September Girls Page 8

  “It’s fine, man,” he said.

  “No, seriously. It’s banana. I don’t even like banana.”

  He took it and slurped practically the whole thing in one gulp.

  “Thanks,” he said. “Maybe I’m dehydrated. This place is fucking weird, though, huh?” He stood to go.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It is.”

  “Don’t trust them,” he said, turning.

  “Who?” I said.

  “You know who,” he said over his shoulder as he walked away. “I can tell you know.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Maybe.”

  Then he stopped for a second, like something had occurred to him, and turned back to face me again.

  “Actually, it’s worth it,” he said. “On second thought—you can’t trust them, but you can’t not trust them either. And it is worth it I guess. No, it is. Yeah.”

  He’d left his shoes behind, white Converse low-tops. “Hey!” I said, calling after him as he wandered across the street. “You forgot your shoes.”

  He looked back one more time and waved me off. “They hurt my feet,” he said, and then I remembered where I’d seen him before: he’d been at Kristle’s party, making out with the girl in the living room right before I’d found DeeDee. Just as I figured it out, a car sped by, almost running him over as it curved into the bypass and headed for the bridge to the next island, and when it had passed, the boy was stumbling off into the dunes.

  His shoes were lying there and suddenly I had to turn away. I don’t know what it was; I just couldn’t look at them. My hand was still in my pocket, absently jangling at my change. I found myself staring at a pay phone on the edge of the parking lot, sticking up out of the yellow, dried-out beach grass at a crooked angle like a half-dead sapling. It looked like it was either from the future or the past or both. A cloud passed overhead; the sun bounced off the receiver. It seemed to me to be a sign.

  So I picked up the receiver, dropped a quarter in, and dialed my mom’s number. She’d never really gotten the hang of using a cell phone; she was always forgetting to charge it or forgetting to pay the bill or forgetting to bring it with her when she left the house or forgetting to turn it on or leaving it buried in her purse where she couldn’t hear it ringing. Even when it did happen to be otherwise functional and in her possession she tended to have a hard time figuring out which button to press in order to answer it. So it had been no surprise at all after her departure when I’d tried to call her once or twice and it had gone straight to voice mail. I hadn’t left messages; I knew she never listened to them anyway.

  But even just hearing her voice on the machine would have reminded me that she still existed. Really, I think I wanted to remind myself that I still existed. This time I would leave a message just to prove it, I decided. “I was here,” I would say.

  After a minute of static, the phone rang once, and then I heard a robotic voice—not my mother’s—in my ear. “To complete this call, please deposit two dollars.”

  I dropped the quarters into the slot obediently, feeling more and more like an idiot with each rattling plunk. Finally there was ringing on the other end. One ring, then two, then three. And then, unexpectedly, my mother herself was talking.

  “Hello! Hello! Is anyone there?”

  “Mom?” I said.

  “Hello? Who is this?”

  “Mom, it’s me, Sam.”

  “Sam? Hello? I can never figure out how to use this damn thing. Can you hear me? Where are you?”

  “Yeah, I hear you,” I said. “I’m at a pay phone. Where are you?”

  “Where am I? I’m at home of course. I show up here, the place is a wreck, the car’s gone, and no one even left a note. I’m still your mother you know; you can’t just go running off to God-knows-where. I’ve been worried sick for the last three hours! Where are you?”

  “We’re at the beach,” I said. “The Outer Banks.”

  “Tyra Banks? What does she have to do with anything? Can you hear me? Sam, tell me exactly where you are. I was about to call the police!”

  “Don’t call the police,” I said. “We just went on vacation. We’re in Nags Head.”

  Then the robot voice came on again. “Please deposit two dollars to continue this call.” I dug in my pockets for change, knowing that I didn’t have any more.

  “Sam! Sam! Don’t you dare hang up!” Mom was saying. “How do I trace this call! Oh, God, how do I use this thing? Siri, trace this call! Sam, stay on the line!”

