September Girls (21 page)

And DeeDee stood, stripped off her white T-shirt and tossed it aside, slid her cutoffs to the sand, and picked the wedgie of her bikini from her ass (which I couldn’t help ogling). She sauntered ahead of me with a careless swing in her shoulders, but when she looked back to make sure I was following, I could see that her confidence was just a put-on. I moved to her side and she took my hand. “Forget Kristle. If you let me drown,
I’ll
fucking kill you,” she said.

I laughed. It was hard to take her too seriously. DeeDee looked like she belonged to the water.

“What is it about it that scares you?” I asked. We had made our way to the edge of the water, but DeeDee had paused abruptly, nervous again. “Besides that you don’t know how to swim.”

“Isn’t that enough?”

“It just seems like there’s something else,” I said.

“Oh, I don’t know. Just the fact that it goes on forever, I guess. The fact that you look out and you can see for miles and miles and miles but it’s not even the start, not even close. The fact that it’s beautiful. I know it sounds stupid, but it’s the same way that you scare me. If you want the truth.”

“I scare you?” I asked. But of course I was pleased. What I was really thinking was,
She thinks I’m beautiful?

“I read somewhere that the human eye can see exactly twenty-six miles into the distance on a perfectly flat surface. So when you look out into the ocean, the point where the water blurs into the sky is twenty-six miles away. The same as a marathon. Doesn’t that seem like a weird coincidence?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But it also doesn’t seem like it’s true.”

“Oh. Yeah. Maybe not. I don’t even remember where I read it. Probably
Her Place
—they run ‘Ripley’s Believe It or Not’ on the back page you know. Anyway, I choose to believe it even if it’s fake. Sometimes you can locate a truer version of the truth somewhere in a total lie. And don’t you think it would be cool to watch a marathon run on the surface of the ocean? Just to stand right here and watch the runners disappearing into nothing at the horizon point, racing straight off the edge of the world?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess it would. If it really worked that way.”

“Details, details,” DeeDee said. “Don’t stand in the way of a pretty thought, babe.”

Although we had stopped moving forward the tide was rising and was now lapping at our toes. DeeDee flinched for a second and gripped my hand tighter when the chilly ocean washed over our feet, but after the third or fourth time it had presented itself to us she seemed suddenly emboldened. When it withdrew again, DeeDee and I went with it, her pulling me forward.

The water had seemed calm from our blanket, but I could see now that it was getting choppy, and when we were in up to our knees, we had to brace ourselves not to be bowled over by the roiling of the waves. I almost lost my balance, and I felt DeeDee tense up again. She shuddered a little.

“Careful,” I said. “Just hold tight.”

I was surprised when she didn’t listen to me, instead dropping my hand to hold steady on her own. The ocean was at our thighs and I thought she’d want to turn back, but she took another step forward and then another, straight into a drop-off, where she began to paddle her arms easily, gliding still farther out, over a swell. I dove under the water to surface at her side, shaking my hair out. It was shallow enough to stand but only barely—when the waves rolled by, you had to sort of hop over them until they passed.

DeeDee was regarding me with amusement. “You look cute,” she said when we both had our bearings. “Like a wet dog.” She pushed my bangs from my eyes. “I guess the water’s not so bad after all. Maybe I can actually do this.”

“Duh,” I said. “Anyone can swim.”

“Not me,” DeeDee said. “ I might be able to go in the water for a second, but I definitely can’t swim. Trust me.”

“You’re safe with me,” I said.

“No,” she said. “No one’s ever safe, babe. The minute you think you’re safe is the same minute you’re screwed.”

“You’re safe,” I repeated, and in a moment of impulse I took her hips and kissed her, never feeling more sure of anything I’d ever done.

I knew she was wrong. Because in that moment, kissing her, our bodies pressed together as the water pulsed through us, I had never felt safer in my life. I felt an unfamiliar happiness swelling in my belly, a warm and twisting certainty. It didn’t matter what happened in the future. It didn’t matter what happened in a minute. It didn’t even matter what had happened already. I didn’t care about anything except right then, there with DeeDee in the water for the first time, us on a cloudy beach, content forever for a second. Then the second was over and we broke away from each other and reality intruded again, but only in the form of a cool and mostly pleasant breeze.

