September Girls (25 page)

But I’d forgotten that Sebastian was Sebastian. It only took him a few seconds to work some kind of magic with the bouncer, and then we were walking inside the club, where we got ourselves beers and stood in the corner, watching the crowd swell and shift around us, watching the girls waving their arms in the air, flashing their midriffs and tossing their hair, laughing and slugging drinks. Sebastian and I didn’t really say much to each other; he seemed as much at a loss for what to do next as I was. But after a few minutes, he shrugged and took a last chug of his drink before plunking the glass down on the bar. “Dude. I’m gonna see what’s up in this place,” he said. “I’ll find you later. Don’t get in too much trouble.”

I waited for him for a while, drinking beer after beer—feeling bold, I’d started experimenting with fruity microbrews—until I was definitely buzzed, and then, when it seemed like I’d given him plenty of time on his own, I went to find him.

I squished into the center of the dance floor, where I found myself in a mass of bodies that twisted and pumped around me as they threw themselves into one another and into the air, all operating as one big indistinguishable organism.

The music was nothing I’d ever heard before, just a swirling funnel of guitars and synths and voices that pushed forward into someplace new and then looped back on itself. I felt like I was staring out the end of a long tunnel, and realized I was probably drunk.

Then I was dancing. I don’t know how I knew how to do it or anything, but my body was moving itself. Driven by the pulsing around me, the thump of the bass that now seemed to be coming from inside my chest.

I closed my eyes and kept going.

The strobe was flashing on the backs of my eyelids, and then it was as if they weren’t closed at all. It was as if I was watching myself from above, pink and green flecks whirling on my face, the vapor from the smoke machine curling at my feet, my beer sloshing as my shoulders rocked and swayed, and the music just shooting through me.

I lost track of where one song ended and the next one began, of where I ended and the music started.

I felt beautiful, like a battery absorbing lights and sound and sweat and rhythm and throwing it back out into the crowd.

It was sort of like being in love, I think—but a different kind of love than most people usually talk about. I was in love with everything and with nothing. I remember feeling very far away from myself, but more myself than ever too.

Eventually Sebastian found me, alone and just moving and not caring who saw me or what they thought. He tapped me on the shoulder and I turned to face him, but kept dancing, unashamed, before slowing to a stop as he looked me up and down with a bemused smile that suggested that he thought I’d gone completely nuts. “Dude,” he said. “This place kind of sucks. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

So we left together and called Sebastian’s sister, who was annoyed to have to take us home so early. She lectured us the whole way about “knowing our limits” and “pacing ourselves.” The next morning I had expected to be wrecked, headachy and hungover, but I was fine.

But the feeling I’d had when I was dancing that night, alone and surrounded by all those people—the feeling that I was trying to reach out to another, truer version of myself across some kind of infinite and unbridgeable divide—remained with me. It was the same feeling I had on the beach in the hurricane, gazing into the shell mirror I’d dug from the sand.

I was looking at myself with this sadness and hunger and love that was all mixed together and shaken up until it was all basically the same thing. And the image I stared at was shedding layers, just sloughing them off. I forgot about my parents, about the beach and the hurricane, and even about the mirror itself. I forgot about DeeDee.

I forgot everything except the person that stared back at me, stripped to an essential but incomprehensible core and wishing that I could be that person.

I don’t know how long I stood there, just looking at myself in the mirror, caught up in the weird rapture of knowledge, the drunkenness of unexpected recognition. But after a while I felt water at my thighs and looked down and saw that the hole I was standing in had entirely filled. I climbed out and looked up and down the beach—or what was left of it.

It was just gone. It had been swallowed by the storm.

Then I felt the wind, in the form of falling on my ass. I was swept over backward onto the sliver of mud that was still left to me. When I tried to stand, I stumbled a little and then fell right back down. Well fuck, it was a hurricane after all. Had it just started? Or had I simply missed it up until now? It occurred to me that I didn’t even really know what a hurricane was. Wasn’t there supposed to be lightning or something?

I sat there, stuck, trying to survey the beach with the wind and rain in my eyes. Somehow, mysteriously, the water had risen so high that the mud I sat was the only spot as far as I could see—from the ocean to the battered outcrop of the dunes—that remained above the flood. Of course I couldn’t actually see that far, so it was hard to know for sure. But at least for now it seemed that I was stuck. Worse, it seemed that it was only a matter of time before the water got me, too.

I figured I had to try to get to the dunes, although with the wind so strong I couldn’t even get to my feet; it didn’t seem promising. But I was going to try to wade or swim or crawl until I could grab on to the dune grass and somehow climb to safety. I was just about to do it when I saw them coming for me.

It was DeeDee and Kristle, walking down the beach as if the storm was nothing, moving easily through the curtain of rain, totally unbowed by the gale that was keeping me on my ass.

They were both usually so afraid of the ocean, but now they seemed unbothered by the fact that it was taking over and that they were walking right through it. At first it looked like they were walking on the water, but as they moved closer I saw that they were following one of their unseen paths, their feet only finding purchase at the exact spots where the flood was at its shallowest.

They looked otherworldly. You couldn’t even see the sky through the weather, but even in the distance I could see the sisters clearly as they approached, like a separate image that had been overlaid on top of reality. Their hair was twirling around their bodies in twisty, jumping crowns of brilliant neon. Their gait was loping, their faces peaceful and resolute. It was impossible to tell how far away they were; their proportions relative to the landscape were all out of whack, their faces big as hovering moons, their eyes piercing green, green, green through the trouble.

I could hear them speaking like they were right next to me, like they were whispering in my ear—a trick, I guessed, of the howling wind. But they didn’t sound like themselves. They were speaking with one voice, a voice that was low and droning and cool:

Our mother is the Deepness. Our father is the Endlessness. Our brothers are Speed and Calm. We are . . .

