Girl at the Edge

by Karen Dietrich

  We get out of the car and hold hands as we walk down the stairs and onto the street. I feel like I’m walking on air, my legs warm and flexible, my cheeks hurting from smiling so much.

  We eat at the Columbia, which the menu states is the oldest restaurant in Florida, family owned since 1905. We’re seated in the Patio Room, with high ceilings and a sky light above that bathes us in white. There are colorful Spanish tiles on the walls and a marble fountain in the center of the room—it looks like a young man riding a fish, with the creature’s tail and the man’s legs intertwined. When I point it out to Clarisse, the waiter tells us the piece is called “Eros and Dolphin,” and it’s a replica of a statue found in the ruins of Pompeii, buried in volcanic ash.

  “Who is Eros?” Clarisse asks, and I swear the waiter blushes as he explains that Eros is the god of love. We order two Cuban sandwiches, a slice of key lime pie, and a piece of mango mousse cake. I ask for lemonade, and Clarisse orders a beer with the confidence of a stoned seventeen-year-old. She winks at the waiter, and he nods and smiles and starts walking away, and for a minute, I think she may have actually charmed him into it. But seconds later he is back and asking for some ID, which Clarisse pretends to look for in her tiny bag until she finally looks up and tells him a café con leche would be just fabulous.

  After we’re finished eating, Clarisse pays for everything with cash her mother gave her for the day, which she will say she spent on the mermaid show and the glass-bottom boat ride. We step back into the brutal sunshine and walk down Seventh Avenue. It’s the main drag of Ybor City, lined with bars and shops and restaurants. Two men walk past us smoking cigars, and I breathe in the woodsy scent that reminds me of hickory, of a bonfire burning on the beach at night. There’s a tattoo parlor on the corner, and we turn our hands into makeshift binoculars, using them to cut the glare so we can peer through the glass to see inside, where a woman lies on her stomach while a tattooed man presses a contraption to the back of her thigh, purple and black ink smeared on her tanned skin.

  When we make it back to the car, we’re hot and sweaty from the sun. Clarisse starts the engine and turns the AC on full blast. She leans her face into the air vent and lets out a loud sigh. “I didn’t know failing a test could feel this good,” she says. “Although I have to admit, I was a little freaked out when you went and knocked on Grandma’s front door. Why didn’t you just tell me you were going to pretend you were a neighbor looking for a cat? I would have loved to play along. I’m pretty good at getting into character, actually.”

  “Oh, so you like role play?” I surprise myself by saying it out loud, still a little high on the weed and the excitement of the day.

  “I’ve been known to put on a show,” Clarisse says. “You, on the other hand, you seem like the voyeur type. I bet you like to watch.” She turns to face me, her eyes narrowing as if she’s trying to read my mind, unlock my secrets.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I mean, I guess I’ve never had the chance. What about you?”

  “Well, why watch,” she says, “when it’s so much fun to join in?” She looks at me, raising her eyebrows, and we laugh together. The sounds of our voices blend until I can’t tell where hers ends and mine begins. I want to kiss her, and I think she might want to kiss me too, but then she puts the car in gear and turns the radio on and we drive.

  As we merge onto the highway, Clarisse reaches over, placing a cool palm on the back of my neck. “I don’t think anyone else would go through this shit with me,” she says. I look over and see her smiling, although tears are welled up in her eyes. “So thank you for that. I owe you one, Ev.”

  “Well, I’ve been keeping track,” I say, tapping my finger to my temple. “So I’ll let you know when I need to cash in.”

  After Clarisse delivers me home on time, after I satisfy my mother and Shea with a few stories from Weeki Wachee—what we saw through the glass bottom of the boat on the river—I go to my room. I climb in bed still wearing my clothes. I dig Emerald’s small comb from my pocket and put it to my lips. I breathe in its scent—a mix of her oily hair and shampoo—impossibly sweet and musty at the same time. I run the comb through my own hair and then secure it just above my ear.

