September Girls (4 page)

When we pulled into the Fisherman’s Net just a few minutes later, it turned out—despite Dad’s promises of an unprecedented dining experience—to just be any old roadside greasy spoon, undistinguished and vaguely seedy, silvered by weather. It was wedged haphazardly between the road and the ocean, constructed on stilts, half on the beach and half over the water, and from the angle it was pitched at I was unconvinced that it wasn’t about to fall right into the sea at any minute.

Outside the entrance a girl in black ballet slippers and a tiny pair of denim cutoff shorts was smoking a long, skinny cigarette. Her breasts were straining against the ribbed cotton of her white wifebeater; her hair was wild and tangled and a little bit matted. My dad let out a low whistle and elbowed me from the driver’s seat.

“Shut up,” I said. “You’re so gross.”

“Did I say anything?” Dad asked, grinding the car into park. I tried to pretend that he didn’t exist as we walked into the restaurant, right past the girl with the cigarette, whom I made a point not to look at because with Jeff right behind me in all his bronze, broad-shouldered glory there was no reason to even bother.

It turned out that the Fisherman’s Net took its role as a tourist trap very seriously. It was not content to just be a restaurant: stepping inside, you found yourself at a crossroads. To the right, through a swinging saloon door, the eating area. To the left, a pathetic gift shop the size of a medium-sized bathroom. “Gifts” seemed to include gum, magazines, T-shirts of questionable taste, crossword puzzle books, and, beneath a glass case, a bunch of tacky little figurines and things like sand dollars with tiny shells glued to the surface. (All of which added up to about twice as much seashell as I thought any person really needed in a single tchotchke.) Straight ahead, a turnstile led out to a pier that stretched into water.

Yet another blonde was halfheartedly manning the register of the gift shop. She was slouched behind the counter with her bare, dirty feet propped on the glass case, looking like the boredest person on earth as she flipped through a terrible-seeming women’s magazine called
Her Place
. Although she was sitting directly under a no smoking sign, she, too, was smoking a long, skinny cigarette. I found myself staring at her, and she looked up from her magazine and smiled. I looked away.

“Howdy,” Dad said to the girl. She looked at him like he was crazy. “We’re just going to grab a bite to eat,” he clarified, to which he received a confused half nod in response. But out of the corner of my eye as I turned to follow him, I thought I saw her wink at me. I brushed it off as just my imagination and decided to look into causes and symptoms of heatstroke when I got home.

We pushed through the saloon doors and took seats in the restaurant, which was decorated to suit a nautical theme. I could actually hear Dad’s stomach making angry gurgling noises from across the table. We all just sat there looking at one another. Even Jeff had nothing to say.

After we’d been waiting for several minutes in absolute silence, the waitress finally sidled up to us. She was angular and statuesque and had her hair piled on top of her head with a few ball-point pens in an elaborate origami. Her eye shadow gave her eyes an exotically trashy aspect, and her red spaghetti-strap tank was cut to reveal a supple, copious helping of cleavage in which a small necklace dangled, a curled seashell in sunset colors.

More seashells. Another blonde. She was standing there, poised to take our orders. We stared up at her expectantly. She stared back.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” Jeff said eagerly.

“I’m Crystal,” the waitress said. I was glad she had cleared up the pronunciation, because her faded plastic name tag read “Kristle.”
Like gristle,
I thought. The name tag had a blob of dried ketchup on it: a rancid comma. There’s nothing sicker to me than the smell of ketchup—dried ketchup especially—but I’ll be real with you. Stupid name and dried ketchup or not, she was gorgeous. Maybe a little tan before her time, but hot nonetheless.

