September Girls (20 page)

She wasn’t doing it for tips or anything. There wasn’t really anyone tipping anyway. She was only doing it to amuse herself, which was easier said than done around here.

One night after we’d been going there a couple of weeks, my parents showed up. As in, they showed up
together
. Taffany was just starting to groove on “Dirty Mind” and then there they were, waltzing right in through the swinging doors like they were regulars at the place. Mom was laughing and looking up at Dad, nuzzling his shoulder, and he had his arm around her waist and this big-ass grin on his face. He was wearing a clean button-down shirt and had what was left of his hair combed; it was the first time I’d seen him dressed respectably in ages.

You could feel the room get weird as soon as they walked in. Jeff was across the bar with Kristle, and he thunked his whiskey down and furrowed his brow before throwing his head back to study the ceiling fan. DeeDee carefully set her cigarette in the ashtray and reached for my leg. She scrunched her mouth to one side of her face.

Even the people I didn’t know seemed to realize something was going on; I saw heads swivel to my parents and then to Jeff and finally to me, everyone with the same confused, concerned frown.

The only person who didn’t notice was Taffany. Because the music had kicked in and she was starting to dance for real now, eyes closed as she swung her hips and flung her hair back and forth across her face, ecstatically mouthing the words to the song.
You just gotta let me lay ya, gotta let me lay ya, lay ya, you just gotta . . .

Mom was waving at me across the room, smiling, and before anyone could do anything about it, she was dancing along to the song. It was just an awkward shuffle at first, her fists clenched at her chest and her elbows stretched out to her sides, but then my dad began his own soft-shoe and Mom upped the ante. She began to twirl and prance, pumping her fist in the air before putting her hands on her hips and bending over so to jiggle her ass.

I assumed my dad would be mortified, but he was getting into it too, clapping and spinning on one foot, bobbling his head back and forth and wiggling his shoulders, all without taking his eyes off my mother. I myself had no clue what the fuck was going on. After having loud sex the day after she’d arrived, they’d mostly been avoiding each other—although, thinking about it, it was true that in the last few days I’d noticed a certain thawing between them.

No one had ever danced while Taffany was dancing. But my parents had broken the seal. Soon Nalgene was dancing too, and then the rest of the Girls and even the few other people at Ursula’s; everyone was on their feet shaking their asses.

“Oh, fuck it,” DeeDee said. “We might as well too. I mean, right?”

“No,” I said. “In fact, I think I’m going to go home.”

At the other end of the bar, I could see Jeff resisting also, sitting resolutely with a frown on his face and his arms folded across his chest as Kristle tried to coax him to his feet. He was not budging.

DeeDee didn’t bother with trying to convince me. She just rolled her eyes and started swaying and waving her arms, and before I knew it, it was “I Feel For You.”

Fuck it,
I thought to myself, and then I was dancing too and everyone was dancing but most of all my parents, who were twirling and dipping and pogoing and pantomiming like they were the only ones in the bar.

And then they were kissing. They were really kissing; it occurred to me that I had never seen them kiss like that before. It was hard to say if I’d ever seen a kiss like that in my life, including in movies. Dad had Mom up against the bar, and she was leaning backward with her leg on the stool, her head cocked back, and her mouth on his. It was pretty gross.

Then I looked to my left and Jeff and Kristle were kissing too. And then I was kissing DeeDee. Tonight, with my mother’s dancing, something had come over all of us, and it suddenly felt right again. It
was
right.

It only lasted a minute, though, because soon the song was over and everyone kind of drifted back to their seats like none of it had happened in the first place. DeeDee’s cig was still in the ashtray, now burned all the way to the filter.

“What the fuck was that?” we said at the same time. Then we both laughed.

“Let’s go outside,” I said. “I need to get the hell out of here.”

So we wandered out of the bar, first onto the deck and then into the grassy plot of empty land between the beach road and the highway. It was before midnight—things happened early around here—but it felt later.

