September Girls (6 page)

I squeezed my eyes shut and when I opened them, the glowing flecks were everywhere. They still weren’t blinking, but they were pulsing, almost imperceptibly getting bigger, then smaller, then bigger again, and maybe moving, too, like from side to side or bobbing up and down. Some were bigger than others, implying closeness.

They reminded me of eyes staring at me. It would be absolutely stupid to think they were eyes. I couldn’t think of what else they could be, though. It must have been my imagination.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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NAME

We come here without names. There are the names they call us. But those aren’t our names.

The names they call us are not hard to guess. Comehere, Wheresmyfood, Trysmilingsometime, and Suckonthis are four common ones, but the list goes predictably on from there and only gets uglier.

Those are the names they call us. Those are not our names. We choose our own names. We choose names from television reruns and dusty paperbacks and celebrity magazines and names from the sides of packages we like. There are always Bibles around, but we hate the names in the Bible. They feel old-fashioned and remind us of our father anyway.

We name ourselves after shampoos and perfumes and dishwasher detergents. We do have one rule: no one is allowed to call herself L’Oréal anymore. We kept getting in fights over who got to be L’Oréal, so a rule was established. We’ve since had a few Pantenes, but not enough to cause problems.

You have no idea how important a name is. You have always known your name. You have no idea what it means to be nameless, or to have the gnawing feeling that your name is only an imitation. An approximation of what is unpronounceable, what is unknowable, what is limitless. What’s really in the end just inexpressible.

The names we give ourselves are like drawings of God. Well, that sounds dramatic. But that’s how it feels. So call us Dramatic. We’ve been called worse.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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FIVE

“WE’RE GETTING YOU laid tonight, bro,” Jeff was saying. “I mean, we’re getting both of us laid tonight. It’s gonna change your life, dude. Dad was hell of right about this place. It’s unbelievable. Where the fuck did all these girls come from? I mean, dude. I mean, dude! That fuckin’ Kristle, dude.”

It was a question I’d had too. Where had they come from? They were everywhere: every time you looked around it seemed like they had multiplied. They were all beautiful. They were all blond, in chest-baring tops, with eyes that changed depending on the light. They all looked like sisters but they couldn’t be sisters, because sisters have parents, and the Girls seemed to have none. They were just
there.
Like they had appeared out of nowhere. No, not nowhere. Like they had crawled straight out of the ocean. (It goes without saying that girls don’t just crawl from the ocean, but anyway.)

“It seems like they’re foreign, right?” I wondered. “Kristle sort of has an accent, you know? It sounds like she might be faking it, I guess. I never heard of a French person named Kristle.”

“Maybe it’s the Americanized version of Kris
tal,”
Jeff said, pronouncing it in the manner of a champagne-swilling rapper. “Very classy.”

“Ha,” I said.

“Oh, who gives a fuck,” Jeff said. “The point is they’re hot and they’re here. I just hope they’re already drunk when we get to the party. I hope they’re ready for a piece of
this.”
He groped his crotch obnoxiously, and I looked at him like he was made out of shit, wondering how it was possible that I was related to this idiot.

He just laughed. “Have a sense of humor, bro,” he said. “I’m just fuckin’ with ya. The truth is I’m the biggest goddamn gentleman you’ll ever fuckin’ meet.”

He and I were on our way to Kristle’s birthday party. It was close enough to walk—everything around here was close enough to walk, if you had time—so we were walking. The night was warm, and I could feel the damp air soaking in through the hairs on my arms, which were standing on end despite the fact that I was not at all chilly. Jeff was excited as hell about the party, parties being his natural habitat, but I wasn’t really looking forward to it.

I’ve never really liked parties. I mean, maybe
dislike
is too strong of a word; I guess it’s more like I’ve just never gotten the point. A bunch of people standing around not talking to each other because the music is so loud, all pretending to have a good time, chugging warm beer, and pretending to be much drunker than they actually are. What is really the point?

