September Girls

by Bennett Madison

  We have always known you. We knew you the moment we saw you. We will know you the next time. You will always break our hearts.

  They were coming to rescue me. And one moment they seemed miles in the distance, and then they were just a few paces off, wading through an ankle-deep tide. “What the hell are you doing out here?” DeeDee said. Her voice was louder than it should’ve been, but at least it sounded like her again.

  Kristle didn’t say anything. She looked frightening, fierce and alien, as she reached out and pulled me to my feet.

  “Here. Come.” As my hand touched hers I felt a warmth coursing through my body. I found that now I could stand without being knocked down.

  “How did you find me?” I asked.

  “The hurricane told us,” Kristle said. She smiled like it was a joke, but I had this weird feeling it might not have been. “Half of this will be gone tomorrow.”

  “Half of what?” I said.

  “Come on,” she said.

  We walked home together, through the storm. It was strange passing through it with them; I had the sensation of moving through an illusion. I could tell that they felt it differently, though. They weren’t talking anymore, but they seemed invigorated by every step we took.

  The beach churned, the waves resembling a looped newsreel of buildings collapsing under the weight of a wrecking ball. The dunes lay flattened and panicked and almost invisible. There was no distance or horizon. Just rain and rain and wind and waves and more rain and wind.

  “It’s the eye,” Kristle remarked when we turned the corner into our cul-de-sac, past the Seashell Shoals sign. I looked into the sky and realized she was right; the sky was white, and a ray of sun pierced through a break in the clouds, streaking my face. The rain had stopped around us. The wind had stopped too. There was a stillness.

  I was tempted to whisper.

  Kristle stood there, hands in the pockets of her soaking shorts, looking off with a blank expression like she’d forgotten who she was or how we’d gotten here. I looked at her for a minute, wondering what I was supposed to do, but DeeDee just motioned for me to leave her.

  “What were you doing out there anyway?” she asked. “Were you looking for something?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and it was basically the truth. Then we were back at my house. It was still standing.

  “Thanks for saving me,” I told DeeDee at the end of the driveway, which was surprisingly still standing. “I don’t know what would have happened to me. How did you do that?”

  “It’s not important, babe. None of it is. Just be with me,” she said. “It doesn’t matter how. Please?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  The calm of the eye felt like its own kind of chaos. The black clouds whirled in a ring, and we were in the center of it, standing in a small bright circle.

  The world moved just a tiny, undetectable fraction of a light-year closer to the sun. We were all of our different selves. DeeDee was beautiful, inscrutable, prickly and wise and angry still. She was a mermaid, complete with tacky hot-pink shells on her boobs. She was a girl. She was with me.

  “Okay,” I said. “Fine.”

  I still had the mirror in my pocket. I’d forgotten it already.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  GIRLS

  We are not girls. At least, we don’t think we are. Girls do not do what we do.

  Once a month at the full moon, from June to September, we make our way through the dunes, across the sand and rocks to our beach.

  There, we undress wordlessly and venture into the water as our bodies begin to transform.

  We set our knife to the side, where it lies angry and glittering, waiting for us to pick it up again.

  We shed our skin and find scales, oily and hard and slick. We shed answers and find questions.

  We lie in the tide and let the waves wash over us. It feels good, this small taste of the home we can’t imagine returning to. This is how we feed the summer. What would become of it if we just stayed home?

  We can’t do that. We need it as much as it needs us.

  But the water is cold. It is endless. It reminds us as much of our father as of our mother. We know what’s down there. We know how dangerous it is. Still, we don’t move.

  We lean back and feel the deepness creeping on us as the tide rises. We feel it first at our ankles and calves and then between our thighs. We feel it lapping at our breasts. Our arms and legs twist and contract, curling slowly into slimy tentacles that sink themselves into the sand like the roots of a tree.

  The world rushes through us. We are peaceful. We are as deep and black as space. Staring up at the stars, we see only our own image reflected back at us.

  We are infinite and we are ravenous.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  TWENTY-FOUR

  IT WAS BRIGHT and hazy on the beach. Figures more than a handful of paces away appeared first in formless silhouettes and then emerged from the cloud of distance like they were climbing down out of a spaceship, still steaming from a fiery entry into the atmosphere.

  As they got closer they gained color, took shape. They kept on walking, drifting through the end of July and into August. Out past the pier, more figures floated into view.

  DeeDee and I were sitting on a blanket, watching them appear and then disappear and appear again, each time with different bodies, different lives. She was in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, and I had just come in from the ocean and was salty and sore from swimming. I had my arm draped around her shoulder and she was leaning into me in an easy slump.

  Summer was moving along to a slow finish, but there was still time left. For now we could put it aside.

  So DeeDee was saying something funny, and I was probably laughing. Kristle and Jeff were playing a game with a Frisbee that involved chasing each other in circles, laughing hysterically, and then tackling each other into the sand, where they would lie, pawing at each other, before picking up the Frisbee and repeating it all over again. Dad had dragged a beach chair to the edge of the water, where he was reading Her Place as the waves came in and out.