  “You don’t need to trace the call,” I said. “And I don’t think Siri does that anyway.” Then, not knowing why I was saying it: “We’re at milepost fifteen. You should come. I mean, if you’re just sitting around at home anyway. It’ll be fun.”

  The only reply was dial tone. I had no idea why I’d told her to come. She probably hadn’t heard me anyway. It was just as well.

  But she had returned home. She had been gone for more than five months. Where had she been all that time, and what had made her come back for us?

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  EIGHT

  MY FATHER DIDN’T even look in my direction as he came down the driveway. He was speeding along, metal detector over his shoulder, his face distant and determined.

  “Find anything good yet?” I asked as I passed him. He looked surprised to see me.

  He brightened a little at my interest but didn’t slow his pace. “A few things, Tiger,” he said. “Here and there. A few things. You never know what’s out there.”

  Dad had become more and more obsessed with the idea of finding treasure since we’d first spotted him combing the beach. He was rarely in the house during the day now and when he was, he was preoccupied, sifting through his spoils for hours as if he was expecting to find something he hadn’t noticed before. I can’t say I minded; it meant that he had mostly abandoned his efforts at male bonding and that I could now be left to my own devices. But there was a part of me that sort of missed his cheery, reliable harassment.

  I had to wonder what he was actually looking for. The way he would pick up certain items after a long day of searching—an old makeup compact, a stainless steel spoon, an aluminum box of breath mints—and turn them over in his hand, examining them as if waiting for them to reveal themselves to him. You’d ask him what he was doing and he’d mutter something you couldn’t quite get about Blackbeard, who I guess is different from Bluebeard, and then he’d just go back to his distraction.

  “Hey, bro,” Jeff called from somewhere above my head. I looked up to see him and Kristle leaning over the edge of the deck, Jeff shirtless and her in a bikini, both of them radiating gold, both drinking from clear plastic tumblers, their chests gilded with thin layers of sweat. “Hey,” I said. Kristle waved at me with a smile like nothing had happened, and I made my way up the stairs, hoping they would leave me alone and let me sneak inside.

  Jeff wasn’t going to make it easy. Although the onset of Kristle had made me even less inclined to hang out with him than usual, it’d had the opposite effect on Jeff. It was becoming a losing battle to continue rebuffing his increasingly aggressive geniality.

  “Where’d you go?” he asked. “It’s like we never hang out anymore. Want a drink?”

  The day was beginning to slip away, and although the sun wasn’t near setting yet, the blue sky was developing a certain periwinkle fatigue that made a drink seem acceptable—not that I cared whether it was acceptable or not. “Okay,” I said. My voice came out the same color as the sky.

  Jeff didn’t seem to notice. He grinned and slapped me on the back. “G and T okay, little guy?”

  I’m not personally that into drinking anything that tastes like a pinecone, but he seemed so enthusiastic about it that I couldn’t say no. “Sure,” I said. “Whatever.”

  “I make a mean G and T,” he said. “I took that bartending class last summer, you k
now.” And he bopped through the sliding doors into the kitchen, humming the first bar of some song as he went. I rolled my eyes as I plopped myself onto the wooden chaise. Then I felt that tingle in my groin again: Kristle had turned to face me. We were alone again.

  She was leaning with her back against the porch rail, drink in hand, her hips jutting out, and legs crossed at the ankles. Her hair was blowing very slightly in the breeze, and she reached into her drink and pulled out an ice cube with her fingers and dropped it into her mouth, crunching on it loudly. She didn’t say anything. This time, when she noticed me looking at her, she looked away.

  “What the fuck?” I finally said. “Seriously, what the fuck?”

  “What?” she said, with a final crunch. Then she fished for her lime wedge and, having extracted it from the bottom of her glass, was sucking on it, eyebrows raised. The juice from the lime dripped down her chin. “What?”