I’d had the mirror in my hand the whole time I’d been sitting here. Though I’d half forgotten it, I’d been clutching it so hard that my palm was beginning to hurt. Without thinking, I shoved it into the pocket of my swimsuit.

We have always known you. We knew you the moment we saw you. We will know you the next time. You will always break our hearts.

They were coming to rescue me. And one moment they seemed miles in the distance, and then they were just a few paces off, wading through an ankle-deep tide. “What the hell are you doing out here?” DeeDee said. Her voice was louder than it should’ve been, but at least it sounded like her again.

Kristle didn’t say anything. She looked frightening, fierce and alien, as she reached out and pulled me to my feet.

“Here. Come.” As my hand touched hers I felt a warmth coursing through my body. I found that now I could stand without being knocked down.

“How did you find me?” I asked.

“The hurricane told us,” Kristle said. She smiled like it was a joke, but I had this weird feeling it might not have been. “Half of this will be gone tomorrow.”

“Half of what?” I said.

“Come on,” she said.

We walked home together, through the storm. It was strange passing through it with them; I had the sensation of moving through an illusion. I could tell that they felt it differently, though. They weren’t talking anymore, but they seemed invigorated by every step we took.

The beach churned, the waves resembling a looped newsreel of buildings collapsing under the weight of a wrecking ball. The dunes lay flattened and panicked and almost invisible. There was no distance or horizon. Just rain and rain and wind and waves and more rain and wind.

“It’s the eye,” Kristle remarked when we turned the corner into our cul-de-sac, past the Seashell Shoals sign. I looked into the sky and realized she was right; the sky was white, and a ray of sun pierced through a break in the clouds, streaking my face. The rain had stopped around us. The wind had stopped too. There was a stillness.

I was tempted to whisper.

Kristle stood there, hands in the pockets of her soaking shorts, looking off with a blank expression like she’d forgotten who she was or how we’d gotten here. I looked at her for a minute, wondering what I was supposed to do, but DeeDee just motioned for me to leave her.

“What were you doing out there anyway?” she asked. “Were you looking for something?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and it was basically the truth. Then we were back at my house. It was still standing.

“Thanks for saving me,” I told DeeDee at the end of the driveway, which was surprisingly still standing. “I don’t know what would have happened to me. How did you do that?”

“It’s not important, babe. None of it is. Just be with me,” she said. “It doesn’t matter how. Please?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

The calm of the eye felt like its own kind of chaos. The black clouds whirled in a ring, and we were in the center of it, standing in a small bright circle.

The world moved just a tiny, undetectable fraction of a light-year closer to the sun. We were all of our different selves. DeeDee was beautiful, inscrutable, prickly and wise and angry still. She was a mermaid, complete with tacky hot-pink shells on her boobs. She was a girl. She was with me.

“Okay,” I said. “Fine.”

I still had the mirror in my pocket. I’d forgotten it already.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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GIRLS

We are not girls. At least, we don’t think we are. Girls do not do what we do.

Once a month at the full moon, from June to September, we make our way through the dunes, across the sand and rocks to our beach.

There, we undress wordlessly and venture into the water as our bodies begin to transform.

We set our knife to the side, where it lies angry and glittering, waiting for us to pick it up again.

We shed our skin and find scales, oily and hard and slick. We shed answers and find questions.

We lie in the tide and let the waves wash over us. It feels good, this small taste of the home we can’t imagine returning to. This is how we feed the summer. What would become of it if we just stayed home?

We can’t do that. We need it as much as it needs us.

But the water is cold. It is endless. It reminds us as much of our father as of our mother. We know what’s down there. We know how dangerous it is. Still, we don’t move.

We lean back and feel the deepness creeping on us as the tide rises. We feel it first at our ankles and calves and then between our thighs. We feel it lapping at our breasts. Our arms and legs twist and contract, curling slowly into slimy tentacles that sink themselves into the sand like the roots of a tree.

The world rushes through us. We are peaceful. We are as deep and black as space. Staring up at the stars, we see only our own image reflected back at us.

We are infinite and we are ravenous.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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TWENTY-FOUR

IT WAS BRIGHT and hazy on the beach. Figures more than a handful of paces away appeared first in formless silhouettes and then emerged from the cloud of distance like they were climbing down out of a spaceship, still steaming from a fiery entry into the atmosphere.

As they got closer they gained color, took shape. They kept on walking, drifting through the end of July and into August. Out past the pier, more figures floated into view.

DeeDee and I were sitting on a blanket, watching them appear and then disappear and appear again, each time with different bodies, different lives. She was in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, and I had just come in from the ocean and was salty and sore from swimming. I had my arm draped around her shoulder and she was leaning into me in an easy slump.

Summer was moving along to a slow finish, but there was still time left. For now we could put it aside.

So DeeDee was saying something funny, and I was probably laughing. Kristle and Jeff were playing a game with a Frisbee that involved chasing each other in circles, laughing hysterically, and then tackling each other into the sand, where they would lie, pawing at each other, before picking up the Frisbee and repeating it all over again. Dad had dragged a beach chair to the edge of the water, where he was reading
Her Place
as the waves came in and out.

Somewhere out in the water my mother was swimming a backstroke. All I could make out of her were her fingers surfacing and sinking in a windmill. She had been at it for ages.

The damage from the hurricane hadn’t been so bad. Most of the buildings had survived, and news of what hadn’t had been accepted by the people who lived here as the inevitable way of the world. Around here, where everything already hung precariously over the ocean’s edge, a thing’s very existence guaranteed its eventual destruction. Life would be washed away, then built over basically the same as before, then washed away again.