September Girls

by Bennett Madison

  Junk floats in the water. Sometimes entire homes have been swallowed. Lives have been destroyed; people have sometimes been killed. But the ocean is still here, and so are we. Nothing feels that different.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  .....................................................................

  TWENTY-THREE

  “HERE,” DAD SAID. “Take this. Go find some treasure, okay?” He was brandishing his metal detector at me almost like a threat. It was the next day and the hurricane still hadn’t come. It was supposed to hit in the late afternoon, according to the news, but they kept changing the prediction. Upgrading, downgrading, pushing, and pulling. I wished it would hurry up and come so we could get it over with.

  Mom was on the couch reading a book about meditation; Jeff was sleeping in a ball on a La-Z-Boy, snoring, his mouth gaping, while the local news anchor droned on about weather predictions. Someone had suggested going to stock up on supplies, but no one was in the mood to deal with the lines. At some point Dad had spotted me gazing longingly into the kitchen cabinet for the thousandth time, hoping something interesting to eat had somehow materialized, and had gone to fetch his device. Now he was shoving it into my hands.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said, taking it from him. It was lighter than I expected. It felt right in my hands.

  “You need something to do.”

  “What about the hurricane?”

  “I don’t think anyone’s going to be worried about a little hurricane when you come back with Blackbeard’s legendary booty. Anyway, the hurricane won’t be here for a few hours at least. Just come back if it starts to get really dicey out there.”

  “What do you think I’ll really find?”

  “Who knows, Tiger? Could be nothing. It’s not really that important anyway. The journey is the destination, as they say.”

  “I’ve heard that.”

  “But you know,” he said. “I haven’t been able to find anything. And I know it’s out there. It occurs to me that maybe you might have a little more luck.”

  I surprised myself by taking his suggestion. I guess I just liked the idea of having no fixed destination, of being carried on the waves of blips and bloops until I looked up and found myself somewhere new. It seemed like it could lead me anywhere, even someplace secret—which is to say a secret place that could be my own, unlike the other secret place that wasn’t mine at all. I also liked the idea of having something to do. So I took the metal detector, put in the headphones, and went out to find whatever it was that I was supposed to find.

  Outside, the dunes were keeling over. The oceanfront buildings were boarded up; the parking lots of the motels were empty. The only people on the street were packs of drunk, shouting bicycle riders—locals, I figured—speeding into the wind, falling over, then getting back up and mounting their bikes again.

  It was already pouring when I stepped onto the beach. The rain soaked me, spilling down from my hair into my face in rivulets so thick I could barely see. It ran down my shoulders and my back and my spine and my chest into the waistband of my underpants, then down my legs. I ignored it and just powered on the metal detector—knowing the water was probably bad for it but whatever—and started my trek. The downpour didn’t last anyway; it was over a few minutes after it started, and though it was windier than ever, it became suddenly dryish, the sky gray but clear.

  So I walked and walked, sweeping my arm back and forth in a slow, repeating arc like a blind man with a cane. I let the thing lead me, not worrying about the fact that I wasn’t moving in anything near to a straight line. Here and there it would beep, and then the beeping would get louder before stopping suddenly, like to say, Oops, sorry about that, no big deal.

  So I’d just keep going, choosing my own path until the beeping suddenly started again and led me a little farther. At first I thought it was being indecisive, but as I made my way farther down the beach in whatever direction, it started to dawn on me that this was how the metal detector wanted it. It was not content to be my guide. Yes, it would give me hints, but I had to act on my own instincts if I was going to find my way.

  As it started to rain again—this time as more of a horizontal drizzle—I thought of the first time DeeDee had taken me to her secret cove. About the way it had just seemed to drop itself in front of us, summoned by an esoteric combination of footsteps. I thought about the fact that when Jeff and I had gone back looking for it on our own, it had obstinately refused to exist.

  The rain got harder. I kept wandering.

  I thought about the night we’d spent in the belly of Nalgene’s fiberglass ship, wrecked on the green-carpeted shoals of the golf course. I thought about how little I’d known DeeDee then, and the fact that I still barely knew her now. I wondered if that really mattered.

  And I wondered what had happened to the Girl we’d seen in the surf on our first night here. Whether she’d found DeeDee and Kristle; whether I had met her without knowing it. I wondered what her name was.

  I thought about whether DeeDee would ever make it home. Around that time, the machine started to beep, and I looked up and saw that I was standing on a part of the beach that I hadn’t seen before. For the most part, the shoreline was all the same around here, but here it was different. It was broader and greener, and the dunes were so high that they looked like grassy little mountains and were bordered with squat and gnarled trees that were twisted over with vines flowering in tiny lavender stars. Even wet, the sand was a bright, clean white, and the water had a cerulean tint not native to the place. It was as if I’d found myself on another planet, which was virtually the same but not quite.

  And the machine was going crazy, beeping and blooping louder than it seemed like it was supposed to. It was practically vibrating in my hand, and then it was pulling me to a spot on the beach, dragging me with it like a stubborn dog until it came to rest at a spot that was nothing special.

