September Girls (24 page)

Mom looked taken off guard, rolling backward onto her heels into an awkward step toward the porch rail and frowning a bit before recovering her smile.

“Sam,” she said. “Sam. Pal of mine. I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I’m here right now, and there’s a hurricane on the way.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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STORM

When the hurricanes come, we are among the few who stay behind. We have nowhere to go and no way to get there anyway. We’re not afraid of a little rain. Actually, we kind of like it.

During the hurricanes—and only during the hurricanes—we find that we have certain immunities. We can step outside into the worst of it and feel suddenly steadier on our feet. We feel the maelstrom passing through our bodies, leaving us with electricity sparking from the center of our chests, shooting out to our fingertips and toes.

Our mother tries to help us where she can.

So when the storm arrives, we make our way out into the streets, off to the bars, unfazed by the rain and wind. We let ourselves inside and turn the jukebox on—at least for as long as the electricity lasts—but we don’t dance. We don’t really talk, either; when we are alone like this—truly alone—conversation becomes superfluous.

We take our shoes off. We put our feet up on the bar and lean back as we sip bizarre and generally disgusting cocktails. We twist our hair around our fingers and feel it twisting back. The Stones sing “Ruby Tuesday.”

The wind rages outside. The walls begin to shake. The floor vibrates like an angry lady downstairs is banging on the ceiling with a broom. There is whistling and crashing, and then the music on the jukebox cuts out along with the lights. We let our eyes adjust to the darkness and hunker down for as long as it lasts. It could go all night and we will not get tired. We settle in. We clink our drinks with each other and know that we are in no danger.

All over these islands, houses are flying away, falling into the ocean, splitting in two, but wherever we stand will remain untouched. We have no doubt about this. The locals know it too, which is why we are allowed in here in the first place, why we are drinking for free.

It’s just the way it is. We are good luck, at least during hurricanes.

They’re when we are happiest. They’re when this place feels the closest to being a home.

And when the storm has passed, when everyone else is sifting through the wreckage, taking stock, rebuilding, we make our way to the beach, stepping over downed power lines and trash and misplaced tree branches, to the shore, where we will sit in quiet, observant clusters, feeling the power that we had for a few hours slipping away.

Junk floats in the water. Sometimes entire homes have been swallowed. Lives have been destroyed; people have sometimes been killed. But the ocean is still here, and so are we. Nothing feels that different.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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TWENTY-THREE

“HERE,” DAD SAID. “Take this. Go find some treasure, okay?” He was brandishing his metal detector at me almost like a threat. It was the next day and the hurricane still hadn’t come. It was supposed to hit in the late afternoon, according to the news, but they kept changing the prediction. Upgrading, downgrading, pushing, and pulling. I wished it would hurry up and come so we could get it over with.

Mom was on the couch reading a book about meditation; Jeff was sleeping in a ball on a La-Z-Boy, snoring, his mouth gaping, while the local news anchor droned on about weather predictions. Someone had suggested going to stock up on supplies, but no one was in the mood to deal with the lines. At some point Dad had spotted me gazing longingly into the kitchen cabinet for the thousandth time, hoping something interesting to eat had somehow materialized, and had gone to fetch his device. Now he was shoving it into my hands.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said, taking it from him. It was lighter than I expected. It felt right in my hands.

“You need something to do.”

“What about the hurricane?”

“I don’t think anyone’s going to be worried about a little hurricane when you come back with Blackbeard’s legendary booty. Anyway, the hurricane won’t be here for a few hours at least. Just come back if it starts to get really dicey out there.”

“What do you think I’ll really find?”

“Who knows, Tiger? Could be nothing. It’s not really that important anyway. The journey is the destination, as they say.”

“I’ve heard that.”

“But you know,” he said. “I haven’t been able to find anything. And I know it’s out there. It occurs to me that maybe you might have a little more luck.”

I surprised myself by taking his suggestion. I guess I just liked the idea of having no fixed destination, of being carried on the waves of blips and bloops until I looked up and found myself somewhere new. It seemed like it could lead me anywhere, even someplace secret—which is to say a secret place that could be my own, unlike the other secret place that wasn’t mine at all. I also liked the idea of having something to do. So I took the metal detector, put in the headphones, and went out to find whatever it was that I was supposed to find.

Outside, the dunes were keeling over. The oceanfront buildings were boarded up; the parking lots of the motels were empty. The only people on the street were packs of drunk, shouting bicycle riders—locals, I figured—speeding into the wind, falling over, then getting back up and mounting their bikes again.

It was already pouring when I stepped onto the beach. The rain soaked me, spilling down from my hair into my face in rivulets so thick I could barely see. It ran down my shoulders and my back and my spine and my chest into the waistband of my underpants, then down my legs. I ignored it and just powered on the metal detector—knowing the water was probably bad for it but whatever—and started my trek. The downpour didn’t last anyway; it was over a few minutes after it started, and though it was windier than ever, it became suddenly dryish, the sky gray but clear.

So I walked and walked, sweeping my arm back and forth in a slow, repeating arc like a blind man with a cane. I let the thing lead me, not worrying about the fact that I wasn’t moving in anything near to a straight line. Here and there it would beep, and then the beeping would get louder before stopping suddenly, like to say,
Oops, sorry about that, no big deal
.

So I’d just keep going, choosing my own path until the beeping suddenly started again and led me a little farther. At first I thought it was being indecisive, but as I made my way farther down the beach in whatever direction, it started to dawn on me that this was how the metal detector wanted it. It was not content to be my guide. Yes, it would give me hints, but I had to act on my own instincts if I was going to find my way.

