It didn’t feel like we were at the beach; if not for the smell of salt water we could have been on the edge of any shitty suburban subdevelopment. Yes, the beach was only a minute’s walk from here, but the strip mall was even closer. We were together, though.
DeeDee lit a cigarette and reached out her other hand for mine. She put her head on my shoulder. “That was nice,” she said.
“I know,” I said.
Starting to understand her was less like learning and more like forgetting. I was forgetting the DeeDee I’d created in my mind. Now, outside Ursula’s in the grass by the highway, she was just DeeDee. She was only herself.
That night, with the cars speeding past us, a few minutes after we’d kissed in the bar, DeeDee took my hand and I pulled her close to me and kissed her again, and this time she didn’t push me away. She seemed nervous, maybe, tentative. But she kissed me back. I ran my hands through her hair and then let my other hand drift to her boob. Then lower.
“Sam,” she said.
“Let’s just do it,” I said. “Let’s just do it.”
“Here?”
“At my place, obviously. Jeff’s gonna be with Kristle. My parents won’t even notice. You saw them in there. Who knows when they’ll even be home.”
She looked away.
“It doesn’t have to be this big deal or anything.”
“Sam,” she said. “Come on. It is this big deal. You know it is.”
“Why?” I asked. “You wanted to do it before. The night at the golf course. I know you wanted to. You would have. It was my fault. So let’s do it.”
“That was before. Things are different now. I’m different now. Everything’s different.”
“I know,” I said. “I know it is. That’s why we should do it. I want to. I’m not afraid anymore.”
Which was a lie, obviously. I was very afraid. I don’t even know what I was afraid of, but I was definitely afraid. But I was a lot of other things besides that too.
“It has this tendency to complicate everything. And I like things how they are now. Don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
“So let’s not fuck things up.”
“Okay,” I said. I was sincere; it was okay.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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LOSING
We have tried to leave this place—or should we say, this prison. We consider ourselves reasonably sneaky, but these islands are sneaky too. They will not surrender us.
The last one to try leaving was Taffany. It was at the beginning of this summer and she had just turned twenty: one year to go. It wasn’t much time, but all she wanted was to see something else before the end. Spend a year in another place, that’s all. Eat at a restaurant she’d never heard of. It would have been enough, she said. She had been talking about it for ages, but time was running out. She said, “What do I have to lose?”
Taffany decided to take a boat. There was some logic behind this choice: she thought that by traveling over water she could go unnoticed until it was too late to stop her. The water is still ours in some ways. And although our father will do anything to keep us, we still have our brothers and our mother on our side. We still have ourselves.
So Taffany got a raft, one of those inflatable ones, but the expensive kind—sturdy, with oars—from the store between the roads where they sell kites and sunglasses and T-shirts and tanning oil. The raft was stolen, so as to avoid detection. (Receipts and credit card statements are our father’s domain.) She brought nothing with her and left right away without saying final good-byes. A shady dip. We thought, Well, maybe this will work.
Of course, we knew it wouldn’t. She was back by the evening. She had paddled for hours across the bay, and when she got to the other side, having never deviated from her course, she found herself just where she had started.
Tressemé took a car, a rusty old Topaz she’d saved for a summer to buy. She left in the middle of the night to avoid outbound traffic on the causeway. But just before she reached the bridge, the engine began to smoke. She kept driving anyway: she only had a mile to go. She could make it if she didn’t panic.
She didn’t panic. And still, the Topaz sputtered and died. When Tressemé opened the hood, water spilled out. It was filled with an ocean. She hitchhiked home. No one would take her across the bridge.
Tiara thought the easiest thing would be to walk. Tiara had been unusual: she too had fallen for an out-of-towner, but this one was a girl. This happens rarely and is not approved of. Love is against our laws as it is, but at least with a boy there are some pragmatic aspects.
The girl had gone home, back to her normal life. Tiara wanted to find her, if only to say good-bye. We wondered if the girl would even remember her, but we didn’t say it.
And what could go wrong with walking? There could be no room for mechanical disaster; Tiara would not be reliant on anyone else’s navigation as one would on a bus or a plane. She packed supplies for several days; she bought comfortable walking shoes from one of the outlets and gathered enough money to survive after her escape.
At the end of the summer, she caught a ride to Manteo, where her plan was to walk across the island and cross the Virginia Dare bridge on foot, finally landing on the mainland in Mann’s Harbor. She didn’t know what she was going to do once she got there, but she would figure it out. We are resourceful.
When her feet began to sting, she kept walking. When she couldn’t walk anymore, she swallowed her pride and crawled.
Tiara’s mistake was persistence. Everyone else had given up.
We found her in the sand, a few days later, lying in the parking lot of the Outback Steakhouse on the bypass, barely able to speak, unable to remember how she’d gotten there. She was never the same.
Still. Someone tries it every summer. Someone will try it again next summer. The stories become legend; they are passed along until they lose meaning. Someone always thinks she will be the one to outsmart him.
She thinks, What do I have to lose?
