September Girls (28 page)

We were alone at the end of the bar. Everyone else was clustered at a table in the corner, smoking in violation of the no-smoking sign that hung directly above Kristle’s head. Jeff had his arm around her, a burning cigarette dangling from his mouth, and I saw him lean into her, push her hair away, and whisper into her ear. Her eyes brightened and she smiled and then burst out laughing. In that moment she was the most beautiful that I had ever seen her; she was joyful in a way that she had never been before. There was something about it that made me want to cry.

Taffany didn’t answer my question. “It’s not so bad here,” she said. “We make a big deal about how terrible it is, how much we hate it, how much we miss home. But the thing is, this
is
home. It’s the only home we remember at least. It would be nice to have a choice, of course, but it could be worse.”

“I’ve actually thought about that,” I said. “But it seemed rude to point it out. I have no idea what it’s really like.”

“It wouldn’t be so bad to stay here forever. Get old here. Maybe save up some money and buy a place like this. Go into business. Something like that. There’s a lot we could do—if we could stay.”

“What do you mean if? I thought you
had
to stay. I thought that was like the thing.”

“Kristle’s leaving,” Taffany said.

“Leaving?” I asked. “Where’s she going?”

“She’s
leaving
,” she said. Her voice was firm and her eyes were sharp. “The kind of leaving where you don’t come back. She’s going—” Her voice wavered. “She’s going, like, to the place of great uncertainty. The place of
final
uncertainty. We all go there eventually. Even you. But I’ll be going a lot sooner. And Kristle’s going tonight.”

I didn’t quite see what she was saying.

“It’s her birthday,” Taffany said. “Twenty-one. It’s a big birthday, all right? Haven’t you ever noticed that none of us are older than twenty-one?”

It started to dawn on me.

“You mean?”

“On our twenty-first birthday, we go back to the water. We can’t help it; it’s just something we do. We’re always drawn to the water, but when we turn twenty-one it just gets to be too much. Just one little problem.”

“You can’t swim.”

“Bingo. And what happens in the ocean to girls who can’t swim?”

Suddenly I understood. Kristle was going to die. Tonight.

“Oh,” I said.

We just looked at each other. Taffany held my eyes so long that I had to look away, but when I averted my gaze, it settled on Kristle, which was even worse. She was now nestled into my brother’s shoulder with her eyes closed. He was looking down at the top of her head with a distant fondness. He knew. Why hadn’t he told me? Why hadn’t I figured it out? I was fucking stupid, that’s why.

“Aren’t you fucking upset?” I asked. I wanted to scream.

Taffany looked at me. “Upset? Of course I’m fucking upset. But you don’t understand. You have no idea. I mean no idea. Kristle will be the third this summer. Fontaine went at the beginning of June. Or was her name Aquavit? Kristle’s first birthday was really a going-away party for Fiesta. We get used to it. The parties at the end of the summer are more low-key. It just gets to be overkill.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Next year there will be six of us,” Taffany said. “That’s Chantarelle, Blair, Serena, Tressemé, and Visa. All twenty-one. And me, of course. My birthday’s the Fourth of July. Send me a present if you want. No books or gift certificates.”

“There’s still time,” I said. “You could still—”

“Nah,” Taffany shrugged. “It seems impossible now to think that there’s time to stop it. Nothing much happens after August here. Anyway—I don’t want to play the game. Call me a conscientious objector.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again. “I can’t even—I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

“I’m sure you are,” Taffany said. “Why shouldn’t you be? Everyone’s always sorry. But there’s nothing anyone can do about it.” She turned her back to me and started arranging bottles. “This is how we live. We try to make the most of it.”

Then it came to me. “I can stop it,” I said. “I can—I mean, Kristle. I could totally . . .”

“You could,” Taffany said. “But you probably shouldn’t. And you won’t. Like I said, I’ve seen it all before. That’s why
I
get to be the bartender. Kristle understands too. She tried to fight it. That’s why she gets to be Kristle. She knows better than anyone that there’s no fighting it, but she fights anyway.”

