September Girls

by Bennett Madison

  “You know what I was thinking,” DeeDee said. “You know exactly what I was thinking, so leave me alone.”

  That was when Kristle slapped her. Hard. The sound of her open palm stinging DeeDee’s face was louder than it should have been; it echoed up and down the beach, and I could see vacationers turn to stare.

  “Hey,” I said, lunging for Kristle, but Jeff had already pulled her away.

  “Okay, okay,” Jeff said. “Enough. Everything’s fine.”

  “It’s not,” Kristle said. “Everything is so not fine.”

  DeeDee took off running. I moved to follow her, but Kristle grabbed me by the elbow. “Let her go,” she said, still glaring. “I want to talk to you.”

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  BECOMING

  It takes us a while to find our bodies. When we first arrive here, we are shifting and blurry at the edges, changing from moment to moment. We have to become something. So we take out our knives and carve ourselves into something that they will find becoming. We chisel and etch ourselves into the form that we will find the most useful.

  We page through magazines and scrutinize the women on television, trying to find the perfect formula. We agree on generalities but sometimes argue about specifics: the ideal proportions, the right curves. We pay careful attention to the men on the streets, watching to see which way their heads turn, where their eyes drift. What makes them give in.

  And so we give ourselves breasts and hips and round, perfect asses. Shining hair, glittering eyes.

  We could look like anything, but we settle in this body until it becomes familiar, if not exactly our own. We might prefer a different appearance, but this is the costume we have chosen. We clothe ourselves in the shortest shorts, the tightest T-shirts. We paint our nails like Kim Zolciak. We wear things that glitter. We glitter too.

  This is not beauty. We would be beautiful in any shape: our beauty is immutable. This—this is just how we get what we want.

  But sometimes we feel ourselves losing our grip on the borders of our form. We find ourselves confused. What was that disguise again? We have to struggle to keep our shape.

  And sometimes, more rarely, we see someone looking straight through us as if he is peeling away our mask, as if he is glimpsing what is truly beautiful: the part of us that is infinite and fiery and dark. He is seeing our strength. He is seeing our knife.

  We are still becoming. But becoming what?

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  TWENTY

  THEY WERE IN the water: there were hundreds of them—maybe thousands, maybe more—lined up hip to hip at the edge of the surf, stretching in a line for as far as I could see. It was after midnight, and I was standing on the outcropping of rocks that overlooked their secret cove. Under the full moon, the shoreline on the cove seemed to have expanded to accommodate infinity.

  I had my flashlight with me, but I didn’t need to use it. The girls were glowing. Or. Maybe glowing isn’t the right word.

  Maybe none of it is the right word. Because to call them girls wasn’t quite accurate either. It was them, for sure—the Girls, I mean, a whole army of them—but tonight they were different. They were all naked, their shining skin rippling with the sway of the water, in and out and in and out, half-submerged in the shallows, pointing to a horizonless horizon. Their hair was fanned out behind them in the sand in tangled clumps, no longer blond but black and iridescent, like seaweed smushed up with gasoline and tar. Every now and then one of them would stretch a little, or splash her legs—if they were even legs—but mostly they were motionless.

  And they were buzzing: bluish and bright in the moonlight, like the flicker of a television in the crack under a closed door.

  There was no reasonable explanation for the fact that they were glowing. The moon was full and bright, yes, but that wasn’t it. It occurred to me that they were lit from within. When I squinted a little, I saw that their legs were shining most of all; they seemed to be covered in something shiny and electric, something throwing sparks. When I squinted a little more, I saw that they were covered in scales.

  DeeDee was here, I was sure. I could feel her presence as a tingling in my chest. But I didn’t bother looking for her; I knew it would have been impossible to pick her out. I began to feel almost dizzy.

  The girls in their repose appeared more alike than ever now, as if in a mirror: enchanted, shattered. From where I stood, they were now so much the same that I had an understanding that they were all part of the same being.

  Or something.

  I knew that I was not supposed to be seeing this. I could tell, somehow, that it was a secret beyond secrets. But I also knew, in some way, that there was a reason I was allowed to be here, a reason I had made it here at all. In the dark on the beach in the secret cove that DeeDee had once taken me to, the Girls were revealing themselves to me in a form that was, if not true, then as true as I could understand. If they had wanted this to be secret, I wouldn’t have been able to find their beach tonight.

  I tried to move closer, but found that I couldn’t; I tried to remember how I had found myself here. The memory was hard to summon at first; I was having trouble thinking. It felt like I was revisiting a dream I’d once had. But it wasn’t a dream.

  Kristle had told me to come here. At the beach earlier that day, DeeDee had run away and Kristle had grabbed my arm and said, “I want to talk to you.”

  “The cove,” she’d said. “Meet me there tonight. It’s a full moon. It will be close by. You’ll find it.”

