September Girls (29 page)

“You have to do it,” she said. “Find her. It’s gotta be you, babe.”

I couldn’t see Kristle anymore, but I knew she was moving just outside of the frame. She was going to the cove.

“I know,” I said. “But what about you?”

DeeDee sighed. “Listen. She’s the one who found me,” DeeDee said. “She’s the one who gave me clothes. She’s my sister. She’s me and I’m her. You have to do it. Just try not to think of it as some big deal, you know? Think of it like you’re doing it for me.”

I looked at DeeDee, then back up the shore into a distance I couldn’t see, where I could picture Kristle venturing forward, her feet aching, a traveler now as always, embarking on a new and strange journey, alone for the first time since she’d arrived here. She had always seemed a lot of things to me, but never lonely. There was something I couldn’t bear about picturing her like that.

So I went after her. When I found her, she was standing at the rocky barrier at the edge of the cove, staring up at it, her hands on her hips like she was trying to summon the strength to start climbing. “Hey,” I said. I was sort of expecting her to jump or something, but she didn’t; she just turned around and gave me a stupid, embarrassed wave.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” she said. “I knew you’d come after me. You’re actually kind of predictable, you know?”

“Yep,” I said. This was it. I hadn’t thought to be nervous. I hadn’t actually put much thought into what I was going to do. But now here I was, and I was scared. “So, uh,” I said. “Okay, then. Here we go.”

I was blushing as I pulled my shirt over my head. Kristle just let out a halfhearted giggle. Her face was hard to interpret. Suddenly I wasn’t totally sure it was even her. It could have been any of them. She could have been all of them.

“Put your shirt on,” she said. “I’m not going to have sex with you.”

“Why not?” I asked. “It’s the only way.”

“’Cause I think you’re gross.”

She must have seen my face fall. “I’m kidding,” she said. “You’re totally a hot little number. I’m not because I’m just not.”

“Don’t you want to live?” I asked.

“Yes,” Kristle said. “But I won’t do it.”

“You will,” I said. “Come on. It’s not a big deal. It’s worth it.”

“It’s not,” Kristle said. She folded her arms at her chest. “I can’t. It’s too fucked up. It’s what he wants. I don’t want to give him the satisfaction. It’s starting to seem to me that the best way to break a curse is just to ignore it.”

“He?”

“Our father. The Endlessness.”

I was disgusted by the whole thing. All of this. It occurred to me that I probably wouldn’t even be able to pop a boner to get the job done anyway. Or maybe I would; it’s one thing I’ve never had an issue with. But I’d never been in a situation quite like this.

“Kristle,” I said. “This is what DeeDee wants.”

“I know,” she said. “I knew she’d send you. I felt her do it. But I made up my mind a long time ago, okay? Or a little while ago, at least. Anyway, I’ve been thinking, and here’s the thing: I’m pretty sure it might not work anyway.”

“What do you mean it wouldn’t work? How can it not work? Isn’t the whole point of things like this that they have rules? That they
work
?”

“The whole point of curses is that there are always loopholes. They’re always trying to trip you up. Where do you think that ‘be careful what you wish for’ thing came from? Sneaky genies—duh. And we’ve never totally understood the curse, you know. It’s not like we have it written down anywhere or anything; we haven’t had a chance to have our lawyers review it. But the older I get—the closer I get to, you know”—she gestured at the ocean—“this—it’s like my mind is expanding or something. I’m already starting to leave my body. It’s like I’m starting to have a deeper understanding. I’m losing my human self, becoming more whatever I was before. Things that didn’t make sense are starting to seem more and more obvious. Not that obvious is probably the right word. The point is that we’ve been operating under the assumption that sex with someone like you is all it takes. I don’t think it is. It’s just a feeling I have, you know; I could be wrong. But I think there has to be something more than plain old sex. There’s another component, there has to be. For it to work.”

“Well what then? What else does there need to be? What
component
?”

“You tell me,” she said. “I think you’re the one who knows. I’ll tell you this, though. I kind of don’t even think the
sex
is the most important part. I think it’s important, okay, sure, but it seems to me that it’s just the last step. It’s dotting the
i
. Fuck, who knows?”