We stood and watched the cars speeding by. It was so muggy out that the beams of the headlights seemed to refract through the beads of moisture in the air into a million little rays that refracted again, and over and over, like the highway was filled with flying disco balls.

It didn’t feel like we were at the beach; if not for the smell of salt water we could have been on the edge of any shitty suburban subdevelopment. Yes, the beach was only a minute’s walk from here, but the strip mall was even closer. We were together, though.

DeeDee lit a cigarette and reached out her other hand for mine. She put her head on my shoulder. “That was nice,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

Starting to understand her was less like learning and more like forgetting. I was forgetting the DeeDee I’d created in my mind. Now, outside Ursula’s in the grass by the highway, she was just DeeDee. She was only herself.

That night, with the cars speeding past us, a few minutes after we’d kissed in the bar, DeeDee took my hand and I pulled her close to me and kissed her again, and this time she didn’t push me away. She seemed nervous, maybe, tentative. But she kissed me back. I ran my hands through her hair and then let my other hand drift to her boob. Then lower.

“Sam,” she said.

“Let’s just do it,” I said. “Let’s just do it.”

“Here?”

“At my place, obviously. Jeff’s gonna be with Kristle. My parents won’t even notice. You saw them in there. Who knows when they’ll even be home.”

She looked away.

“It doesn’t have to be this big deal or anything.”

“Sam,” she said. “Come on. It is this big deal. You know it is.”

“Why?” I asked. “You wanted to do it before. The night at the golf course. I know you wanted to. You would have. It was my fault. So let’s do it.”

“That was before. Things are different now. I’m different now. Everything’s different.”

“I know,” I said. “I know it is. That’s why we should do it. I want to. I’m not afraid anymore.”

Which was a lie, obviously. I was very afraid. I don’t even know what I was afraid of, but I was definitely afraid. But I was a lot of other things besides that too.

“It has this tendency to complicate everything. And I like things how they are now. Don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

“So let’s not fuck things up.”

“Okay,” I said. I was sincere; it was okay.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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LOSING

We have tried to leave this place—or should we say, this prison. We consider ourselves reasonably sneaky, but these islands are sneaky too. They will not surrender us.

The last one to try leaving was Taffany. It was at the beginning of this summer and she had just turned twenty: one year to go. It wasn’t much time, but all she wanted was to see something else before the end. Spend a year in another place, that’s all. Eat at a restaurant she’d never heard of. It would have been enough, she said. She had been talking about it for ages, but time was running out. She said, “What do I have to lose?”

Taffany decided to take a boat. There was some logic behind this choice: she thought that by traveling over water she could go unnoticed until it was too late to stop her. The water is still ours in some ways. And although our father will do anything to keep us, we still have our brothers and our mother on our side. We still have ourselves.

So Taffany got a raft, one of those inflatable ones, but the expensive kind—sturdy, with oars—from the store between the roads where they sell kites and sunglasses and T-shirts and tanning oil. The raft was stolen, so as to avoid detection. (Receipts and credit card statements are our father’s domain.) She brought nothing with her and left right away without saying final good-byes. A shady dip. We thought,
Well, maybe this will work.

Of course, we knew it wouldn’t. She was back by the evening. She had paddled for hours across the bay, and when she got to the other side, having never deviated from her course, she found herself just where she had started.

Tressemé took a car, a rusty old Topaz she’d saved for a summer to buy. She left in the middle of the night to avoid outbound traffic on the causeway. But just before she reached the bridge, the engine began to smoke. She kept driving anyway: she only had a mile to go. She could make it if she didn’t panic.

She didn’t panic. And still, the Topaz sputtered and died. When Tressemé opened the hood, water spilled out. It was filled with an ocean. She hitchhiked home. No one would take her across the bridge.