  For some reason I was actually emboldened by the way she was looking at me, by her hair and her hips and her breasts, quivering in her bikini. It had made me shy and nervous before, but now it just made me want to know who the fuck she thought she was.

  “So what was that about?”

  “What was what about?”

  “Earlier today. You know.”

  It was the first time I had seen her seem nervous. “You’re such an American. You all make such a big deal about everything. It wasn’t remotely a big deal. I was just trying to be friendly. I just wanted you to know we were friends. That you can trust me.”

  “Funny you should put it that way,” I said. “I met this guy today. He was weird; it was like he’d had his heart sucked out through his nose. I didn’t even know him. I barely said anything to him. But you know what he told me?”

  “Let me guess,” Kristle said. She didn’t guess.

  “He told me not to trust you.”

  Kristle hooted. “Me? He told you not to trust me? That’s a laugh. I don’t even know any guys other than your brother. I only know girls and assholes. How should some random guy I’ve never met know anything about me?”

  “He wasn’t talking about you specifically,” I said.

  “Oh, not me specifically. Of course. So who was he talking about?”

  “You know who he was talking about. All of you.”

  “All of us.”

  “All of you. He said not to trust any of you.”

  “And I’m the one getting blamed for some unknown, untrustworthy thing all of us supposedly did? I don’t even know who this person is. Like I said: you’re such an American.”

  “I never trusted you anyway,” I said. “I don’t know if you’re trying to fuck with me or fuck with my brother or if you just like fucking with everyone or what. It doesn’t take someone telling me to make me think you might not be so trustworthy. But it does help.”

  She recoiled, wounded and angry. “You have no idea what I’m about,” she said, and she turned out to face the ocean and leaned over the street, balancing her weight on her palms and lifting her heels into the air. “Some people have no fucking clue.”

  That night, Jeff and Kristle decided to sleep at her place—wherever that was. While Jeff was gathering his stuff up, Kristle cornered me one more time.

  “Listen to me,” she said. “Listen carefully. I want you to know that I really like your brother, okay? Like, I really like him. Please don’t mess with that.”

  “I’m not the one messing with it.”

  “I know,” she said. She tugged at her hair, and she really did look sort of upset. “I know. But still.”

  I stared at her for a few seconds. “Okay,” I finally said. And then: “Can you tell DeeDee to say hi sometime?”

  Kristle tilted her head one way, then another, considering it. “Yeah,” she said. “Sure. Fine. I mean, it’s not like she listens to me ever. But fine, who cares? If that’s really what you want. But did you ever think maybe it’s not me you need to worry about trusting?”

  Then Jeff appeared with his backpack, ready to go. “Hey,” he said with a cocky wink, “you hitting on my girlfriend, bro? Uncool.”

  “I’m nobody’s girlfriend,” Kristle said. She was smiling and Jeff just laughed in his usual dopey, good-natured way, but I could tell he was bothered.

  At first I was pleased to have them out of my way for the night, but after I’d been sitting alone in the living room for an hour—watching TV and picking sand from the crevices of the couch, getting slowly drunk by myself—I started to get bored. I decided to go for a walk on the beach. I took the flashlight with me and headed to the ocean, still just in my bathing suit.

  When I got to the shore, the moon was behind a cloud. I didn’t remember that it had rained during the day, but the sand was damp. I sat down anyway.

  I thought of my father with his metal detector and the fact that we were seeing him less and less lately. I thought of myself, and how untethered I felt, like I could float away at any moment. I thought of the boy outside the 7-Eleven, wandering off into the dunes, his shoes still lying in the parking lot.

  I thought of the girl we’d seen on the first night here, and I cast my flashlight out to the ocean, wondering if I’d see another one heading for land. But I didn’t see anything. Instead I heard a voice behind me: “Hey you.” That slow and twisting accent again, but this time with a different, still familiar timbre.

  I turned. It was DeeDee, standing in the sand with her shoulder cocked awkwardly, her hair wild and blue. I should have been surprised to see her but for some reason I wasn’t; I wondered if I had been expecting her this whole time. Maybe Kristle had told her to come find me after all. I sort of doubted it though.

