The Key to the Golden Firebird (17 page)

As far as May was concerned, the days at the beach were just days she had to kill as painlessly as possible so that she could get back home. She stretched out on the sand with her chemistry book (she'd already purchased her textbook for the next year, as was recommended for advanced students), trying to absorb the periodic table. When she couldn't focus on that, she tried to work through her pile of required summer reading books for English, all of which she'd checked out of the library and brought with her. About ten pages into
Frankenstein
she flipped over on her stomach and fell asleep. She accompanied Palmer to a batting cage and watched as her little sister stunned everyone by hitting every single ball with astonishing ferocity. She walked along the strip of shops in town with her mom and tried to work up an interest in coral necklaces and knickknacks made from painted seashells. She played cards with Brooks under the awning of the RV.

But her brain was filled with Pete. He walked into her every thought—all freckles and frizzing curls. When she walked past the old-fashioned photo place, she imagined them getting their picture taken. (He would look cute in one of those gangster outfits.) At night she counted up in her mind the dozens of secluded spots on the campground and the beach where they could be together.

On the third night her mom and Palmer decided to get
some dinner and go to a movie. Their selection held no appeal for May or Brooks, so they were dropped off at the boardwalk along the way. It wasn't quite dark out, and the crowd was still mixed. There were groups of elderly people and adults with kids, but the first of the night crowd had also arrived, taking their positions in front of the arcade or at the beachfront bars.

“I feel like a twelve-year-old.” Brooks sighed, leaning against the boardwalk rail, looking out over the sand. “I hate getting dropped off.”

May was gently pressing on her sunburn, watching the white fingerprints appear and disappear under the pressure. The time on the beach had fried her beyond recognition.

“What do you want to do?” Brooks asked. “Or are you just going to do that all night?”

“I might,” May said. She leaned against the rail and put her back to the ocean to watch the slow boardwalk tram chug along at three miles an hour. “Why do they need a train for something called a board
walk
? Doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose?”

Brooks kicked a crab claw in the direction of an overflowing trash can and took a deep breath. The smell of beer and buffalo wings wafted over from the restaurant across from them.

“What have we got?” she asked May. “Two hours until their movie is over?”

“Something like that,” May replied, making a happy face of white splotches on her thigh. “We can go back whenever we want. We can just walk.”

“I guess we could go down to the rides,” Brooks said, squinting at the brightly lit amusement pier, about a quarter mile up from where they were standing.

They walked along past the T-shirt shops with the throbbing speakers and the endless food stands. Brooks stopped and bought a soda. May bought a small bag of candy fruit slices.

“Palmer told me that you and Pete were in the RV for almost an hour the other night,” Brooks suddenly offered as they continued toward the pier.

May almost choked on her orange slice.

“I was…showing him…it.”

“
Were
you?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Actually, I do,” Brooks said.

May saw no point in trying to deny anything. Brooks would see right through her.

“Want me to shut up?” Brooks said.

“That's an option?”

“Come here,” Brooks said, pulling May off to the side and taking a large Coke bottle from her bag. It was filled with a clear liquid.

“What's that?”

“Vodka.”

“Are you nuts?” May said. “Where did you get this?”

“I had a bottle left over from before. Come on, we're on vacation. And I'm not driving. Neither are you.”

“You can't have this! You've already been arrested.”

“No one is going to find out,” Brooks said. “Look around. We're on the board
walk
. We're
walking
, not driving.”

May threw up her hands and walked over to the rail. She stared out over the sand. Brooks followed her.

“Come on,” Brooks said. She smiled. It was an approving
smile, one that warmed May's heart. Brooks never smiled at her unless she had something horrible caught in her teeth or some piece of damaging information against her. “We've never gone out together.”

This was a first—Brooks was actually trying to include May in something. Normally Brooks's idea of bonding with her sisters was shooting straw wrappers at May's face and snickering with Palmer.

“You have to be kidding,” May said.

“What else are we going to do tonight?” Brooks asked. “Come on. It'll be fun. And I'll shut up about Pete.”

There was something in Brooks's tone that warmed May. She really did appear to want to spend some time with her and include her. Brooks wanted to
party
with her. As much as she hated to admit it, she had always longed for this kind of approval from Brooks.

And really, what else
were
they going to do? Drinking might make the time go by a little faster.

May reached over and took the bottle.

“All right.” Brooks nodded encouragingly. “This is how this works. You take a long sip from the bottle, then you gulp it fast and take a drink of the soda right away. It's got to be fast—the soda washes away the taste.”

May sniffed the contents of the bottle and eyed the sweating soda cup.

“Okay,” May said. “But you have to promise to keep quiet about Pete.”

“My lips are sealed,” Brooks said.

 

An hour later—was it an hour? May wasn't sure. Anyway, they were playing Skee-Ball.

May had always been the queen of the arcade when they were kids. She could roll those hard wooden balls down the lane, catch just the right amount of bounce, land them right in the middle rings, get loads of tickets. It was her one athletic skill.

Of course, she'd never tried the game after sucking back a huge bottle of extremely cheap vodka and Tang. Some of May's Skee-Balls made it into the rings, but many more made their way into other people's lanes, and she decided to leave after getting a few dirty stares. She wandered out of the arcade and into the crowd, past the Tilt-A-Whirl and the haunted house and the giant slide.

She looked out over the beach to the water. Kites. A whole lot of kites tethered to rails of the boardwalk, to poles in the sand, to…nothing? May hung her head over the rail and looked in wonder at the dark space below her, then she swung her gaze up to the kites. There was one kite in particular, an enormous dragonfly, that held May's attention as it cut through the air. It made crisp noises to demonstrate—just to her, she felt—that the air was there and real and tangible. You could slice into it with a soft piece of cloth and it would make a sound like a knife sliding into an apple.