  The metal detector was quivering with excitement. It wanted me to stop here. So I set it aside and began to dig. At first I felt silly doing it—what was I really going to find, anyway?—but the more I dug the more it felt important, the more it felt like I couldn’t stop until I hit something.

  I started with one hand, scooping damp sand and tossing it to the side, and then when the earth got firmer, I began to use two. I still didn’t know what I was looking for—didn’t even consider it, really—but soon the hole was deep enough and wide enough that I had to climb inside it to keep digging. So I did.

  The rain started getting harder again. The water started to fill up around me in my pit, but I kept going.

  Time seemed to have stopped, or at least I had stopped caring about it. The metal detector, placated that I was digging, wasn’t screaming anymore and had settled into a robotic purr.

  What I didn’t realize was that the beach was shrinking around me. How could I know, absorbed as I was in my dig, that the water was rising around me on every side, that I now stood in something like an island, five feet by five feet, as the hurricane raged and the water flooded? How could I know that the metal detector had been swept away, that I was alone now, and that there was no way home?

  All I knew was that I was digging. That there was something here and that I needed to find it. Maybe it was what my dad had been searching for all along.

  Or. Maybe it was something else.

  The wind was raging around me, but I was dug in deep enough that I was safe from it. The rain didn’t bother me anymore. I was about to toss another handful of dirt to the side when I felt a lump in my hand.

  I was uncertain at first that I’d found what I was supposed to be looking for. At first, it looked like nothing more than a crappy shell.

  But then I looked closer and saw that it wasn’t a shell at all but a silver, clam-shaped something—man-made and barely bigger than a large coin or the face of a watch, crusted in sand and grime and greenish mossy stuff. I turned it over in m
y hand, examining the scalloped grooves on the back, running my fingers over the slimy fuzz. Dad’s discoveries had mostly been stuff that had probably been dropped by people on the beach the same afternoon and been covered over by an inch of sand, but this had been here a long time. He had never found anything like this. It seemed likely that it could have been buried here forever.

  Then I noticed that it was hinged at the bottom edge, with a deep groove around the outside rim, like a locket or a pocket watch.

  I pushed at the groove with my thumbnail. I didn’t really expect it to open, but all I did was pry it a little and it yielded easily: with a click, it flipped right open. There was a minor flash of brightness that could have been my imagination, but I flinched as a fractured bit of what might have been sunlight, if it had been sunny, bounced into my eyes. When I opened them, I realized that I was looking at a mirror.

  The glass was unscuffed and gleaming like new, and was framed by five tiny green jewels, each set into a recess in the intricate silver molding. It looked expensive. But I didn’t take the time to examine it. I was too busy staring at the person who was staring up at me.

  It was me. And I couldn’t help it: I caught my breath. It took me a beat to realize it was me.

  I looked so different. I had changed since we’d come to this beach, and somehow I had missed it. Now I could see myself all at once as a re-created person.

  When we’d left home in May, my hair had been short enough that you’d barely know it was technically curly; now it had grown out into wild rings that spiraled into my face, weighted by rainwater. I had changed color, too. My skin was burnished gold and splattered with a confused matrix of orangey-brown freckles that crawled out across my cheekbones from the broad bridge of my nose. My jaw looked wider; my eyes were deeper set and ringed with dark circles. I was heavier, more substantial, but there was a definition in my face that was new.

  In the mirror, my mouth was open, and I realized I was smiling, just a little, revealing a small sliver of this one snaggly tooth I have.

  I’d never really looked at myself before, not like this.

  I was seeing myself for the first time, not as a stranger would see me, but like when you meet someone and have that zing of déjà vu. It was almost how I’d felt when I’d opened that door and found DeeDee in the bedroom of that beach house at Kristle’s birthday.

  It recalled another feeling too, and a night I’d almost forgotten about. Back in October—it was less than a year ago, but it seemed longer now—Sebastian’s parents had been out of town, and he’d had this great idea to catch a ride into the city with his sister, to sneak into this club where they were having some dance party type of thing he’d read about on the internet.

  I’m not much of a dancer, but I’d gone along with him because Sebastian thought it was such a great idea and I didn’t want to chicken out. Anyway, I’d figured there was no way we’d be able to get in; we were underage.

  But I’d forgotten that Sebastian was Sebastian. It only took him a few seconds to work some kind of magic with the bouncer, and then we were walking inside the club, where we got ourselves beers and stood in the corner, watching the crowd swell and shift around us, watching the girls waving their arms in the air, flashing their midriffs and tossing their hair, laughing and slugging drinks. Sebastian and I didn’t really say much to each other; he seemed as much at a loss for what to do next as I was. But after a few minutes, he shrugged and took a last chug of his drink before plunking the glass down on the bar. “Dude. I’m gonna see what’s up in this place,” he said. “I’ll find you later. Don’t get in too much trouble.”

  I waited for him for a while, drinking beer after beer—feeling bold, I’d started experimenting with fruity microbrews—until I was definitely buzzed, and then, when it seemed like I’d given him plenty of time on his own, I went to find him.

  I squished into the center of the dance floor, where I found myself in a mass of bodies that twisted and pumped around me as they threw themselves into one another and into the air, all operating as one big indistinguishable organism.