The event was being held at an empty rental not too far from ours. One of Kristle’s roommates was a receptionist for the realtor and had “borrowed” the key for the night. Jeff had forgotten to write down the exact address, but it turned out to be unnecessary. A block away I could already feel the bass thumping in my chest, and when we followed the sound of the music and turned the corner into another beachfront development, there was no mistaking which house was hosting us. There it was, at the very end of the block, right on the dunes: towering and Adderall blue and glowing from within, with kids hanging off the porches and trailing out of the driveway into the street. Every few seconds a whoop would ring out and there would be a splash or the crash of shattering glass followed by raucous laughter and maybe an ear-piercing scream or a “Dude!”

“Shit, man,” Jeff said. “This is gonna be good.” I had my doubts but I’d already made up my mind not to be a complete dishrag. I just smiled and nodded.

Jeff became one with the party as soon as we stepped inside. He surveyed the scene, gave me a quick punch in the shoulder—“You’ll be okay, right, bro?”—and then was gone. The place was filled, mostly with men. Or boys I guess. Or man-boys. All of the above really, because it was all kinds of guys: fratty guys in oxfords and white baseball caps, long-haired sun-leathered beach dudes, wan and dazed-looking out-of-towner preppies in boat shoes and popped collars who looked like they had gotten lost on their way to somewhere else. There was even a clutch of dad-aged dudes standing in the corner sucking down beers and watching the scene from the sidelines, looking hell of creepy.

The Girls were here too, obviously, but they were outnumbered. It was clearly the way they liked it. It was Kristle’s party, after all, and her guest list. The Girls were scattered throughout the place, each one holding court individually as the center of her own tiny universe. They were vamping and tossing their hair and shotgunning beers, shimmying their hips to the music, smoking cigarettes with calculated carelessness, while the guys circled them and ogled and competed for their attention. It only took a second of casual eavesdropping to tune in to the stupid jokes the guys were all telling in some dumb competition for the Girls’ fakey, too-loud laughter.

The only people who seemed at all out of place (besides me of course) were the few, scattered normal girls—girls with mousy hair and unremarkable scowls who had surmisably not been invited themselves but had simply been dragged along by their oblivious boyfriends. These girls were standing at the fringes of clusters with their arms folded, staring at the ceiling, looking unhappy. Well, at least I wasn’t one of
them
. At least I could blend in, sort of.

I cast around, hoping to see someone I recognized, but I did not. I don’t know who I was hoping for. It’s not like there was any reason I would know a single person here except for Kristle herself, and even that was a stretch. Maybe I had some outlandish fantasy that Sasha Swain or any one of my friends from school—even Sebastian!—would just pop out of nowhere, all
Dude, what are you doing here? You didn’t tell me you were coming to this too. It’s crazy, right? Look at all these hos!
But no. Of course that was totally impossible.

I resigned myself to the fact that I was on my own and pushed my way through the packed crowd of happy, drunk strangers, heading first for the kitchen to grab a beer from the island and then out through the sliding glass doors onto the wraparound porch, where I looked out over the beach and the ocean and sipped slowly. I hoped that no one would notice me standing there all alone. It was embarrassing.

I was alone. I just was. I had been alone for months. I had made a hobby of it.

As lonely as I was, I ignored the Girls who approached me. I’d gotten used to it by then. They’d wander up and stare at me for a few seconds, sometimes openly and sometimes with mild subtlety, but either way they’d go away if I didn’t say anything.

It seems stupid that I didn’t say anything, but for some reason I just felt like talking to strangers would make me feel even lonelier than I already was.

So a half hour later I was still standing by myself, considering the waves with my now warm and nearly empty Bud in hand, while the crowd around me jostled and chugged and laughed some more. Some shit song was thrumming from the stereo inside, but you could barely make out what it was over the noise.

Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves thoroughly except me. I wondered if I had been this way forever. Had I always been this big of an asshole or if it was a new development? I mean, I guess it was new. There was a time when I enjoyed Budweiser. There was even a time when I enjoyed Beyoncé. I just couldn’t remember when that time was.

