare moment of distraction, reading the funny pages or whatever (Jeff was an unapologetic fan of both Garfield and Marmaduke), and Kristle would be leaning against the refrigerator a few feet away, Budweiser in hand, gazing at him with a curious and crooked look of beleaguered affection. A halfhearted hand on her hip. Was it love or something opposite? Was there a hint of contempt in the upturned corner of her mouth? Or was I just being paranoid?

  Sometimes she noticed me noticing her, and she’d look up at me and shrug like, Well what the fuck do you want me to say? And I would just turn.

  And then, more rarely but still regularly, I’d be scavenging in the cupboards for something to eat or sitting on the couch reading an old copy of Her Place—thinking of DeeDee as I scanned through the quiz—and I’d feel a tingle in my groin, only to slowly turn and see Kristle behind me, appraising me with an unembarrassed up-and-down, arms folded across her chest, mouth puckered, and eyes sparking with intensity.

  She wasn’t the type to look away. When I caught her staring, she’d just hold my gaze until I flinched. It never took long.

  Jeff seemed to have completely forgotten the entanglement he’d recently caught us in. I remembered it myself only in a vague way, like it was something that had happened to someone else.

  Even so. I hadn’t kissed that many people in my life, and having shared with Kristle what I am probably embarrassing myself by characterizing as an intimate moment, it was kind of unsettling to have her now constantly in my midst, making ostentatious time with my fuck of a brother and ogling me creepily when I was just trying to go about my business in my own fucking house. I couldn’t figure out her game. So I tried to just avoid the two of them as much as I could.

  Kristle would not be avoided. One day I was digging some milk out of the refrigerator and turned around to see that she had appeared out of nowhere. She was sitting on the kitchen island, swinging her feet, wearing only a pair of tiny mesh shorts and a bikini top, and staring at me. I jumped. She smiled.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “Just waiting for your brother,” she said. “He went to get us coffee. The stuff your machine makes is nasty.”

  “I think it tastes okay,” I said. I poured some milk into it and took a big sip without even stirring. “Mmm,” I said. “Delicious.” But she was right; it did taste waterlogged and gross.

  “If you say so,” she said.”

  “So how’s your little sister?” I asked, mostly just for something else to say. Well, no, actually, that’s not totally true. I had been wondering. I had been hoping I’d run into her ever since the party and had even poked my head into the Fisherman’s Net a couple of times hoping she’d be working, but she hadn’t been there.

  “Oh, you mean DeeDee,” Kristle said. “Yeah, she mentioned you guys hung out. She’s actually not my sister you know; we just sort of look alike. Forget her; she’s a bitch. I’m not trying to be rude. I’m just saying.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well she didn’t seem like one.”

  She shrugged. “You know, Sam,” she said, “you don’t have to feel nervous around me. Just because I’m into your brother or whatever.” She slid off the island and took a step closer to me. “What I have with your brother is its own thing. But you and I could have our own thing too.” Her breath smelled like salt water. “You’re a good kisser, you know.”

  I panicked, expecting Jeff to walk in at any second. “I have to go get a newspaper. I promised my dad.”

  Kristle looked over to the newspaper sitting right on the counter, raised an eyebrow, and flipped her hair. “Have fun,” she said. “Don’t forget sunscreen.”

  I skipped the sunscreen, slid on some flip-flops, and was out of there. I walked the mile to Cahoon’s, where I bought a pair of sunglasses. I didn’t really need a pair of sunglasses, but I was there; I had to buy something. I was sort of relieved that the woman at the register was well into her forties; Kristle had freaked me out and I didn’t want to be reminded of it by another one of her creepy friends.

  I couldn’t figure out what she wanted from me. On one hand, I didn’t want to know. On the other hand, she was hot, so obviously I had spent a fair amount of time considering unspeakable possibilities.

  After having walked all the way to the store I was thirsty. I considered getting a soda, but that seemed like the biggest waste because we had plenty of soda at home, so I kept walking to the 7-Eleven that was wedged into the pie-shaped junction where the bypass met the beach road. The Slurpee machine was mostly broken and only had banana flavor, which I normally hate and which was only half-frozen, but I bought it anyway.

  When I came out of the store, there was a boy around my age in the parking lot, just sitting there on one of the pieces of rotten old wood that marked the spaces. The guy was barefoot, his sneakers lying next to him on the asphalt, and he had a dazed expression on his face, not like he was lost, exactly, but more like he’d lost something. Like he’d misplaced himself.

  A car zoomed by, close enough to toss the boy’s hair across his face, but he was oblivious to it. He was shirtless and tanned like he’d been lying in the sun for months, and when I got a good look at him, I recognized a flicker of something familiar. I knew h
im from somewhere, but I couldn’t place him.

  There was something about him that bothered me: the way his eyes were sharp and watery, the way he was casting around like he was looking for something he knew he wasn’t going to find. There was something about him that I could relate to. He reminded me of someone who could have been a friend.

  I would have ignored him anyway, but he caught my eye as I was about to turn in the other direction, and I felt like I didn’t have much choice but to say something. “Is everything okay?” I asked.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “Thanks.”

  “Do you need money or something?” I dug in my pockets. “I’ve got a bunch of quarters.” Then I felt like a dick, because why would I assume he needed money, and anyway, what’s anyone going to do with a bunch of quarters other than buy a Slurpee?

  He didn’t seem to care. “It’s just—I forgot how to swim,” he said.

  “You can’t forget how to swim,” I said. He had revealed himself as a crazy person, but it was weird to think of someone who looked so much like me as crazy, so I didn’t walk away yet. Maybe he had sunstroke or something. “You either know or you don’t.”

  “That’s what I thought,” he said. “But I forgot. So maybe you can. I went in the water this morning, and I couldn’t do it. I was on the swim team back home. I’m a good swimmer. Or I was. It’s so weird.”

  He really didn’t seem crazy. Something was happening. He was saying something important.

  “It’s not just that either,” he said. “I forgot something else, too. But I can’t remember what; all I know is it seems important. I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

  “It’s okay. Did you forget which house is yours? They all sort of look the same around here.”

  “Nah,” he said. “I remember that. I basically don’t feel like going home right now. I actually don’t want to talk about it.”

  “I’m sure you’ll remember,” I said. “Anyway, no one forgets how to swim. Maybe you need some sleep or something. Here, have my Slurpee.”