  So a few hours later, when it was dark, I’d left the house and headed to the beach. I didn’t have to worry about finding the cove. As soon as I stepped onto the beach road, I’d noticed a girl making her way through the dunes toward the beach. She had a familiar gait, and for a second I thought it was DeeDee but then realized it wasn’t. Making my way down the road I kept seeing them, girl after girl, all of them looking skittish but determined, all glancing over their shoulders before sneaking off into the tall grass. Finally, I decided to follow one of them onto the sand. There, I found an almost-procession of them, all heading up the beach, each of them alone.

  I wasn’t just meeting Kristle. I was meeting all of them. As I walked up the beach, the moon grew not just brighter but larger and lower, and when it was a half dollar scraping the water, I saw rocks emerging from the sand. The Girls were crawling over them, one by one as if in a trance, none of them acknowledging the others. I sat in the sand for a while and waited; they didn’t seem to notice me as they passed me by. Then, after the parade trickled to a halt, I figured it was safe and began my own climb up the slippery rocks. At the top I looked out and started to understand.

  There they were in the water, no longer girls and no longer anything I could recognize. They were just Them.

  Kristle had wanted me to see this. DeeDee had wanted me to see this too; it was what she had been trying to tell me in the water that afternoon (had it only been that afternoon?) just when she’d gotten sucked under by the wave.

  They all wanted me to know this about them.

  Well, I could see it. And still, I knew I would never, ever really understand what I was looking at. Any explanation would never be explanation enough. It was like looking at a drawing of God: it doesn’t even begin.

  I don’t know how long I stood there watching them.

  Then I felt a hand on my shoulder, but I didn’t jump. It was almost like I was expecting him: Jeff was at my side. He looked different in the full moon too, both more and less than himself. His dark, curly hair was longer and wilder than I’d ever seen it and his biceps were pulsing, his shoulders cartoonishly broad. He smiled and punched me in the side.

  “Fucking unbelievable, right?”

&
nbsp; “How long have you known about it?” I asked him.

  “A while. Long enough.”

  “What are they?” I asked.

  “They are what they are,” he said. “I don’t even think they know, not totally at least. Why does there need to be a name for it?”

  The word mattered to me, though. Names matter.

  Before I knew it the moon was gone and the sun was yellow and burning, and I rubbed my eyes from sleep. I was in the sand, the rocky barrier of the cove above me. The Girls were gone.

  DeeDee’s face appeared first. Her hair was wet, slicked back, and she was golden, washed in sun.

  “I have to tell you something,” she said.

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  LEGEND

  We are renters and borrowers and, in the end, only thieves. Our jewelry boxes are filled with things we have stolen: dangly fish-tail earrings and sea glass and little plastic figurines that we find in the sand. Bracelets left behind at tables we serve, driver’s licenses abandoned in the rooms we clean. Finders keepers.

  We have learned by now that our beauty does not count as a possession. The only thing we truly own is our legend.

  Legend:

  Once upon a time, we were happy. Once upon a time, we were home.

  We had a mother and two brothers and even a father, although he was distant and saturnine. Our mother was patient and gentle and kind.

  Our mother is the Deepness. She is beautiful with the wisdom of the universe, brimming with formulas and poems and books and myths and other things beyond description.

  You may call her a whore. Some have. But being the Deepness, how could she be asked to draw edges around what has none? Being the Deepness, how could she be expected to turn her back on the possibilities of the world, to ignore the unfathomable caves of her being, the glittering wrecks abandoned in her honor at every turn? How could she do anything but accept what is rightfully hers? If that makes her a whore, then we’re whores too.

  Well, maybe we are.

  Our father is the Endlessness. The Endlessness had grown envious of our mother’s knowledge. And being the Endlessness—having an understanding of the infinite reaches of jealousy, being acquainted with the unquenchable deserts of vengeful rage—he exacted a punishment.

  To punish a mother, you punish her daughters. Every king in history has known that rinky-dink little trick. It doesn’t matter if her daughters are your daughters too. A father still has his sons. A father still has Speed and Calm. Most importantly, he still has his cock.

  So the Endlessness banished us to this nowhere. We come here on our sixteenth birthday, spit from the ocean we’re born in. We crawl naked from the water with no possessions, no memories, and no name. We come unable to swim and barely able to walk. We come bearing only our knife.

  The older girls—the ones who have been here for many summers—know where and when to look for us. They are led to us by the aching in their feet. They take us in, give us clothes and Chinese slippers, and help us soothe our feet in baths of salt water. They feed us french fries and teach us the names of all the characters on soap operas.

  They teach us this legend. First, they remind us of our curse—remind us why we are here before it becomes indistinct in our memories. Then they reveal the second and more important part of the curse, which is how to break it. Which is the way home.

  Our sisters hate us, of course.

  We hate them, too. We all hate one another. We have to hate one another: like the lost girls on Top Model and The Bachelor we are not here to make friends. We are here for one reason only, and that is to leave. But it doesn’t really matter whether we’re friends. We’re sisters, and few of us are leaving anyway.

  Well, put it a different way: only a few of us are going home. As for the rest of us—we don’t like to talk about that.

  All we want is to break the curse. Like any good curse, it is breakable. Like any good curse, you lose as much in the breaking as you gain. Perhaps more. But what’s the alternative?