“I need to tell you something,” she said. “I should have told you before, but I didn’t know how. Actually, I still don’t know how.”

“What?” I asked. “You can tell me anything.”

DeeDee just looked at me, twisting her mouth and sort of wincing. “You’re going to kind of freak out,” she said. “I mean, you probably won’t even believe me.”

“What?” I asked, suddenly nervous.

Before she could say anything more, a wave came out of nowhere.

We’d been safe in the steady, gentle swells beyond the surf. The minute you think you’re safe is the same minute you’re fucked. And we were fucked. The wave was an angry one: I saw it towering two or three feet above my head, about to break right on top of us. “Duck,” I said. I reached for DeeDee but I couldn’t find her. Still, wherever she was, I thought I heard her mumble something about her father just before we were taken by the wave. Then we were wrecked.

The water boiled me: flipped me heels over head and pulled my back into a painful zigzag before pummeling me shoulder-first into a rough and prickly sandbar. I came up coughing, lungs waterlogged and sinuses stinging. I’d scraped my elbow and when I looked down, I could see it was bleeding. But I wasn’t worried about blood. I was worried about DeeDee, who was nowhere to be seen. She couldn’t swim.

I recovered quickly and scanned the shore for DeeDee, hoping to see her lying safe (if bruised) in the sand. She was not. Using my hand as a visor, I turned again to the sea. At first I saw nothing, but then I shifted my focus to a more distant point, and there she was. Barely.

I had no idea how she’d gotten out so far, but I could see her head bobbing in the water, just beyond the waves. She was sputtering and flailing, gasping for breath.

“DeeDee,” I screamed. Or tried to scream—it came out as just a cracked and hopeless wail that I knew couldn’t come close to reaching her. Even if it mattered.

So even though I’m barely a swimmer myself, I dove back into the water and swam. I pushed hard, trying to remember the swimming lessons I’d neglected to pay attention to when I was ten years old. Somehow, I found a reserve of strength within myself, a well of technique that I’d never known I’d had. I felt supercharged. Several times since I’d gotten here, I’d thought I’d felt hands grasping at my legs, trying to pull me under. This time, I felt the same thing, and I realized that they weren’t trying to pull me at all. Something—or someone—was helping me.

When I caught up with her, she was treading water helplessly, her head thrown back, face barely suspended above the surface of the water, eyes barely open. “DeeDee,” I said, wrapping my arm around her limp body. “What the hell are you doing?” She looked up at me, startled.

“Sam?” DeeDee was surprised to see me. “It was so weird. We were just standing there talking and then . . . how did we get so far out? It’s fucking freezing!”

“Come on,” I said. “Relax.”

“I can’t even swim!” DeeDee said. And as it dawned on her what was going on, she suddenly started struggling, paddling her legs furiously and thrashing around in my arms. She began to cough up water.

“Shh,” I said. I piled her hair on top of her head with my free hand. I took the wet strand that was stuck to the side of her face and tucked it behind her ear. Her breathing got slower. “Just float on your back. I’ll float with you. Just relax. We’ll be fine.” DeeDee halfheartedly tried to push me away, but I held her tight.

“Come on,” I whispered. I let her go, rolling onto my back as an example. I looked her in the eyes until she followed my lead, and I reached out and touched her shoulder and we floated back to the shore, like that, wave by wave until we could stand, and soon we were back on the shore floundering in the cold of Kristle’s glare.

“What the fuck is this?” Kristle said, before we’d even stood up. Jeff was standing beside her with his arms crossed awkwardly across his chest, looking off to the side. “DeeDee can’t swim, dipshit.” And then, pulling DeeDee up by the hand, “What the fuck were you fucking thinking?”

“You know what I was thinking,” DeeDee said. “You know exactly what I was thinking, so leave me alone.”

That was when Kristle slapped her. Hard. The sound of her open palm stinging DeeDee’s face was louder than it should have been; it echoed up and down the beach, and I could see vacationers turn to stare.

