September Girls

by Bennett Madison

  “It’s not the world,” Kristle said. “And I’m not giving up. We don’t even actually know what happens next. We’ve only been speculating.” And then: “Come on. Dude, you know what you need to do. And it doesn’t involve me.” She started for the rocks, and I tried to stammer out a good-bye, but couldn’t find one. Then I remembered what I had in my pocket.

  Suddenly, I knew exactly why I had found it, and who it was for.

  “Wait,” I said. “I have a birthday present for you.” And I dug into the pocket of my shorts and pulled out the mirror I’d found buried on the beach during the hurricane. I held it in my hand for a moment and looked at it. It was glowing and oil-slick iridescent, pink and green and black, and I realized it wasn’t made of silver or any other metal but of something that can probably only be found at the bottom of the ocean. I’d been carrying it with me everywhere I went since I’d found it without knowing why. I didn’t actually want to give it away. But I handed it to her anyway.

  “Take this,” I said, standing there with my open palm outstretched. “It’s for you.”

  She looked at it for a second and seemed to hesitate. Her mouth twitched with recognition and then again with disbelief.

  Kristle took the mirror, clicked it open, and held it up. As she stared at herself, she looked at first curious, then astonished, and then troubled. I saw a flicker and a spark and then a flame ignite in her. She stayed like that for a minute, and then laughed with pleasure and surprise. But tears were also rolling down her cheeks now.

  She flicked the mirror closed and palmed it, dropping her hand back to her side. She tossed her hair and shrugged. “You’re fucking sweet, Sam. Okay, I guess what I mean to say is that I fucking love you.”

  “What did you see?” I couldn’t help asking.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Well, a lot of things, but nothing I’d never seen before. Nothing I hadn’t realized by now. Still. I love it. I’ve been looking for it. It’s pretty much the best present you could have given me. I think it belonged to our mother when she was younger. She must have sent it to us.”

  Then she leaned over and kissed me, on the lips, closed mouth but lingering, slick and sweet with strawberry-kiwi gloss. It was a kiss for friendship.

  When she pulled away, she looked different. I couldn’t identify what it was that had changed, but she seemed more solid, somehow. When I’d kissed her on the deck on the night that was supposed to have been her birthday, her face had seemed to shift before my eyes, rearranging itself as I took it in, like one of those sliding puzzles. Now it had settled into place. It was just a feeling. I opened my mouth to say something, but she put a finger to my lips. I noticed that her nails were unpainted; they were short and jagged like she’d been biting them.

  “Shhh,” she said. “I already said good-bye to your brother. But say good-bye to him for me anyway.”

  “What about DeeDee?” I asked.

  “Dude,” Kristle said “You two are on your own now. I don’t know what you need to do. I thought I did and now I don’t anymore. But you’ll do the right thing. Even if you don’t, she will. She’s always been different, you know. We’re all supposed to be the same, but we’re not really, and DeeDee’s always been the most different of all. More confident or something. Angrier, maybe, although who could be angrier than me? It doesn’t matter. From the minute she got here, I knew she would be the one who would get to leave in one piece. Even if I didn’t want to admit it.”

  We just stood there. “All righty,” she said. She looked at her watch, and then laughed a silent laugh when she realized she wasn’t wearing a watch. She slapped me on the ass and then cocked her head, looked me up and down with a happy smirk, and let the mirror drop to the sand. It spun through the air like in slow motion as it fell, catching the moonlight and whirling it around. I looked down to where it had fallen, thinking I’d bring it to DeeDee, but it had disappeared.

  “Nah,” Kristle said, reading my mind. “She doesn’t need it. I don’t think she ever did. Leave it for someone who does.” Then she walked off toward the water.

  That was the last time I saw her. Or at least I think it was. Maybe it was my imagination, but as she walked away, even though it was impossible, I almost thought I heard her whispering in my ear. My mother is the Deepness. My father is the Endlessness. I am something else. You will see me again in commercial breaks and in the bridges of songs and the change of seasons and in the moments just before sleep. You will see me in the spaces between.

  I knew less about love than I had when I’d gotten to this place. Not that I’d known much then, either; honestly I hadn’t really thought about it a lot until I’d met DeeDee and Kristle. But the more I’d thought about it the more I’d gotten tangled up in what it all really meant, and while at the beginning of the summer I think I would have been able to identify at least two or three incontrovertible facts on the topic, I no longer felt equipped even for that. Summer was ending.

  The one thing I knew was that I loved Kristle. It was unexpected. It occurred to me just as she was walking away from me, as I heard her alien voice in my head. I didn’t know what it meant. But there are a lot of different kinds of love, right?

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  RAPTURE

  Before we leave this place, we wade into the water one last time. Or maybe it’s for the first time. Ankles, thighs, hips, chests, waves crashing around us. We feel the weather in our eyelashes, the summer in our hair. We feel the cold air on our bare shoulders. Then we don’t.