  It doesn’t matter. We will do whatever it takes. We don’t care what we lose. Loss is our legend.

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  TWENTY-ONE

  DEEDEE TOLD ME the legend, and the beach lost its detail. As she spoke, the tourists and the umbrellas and even the sun and the clouds overhead just faded into nothing until we were facing each other on a bright and infinite shore, only us two. Even the water at our feet was indistinct, abstract.

  DeeDee was fidgety, waiting for my reaction. I noticed that she had a flower in her hair, small and pink and intricate in its composition. I didn’t know where it had come from. Had it been there before?

  Somewhere in the uncertain distance, on the fringes of the endless landscape, I felt the Girls hovering, watching, listening, waiting. Their eyes glowing, hair twisting, arms solemnly at their sides.

  Beyond the ocean’s horizon, I sensed DeeDee’s other sisters beneath, reaching for the surface of the waves with slimy, grasping fingers. But right there, on the beach, it was just us.

  “So how do you break the curse?” I asked finally.

  I didn’t waste time arguing over whether the story was true. I didn’t expend a lot of thought on the idea that she was crazy, or that I was crazy, or anything. Although I did feel a little crazy. It’s hard to explain why I accepted it all so easily, considering how unbelievable it was. But. Maybe it was just that I’d been at the beach so long. It all made a certain watery, logicless sense.

  I had seen it with my own eyes. I had felt it. It was all as reasonable as anything could be around here.

  DeeDee laughed ruefully. “Oh, it’s simple, really,” she said. “I mean, very simple, but complicated, too. Like all good curses.”

  “Well how?” I asked.

  She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, darted her eyes left and right, and then looked at me again, now steady and direct. She took a deep breath.

  “You do it with a virgin,” she said. “I mean, we do. I do. A virgin boy, obviously. Don’t hear much about them, do you?”

  “No,” I said. “I guess you don’t.” I didn’t smile. A virgin.

  “I mean, don’t get the wrong idea,” she said. “You’re still a guy. I wouldn’t go trying to ride any unicorns or anything.” She grinned entreatingly. “It’s just this particular little bit of magic.”

  “Why are you acting like this is a joke?” I asked.

  She crossed her arms and faced away from me, looking at the sand. “Because it is a joke. A bad one, but still—don’t you see? Our father has always had an obnoxious sense of humor.”

  “I’m not following,” I mumbled.

  “Come on. In the book of curses it doesn’t seem very serious, does it? Sex with a teenage boy. How fucking difficult can that be? Hardy har har.”

  I frowned.

  “Should be easy, right? “ She shrugged apologetically. “Look, we figured that little punch line out a long time ago. We’re not as stupid as we pretend to be—we get that from our mother. Our sense of irony—that’s from Dad. Anyway, it’s harder than it sounds. A lot harder. You guys are picky. You only get to lose your virginity once. And there aren’t actually that many of you. Children don’t count, by the way, not that we would stoop that low.”

  I understood. Maybe I had understood all along. Fuck a virgin. Well that was me. They must have been able to smell it on me from the start. That explained the Girls staring at me everywhere I went, Kristle’s hand on my neck at our first lunch at the Fisherman’s Net, the fact that they’d all but ignored Jeff, at least at first. The visit in the middle of the night. It explained pretty much everything.

  I felt sick to my stomach.

  “So that’s it?”

  “You
have to understand,” she said. “We live with this. This is strange to you. It’s everything to us.”

  It didn’t matter what it was to them.

  I was their ticket out. I mean, not theirs. I was her ticket out. Not even DeeDee. Any her. Whichever her got to me first. It was just that simple. The rest of it—the details, the explanations, the caveats, whatever—was all meaningless to me. It wasn’t even my business.

  Yes I had questions. Well, how could I not? But I was too angry to really ask any of them. Instead I started unbuttoning my jeans. “I guess we might as well get it over with, then.”

  “Sam,” she said. “Come on.”

  “What?” I said. “This is what you want. I’ll stick it in, and then you can get your ass out of here. Back to where you belong, to wear pink shells on your boobs, hang out with Ariel and the rest of them. Let’s get this shit over with.”

  “I’m not going to do it with you,” DeeDee said. “I already decided, so you can button your pants.”

  It was too late; I was sliding them off. “How long does it have to last to work, anyway? Do I even get to wiggle it around a little? Or is it just wham, bam, no more curse?”

  “Don’t humiliate me,” she said. “Please?” She was touching her mouth.

  My jeans were puddled at my ankles. I was standing there in just my white briefs. I tried to affect an air of defiance, but it was difficult; I suddenly remembered that the right butt cheek of this particular pair of underpants had a hole from washing them too many times.

  Humiliate you? I wanted to say.

  DeeDee was standing straight, shoulders back, neck long, and chin up. She had her jaw squared. She didn’t look sad about any of this. She looked tired and over it, but not sad. What, no cigarette? I wanted to say.

  “So then what? So we don’t do it; then what happens? Then what do you do? What next?”

  “I still have a few years to take care of it,” she said, like it was the least important thing I could ask.