September Girls (12 page)

“Huh,” DeeDee said. “That sucks.”

“The craziest part is she’d deleted her Facebook profile.”

“When did it happen?”

“I dunno, like six months ago.”

“Oh,” DeeDee said. “Sorry. That sucks.”

“What about your mom?” I asked again. “Where is she? Is she dead?”

“No. Not really. It’s hard to explain. She’s
around
, I guess. She’s just very distracted or something.”

“Come on,” I said. “Tell.”

She dodged the question. “I want to show you something.” And before I could say anything back, the flask was in her bra again and she was dangling from the mermaid statue’s fins and clambering down the lagoon into an inch-high moat. “Come on,” she said. I jumped down and followed her across the golf course to the large pirate ship that faced out over the bypass. It was held aloft over the third hole by two fake rocks, creating both the vision of a spooky shipwreck and the more practical effect of a little tunnel for mini-golfers to putt through.

“Can I have your flashlight?” DeeDee asked.

I tossed it to her and she caught it, flicked it on, walked into the tunnel, and shone the light toward the underside of the ship. “Here,” she said after a second, and reached up, unlatching something. A trapdoor swung down.

“Help me in,” she said. She was a little shaky and so was I, but I managed to hoist her through the hatch, into the belly of the pirate ship. I had some trouble making it myself—upper body strength is not something I’ve been blessed with an excess of—but DeeDee grabbed me under my armpits when I was halfway in and pulled me the rest of the way.

It smelled like mildew. I sat up and crawled farther in, feeling my way and stumbling a little over some unidentified detritus. Behind me, I could hear DeeDee pulling the door closed.

I squeezed my eyes shut, and when I opened them again, DeeDee was reclining against the curvy wall of the ship’s interior. She’d tossed the flashlight to the floor, and the light was bouncing through the place in unexpected patterns, creating odd shadows. She was smiling, glowing warm and yellow, and I crawled over to where she sat, collapsing next to her. The ship was spinning a little—even though it was fake, I felt seasick.

“Look,” she said. She picked up the flashlight and began flashing it around so I could really see the place, which was small and narrow—not much bigger than a very large bathroom—and stuffed with junk.

It was everywhere. It was actually hard to tell what all the stuff was since it was scattered and piled in jumbled heaps, like that show
Hoarders,
but I could pick out clothes and comic books and crappy paperbacks and all kinds of stupid trinkets like votive candles and flatware and Fiestaware dishes. And looking closer under the traveling beam of the flashlight: crappy jewelry and high-heeled shoes and plastic action figures, their poor arms and legs twisted in uncomfortable directions. Propped against the wall at the opposite end was a large mirror with a crack straight down the middle.

“Look at this stuff,” DeeDee said. “Isn’t it neat?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Neat. Is all this yours?”

“Nah. I wish. It’s Nalgene’s. It’s her secret hideout. Like her
lair
or whatever
.
She works here, you know—at Hole-N-Fun, taking the money and handing out scorecards and clubs and stuff. Anyway, she hides in here sometimes. She doesn’t know I know about it, but I saw her climb up in here one day as the place was closing, so I waited for her to leave and then checked it out for myself. Sometimes I use it too. Like I’ll come in here just to hang out or to take a nap or whatever. Nalgene would murder me but I don’t actually care. It’s nice to have a place to be alone. It’s important. Next summer I’m hoping she’ll work somewhere else, and I’ll get to take over here and this’ll be mine.”

“Where’d she get all of it?”

“Well,” she said. “She has, um, this problem. There’s always been something a little wrong with Nalgene; Kristle says it’s low self-esteem, but why would her self-esteem be any different from the rest of ours when we’re all basically the same? Taffany thinks she’s just a little stupid, but I don’t know about that either. Whatever it is, she has, like, a shoplifting thing. You have to watch out; she’s always trying to pick something up. She doesn’t mean anything by it—it’s just what she does. She could be digging around in your pocket for a quarter or a piece of gum at the same time she’s hugging you. So I guess this is all stuff she stole. Or, you know,
found.
Or both. I don’t actually know where any of it comes from, but it’s got to come from somewhere, right? All I can say is that I guarantee she didn’t pay for any of it.”