  Somewhere out in the water my mother was swimming a backstroke. All I could make out of her were her fingers surfacing and sinking in a windmill. She had been at it for ages.

  The damage from the hurricane hadn’t been so bad. Most of the buildings had survived, and news of what hadn’t had been accepted by the people who lived here as the inevitable way of the world. Around here, where everything already hung precariously over the ocean’s edge, a thing’s very existence guaranteed its eventual destruction. Life would be washed away, then built over basically the same as before, then washed away again.

  For everyone, things were mostly back to what passed for normal, at least for the end of July.

  It was very hot. Since the storm, the heat had become constant and slimy and a little bit sinister. Things had slowed down: every day felt like swimming through a pool of Jell-O. Words dribbled out of our mouths at half speed; it sometimes took a full minute to climb the stairs up to the cottage. At night on the back porch the air was so thick that Kristle’s cigarette smoke left her lungs and just hung in front of her face as a dense and listless cloud that needed to be waved off every few seconds.

  Mosquitoes were everywhere. And flies, too, big, black, fearless things that orbited your head in a sickening halo. You couldn’t stop moving, because if you paused for just the tiniest second the flies would all land on you and start crawling on your skin. It wasn’t worth trying to swat them; they were the only thing that still seemed to be able to move quickly. Anyway, we didn’t mind them all that much. They had started to feel like part of our bodies.

  By now I was immune to the sun. All summer
I had been shedding layer after layer of skin from sunburn, and then one day I crawled from the sand brown and new, finally a creature of the beach. I jumped into the water without hesitation now, never noticing the cold, never flinching at the sight of jellyfish. I was unbowed by even the biggest waves.

  DeeDee had quit smoking, but had taken to constantly touching her mouth, still searching for a phantom cig.

  It was like we’d entered a dream somewhere in the middle. Days spent in the sand now had that blur around the edges that signifies not the end, but the part just before—the golden hour before sunset, the glittering bridge of the song.

  One day, DeeDee took me to the cove. She paused at the top of the rocks and I was climbing behind her. “Look,” she said.

  In the distance, a horse was wandering in the surf.

  “A Banker pony,” DeeDee said. “They have them all over in Corolla and Rodanthe, but you never see them around here. I wonder how it made it so far.”

  The pony was gray and small, squat with a bowlegged gait, and had an air of amused indifference about it. Its pelt was threadbare and patchy, its mane a frizzy tangle of knots. The thing was less than majestic, not exactly the Black Stallion or even Misty of Chincoteague. But it was still a horse alone on the beach, and DeeDee and I just stood there watching it.

  We jumped from the rocks onto the sand, and the horse looked up at us curiously but didn’t startle. The horse began to move toward us. “Um,” I asked. “Are they dangerous? What if it has rabies?” Other than squirrels, wild animals are not something I have a lot of experience with in general.

  She laughed. “Don’t be stupid,” she said. “Look at it. Does that thing look dangerous to you?”

  It didn’t.

  The horse was not afraid of us. In fact, it seemed to like me—it came right up to me and almost knelt, bowed its head like it was waiting for something. “Go ahead,” DeeDee said. And I reached out and rubbed my hand across its face. Then DeeDee did. And the horse turned around and trotted away before breaking into a surprisingly swift gallop and disappearing into the dunes.

  “I wonder if there will be a new one tonight,” DeeDee was saying. Seeing the horse had made her contemplative. “I have this feeling there will be. We usually get a sense. We can feel it in our feet.”

  “A new what?” I asked, brushing a stray strand of hair from her face.

  “A new girl,” she said. “A new one of us. They keep coming until September. It’s always weird when they get here close to the end like this. Like an afterthought. Kristle was born at the end, you know. I’ve always wondered what it was like when she got here—who found her. She never talks about it.”

  I was getting used to the idea of all this. I still didn’t quite believe any of it. Except that I did. “Jeff and I saw one the night we got here,” I said. “Back at the beginning. I wonder who it was?”

  “Saw one what?” DeeDee asked, and I told her about the girl we’d seen that first night at the beach, the one crawling from the water. It was the first time I’d been able to talk about her. A spell of silence had been broken.

  “Maybe I know her,” DeeDee said. “But maybe not. There are hundreds of us, you know—who knows, maybe thousands, maybe even at other beaches.”

  “I wonder,” I said.

  “I wonder what name she chose,” DeeDee said. She leaned down and flicked a handful of sand into my lap. “I wonder if she’s happy.”

  “Are you happy?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, I would have said no. But I think I am, actually. Right now, at least, like at this minute, I guess I am.”

  “I’ve been thinking about the Lost Colony,” I said. “Where do you think they went?”

  “Oh,” DeeDee said. “I’m sure they’re still around here somewhere. They probably just want some peace and quiet. Now that they’re local celebrities and all.”

  We lay in the sand for a while; we didn’t have towels with us, but it didn’t matter. I went for a swim while DeeDee sat on the beach and watched. I tried to do tricks to amuse her—standing on my hands, doing backflips into the waves. None of those things are really so impressive-looking, though, and I couldn’t tell if she really noticed. But she seemed content to watch.