  I slide through the recent photos on my phone: Clarisse at the Columbia, giving the key lime pie a thumbs-up, me posing with a candy cigar we found inside a candy store, a blurry shot of the yellow-and-red streetcar moving along Eighth Avenue.

  I delete each one with a tap of my finger, and just like that, it’s as though the entire day never happened.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Shea is eating gummy bears straight from a one-pound bag on her lap. Every five minutes or so, she offers some to me and Clarisse, hoisting the bag behind her and into the backseat. We’re on our way to Treasure Island. My mother is driving, and Shea is in the passenger seat, her window down, the collar of her denim vest up.

  We’ll spend Friday and Saturday night at a hotel called the Thunderbird. Bright and early Saturday morning, the lawyer, Dana Apple, will meet us at her office, and then we’ll follow her to my grandmother Ella’s house, where I can look around the place and claim the Limoges butter dish.

  It was my idea to go to Treasure Island and see Ella’s house, and Shea’s idea to make an entire weekend of it, turning it into a girls’ getaway. We’ll head home on Sunday morning. That is the plan.

  Plans make you feel as though you’re in control. Plans make you feel powerful, a way to organize time, a way to conjure the future into being. Plans are your hopes and dreams written down in a notebook, scrawled on the back of a receipt, typed into the keys of a glowing keyboard. My mother says, if you want to make God laugh, make plans. I say plans are all we have.

  Clarisse and I sit side by side in the back of the car, the bare skin of my left leg touching the bare skin of her right leg. We share a pair of earbuds and listen to Pink Floyd, only a thin white wire connecting us, a tendril of sound. George turned us on to Pink Floyd because he’s often playing The Wall or The Dark Side of the Moon in the kitchen when he’s cleaning up. George believes that David Gilmour’s guitar solo in “Comfortably Numb” is the best guitar solo of all time, and he made us listen to it while he mimicked along on air guitar and pointed out all the best parts.

  That first time I heard it, it sounded like birdsong, climbing higher and higher then breaking the air open with sound. I could feel tingling on my bare arms and the back of my neck, as if the music had crystallized the oxygen in the room, and then shattered it, sending small slivers to rain down, landing on my skin like a million little pinpricks. George closed his eyes and swayed back and forth, a gesture of praise, as if he were in church and David Gilmour were God.

  I look out the car window at the scenery, which hasn’t changed much the entire time we’ve been traveling—palm trees and exit signs and the occasional road kill, mostly possums and raccoons, creatures that only come out at night, under cover of darkness.

  I’ve always been told to fear raccoons that venture out in the daytime, been warned that, if you see one during the day, it must have rabies, and you should stay far away from it because surely the animal is deranged and will attack you if you get too close. But then I looked it up and found out that’s not true at all. There are many reasons why a raccoon might be out and about during the day, especially if it’s a nursing mother with babies. The mother raccoon can’t go all day without eating. She needs to eat more than usual so she can produce milk. It’s amazing what a mother can do, even out in the wild, with no one to help her. She gives birth, she keeps her babies safe, she feeds them, she teaches them how to live. All this happens without human intervention, life going on and on without people in charge.

  The Thunderbird is an older hotel, built in the late fifties, the decade when most of the Gulf Coast was developed and little tourist stands started popping up along the water. Shea saw the hotel online and immediately fell in love with it because it’s vintage. My mother doesn’t like it for that same reason.
For someone who loves almost everything else secondhand, my mother likes hotels to be as new as possible. She wanted to stay at the brand-new Holiday Inn we passed on our way into town, the large cursive H pulsing with green light on the side of the stucco building. My mother gets paranoid when we travel, and modern architecture calms her down.

  The décor of the Thunderbird has an American Southwest vibe to it, its logo a red and green rendering of a thunderbird. The image of the thunderbird has the appearance of an eagle, with its strong profile and large curved beak. In Native American mythology, the thunderbird was believed to control rainfall, its wings so massive that the sheer force of their movement caused thunder to rumble. When the thunderbird blinked, sheets of lightning came down from the sky.