Just make sense, I wanted to say. Just tell me what I need to do. I had been angry all summer, angry since we had gotten here, all at something I couldn’t identify. Now I wasn’t mad anymore and I missed it. Anger was a tool to get you what you wanted, and without it I felt powerless. So I tried to summon it back. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I couldn’t find it. It was like someone asking you your name and being unable to come up with a good answer.

“You have to live,” I said. I meant to shout it, but it came out nearer to a whisper. Still, even whispering, my voice bounced off the waves and hit me in the gut. “What about DeeDee? Fuck, what about Jeff? What about the whole fucking world? You’re just going to give up all of this?”

“It’s not the world,” Kristle said. “And I’m not giving up. We don’t even actually know what happens next. We’ve only been speculating.” And then: “Come on. Dude, you know what you need to do. And it doesn’t involve me.” She started for the rocks, and I tried to stammer out a good-bye, but couldn’t find one. Then I remembered what I had in my pocket.

Suddenly, I knew exactly why I had found it, and who it was for.

“Wait,” I said. “I have a birthday present for you.” And I dug into the pocket of my shorts and pulled out the mirror I’d found buried on the beach during the hurricane. I held it in my hand for a moment and looked at it. It was glowing and oil-slick iridescent, pink and green and black, and I realized it wasn’t made of silver or any other metal but of something that can probably only be found at the bottom of the ocean. I’d been carrying it with me everywhere I went since I’d found it without knowing why. I didn’t actually want to give it away. But I handed it to her anyway.

“Take this,” I said, standing there with my open palm outstretched. “It’s for you.”

She looked at it for a second and seemed to hesitate. Her mouth twitched with recognition and then again with disbelief.

Kristle took the mirror, clicked it open, and held it up. As she stared at herself, she looked at first curious, then astonished, and then troubled. I saw a flicker and a spark and then a flame ignite in her. She stayed like that for a minute, and then laughed with pleasure and surprise. But tears were also rolling down her cheeks now.

She flicked the mirror closed and palmed it, dropping her hand back to her side. She tossed her hair and shrugged. “You’re fucking sweet, Sam. Okay, I guess what I mean to say is that I fucking love you.”

“What did you see?” I couldn’t help asking.

“Nothing,” she said. “Well, a lot of things, but nothing I’d never seen before. Nothing I hadn’t realized by now. Still. I love it. I’ve been looking for it. It’s pretty much the best present you could have given me. I think it belonged to our mother when she was younger. She must have sent it to us.”

Then she leaned over and kissed me, on the lips, closed mouth but lingering, slick and sweet with strawberry-kiwi gloss. It was a kiss for friendship.

When she pulled away, she looked different. I couldn’t identify what it was that had changed, but she seemed more solid, somehow. When I’d kissed her on the deck on the night that was supposed to have been her birthday, her face had seemed to shift before my eyes, rearranging itself as I took it in, like one of those sliding puzzles. Now it had settled into place. It was just a feeling. I opened my mouth to say something, but she put a finger to my lips. I noticed that her nails were unpainted; they were short and jagged like she’d been biting them.

“Shhh,” she said. “I already said good-bye to your brother. But say good-bye to him for me anyway.”

“What about DeeDee?” I asked.

“Dude,” Kristle said “You two are on your own now. I don’t know what you need to do. I thought I did and now I don’t anymore. But you’ll do the right thing. Even if you don’t, she will. She’s always been different, you know. We’re all supposed to be the same, but we’re not really, and DeeDee’s always been the most different of all. More confident or something. Angrier, maybe, although who could be angrier than me? It doesn’t matter. From the minute she got here, I knew she would be the one who would get to leave in one piece. Even if I didn’t want to admit it.”