“Yeah,” I said, thinking about Kristle naked over me in my bed, about the way she’d looked at me. About her on the porch, a gin and tonic in her hand, sweat on her chest, and hair glittering in the summer sun, brittle and determined. They were always talking about how they were the same, how there was barely any difference between them, but it was the furthest thing from the truth.

“I mean, this could be the first time she’s ever failed. When Kristle puts her heart into it, she usually gets what she wants. It’s what makes her a bitch, but it’s also why she gets to have the big bed. Maybe her heart wasn’t actually into it after all, come to think of it. Look, even your brother understands.”

The jukebox had flipped over to some shitty synth-country ballad, and Kristle and Jeff had stood and were dancing, her head against his chest, his hands on her hips, both of them swaying back and forth, looking oddly peaceful, oddly at ease with each other. Normally I would have thought it was ridiculous. He looked like a total schmuck. But he was not a schmuck at all. It was hard for me to decide whether he had been one in the first place, or whether the summer had changed him. I supposed it had changed everyone.

Then DeeDee appeared. Like Jeff, she was dressed for an occasion. She was wearing a simple blue dress, the kind that ties at the neck, and had smeared her eyes with eyeliner and sparkly blue eye shadow. She had braided her hair and twisted the plaits in rings around her head. Everyone turned to look at her, but she didn’t say hello to any of them; she headed to an empty corner of the room where she sat down at a table alone. Without me even asking, Taffany had already pushed another drink across the bar to me. I took it and made a move to pay and she just waved me off.

“You didn’t tell me,” I said to DeeDee, plunking the drink down in front of her and sitting. She was already lighting a cigarette, although she had supposedly quit weeks ago, and the music from the jukebox was whirling around us. “How could you have not told me?”

“I thought about it,” she said. “I almost told you. But Kristle didn’t want me to. And, really, I guess I didn’t want to either. Maybe that was selfish.”

“Maybe it was,” I said.

“We have a hard time understanding selfishness,” DeeDee mused. “It’s one of those words that doesn’t quite translate. It gets all confused with
selflessness
.”

“I’ve never actually noticed your English being as bad as you’re always saying it is. Kind of the opposite, actually.”

“Maybe every time you’ve understood me, I was actually trying to say something completely different from what you thought?”

I shook my head. “Nope.”

We finished our drinks and then got another round and wandered over to the table where everyone was sitting.

There wasn’t like a whole thing or anything. No one said a toast for Kristle; no one got too sentimental. Even Nalgene, who I’d heard had a reputation for being a weepy drunk, seemed happy and relaxed. Kristle was swaying along with the music and tossing her hair and brandishing her Gauloises with languorous panache. Every now and then I saw her looking sideways at Jeff as he talked. She was smiling peacefully. The last time I caught her, she looked up after a few seconds and saw me watching her, and she just took a drag of her cigarette and kicked me under the table, then tossed her head back and laughed.

After a few hours, when the songs on the jukebox were all starting to seem terrible and no one wanted to drink anymore, we went down to the beach: me, DeeDee, Jeff, Kristle, Nalgene, Chantarelle, Tressemé, Activia, Jessamee, Blair, Serena, Visa—even Taffany, who didn’t bother locking up.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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WANT

What we want:

High-heeled shoes. Patent leather. Sharp enough to slit throats. We want them so tall you can’t tell the difference between our hair and the sun.

A bedroom of our own, with a down comforter and striped Todd Oldham pillowcases from Target, and a window that looks out over anything except a parking lot. With a bathroom with a door that locks. And a bulletin board with tacked-up photos of ourselves and our friends, which are another thing we want.

And a mother.

And a home karaoke system with dual microphones and lots of songs.

And a taste of snow.

And a red Camaro, a checking account with a plastic card, a trip to Paris. A break from all this work. A glimpse of clouds as they appear from above, as they appear from an airplane. And, and, and.