  At the hotel check-in counter, Shea gets our room keys, and we load our stuff from the car onto a small brass luggage cart with squeaky wheels. Our room is on the third floor with a view of the Gulf of Mexico from our window. My mother and Shea claim the bed closest to the bathroom, throwing their bags on the scratchy-looking bedspread.

  “I hate these ugly things,” Shea says, moving all the bags to the floor for a moment so she can rip the bedspread off the bed, roll it up, and stuff it into the small closet. She throws the bags back on the bed and props herself up against the headboard with a pillow. “That’s more like it,” she says, and then sighs as she makes herself comfortable. “Now I can really take in the view.” Shea flashes a smile toward my mother that’s more of a smirk, really, and my mother looks like she’s blushing as she walks into the bathroom to wash her face, her purple headband in her hand.

  Clarisse searches her duffel bag and finds her bathing suit, a red two-piece with little white flowers. “Get your suit,” she says to me. “Let’s hit the pool before dinner.” I look at Shea, and without skipping a beat, she answers the question I’m asking in my head.

  “Your mom won’t mind,” Shea tells me. “Go have fun.”

  “Take your phone with you!” my mother calls from the bathroom over the sound of running water.

  Clarisse and I change into our bathing suits quickly, performing those feats of magic girls learn when forced to change clothes in middle school locker rooms, that time in your life when you are most self-conscious about your body, which feels stranger to you with each passing day. If you time it right, you can get changed without exposing yourself much at all—maybe a split second flashing of skin here and there, but that’s much better than standing around naked. Most girls agree on this, but there’s always an exception to that rule. When I was in seventh grade, it was Brooklyn Marko. She would dress slowly and leisurely, pulling her T-shirt off over her head in an exaggerated motion and pushing her panties down to the floor until they were resting in a pink puddle at her ankles. I’d watch Brooklyn just long enough, until I would sense that she was about to feel my gaze, my eyes on her breasts or the dark clutch of hair between her legs.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The Thunderbird has a tiki bar on the beach and a swimming pool with a thunderbird depicted in green and red tiles on the bottom. There is a breakfast buffet in the morning, but there is also a Shell station across the street so I bet we will get our breakfast there tomorrow. My mother loves gas station coffee (black), and donuts from a Plexiglas case.

  We have the entire hotel pool to ourselves so Clarisse and I take turns doing handstands in the shallow end, counting to see how long each of us can hold the pose. Clarisse can hold her breath longer than I can, which gives her the advantage every time.

  Then we swim down to the bottom of the deep end, touching the slimy concrete floor. I open my eyes underwater and see the red and green tiles of the thunderbird, blurry flashes of color. I feel the burn of chlorine in my eyes when I come up for air. Clarisse and I act like little girls, playing and splashing and taunting each other, until a group of three high school boys appear. They are all wearing board shorts and flip-flops, and their bodies are lean and long. They look related, maybe brothers or cousins, each head of hair sandy blond, each face fair skinned and angular.

  The boys claim a group of lounge chairs and throw their towels down. They kick off their flip-flops and jump into the shallow end one at a time, each one making a splash that ripples out to the rest of the pool. Clarisse and I swim to the side of the pool and hold on to the edge, our bodies suspended, floating in the deep water.

  The boys begin to walk through the shallow end toward us, their smiles so big they are practically giddy, about to burst into laughter at any moment. They stop when the water gets too deep to walk, and then the tallest one motions for us to come over.

  Clarisse glances at me and gives me a reassuring look, one that says, I’m brave enough for both of us. And I believe her. We swim over to the shallow end and say hello.

  The boys are from Massachusetts “but not Boston,” they make sure to specify. Two are brothers, and the third is their cousin. They’re here with their parents for a family reunion of sorts. It’s nothing too official, just a bunch of people from their extended family meeting up on the beach and hanging out. They’re early, they say. The rest of their family members aren’t arriving until Sunday.