“But what’s the point?” I asked.

DeeDee looked at me blankly. “What do you mean, the point?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Why bother having all this junk if you’re just going to hide it away and never use it? It looks like she’s never touched any of it.”

“The point is just to have it,” DeeDee said. “To own something.”

“Oh,” I said, still not really getting it.

“It makes a lot of sense to me,” DeeDee said. “When you’re all the same, all you have is what you own. And we don’t own a lot.”

“You don’t seem the same to me,” I said. “You and Kristle are nothing alike.”

“Don’t be so sure,” DeeDee said darkly.

“Wait. You still haven’t told me anything about you. I told you I peed in the sink and I told you all about my dumb mom. And you told me about Nalgene. But I still barely know anything about
you
.”

“Maybe there’s nothing to know,” DeeDee said. “Have you considered that?”

“No,” I said. “I reject that premise.”

“Fine,” DeeDee said. “Well maybe I need you to tell me, then.”

“Tell you what?”

“Something about myself. Anything. Just something.”

“You’re funny,” I said. “But you seem sort of angry about something too.”

“Funny,” she said. “That’s how I would describe you.”

And then she tossed the flashlight aside and I was kissing her. I don’t know, I mean, we were kissing. I’m pretty sure that I was the one who made the first move this time but I could be wrong. Even if I had been, it wasn’t something I did intentionally. It was just like we were sitting there looking at each other, and then we were kissing each other and it was a pretty equal thing.

It was different from when Kristle had kissed me. (Had that really even happened?) It was different from when I had kissed Sasha at that Halloween party too. Most of all, it was different from the silly, off-the-cuff kiss after karaoke, which I was pretty sure was really meant for James Taylor. Kissing DeeDee in the hold of the fake fiberglass ship, surrounded by all of Nalgene’s crazy plunder, I felt like I was on an expedition to the edge of the world. I felt life unfurling itself in lazy and salty spirals in the water below my feet, revealing itself as something I would never have guessed.

It was perfect.

And then DeeDee’s hand was on my boner, and I felt my spine straighten, my shoulders tense, my tongue stiffen in her mouth. I don’t know why I was so taken aback; I know that as a seventeen-year-old boy, a girl’s hand on my boner is supposed to be one thing that I cannot resist. And yes, it felt good. But my heart was pounding and, okay, I was afraid. So fucking kill me; I pushed her hand away.

“What?” she whispered, biting my ear.

“I don’t know,” I whispered back. “Not yet.” Jesus Christ. What was wrong with me?

“Okay,” she said, but then her hand was creeping up the front of my shirt.

“Can we just wait?”

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. I’m tired anyway. Let’s just sleep.” She gave me a warm peck on the cheek and let me go, curling herself into a ball in the bow. I moved behind her and wrapped my arms around her chest and she murmured something happy sounding, and the summery, saltwatery smell of her skin enveloped me as we drifted off together, forward, into whatever unknown ocean.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

OCEAN

We don’t know how to swim.

We don’t really even understand swimming. We see the Others in the water, flailing around, jumping and diving and flopping backward into waves, and we are confused. They call it swimming, but it doesn’t look like swimming to us. Maybe we’re mistranslating.

We have learned to use our bodies. We have learned to walk without wincing, to stand upright and put one foot in front of the other, to stumble from one place to the next. We have learned to do the other things required of us in this place, too.

But we have forgotten as much as we have learned.

We have forgotten the ocean: what it looks like from below the surface, the mysteries it holds.

We have forgotten how to navigate by the stars.

We have forgotten how to survive on salt. (Though we continue to enjoy salty food.)

We have forgotten almost everything.