The wind that propelled the kites blew strands of her hair into her mouth when she opened it, so she had to spend a few seconds extracting them from between her teeth.

“That's it,” she said aloud to no one. “I'm going to do it. I'm going to call him.”

After making this pronouncement, it took her a few minutes
to find a phone. It took a few more still to figure out how to make a collect call, even though there were clear instructions. But her trying paid off, and she heard Pete's mom answering the phone and taking the call.

“Hi!” she screamed.

“May?” Mrs. Camp seemed surprised to hear from her. “Are you okay?”

“Hi, Mrs. Camp! It's May! Is Pete there?”

“Um, hold on, May.”

Some noise as Pete was found. May picked some chipping paint off the wall behind the phone.

“May?”

“Can you hear me?” she yelled. “Should I speak up?”

“No!” Pete yelled back. “No. I can hear you.”

“Okay!”

“What are you doing?” he asked. “Is everything all right?”

“I'm on the boardwalk! I wanted to talk to you.”

“Okay.”

The dragonfly swooped down to the sand, then tore straight up again, dipping and swerving.

“It's just that…there's been a lot going on, you know?” May inhaled deeply and took in some of the warm salt air, the fragrance of hot fries, lemons from the lemonade stand, a sugary odor that floated on the cold blasts from the air-conditioning vent of the candy shop.

“Right…”

“Okay.” She sighed. “So listen. The other night.”

Silence as May watched a kid feeding cotton candy to a dog. The dog got confused when the candy stuck to his nose. He
tried unsuccessfully to wipe it off with his paw. May considered setting down the phone to go help him.

“Are you still there?”

“Listen,” May said, snapping back to the conversation, “I want to know if you're…mad at me or something.”

“
Mad
at you?”

“Because now you might have some trouble. The whole Nell thing. I mean…I just wanted to call and say thanks.”

“For what?”

“I mean, since my dad…It's all been so weird since then. Since we have, like, no money, and my mom has no time…You should break up with Nell.”

Now the silence was on Pete's end.

“You should really, like, dump her and date me instead,” May heard herself saying, all confidence. “I'm not as irritating. I mean, I'm irritating, but I'm not as bad as she is. And you know me better. Wouldn't that be funny? I mean, we've already hooked up, so we're good.”

“We broke up,” Pete said quickly. His voice was so bright that May could hear the smile coming through. For a moment she was confused.

“Who, you and me?”

“No. Nell and I.”

“Oh…”

The meter in her brain clicked once or twice, signaling May that she'd probably said enough.

“I have to go,” she said suddenly. “Okay? I think that's great. Cool. Okay. Gotta go now. Hey, Pete, I love you!”

There was a pause during which Pete should have said
something back, but May didn't hear anything. She assumed that he was gone, hung up the phone, and swaggered off back down to the boards. That was good. It was good that she'd had a talk with Pete. All she wanted to do now was let the warm ocean air run along her skin, let the breeze push her hair from her eyes, and walk around with people.

Brooks…

Her sister's name drifted through May's consciousness, but there was no urgency accompanying the idea of Brooks. Brooks was somewhere in this crowd, and if she walked around, sooner or later she would find Brooks or Brooks would find her.

She went down the steps to the beach and walked along the cool sand. The ocean was dark and thin and rolled off like a carpet until it hit the horizon. May walked toward it, noticing a strange, tumbling feeling inside, as if her stomach had switched into cement mixer mode. It all went south very quickly. May was down on her knees within a few minutes, gripped by a hideous wave of nausea.

Sand gets cold,
she thought.
Cold sand seems to stick less.
Maybe the coldness of the sand could prevent vomiting. If she just focused on the coldness of the sand and nothing else, maybe, just maybe, she might not vomit.

Cold sand, cold sand, cold sand, cold sand…

Nope.

Her back arched, her insides convulsed, and nothing came up but air. She clawed into the sand. Nothing to grip.

She was alone, as alone as she could ever get, shuddering on the sand, looking out over the sea, in the realm of jellyfish and ghost crabs and rogue tidal waves and wayward Jeeps racing
along the beach and potential rapists hiding under the boardwalk—and she was in danger of just generally dying, unseen and unheard. Everything, including the entire ocean and horizon, was spinning.

I'm just drunk…,
she told herself.
I'm not dying.

She curled herself up into a ball, put her head on a pile of damp seaweed, and tried to breathe evenly and rest.

 

It took Brooks about fifteen minutes to realize that May was no longer in the arcade. She had been mesmerized by a group of guys trying to master Dance Dance Revolution, and when she'd managed to rip her gaze from their efforts, May had been long gone. At first she was unconcerned, thinking May had stepped out for air. But when May wasn't waiting outside or standing at one of the booths nearby, it began to dawn on her that she might have a problem on her hands. She looked down at the mile of boardwalk, the surrounding beach and water that bordered them on one side, and the entire shore town that was right at their heels. May could be anywhere in the mix.

She cased the boardwalk, walking at first, then loping into a slow jog. She was slightly drunk, so each step seemed to bounce her high, and all of the lights bounced up and down with her. She went all around the area, up one side and back down the other, peering in every shop, every arcade, every ride, every little offshoot. When the search of the pier turned up nothing, she went down to the sand. She looked under the boardwalk and the pier, then started combing the beach. The run on the sand was a slightly harder one, especially considering that there was a good amount of punch still sloshing around in her stomach. It
was a smelly night at the ocean. The air was heavy with salt and decaying seaweed.

She found May a block or two away, sitting between six tethered kites, staring out at the water. Brooks sat down in the sand next to her sister. May smiled and coughed. Her eyes were badly bloodshot.

“I
didit
,” May slurred.

“That's great, May,” Brooks said, rubbing her temples. “Now, do you think you can walk?”