We want a name.

We want a choice.

You might say that we want a lot of things. Of course there’s really only one thing that we want. We thought we knew what it was. We were told what it was. We were deceived.

We’re not asking for sympathy. We’re just trying to explain where we’re coming from. But by now you know exactly where we come from.

For want of a home we’ve lost everything we ever wanted. We lost one another. We lost you. You: our home.

What we want. What we really wanted. What we gave up, not knowing—thinking we knew exactly what it was that we pursued.

And what we overlooked in our wanting: the absolute home of your uncertain smile. Your steady, familiar embrace in the sand before dusk when you were peaceful and near sleep; the rising and falling of your chest, with its little hairs starting to grow in their uneven spiral. The wild, dark curls at your temples, the broadness of your shoulders and ropy muscles of your arms. Even the gnarled and undersized big toe on your right foot. The glint in your eyes from one angle is mischievous and bold—reckless—and from another so vulnerable that it would break our hearts, if our hearts were capable of being broken.

You have appeared many times, with many faces. You are always, always, always just exactly the same.

You always surprise us. It’s hard to surprise us—like heartbreak, surprise is against our general nature—but every moment with you is a revelation. The things you find troubling and the things you find funny. Your jammed-together and slightly crooked teeth and the way they blossom into a smile that is warm and unguarded and beautiful. Your unexpected freckles and your prickly gentleness, just as unexpected. And then there is the final surprise that didn’t strike us until it was too late.

This is the home we are leaving; this is what we give up. What we will miss. This is what we wanted after all. We never had a choice. Or did we? Well, we want to think we didn’t.

We never get what we want.

But who does, really?

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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TWENTY-SIX

THE TEN-MINUTE WALK to the ocean somehow took the form of a procession, with DeeDee leading the way and each of us following behind her in a sloppy single file with no one speaking. When we made it through the dunes, we stood in a row, still silent for a few minutes, all looking out at the water before Jeff let out a roar and ran, stripping his clothes as he went until he was down to his pink boxers and then they were off too. He swung them over his head like a lasso and tossed them onto the sand, then cannonballed into the breakers in triumph.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Kristle laughed. The momentary tension broke and we all dispersed, Kristle to the water’s edge, where she yelled shit at Jeff while he vamped and frolicked, shouting a stupid, tuneless song he’d made up on the spot. The rest of the girls drifted together to a spot in the sand, but DeeDee came to me and took my hand, leading me ahead to where the shore was still damp.

“So this is it,” DeeDee said. “The end of the summer.”

“Summer doesn’t officially end until September twenty-third,” I said. “Autumnal equinox. I looked it up.”

“Be real,” DeeDee said. “Summer ends now. Feel the breeze.”

I don’t particularly believe in magic, but where the air had just been perfectly still, there was suddenly a breeze out of nowhere. It was cool and dry and smelled a bit like smoke. But for once, no one was smoking. Then it was gone and all I could smell was salt and fruity shampoo.

“Bye,” DeeDee said to no one, waving at nothing.

Jeff had finally stumbled out of the water and he and Kristle were a few paces off, just talking. I knew I shouldn’t watch—it was private and also Jeff was completely naked, not that you could see anything—but I couldn’t look away either. DeeDee put a hand on my hip and I could feel her staring in the same direction, watching them with me. They were saying good-bye.

They were laughing and leaning into each other, touching each other with casual intimacy, almost like it was no big deal, and then they were kissing and they lit up the beach. I realized that DeeDee and I were not the only ones staring. We were all watching. But Jeff and Kristle didn’t seem to know or care.

Then Kristle was walking off down the beach, and Jeff was standing alone in the surf.

He ran his hands through his hair, then sank to his ass, still watching her go. A wave came in and pooled around him. I wanted to go to him, wanted to say something, but DeeDee grabbed me by the elbow before I could move.