But there’s always something.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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NINETEEN
WE WENT TO the ocean. DeeDee couldn’t swim and she was never really that excited about lying on the beach, but it was a Tuesday. She had the day off, and we couldn’t think of anything else to do. So now we were lying on an old blanket together, her flipping idly through an old paperback she’d found and me just napping, drifting in and out of wakefulness, every now and then turning to look at her when she thought I was still sleeping. I knew it was pushing my luck, but I wanted to go in the ocean. “C’mon,” I said again when she ignored me. “Let’s go for a swim. It’ll be fun.”
DeeDee flushed without looking up from the page she was reading. “I can’t swim,” she said. “I know it’s weird. I just can’t.”
“We don’t have to go in deep. Just up to our waists. It won’t even be swimming.”
She sighed, still pretending to be absorbed in her dumb magazine. “It’s not the swimming part I don’t like. It’s more like I’m afraid of the water. It’s just one of those things—it’s like, hereditary. Ask Kristle. Ask any of them. Don’t start.”
The day was hot and overcast. The sun had made cursory appearances over the course of the morning, but since lunch it had been coy behind a mountainous landscape of clouds. As the beach deepened in its monochrome, the dullness of the afternoon began to turn DeeDee more radiant, her hair and eyes burning in breathtaking relief against the gloomy backdrop. Lying in the sand in a white V-neck and denim booty-shorts, she cut through the gray like she was lit from an entirely different source, like the world was one of the doctored photos in her dumb magazine and DeeDee was the element that had been hastily dropped in.
“C
ome on,” I said. I rolled onto my stomach and leaned close to her face with the same eyes that had lured her onto the blanket on the sand. “Just get your feet wet. I won’t let anything happen.” I kissed her on the cheek and she dropped her book and laughed, finally looking up at me from a place somewhere far beyond a heavy veil of lashes and slanty Cleopatra eyeliner. “Okay,” she said, smiling tightly. Deep breath. “Fine. Let’s do it. Just make fucking sure I don’t drown, or Kristle’ll kill you.”
“I wouldn’t want to get on Kristle’s bad side, that’s for hell of sure. She looks like she’d cut a bitch for looking at her funny.”
“She would,” DeeDee said. “I’ve seen her do it. Blood everywhere, not a pretty sight. All because someone sent his fish sticks back to the kitchen.”
Since the Fourth of July, Kristle had become something like a normal person, had stopped staring at me and touching me inappropriately and climbing nude into my bed when I was sound asleep. Jeff, too, had forgotten to be mad at me and had started behaving like his usual obnoxious self again.
And DeeDee stood, stripped off her white T-shirt and tossed it aside, slid her cutoffs to the sand, and picked the wedgie of her bikini from her ass (which I couldn’t help ogling). She sauntered ahead of me with a careless swing in her shoulders, but when she looked back to make sure I was following, I could see that her confidence was just a put-on. I moved to her side and she took my hand. “Forget Kristle. If you let me drown, I’ll fucking kill you,” she said.
I laughed. It was hard to take her too seriously. DeeDee looked like she belonged to the water.
“What is it about it that scares you?” I asked. We had made our way to the edge of the water, but DeeDee had paused abruptly, nervous again. “Besides that you don’t know how to swim.”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“It just seems like there’s something else,” I said.
“Oh, I don’t know. Just the fact that it goes on forever, I guess. The fact that you look out and you can see for miles and miles and miles but it’s not even the start, not even close. The fact that it’s beautiful. I know it sounds stupid, but it’s the same way that you scare me. If you want the truth.”
“I scare you?” I asked. But of course I was pleased. What I was really thinking was, She thinks I’m beautiful?
“I read somewhere that the human eye can see exactly twenty-six miles into the distance on a perfectly flat surface. So when you look out into the ocean, the point where the water blurs into the sky is twenty-six miles away. The same as a marathon. Doesn’t that seem like a weird coincidence?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But it also doesn’t seem like it’s true.”
“Oh. Yeah. Maybe not. I don’t even remember where I read it. Probably Her Place—they run ‘Ripley’s Believe It or Not’ on the back page you know. Anyway, I choose to believe it even if it’s fake. Sometimes you can locate a truer version of the truth somewhere in a total lie. And don’t you think it would be cool to watch a marathon run on the surface of the ocean? Just to stand right here and watch the runners disappearing into nothing at the horizon point, racing straight off the edge of the world?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess it would. If it really worked that way.”
“Details, details,” DeeDee said. “Don’t stand in the way of a pretty thought, babe.”
Although we had stopped moving forward the tide was rising and was now lapping at our toes. DeeDee flinched for a second and gripped my hand tighter when the chilly ocean washed over our feet, but after the third or fourth time it had presented itself to us she seemed suddenly emboldened. When it withdrew again, DeeDee and I went with it, her pulling me forward.
The water had seemed calm from our blanket, but I could see now that it was getting choppy, and when we were in up to our knees, we had to brace ourselves not to be bowled over by the roiling of the waves. I almost lost my balance, and I felt DeeDee tense up again. She shuddered a little.
“Careful,” I said. “Just hold tight.”