  When they ask where we’re from, Clarisse tells them we’re sisters, and that we live at the hotel. “Our mom works here,” she tells them. “So we grew up here, ordering free room service and using the pool whenever we want.” I’m certain they’re going to see right through this. Clarisse and I don’t exactly look alike, and it seems rather far-fetched that the hotel would allow employees and their families to live here. I scan the boys’ faces, looking for signs of them calling bullshit, of them telling us we’re stupid little girls who are also stupid little liars. All I see is more wide smiling.

  “That’s really cool,” the tallest boy says. “It must be awesome to live in Florida. No winter.” He’s giving Clarisse the once-over with his laser-beam eye, scanning her body like he’s a machine. “How old are you?” he asks.

  “I’m nineteen,” Clarisse says without blinking. Everyone knows that blinking is a tell, a sign of lying. Other tells are touching your face, looking down, clearing your throat, and taking long pauses. Clarisse knows to avoid them all. “I go to Florida State. She’s eighteen,” Clarisse says, motioning to me. “She’s starting FSU as a freshman in the fall so we’ll finally be back together.” She drapes one arm over my shoulder, a sign of sisterly love. “How old are you guys?”

  They sound off their ages. The brothers are seventeen and fourteen, and the cousin is fourteen too. The seventeen-year-old smiles at Clarisse.

  “Do you get a lot of guys hitting on you here?” he asks. “I bet you do.” He is cupping water in his hands and then raising them and letting the water fall, making a trickling sound like a leaky faucet.

  “It’s not so bad,” Clarisse says. “When that happens, I just tell them that my mom works in human resources here at the hotel. And she’s very good at handling sexual harassment cases. That usually solves the problem.”

  One fourteen-year-old challenges the other fourteen-year-old to a race to the other side of the pool. They take off with a start, noisily splashing away from us.

  “Don’t mind them. They’re just trying to show off,” the older boy says. “They aren’t around pretty girls very often.” He’s looking at me now, eyeing my breasts covered by my purple bathing suit top. My body feels like a silvery fish at the market, shining on a bed of ice as customers walk by and examine me. I stand up a little straighter, pushing my chest out just a little. I almost can’t believe that I want him to see me. I’m so used to wanting to be invisible.

  An elderly woman in a black bathing suit arrives poolside, her skin sagging and spotted from sun damage. She walks into the pool, the skirt of her bathing suit eventually floating around her like a little black cloud. A few minutes later, two moms arrive with two squealing toddlers—armed with floaties and water wings and foam noodles.

  “Let’s get out and go down to the beach,” the seventeen-year-o
ld boy says.

  “Actually, we should probably get going,” Clarisse says. “We have to check in with our mom about dinner. But maybe we’ll see you later?”

  Clarisse taps me on the shoulder, and we walk up the steps and out of the pool. I wrap myself up in my towel, and Clarisse dries her hands on hers and then picks up her phone. I watch the water drip from Clarisse’s body while the boy recites his number with the Massachusetts area code, and she taps the digits into her phone.

  “I’m Heidi, by the way,” she says. “And this is Gretchen.” I smile, trying to look nonchalant after hearing my new name. The fourteen-year-olds are racing back to the shallow end now, their lean bodies cutting the water as if it were glass.

  The seventeen-year-old smiles with his teeth this time, which are straight and white and perfect. “I’m Oliver,” he says. “Nice to meet you.”

  Inside the hotel elevator, Clarisse and I watch the numbers light up as we are transported to our floor. There is a woman with a baby in one corner and what appears to be a newlywed couple in another.

  Clarisse smiles at me and then retrieves her phone from her bag and sends me two texts. He’s hot, her first message reads, and then she sends a second message that is just a bunch of fire emojis, dollops of identical orange and red digital flames lined up in perfect rows.

  I nod silently, smiling at the illuminated screen of my phone. When the stainless steel doors glide open, we step out of the elevator and into possibility.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  When we stay in hotels, my mother has a hard time falling asleep in the silence. She needs something on in the background so she likes to keep the television on. Shea can deal with the television, but she can’t have anything on with a story or she’ll pay too much attention to it and never fall asleep.