  “Can I ask a question?” I asked her when we were walking home. It had been a long day spent all outside, and I was sun sore and peaceful. I was holding her hand. There had been so many things I wanted to know about, but it had never felt quite right to ask.

  “Sure,” she said.

  “All summer, I saw these girls looking at me. Smiling at me and stuff. Not saying anything but just like glittering in my direction. It was like they knew. Who I am. Like, what I am to them or whatever.”

  “We can tell,” she said. “We can feel it. It’s almost like a smell, except that it’s not a smell at all.”

  “I thought so,” I said. “And don’t take this the wrong way, but why was it just you and Kristle? Why were you the only ones who ever really talked to me? All the other ones just stared. You would think if I had this thing—this valuable thing—you would think they would have tried harder. In terms of sheer practicality or whatever.”

  “Yeah.” DeeDee looked embarrassed. She hemmed and hawed. “Oh, you know, well, it’s funny.”

  “But why?” I asked. “Is there an actual reason?”

  DeeDee dropped my hand and looked me in the eye. “We’re not allowed to talk to you first,” she said. “It’s one of the rules. You have to be the one. You said hello to me. You said hello to Kristle. So we were allowed. It’s as simple as that.”

  “I’ve talked to Taffany,” I said. “I’ve had a million conversations with her at the bar. She always acted pretty normal though.”

  “Taffany’s different,” DeeDee said. “She doesn’t really care about breaking the curse. She, like, refuses to participate. Sometimes I think she’s the only one around here who knows what she’s actually talking about. Sometimes I think maybe to just say fuck it is the way to go. But at the same time, I want to go home, right? I miss it. Think about what it must be like. How can you just say fuck it to all that? But Taffany’s Taffany. You’ve seen the way she dances. I wish I were like her. It would make everything simpler. But I’m not. I’m just not. What can I do?”

  “You guys make this big deal about we. It’s always we we we. You act like you’re all the same, like you all want the same things. It’s like you think with the same mind or something. But you don’t. Sometimes you’re really not alike at all, other than all having basically the same hairstyle. Which I hate to tell you, but blond is not technically a personality trait.”

  “Yeah,” DeeDee said, like she was uncertain. From her tone I could tell she wasn’t really hearing what I was saying. “I guess,” she said. “It’s sort of hard to explain. We’re not like regular people.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Kristle,” she said. “All of them, actually. I just close my eyes and . . .”

  She closed her eyes and a distant look came over her face. Then she began to laugh.

  “What?” I asked. “Why are you laughing?”

  “She’s watching The Price is Right,” she said.

  “So you’re, like, psychic?” I wondered why she had never told me this before. It seemed like a useful and potentially important piece of information.

  “Not really. We’re connected to each other. We always are; it’s just a matter of whether we choose to pay attention. We usually don’t—it can get confusing. Sometimes even I forget which one of us I am.

  “That explains some things, I guess,” I said. “You should have told me that before.”

  “I didn’t want to weird you out.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I get it.”

  “We’re connected to other things too,” she said.

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Like everything,” she said. “But everything is a lot of things. You have to be careful. You can’t do much more than dip a
toe into it or you get washed away.”

  “Like the ho with the apple,” I said.

  “Now you get it,” she said.

  When we were back on the main stretch of beach, it was getting late. Most people had gone home, but there were some stragglers left. There was a family with small children, two little boys. Their father was chasing them around in the almost-dark while the mom laughed and egged them on. I couldn’t decide whether it made me sad or happy; both I guess.

  “It’s sort of a strange curse, isn’t it?” I asked DeeDee.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I just mean, isn’t it unusual that your father wants to punish you by making you have sex? It’s sick. I thought that was the opposite of how fathers were supposed to be. And why does he want to punish you anyway. You didn’t do shit to him.”

  “Read a Greek myth sometime,” she said. “Read a fairy tale. Read Her Place, for that matter. It’s how the world works.”

  “It still seems weird to me.”

  “Yeah, well. Sometimes I think it’s not a curse at all,” she said. “Sometimes I think, maybe we don’t know the first thing about it. Maybe parts of it have gotten lost in the translation, or maybe we’re only seeing half of it—the obvious part. It could mean something else entirely than what we think it means. And maybe it’s not a curse at all. Maybe it’s a lesson. Or something.”

  “What kind of lesson?”

  “Who knows,” she said. “I’m talking out of my ass. But the thing is, we don’t even really know how we know about it. It’s just been passed down. I’m not saying it’s not real—it’s definitely real. But maybe there’s more to it. Sometimes I wonder if it doesn’t come from our father at all. It could be our mother’s doing. You never know, really.”

  Then I noticed two figures moving toward us, shadows. It was Jeff and Kristle. “Come home,” Jeff called. “Dad’s barbecuing.”

  So we all went home for dinner. Dad toiled happily over the barbecue on the porch while the rest of us just hung out. My mother sat by herself on a chair a few feet away, speaking up only to read little silly bits of poetry aloud from her book every now and then.