As it started to rain again—this time as more of a horizontal drizzle—I thought of the first time DeeDee had taken me to her secret cove. About the way it had just seemed to drop itself in front of us, summoned by an esoteric combination of footsteps. I thought about the fact that when Jeff and I had gone back looking for it on our own, it had obstinately refused to exist.

The rain got harder. I kept wandering.

I thought about the night we’d spent in the belly of Nalgene’s fiberglass ship, wrecked on the green-carpeted shoals of the golf course. I thought about how little I’d known DeeDee then, and the fact that I still barely knew her now. I wondered if that really mattered.

And I wondered what had happened to the Girl we’d seen in the surf on our first night here. Whether she’d found DeeDee and Kristle; whether I had met her without knowing it. I wondered what her name was.

I thought about whether DeeDee would ever make it home. Around that time, the machine started to beep, and I looked up and saw that I was standing on a part of the beach that I hadn’t seen before. For the most part, the shoreline was all the same around here, but here it was different. It was broader and greener, and the dunes were so high that they looked like grassy little mountains and were bordered with squat and gnarled trees that were twisted over with vines flowering in tiny lavender stars. Even wet, the sand was a bright, clean white, and the water had a cerulean tint not native to the place. It was as if I’d found myself on another planet, which was virtually the same but not quite.

And the machine was going crazy, beeping and blooping louder than it seemed like it was supposed to. It was practically vibrating in my hand, and then it was pulling me to a spot on the beach, dragging me with it like a stubborn dog until it came to rest at a spot that was nothing special.

The metal detector was quivering with excitement. It wanted me to stop here. So I set it aside and began to dig. At first I felt silly doing it—what was I really going to find, anyway?—but the more I dug the more it felt important, the more it felt like I couldn’t stop until I hit something.

I started with one hand, scooping damp sand and tossing it to the side, and then when the earth got firmer, I began to use two. I still didn’t know what I was looking for—didn’t even consider it, really—but soon the hole was deep enough and wide enough that I had to climb inside it to keep digging. So I did.

The rain started getting harder again. The water started to fill up around me in my pit, but I kept going.

Time seemed to have stopped, or at least I had stopped caring about it. The metal detector, placated that I was digging, wasn’t screaming anymore and had settled into a robotic purr.

What I didn’t realize was that the beach was shrinking around me. How could I know, absorbed as I was in my dig, that the water was rising around me on every side, that I now stood in something like an island, five feet by five feet, as the hurricane raged and the water flooded? How could I know that the metal detector had been swept away, that I was alone now, and that there was no way home?

All I knew was that I was digging. That there was something here and that I needed to find it. Maybe it was what my dad had been searching for all along.

Or. Maybe it was something else.

The wind was raging around me, but I was dug in deep enough that I was safe from it. The rain didn’t bother me anymore. I was about to toss another handful of dirt to the side when I felt a lump in my hand.

I was uncertain at first that I’d found what I was supposed to be looking for. At first, it looked like nothing more than a crappy shell.

But then I looked closer and saw that it wasn’t a shell at all but a silver, clam-shaped something—man-made and barely bigger than a large coin or the face of a watch, crusted in sand and grime and greenish mossy stuff. I turned it over in my hand, examining the scalloped grooves on the back, running my fingers over the slimy fuzz. Dad’s discoveries had mostly been stuff that had probably been dropped by people on the beach the same afternoon and been covered over by an inch of sand, but this had been here a long time. He had never found anything like this. It seemed likely that it could have been buried here forever.

Then I noticed that it was hinged at the bottom edge, with a deep groove around the outside rim, like a locket or a pocket watch.

I pushed at the groove with my thumbnail. I didn’t really expect it to open, but all I did was pry it a little and it yielded easily: with a click, it flipped right open. There was a minor flash of brightness that could have been my imagination, but I flinched as a fractured bit of what might have been sunlight, if it had been sunny, bounced into my eyes. When I opened them, I realized that I was looking at a mirror.

The glass was unscuffed and gleaming like new, and was framed by five tiny green jewels, each set into a recess in the intricate silver molding. It looked expensive. But I didn’t take the time to examine it. I was too busy staring at the person who was staring up at me.

It was me. And I couldn’t help it: I caught my breath. It took me a beat to realize it was me.

I looked so different. I had changed since we’d come to this beach, and somehow I had missed it. Now I could see myself all at once as a re-created person.

When we’d left home in May, my hair had been short enough that you’d barely know it was technically curly; now it had grown out into wild rings that spiraled into my face, weighted by rainwater. I had changed color, too. My skin was burnished gold and splattered with a confused matrix of orangey-brown freckles that crawled out across my cheekbones from the broad bridge of my nose. My jaw looked wider; my eyes were deeper set and ringed with dark circles. I was heavier, more substantial, but there was a definition in my face that was new.

In the mirror, my mouth was open, and I realized I was smiling, just a little, revealing a small sliver of this one snaggly tooth I have.

I’d never really looked at myself before, not like this.

I was seeing myself for the first time, not as a stranger would see me, but like when you meet someone and have that zing of déjà vu. It was almost how I’d felt when I’d opened that door and found DeeDee in the bedroom of that beach house at Kristle’s birthday.

It recalled another feeling too, and a night I’d almost forgotten about. Back in October—it was less than a year ago, but it seemed longer now—Sebastian’s parents had been out of town, and he’d had this great idea to catch a ride into the city with his sister, to sneak into this club where they were having some dance party type of thing he’d read about on the internet.

I’m not much of a dancer, but I’d gone along with him because Sebastian thought it was such a great idea and I didn’t want to chicken out. Anyway, I’d figured there was no way we’d be able to get in; we were underage.