I was just considering leaving—fuck Jeff—when I found a hand on my elbow. I didn’t turn around. Then I felt breasts against my back, and breath in my ear. It smelled like Malibu. A strand of blond hair curled over my shoulder and tickled my chest through the V-neck of my T-shirt, and then a pair of arms wrapped around me from behind. “Hey,” a voice whispered. There was that accent. Where did it come from, anyway? It sure as fuck wasn’t French. It was Kristle. “You always this antisocial?” she breathed.

“Usually,” I said, still without turning.

She untangled herself and moved in next to me. She lit a cigarette and offered me one but I turned it down.

“Happy birthday,” I said. No harm in being polite.

“Thanks,” she said. She hoisted her beer can with an amiable raise of the eyebrows and a smile, and we clanked, cheersing.

“So how old are you?” I asked. “Or is that rude to ask?”

“Oh—it’s not really my birthday,” she said. “My birthday’s at the end of the summer. I just like to have my
party
at the beginning. The end of the summer’s always so depressing. Who wants to have a party when summer’s about to end? What’s fun about that?”

“I guess nothing,” I said, even though it seemed stupid. I could understand throwing a birthday party a few days or even a few weeks before your actual birthday, but jumping the gun by months was a little aggressive. “So how old will you be on your actual birthday then?” I asked.

“Twenty-one,” Kristle said, sighing a big cloud of smoke into the night. I watched it curl away in the moonlight, toward the water. “Legal and everything. I don’t want to talk about it, okay?” she said. Even though the cigarette was barely started, Kristle tossed it off the porch without bothering to stub it out. “These things’ll fuckin’ kill you.” And she reached into her bra and pulled out a metal Altoids case, which she flipped open to reveal a neat row of perfectly wrapped joints. “A birthday present,” she said, smirking and plucking one from the tray. “I forget from who. Splitsies?”

“Sure,” I said. She tossed her hair, placed the joint between her lips, and lit it.

“Where’d your brother go?” Kristle took a deep drag and held it, then passed to me.

“Good fuckin’ question,” I said. I inhaled. The joint was already soggy from Kristle’s lip gloss. Hold it. Burn. Breathe. “He’s like what you would call unreliable.”

“Uh-oh,” Kristle said. “I know the type. But fuck him.”

She reached out a finger and dragged her long, red nail from my shoulder down my chest, swaying her hips as she did it. Her eyes were burning: green with gold rings around the pupils. I tried to look away but I found that I could not. I instantly had a raging boner.

“You seem like you could be pretty unreliable yourself,” she said.

“Well,” I said. “I’m not. Sorry.”

“So modest.” She took another puff from the joint, holding my gaze as she handed it back to me.

I knew I shouldn’t have another hit, but I couldn’t see any way of turning it down. So I sucked.

“Thanks,” I said after a brief coughing fit.

Kristle was casually half dancing to the beat of a song coming from inside. I studied her.

She was beautiful. I mean, she was beautiful but she wasn’t: she was both beautiful and ugly at the same time. Her face changed the longer you looked at it, and the more you looked at it the more you couldn’t put all the pieces together. Just as it was starting to make sense, it all fell apart. She was a page in a book in a dream where you can’t read.

And she was saying something, but I didn’t speak the language anymore. All I could focus on was her lips, her eyes, her large and jagged nose. The landscape of her bare collarbone.

I started to feel dizzy. And then Kristle’s hands were on my waist and she was kissing my neck. Then her hands were on my ass and her warm tongue was in my mouth. I mean my tongue was in her mouth. I mean both. She pushed me up against the railing, and before I knew what was happening, my hand was on her breast as she nibbled at the corner of my lips. I guess people were probably watching us, but I didn’t even consider it at the time. I was gone. I was flying with cement feet.

“Do you want to go upstairs?” Kristle whispered in my ear.

I didn’t know what to say. I’m not sure if I was capable of speech at that point anyway—I might not have been capable of reciting the alphabet. But I was reaching for something that resembled yes when I opened my eyes and saw my brother standing not ten feet away, staring through the crowd. His mouth screwed to one side, brow furrowed, nostrils flaring—more hurt than angry, I thought, but mostly just shocked. He was standing all alone.