  “Can I sit down?” she asked. “I just got off work. Sucky day.”

  “Yeah,” I said. It was so dark that she probably couldn’t see me smiling, but I was in fact smiling. She had found me. “I had a sucky day too. Or at least just weird.” I had already forgotten about Kristle’s warning not to trust her.

  “Weird is good. Weird is at least interesting. You wouldn’t believe how boring it gets here,” she said. “We watch a lot of TV.” She plopped down next to me in the sand with a sigh.

  “Yeah, I’ve noticed. Kristle’s really into those shows about the housewives.”

  “Who isn’t?” DeeDee said. “Being a housewife seems like it could be a lot of fun, right? Anything’s better than waiting tables—except maybe being a maid. Either way, housewives don’t have to do any of that. I mean, they’re free. Who could be freer?” She took off her cheap Chinese slippers and shook them out into the sand before placing them in her lap.

  “You should get more comfortable shoes,” I said, not bothering to comment on the relative freeness of housewives or the pure shit my mother had spouted about something called “the feminine mystique” in the weeks leading up to her escape.

  “I’ve tried,” she said. “It doesn’t help. These are actually the best. I have problems with my feet. We all do.”

  “If you were housewives you could just sit around all day with your feet in footbaths full of Epsom salts,” I said, half sarcastically. I only knew about the existence of Epsom salts at all because they were something my mom had been really into. I didn’t really understand what they were.

  “Exactly,” DeeDee said. “We talk about that all the time.”

  We sat there in silence at the very edge of the surf, the cold water creeping up on our ankles every few seconds and then receding. I’d already discovered that when DeeDee started talking she could talk forever, but I was surprised to discover that she was pretty good at being quiet, too.

  I was playing a game with myself where I tried to time my breath to the in-and-out of the water, but the truth is that I’m terrible at holding my breath.

  “Can you explain Kristle to me?” I asked.

  “What about her?” DeeDee asked.

  “She confuses me,” I said. “For one thing, is she your sister or not? Do you guys hate each other or are you friends?”


  DeeDee didn’t reply, and I looked over at her curiously. I could see vague reflections of waves rolling in her eyes. Her expression was blank and very far away. She appeared mesmerized. I wondered if I should kiss her again; I felt slightly guilty that she had been the one to kiss me at Ursula’s. But it seemed wrong to kiss someone who may have forgotten I was even there.

  I was still debating it when she snapped back. “Ugh,” she said. A cigarette had appeared between her fingers, seemingly from nowhere, and she had to fuss with her lighter before it would light. “I hate the ocean. You want to, like, go somewhere?”

  “Like where?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “We could break into the mini-golf course.”

  I’m generally a law-abiding person. Not out of any sense of morality, but because I’m sort of a pussy. I don’t even like skipping class; it makes my stomach hurt. But I looked over at DeeDee, who wiggled her eyebrows in a way that was at once sarcastic and entreating, in a way that made lawbreaking seem totally worth it, and I was just like, “Okay.”

  She sprang up and dusted her beautiful ass off. She forged a curling and mysterious trail up the beach, cigarette burning from her fingers, and all I could do was smile and scramble behind her. It didn’t strike me then that a person can get lost even when following a path.

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  NINE

  “SO TELL ME about you,” DeeDee was saying. “I want to know everything.”

  The golf course was closed for the night—we’d crawled in through a hole in the chain-link fence—and now we were bathed in the eerie, bluish, almost underwater light of the garden lamps as we perched atop a fake lagoon overlooking the seventh hole of Cap’n Redbeard’s Hole-N-Fun. Between us, a fiberglass mermaid reclined in a way that was meant, I think, to be seductive but actually made it look like she had a problem with her spine. DeeDee had pulled a small flask of whiskey from her bra, and we were passing it back and forth.