“Hey,” I said, lunging for Kristle, but Jeff had already pulled her away.

“Okay, okay,” Jeff said. “Enough. Everything’s fine.”

“It’s not,” Kristle said. “Everything is so not fine.”

DeeDee took off running. I moved to follow her, but Kristle grabbed me by the elbow. “Let her go,” she said, still glaring. “I want to talk to you.”

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HarperCollins Publishers

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BECOMING

It takes us a while to find our bodies. When we first arrive here, we are shifting and blurry at the edges, changing from moment to moment. We have to become something. So we take out our knives and carve ourselves into something that they will find becoming. We chisel and etch ourselves into the form that we will find the most useful.

We page through magazines and scrutinize the women on television, trying to find the perfect formula. We agree on generalities but sometimes argue about specifics: the ideal proportions, the right curves. We pay careful attention to the men on the streets, watching to see which way their heads turn, where their eyes drift. What makes them give in.

And so we give ourselves breasts and hips and round, perfect asses. Shining hair, glittering eyes.

We could look like anything, but we settle in this body until it becomes familiar, if not exactly our own. We might prefer a different appearance, but this is the costume we have chosen. We clothe ourselves in the shortest shorts, the tightest T-shirts. We paint our nails like Kim Zolciak. We wear things that glitter. We glitter too.

This is not beauty. We would be beautiful in any shape: our beauty is immutable. This—this is just how we get what we want.

But sometimes we feel ourselves losing our grip on the borders of our form. We find ourselves confused. What was that disguise again? We have to struggle to keep our shape.

And sometimes, more rarely, we see someone looking straight through us as if he is peeling away our mask, as if he is glimpsing what is truly beautiful: the part of us that is infinite and fiery and dark. He is seeing our strength. He is seeing our knife.

We are still becoming. But becoming what?

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HarperCollins Publishers

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TWENTY

THEY WERE IN the water: there were hundreds of them—maybe thousands, maybe more—lined up hip to hip at the edge of the surf, stretching in a line for as far as I could see. It was after midnight, and I was standing on the outcropping of rocks that overlooked their secret cove. Under the full moon, the shoreline on the cove seemed to have expanded to accommodate infinity.

I had my flashlight with me, but I didn’t need to use it. The girls were glowing. Or. Maybe glowing isn’t the right word.

Maybe none of it is the right word. Because to call them girls wasn’t quite accurate either. It was them, for sure—the Girls, I mean, a whole army of them—but tonight they were different. They were all naked, their shining skin rippling with the sway of the water, in and out and in and out, half-submerged in the shallows, pointing to a horizonless horizon. Their hair was fanned out behind them in the sand in tangled clumps, no longer blond but black and iridescent, like seaweed smushed up with gasoline and tar. Every now and then one of them would stretch a little, or splash her legs—if they were even legs—but mostly they were motionless.

And they were buzzing: bluish and bright in the moonlight, like the flicker of a television in the crack under a closed door.

There was no reasonable explanation for the fact that they were glowing. The moon was full and bright, yes, but that wasn’t it. It occurred to me that they were lit from within. When I squinted a little, I saw that their legs were shining most of all; they seemed to be covered in something shiny and electric, something throwing sparks. When I squinted a little more, I saw that they were covered in scales.

DeeDee was here, I was sure. I could feel her presence as a tingling in my chest. But I didn’t bother looking for her; I knew it would have been impossible to pick her out. I began to feel almost dizzy.

The girls in their repose appeared more alike than ever now, as if in a mirror: enchanted, shattered. From where I stood, they were now so much the same that I had an understanding that they were all part of the same being.

Or something.

I knew that I was not supposed to be seeing this. I could tell, somehow, that it was a secret beyond secrets. But I also knew, in some way, that there was a reason I was allowed to be here, a reason I had made it here at all. In the dark on the beach in the secret cove that DeeDee had once taken me to, the Girls were revealing themselves to me in a form that was, if not true, then as true as I could understand. If they had wanted this to be secret, I wouldn’t have been able to find their beach tonight.