We just stood there. “All righty,” she said. She looked at her watch, and then laughed a silent laugh when she realized she wasn’t wearing a watch. She slapped me on the ass and then cocked her head, looked me up and down with a happy smirk, and let the mirror drop to the sand. It spun through the air like in slow motion as it fell, catching the moonlight and whirling it around. I looked down to where it had fallen, thinking I’d bring it to DeeDee, but it had disappeared.

“Nah,” Kristle said, reading my mind. “She doesn’t need it. I don’t think she ever did. Leave it for someone who does.” Then she walked off toward the water.

That was the last time I saw her. Or at least I think it was. Maybe it was my imagination, but as she walked away, even though it was impossible, I almost thought I heard her whispering in my ear.
My mother is the Deepness. My father is the Endlessness. I am something else. You will see me again in commercial breaks and in the bridges of songs and the change of seasons and in the moments just before sleep. You will see me in the spaces between.

I knew less about love than I had when I’d gotten to this place. Not that I’d known much then, either; honestly I hadn’t really thought about it a lot until I’d met DeeDee and Kristle. But the more I’d thought about it the more I’d gotten tangled up in what it all really meant, and while at the beginning of the summer I think I would have been able to identify at least two or three incontrovertible facts on the topic, I no longer felt equipped even for that. Summer was ending.

The one thing I knew was that I loved Kristle. It was unexpected. It occurred to me just as she was walking away from me, as I heard her alien voice in my head. I didn’t know what it meant. But there are a lot of different kinds of love, right?

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

RAPTURE

Before we leave this place, we wade into the water one last time. Or maybe it’s for the first time. Ankles, thighs, hips, chests, waves crashing around us. We feel the weather in our eyelashes, the summer in our hair. We feel the cold air on our bare shoulders. Then we don’t.

Our younger sisters are waiting just beyond the waves to encircle us as we enter the deep. They grasp at our green and floating hair. They run their slimy fingers curiously along the curves of our breasts and kiss us tenderly at our necks. Our lungs fill with water. Bubbles swirl around us as the moon shines in from the surface like light shining into a dusty bar during daytime. Our sisters bat at the bubbles and laugh, and we clutch our chests, beginning to panic.

Our sisters know nothing. They don’t even know that almost every one of them will someday be in our place. They’re too young to understand. But we know, now. We know almost everything, now. (Almost.)

We know that we aren’t joining them. We know that we aren’t staying here. We are going where the forgotten ones have gone: Donna, Kelly, Brenda. The L’Oréals. The ones whose names we can no longer summon. We don’t know where we are going, but we are not going home. We will never go home. We are on our way to elsewhere. We feel like we are drifting off to sleep.

Our father is the Endlessness. Our mother is the Deepness. Our brothers are Speed and Calm. We didn’t know who we were. Soon we will find out.

We leave this place by wading into the water one last time. Our sisters encircle us. They reach out for us in underwater slow motion, but we understand that it’s simple fascination that draws them to us rather than affection. Our eyes begin to close. We feel our muscles slackening. And just as we’re about to drift off, they begin to swarm us—what suddenly seems like hundreds of them coming from every direction, the water pulsing with their excitement—and they lean in, all together, to whisper our true name into our ear. The name we had forgotten. The name we were never even sure we had. And our eyes pop open. We gasp in recognition with our last fist of air. Even though it’s not possible, I speak.

“No,” I say. “My name is Kristle.”

Then I’m gone.

I am not returning to the water. I was banished from this place long ago; it is no longer my home. If it ever was. I have no home now, and home is not where I’m going. But this is not death, either, not in the way we understood it before. That would be punishment, and the punishment is over. My father no longer has any power over me.

I know this because the last thing I see is my mother’s face, a face I thought I had forgotten but which I remember as soon as it appears to me. It isn’t what I expected, not how I imagined it all the times I tried to imagine and not the face that sometimes used to come to me in dreams.

It’s a face and it is faceless; there is no nose, no mouth. My mother’s eyes are filled with the reflection of a universe of stars. She is beautiful, but it would be easy to call her ugly or at least terrifying. She holds no knife.

She is covered with tattoos upon tattoos, her skin so black that it circles back to brilliance. Every one of them bears another legend. I am not scared.