The feeling remains, though. That is what we remember: The weightlessness in our toes and the velocity in our fingertips. The way the water once carried us, and how our destination always ended up lying somewhere halfway between our own desires and the intention of the ocean.

We remember waves and currents.

And we remember the knowing. The knowing that as deep as you travel, there is always a deeper wreck to be discovered.

The knowing of our own names.

The ocean frightens us now. We are frightened by how much we miss it. We are frightened as much by what we remember as by what we don’t. We are frightened by the way it sings to us, calling us back to depths we know we can no longer survive.

An ocean is large. It’s so large that it’s probably dangerous to think about its largeness for too long. This may be the reason that we are crazy. Spend too much time contemplating something beyond comprehension and one can start to lose what one had in the way of marbles.

You can see why we would be afraid. It’s too easy to get lost. Even just sticking a toe in is dangerous. And an ocean can swallow you, even when you can swim.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

TEN

I WOKE UP in Nalgene’s lair achy and dry mouthed and a little hungover. I guess we’d had more to drink than I’d realized. Plus I’d slept inside an attraction at a miniature golf course, which never helps. DeeDee was gone. I had also inexplicably managed to lose one of my socks.

I tried not to invest too much significance into her disappearance. She probably had to go to work. Or whatever. But I still felt sort of abandoned and stupid as I dropped out of the trapdoor at the base of the ship and onto the golf course, ignoring the stares of a vacationing family playing through the third hole, and walked right past Nalgene—who was occupied separating colored balls into canisters and not paying attention—out through the front entrance onto the beach road to head home.

No one was at the house when I got back, and my head was killing me, so I poured myself a giant bowl of Lucky Charms, sat down in front of
The Price is Right
, and was asleep in two seconds. I didn’t wake up until I heard Dad clanking around the kitchen after a long day’s treasure hunting. He was milling around the room, shirtless and whistling as usual, hauling this big-ass plastic bucket behind him.

“Wanna help me sort through the day’s spoils, Tiger?” he asked hopefully, wiggling his eyebrows.

“Are you talking to me?” I said, being unnecessarily prissy just for the fun of it. “No thank you.”

“Suit yourself.” Dad took his bucket and dumped it out over the dining table, all his scavenged metal crap clattering out in a messy pile. I couldn’t tell exactly what he’d scored, but it looked like a lot of aluminum cans and maybe a fork or two.

“Anything good?” I asked, curious in spite of myself.

“We’ll see,” he said. “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”

“Yes, but which man’s treasure is it?” I asked. “Yours? And if so, why exactly? To me those look like a bunch of sandy fucking Budweiser cans.”

Dad was hurt. “We’ll see,” he repeated. “Anyway, I hope you’re having fun at the beach. Tiger.”

“I am,” I said.

“Where were you last night?” he asked. I turned around, surprised.

“What do you mean?” I asked. Okay, obviously I knew what he meant, but I was still surprised.

“You think no one notices when you’re out all night?”

Actually I did think that. While my father had once been mostly normal—inquiring as to the state of my homework, smelling my breath when I came home from a party to see if I’d been drinking, objecting to me staying out all night with no explanation—those days felt like a very long time ago. In recent weeks I’d almost entirely forgotten that in addition to being an avid scavenger of metallic bric-a-brac, he was charged with the parental duty of keeping track of my whereabouts.

“Next time I’ll tell you,” I said, and I took a beer out of the fridge and went to sit on the porch, knowing there would be no objection. It was mostly for show. I didn’t even really want the beer.

As soon as I had time to actually sit and think, I was overtaken with humiliation at the events of the previous night. I had a sneaking suspicion that when a girl actually did finally deign to grab your hard-on that it was an unpopular and possibly completely pussified choice to ask her if she could please stop. No doubt she had fled in disgust—Kristle and Jeff were probably right this minute sitting with her and speculating about my potential homosexuality—and if I ever saw her again it would only be for long enough for her to look away awkwardly, trying to suppress a sneer.