Tiara thought the easiest thing would be to walk. Tiara had been unusual: she too had fallen for an out-of-towner, but this one was a girl. This happens rarely and is not approved of. Love is against our laws as it is, but at least with a boy there are some pragmatic aspects.

The girl had gone home, back to her normal life. Tiara wanted to find her, if only to say good-bye. We wondered if the girl would even remember her, but we didn’t say it.

And what could go wrong with walking? There could be no room for mechanical disaster; Tiara would not be reliant on anyone else’s navigation as one would on a bus or a plane. She packed supplies for several days; she bought comfortable walking shoes from one of the outlets and gathered enough money to survive after her escape.

At the end of the summer, she caught a ride to Manteo, where her plan was to walk across the island and cross the Virginia Dare bridge on foot, finally landing on the mainland in Mann’s Harbor. She didn’t know what she was going to do once she got there, but she would figure it out. We are resourceful.

When her feet began to sting, she kept walking. When she couldn’t walk anymore, she swallowed her pride and crawled.

Tiara’s mistake was persistence. Everyone else had given up.

We found her in the sand, a few days later, lying in the parking lot of the Outback Steakhouse on the bypass, barely able to speak, unable to remember how she’d gotten there. She was never the same.

Still. Someone tries it every summer. Someone will try it again next summer. The stories become legend; they are passed along until they lose meaning. Someone always thinks she will be the one to outsmart him.

She thinks,
What do I have to lose?

But there’s always something.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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NINETEEN

WE WENT TO the ocean. DeeDee couldn’t swim and she was never really that excited about lying on the beach, but it was a Tuesday. She had the day off, and we couldn’t think of anything else to do. So now we were lying on an old blanket together, her flipping idly through an old paperback she’d found and me just napping, drifting in and out of wakefulness, every now and then turning to look at her when she thought I was still sleeping. I knew it was pushing my luck, but I wanted to go in the ocean. “C’mon,” I said again when she ignored me. “Let’s go for a swim. It’ll be fun.”

DeeDee flushed without looking up from the page she was reading. “I can’t swim,” she said. “I know it’s weird. I just can’t.”

“We don’t have to go in deep. Just up to our waists. It won’t even be swimming.”

She sighed, still pretending to be absorbed in her dumb magazine. “It’s not the
swimming
part I don’t like. It’s more like I’m afraid of the water. It’s just one of those things—it’s like, hereditary. Ask Kristle. Ask any of them. Don’t start.”

The day was hot and overcast. The sun had made cursory appearances over the course of the morning, but since lunch it had been coy behind a mountainous landscape of clouds. As the beach deepened in its monochrome, the dullness of the afternoon began to turn DeeDee more radiant, her hair and eyes burning in breathtaking relief against the gloomy backdrop. Lying in the sand in a white V-neck and denim booty-shorts, she cut through the gray like she was lit from an entirely different source, like the world was one of the doctored photos in her dumb magazine and DeeDee was the element that had been hastily dropped in.

“Come on,” I said. I rolled onto my stomach and leaned close to her face with the same eyes that had lured her onto the blanket on the sand. “Just get your feet wet. I won’t let anything happen.” I kissed her on the cheek and she dropped her book and laughed, finally looking up at me from a place somewhere far beyond a heavy veil of lashes and slanty Cleopatra eyeliner. “Okay,” she said, smiling tightly. Deep breath. “Fine. Let’s do it. Just make fucking sure I don’t drown, or Kristle’ll kill you.”

“I wouldn’t want to get on Kristle’s bad side, that’s for hell of sure. She looks like she’d cut a bitch for looking at her funny.”

“She would,” DeeDee said. “I’ve seen her do it. Blood everywhere, not a pretty sight. All because someone sent his fish sticks back to the kitchen.”

Since the Fourth of July, Kristle had become something like a normal person, had stopped staring at me and touching me inappropriately and climbing nude into my bed when I was sound asleep. Jeff, too, had forgotten to be mad at me and had started behaving like his usual obnoxious self again.