“What can I get for you boys?” she asked, pulling one of her pens from her updo without disturbing it in the slightest. She had a slight accent—practically unidentifiable, but foreign for sure. I looked back down at my menu, still undecided between a burger and a steak and cheese—I was leaning toward the burger because I didn’t know about the wisdom of getting a steak and cheese in the American South—and that’s when I felt her hand on my shoulder. I looked up slowly and saw both my father and brother staring at me with expressions that were flipping between surprise, amusement, and
what the fuck
. Kristle gave my neck a tender squeeze.

“Got a little sunburn there,” she said. I couldn’t tell if she was making fun of me.

“Uh, burger,” I said, doing that thing where you stare straight ahead and look at a person at the same time.

“One burger,” Kristle said.

When she took my menu from me, her fingers brushed against my wrist, and I felt a tiny tingle shoot up my arm and into my chest.

After she’d walked away, my father made an exaggerated face like,
okay now
, and Jeff gave me a look of befuddled consternation.

When we were finished eating, my father and Jeff went down to look at the beach, and I paid a dollar to the gift shop girl for a ticket to the fishing pier. She took my dollar, reached into a drawer, pulled out a ticket, and ripped it in half before handing me the stub. As she gave it to me, it was like she let her fingers rest in my palm a split second longer than usual.

I took it from her, weirded out, and walked away without saying anything.

I walked out to the pier alone, past old grizzled fishermen with leathery brown skin and scraggly beards and those little hats and buckets of bait and everything. When I got to the end, I lingered against the side, just to look like I had some purpose for being out there, like maybe I was waiting for someone to deliver my fishing rod.

I watched my father and Jeff in the distance. They were in the sand together and were now standing and chatting. It was weird. I was so sick of my father, and the last thing in the world I wanted to do was talk to him, but seeing him and Jeff talking so easily I felt left out. It looked like they were having some kind of intense conversation, standing facing the water, Jeff with his arms folded high on his chest as he nodded thoughtfully, the wind whipping his hair in every direction and the late-afternoon sun glowing on his face. I wondered what they could possibly be talking about. Maybe Dad was still talking about how great the fucking french fries were “down here.” (Mine had been soggy and unremarkable.)

I watched them for a few minutes and finally—reluctantly—decided to join them. And when I turned around, I saw one of the girls from the restaurant standing behind me. Not Kristle, not the girl at the gift shop, but the girl who had been smoking out front when we’d walked in. She was just standing there, right behind me, not doing anything, just smiling and looking me up and down.

She was prettier up close than she’d looked earlier. Her eyes were green with gold rings around the pupils, and her nose was large and aquiline—the kind of nose most of the girls I went to school with would probably have been begging to have replaced. It made her more beautiful. Her breasts were just as unavoidable as before, and her hair was cascading down her back in clumped, luxuriously greasy tangles. Her shorts were unbuttoned and folded down at the waistband, revealing a half inch of her smooth, sharp hip bones.

“Hi,” I said. I wondered if it was a southern thing not to speak unless you were spoken to.

“Hey,” she said. She reached into the waistband of her cutoffs and pulled out a package of cigarettes. “Do you have a light?” she asked, placing a cigarette between her full and glossy lips. She had the same accent that Kristle had. It was soft and fluid and could have been French or Scottish or South African or anything really.

“No,” I said. “Sorry.”

“I think I have one anyway,” she said, and, without hesitation, pulled a hot-pink Bic from her pocket. She lit up and took a deep drag. “Do you want one?” she asked.

“No thanks,” I said.

She looked me in the eyes and smiled. “What’s your name?” she asked.

“Sam,” I said.

“Hey, Sam,” she said. “I’m DeeDee.”

“Hey, DeeDee,” I said.

She raised her eyebrows. “You’re cute.” She blew a puff of smoke into my face. “See you soon, I’m sure,” she said as she turned and walked away. “Thanks for the light.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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YOU

We have always known you. Before we even saw you, we knew you. We have known you every time. We will know you the next time.

You have been many things and many people. You have always been the same.

We wait for you every summer. We wait to see who you will appear as this time. The line of your shoulders, the arc of your smile. The things that you find funny and the things that trouble you. We are always surprised.