I was surprised when she didn’t listen to me, instead dropping my hand to hold steady on her own. The ocean was at our thighs and I thought she’d want to turn back, but she took another step forward and then another, straight into a drop-off, where she began to paddle her arms easily, gliding still farther out, over a swell. I dove under the water to surface at her side, shaking my hair out. It was shallow enough to stand but only barely—when the waves rolled by, you had to sort of hop over them until they passed.
DeeDee was regarding me with amusement. “You look cute,” she said when we both had our bearings. “Like a wet dog.” She pushed my bangs from my eyes. “I guess the water’s not so bad after all. Maybe I can actually do this.”
“Duh,” I said. “Anyone can swim.”
“Not me,” DeeDee said. “ I might be able to go in the water for a second, but I definitely can’t swim. Trust me.”
“You’re safe with me,” I said.
“No,” she said. “No one’s ever safe, babe. The minute you think you’re safe is the same minute you’re screwed.”
“You’re safe,” I repeated, and in a moment of impulse I took her hips and kissed her, never feeling more sure of anything I’d ever done.
I knew she was wrong. Because in that moment, kissing her, our bodies pressed together as the water pulsed through us, I had never felt safer in my life. I felt an unfamiliar happiness swelling in my belly, a warm and twisting certainty. It didn’t matter what happened in the future. It didn’t matter what happened in a minute. It didn’t even matter what had happened already. I didn’t care about anything except right then, there with DeeDee in the water for the first time, us on a cloudy beach, content forever for a second. Then the second was over and we broke away from each other and reality intruded again, but only in the form of a cool and mostly pleasant breeze.
“I need to tell you something,” she said. “I should have told you before, but I didn’t know how. Actually, I still don’t know how.”
“What?” I asked. “You can tell me anything.”
DeeDee just looked at me, twisting her mouth and sort of wincing. “You’re going to kind of freak out,” she said. “I mean, you probably won’t even believe me.”
“What?” I asked, suddenly nervous.
Before she could say anything more, a wave came out of nowhere.
We’d been safe in the steady, gentle swells beyond the surf. The minute you think you’re safe is the same minute you’re fucked. And we were fucked. The wave was an angry one: I saw it towering two or three feet above my head, about to break right on top of us. “Duck,” I said. I reached for DeeDee but I couldn’t find her. Still, wherever she was, I thought I heard her mumble something about her father just before we were taken by the wave. Then we were wrecked.
The water boiled me: flipped me heels over head and pulled my back into a painful zigzag before pummeling me shoulder-first into a rough and prickly sandbar. I came up coughing, lungs waterlogged and sinuses stinging. I’d scraped my elbow and when I looked down, I could see it was bleeding. But I wasn’t worried about blood. I was worried about DeeDee, who was nowhere to be seen. She couldn’t swim.
I recovered quickly and scanned the shore for DeeDee, hoping to see her lying safe (if bruised) in the sand. She was not. Using my hand as a visor, I turned again to the sea. At first I saw nothing, but then I shifted my focus to a more distant point, and there she was. Barely.
I had no idea how she’d gotten out so far, but I could see her head bobbing in the water, just beyond the waves. She was sputtering and flailing, gasping for breath.
“DeeDee,” I screamed. Or tried to scream—it came out as just a cracked and hopeless wail that I knew couldn’t come close to reaching her. Even if it mattered.
So even though I’m barely a swimmer myself, I dove back into the water and swam. I pushed hard, trying to remember the swimming lessons I’d neglected to pay attention to when I was ten years old. Somehow, I found a reserve of strength wi
thin myself, a well of technique that I’d never known I’d had. I felt supercharged. Several times since I’d gotten here, I’d thought I’d felt hands grasping at my legs, trying to pull me under. This time, I felt the same thing, and I realized that they weren’t trying to pull me at all. Something—or someone—was helping me.
When I caught up with her, she was treading water helplessly, her head thrown back, face barely suspended above the surface of the water, eyes barely open. “DeeDee,” I said, wrapping my arm around her limp body. “What the hell are you doing?” She looked up at me, startled.
“Sam?” DeeDee was surprised to see me. “It was so weird. We were just standing there talking and then . . . how did we get so far out? It’s fucking freezing!”
“Come on,” I said. “Relax.”
“I can’t even swim!” DeeDee said. And as it dawned on her what was going on, she suddenly started struggling, paddling her legs furiously and thrashing around in my arms. She began to cough up water.
“Shh,” I said. I piled her hair on top of her head with my free hand. I took the wet strand that was stuck to the side of her face and tucked it behind her ear. Her breathing got slower. “Just float on your back. I’ll float with you. Just relax. We’ll be fine.” DeeDee halfheartedly tried to push me away, but I held her tight.
“Come on,” I whispered. I let her go, rolling onto my back as an example. I looked her in the eyes until she followed my lead, and I reached out and touched her shoulder and we floated back to the shore, like that, wave by wave until we could stand, and soon we were back on the shore floundering in the cold of Kristle’s glare.
“What the fuck is this?” Kristle said, before we’d even stood up. Jeff was standing beside her with his arms crossed awkwardly across his chest, looking off to the side. “DeeDee can’t swim, dipshit.” And then, pulling DeeDee up by the hand, “What the fuck were you fucking thinking?”
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