  The music was nothing I’d ever heard before, just a swirling funnel of guitars and synths and voices that pushed forward into someplace new and then looped back on itself. I felt like I was staring out the end of a long tunnel, and realized I was probably drunk.

  Then I was dancing. I don’t know how I knew how to do it or anything, but my body was moving itself. Driven by the pulsing around me, the thump of the bass that now seemed to be coming from inside my chest.

  I closed my eyes and kept going.

  The strobe was flashing on the backs of my eyelids, and then it was as if they weren’t closed at all. It was as if I was watching myself from above, pink and green flecks whirling on my face, the vapor from the smoke machine curling at my feet, my beer sloshing as my shoulders rocked and swayed, and the music just shooting through me.

  I lost track of where one song ended and the next one began, of where I ended and the music started.

  I felt beautiful, like a battery absorbing lights and sound and sweat and rhythm and throwing it back out into the crowd.

  It was sort of like being in love, I think—but a different kind of love than most people usually talk about. I was in love with everything and with nothing. I remember feeling very far away from myself, but more myself than ever too.

  Eventually Sebastian found me, alone and just moving and not caring who saw me or what they thought. He tapped me on the shoulder and I turned to face him, but kept dancing, unashamed, before slowing to a stop as he looked me up and down with a bemused smile that suggested that he thought I’d gone completely nuts. “Dude,” he said. “This place kind of sucks. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  So we left together and called Sebastian’s sister, who was annoyed to have to take us home so early. She lectured us the whole way about “knowing our limits” and “pacing ourselves.” The next morning I had expected to be wrecked, headachy and hungover, but I was fine.

  But the feeling I’d had when I was dancing that night, alone and surrounded by all those people—the feeling that I was trying to reach out to another, truer version of myself across some kind of infinite and unbridgeable divide—remained with me. It was the same feeling I had on the beach in the hurricane, gazing into the shell mirror I’d dug from the sand.

  I was looking at myself with this sadness and hunger and love that was all mixed together and shaken up until it was all basically the same thing. And the image I stared at was shedding layers, just sloughing them off. I forgot about my parents, about the beach and the hurricane, and even about the mirror itself. I forgot about DeeDee.

  I forgot everything except the person that stared back at me, stripped to an essential but incomprehensible core and wishing that I could be that person.

  I don’t know how long I stood there, just looking at myself in the mirror, caught up in the weird rapture of knowledge, the drunkenness of unexpected recognition. But after a while I felt water at my thighs and looked down and saw that the hole I was standing in had entirely filled. I climbed out and looked up and down the beach—or what was left of it.

  It was just gone. It had been swallowed by the storm.

  Then I felt the wind, in the form of falling on my ass. I was swept over backward onto the sliver of mud that was still left to me. When I tried to stand, I stumbled a little and then fell right back down. Well fuck, it was a hurricane after all. Had it just started? Or had I simply missed it up until now? It occurred to me that I didn’t even really know what a hurricane was. Wasn’t there supposed to be lightning or something?

  I sat there, stuck, trying to survey the beach with the wind and rain in my eyes. Somehow, mysteriously, the water had risen so high that the mud I sat was the only spot as far as I could see—from the ocean to the battered outcrop of the dunes—that remained above the flood. Of course I couldn’t actually see that far, so it was hard to know for sure. But at least for now it seemed that I was stuck. W
orse, it seemed that it was only a matter of time before the water got me, too.

  I figured I had to try to get to the dunes, although with the wind so strong I couldn’t even get to my feet; it didn’t seem promising. But I was going to try to wade or swim or crawl until I could grab on to the dune grass and somehow climb to safety. I was just about to do it when I saw them coming for me.

  It was DeeDee and Kristle, walking down the beach as if the storm was nothing, moving easily through the curtain of rain, totally unbowed by the gale that was keeping me on my ass.

  They were both usually so afraid of the ocean, but now they seemed unbothered by the fact that it was taking over and that they were walking right through it. At first it looked like they were walking on the water, but as they moved closer I saw that they were following one of their unseen paths, their feet only finding purchase at the exact spots where the flood was at its shallowest.

  They looked otherworldly. You couldn’t even see the sky through the weather, but even in the distance I could see the sisters clearly as they approached, like a separate image that had been overlaid on top of reality. Their hair was twirling around their bodies in twisty, jumping crowns of brilliant neon. Their gait was loping, their faces peaceful and resolute. It was impossible to tell how far away they were; their proportions relative to the landscape were all out of whack, their faces big as hovering moons, their eyes piercing green, green, green through the trouble.

  I could hear them speaking like they were right next to me, like they were whispering in my ear—a trick, I guessed, of the howling wind. But they didn’t sound like themselves. They were speaking with one voice, a voice that was low and droning and cool:

  Our mother is the Deepness. Our father is the Endlessness. Our brothers are Speed and Calm. We are . . .

  I’d had the mirror in my hand the whole time I’d been sitting here. Though I’d half forgotten it, I’d been clutching it so hard that my palm was beginning to hurt. Without thinking, I shoved it into the pocket of my swimsuit.