September Girls (10 page)

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 him 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.”

“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?

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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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 know.” 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?”