We are always surprised, but one thing is always the same. There is one thing we can count on. You will always leave us. You will always, always break our hearts.

Or is it just the other way around?

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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FOUR

AFTER A FEW days there was no question at all. The girls had taken notice. Everywhere I went, they smiled at me. They stared. They swiveled their hips a little more when I walked near, pushed their boobs up a little higher. Their hair was always tossing, tossing, tossing; their eyes sparked and pulsed like flakes of mica at the bottom of a creek.

It made me nervous.

It’s not that I minded the attention. I was as flattered and turned on as any person would be to have insanely hot girls staring at him wherever he went. I’d be sitting alone on the beach, putting on sunblock or walking to the store or whatever, and suddenly there would be this electricity in the air, and I’d look up and see a girl, unflinching, hair blowing behind her like in a music video, just staring, maybe with the hint of a smile, or, if not, with that fake-o insouciant pucker that people learn from watching television. They were always staring, always smiling, always daring me to make my move. They never came near me, though, and never said anything. They were waiting for me.

I don’t really like dares, even implied ones. I think if someone wants something from you they should ask directly. Anything else is just passive aggression.

So I did not make any move. I was suspicious. I didn’t know what to make of any of it. Girls had never looked at me like this before—they had always turned to Sebastian or Jeff or whoever first, with me as a second choice if not necessarily a last resort. Now, even with Jeff right next to me—even with him casually flexing his pecs for show—it was like I was the only guy left on earth.

If I was the only one who had noticed what was going on that might be one thing—you could chalk it up to my imagination, hubris, wishful thinking, whatever. But Jeff saw it too. In fact, it was pissing the hell out of him. He was used to commanding all attention.

“You wearing some kind of special cologne or something?” he asked. “You’re working some crazy voodoo on those bitches.” He was trying to sound obliging, but there was annoyance in his voice. In the week since our arrival at the beach, he had started primping before we left the house, taken to wearing sleeveless shirts and swimming laps in the ocean out beyond the breakers every day, going for jogs—the whole drill. He was trying to keep himself in fighting form, maybe attract a few glances of his own. It was no use. The girls wanted me.

Okay, maybe I’m overstating things a little bit. It wasn’t
all
of them. The thing that’s hard to explain is that there were other girls too. There were girls, and then there were Girls. You could tell the difference. It’s hard to say exactly what separated them, except that the
other
girls were just regular girls—I mean, the kind I go to school with. Some were pretty; some were busted. Some were fat; some were thin; some were a little of both. Blondes, brunettes, whatever. They were on vacation. They were with their families, with their boyfriends, walking along the beach, whatever, and they would be leaving in a week or two. Those girls didn’t pay any attention to me.

It was the Girls who cared. The Girls who were all tall and blond and a little strange looking, all of them young and beautiful but odd. Who seemed sort of alien, who worked in the stores and the restaurants and at the surfboard rental shacks. These were girls you wouldn’t be able to imagine living anywhere else but here, except that they seemed out of place
here,
too. Not just because of that weird accent, but also because of the way they drifted without purpose, hesitant and distracted looking, almost like they weren’t ever sure where they were going. DeeDee. Kristle. The gift shop girl. The rest.

When they passed me, they stared and smiled.

Again, it was fucking weird. I couldn’t piece it together. So I didn’t bother. I just tried to ignore it, just went on doing my thing. For our first week and a half at the beach I continued waking up early and taking walks alone, always to the pink hotel, where I would sit for a few minutes before returning home.

It was a ritual that I enjoyed. I liked the melancholy of it; I liked the solitary feeling of being alone against the backdrop of peeling paint and happy vacationers. It was like being the last survivor of a civilization, like the crowds around me weren’t even real but just lingering echoes from other, beachier times. Sometimes I would try to eavesdrop on their conversations, but they all just sounded like squawking birds.