  Our younger sisters are waiting just beyond the waves to encircle us as we enter the deep. They grasp at our green and floating hair. They run their slimy fingers curiously along the curves of our breasts and kiss us tenderly at our necks. Our lungs fill with water. Bubbles swirl around us as the moon shines in from the surface like light shining into a dusty bar during daytime. Our sisters bat at the bubbles and laugh, and we clutch our chests, beginning to panic.

  Our sisters know nothing. They don’t even know that almost every one of them will someday be in our place. They’re too young to understand. But we know, now. We know almost everything, now. (Almost.)

  We know that we aren’t joining them. We know that we aren’t staying here. We are going where the forgotten ones have gone: Donna, Kelly, Brenda. The L’Oréals. The ones whose names we can no longer summon. We don’t know where we are going, but we are not going home. We will never go home. We are on our way to elsewhere. We feel like we are drifting off to sleep.

  Our father is the Endlessness. Our mother is the Deepness. Our brothers are Speed and Calm. We didn’t know who we were. Soon we will find out.

  We leave this place by wading into the water one last time. Our sisters encircle us. They reach out for us in underwater slow motion, but we understand that it’s simple fascination that draws them to us rather than affection. Our eyes begin to close. We feel our muscles slackening. And just as we’re about to drift off, they begin to swarm us—what suddenly seems like hundreds of them coming from every direction, the water pulsing with their excitement—and they lean in, all together, to whisper our true name into our ear. The name we had forgotten. The name we were never even sure we had. And our eyes pop open. We gasp in recognition with our last fist of air. Even though it’s not possible, I speak.

  “No,” I say. “My name is Kristle.”

  Then I’m gone.

  I am not returning to the water. I was banished from this place long ago; it is no longer my home. If it ever was. I have no home now, and home is not where I’m going. But this is not death, either, not in the way we understood it before. That would be punishment, and the punishment is over. My father no longer has any power over me.

  I know this because the last thing I see is my mother’s face, a face I thought I had forgotten but which I remember as soon as it appears to me. It isn’t what I expected,
not how I imagined it all the times I tried to imagine and not the face that sometimes used to come to me in dreams.

  It’s a face and it is faceless; there is no nose, no mouth. My mother’s eyes are filled with the reflection of a universe of stars. She is beautiful, but it would be easy to call her ugly or at least terrifying. She holds no knife.

  She is covered with tattoos upon tattoos, her skin so black that it circles back to brilliance. Every one of them bears another legend. I am not scared.

  She kisses me.

  “I love you,” she says. All this time, we thought she had been powerless. But she was just holding back, letting us find our own way.

  Magic is full of loopholes; one might say it’s all loopholes. All curses have more than one way out. There’s always a back door. I found it. I stepped through the mirror.

  I am going somewhere else now. I don’t know where. I don’t know how long it will take. When I get there, I will be something else. But I will never forget my name.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  I FOUND DEEDEE on the pier. She knew I would look for her there. I walked out to where she was sitting, halfway out into the ocean, her feet dangling off the edge. The night was black and cloudless and there was a breeze. Her back was to me. Her hair was tangled with stars.

  “So did you do it?” she asked without moving as I neared her.

  “No,” I said. I sat down next to her and she turned her face to me. It was dark and bitter; she had been crying.

  “You fuck!” she said. “You piece of shit. You guys are good for exactly one thing, and you can’t even make yourself useful when it counts.” It would have hurt my feelings except that she didn’t sound like she meant it. She was trying to summon her old anger and it wasn’t coming to her. “I told you to fucking do it,” she said. “I fucking fucking told you. If you loved me you would have done it.”

  “I mean, I wanted to,” I said.

  “I knew you wouldn’t,” DeeDee said. “I knew she wouldn’t, too.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “She wouldn’t. I would have. I was totally ready.”

  DeeDee rolled her eyes. “I should have known. Men!” Even now, even this. She couldn’t bring herself to be really mad, but she was still able to find it funny.

  We both started laughing, and then we were laughing so hard that we couldn’t stop. I put my arm around her, and then we collapsed on our backs onto the wooden pier, still cracking up.

  “So she’s gone, huh?” she asked when we were out of breath.

  “I guess she is,” I said. “Whatever that really means. It’s not like I have a lot of experience dealing with this. With, you know, magic or whatever.”

  “Damn. She was one crazy bitch. She was pretty much the best.”

  “I’m going to miss her too,” I said. “She’s really nothing like I thought she was.”

  “I know,” DeeDee said. “She’s nothing like anyone could think. I mean, she taught me basically everything. I don’t know what I would have done without her. She was the closest thing I had to a mother.” She caught herself and sat up. “What did she say to you anyway?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Just good-bye.” I thought about telling her about the voice I’d heard in my head as Kristle had waded into the water. She deserved to know. But it was something between Kristle and me. Kristle deserved to have her last secret. Something that was just hers.

  DeeDee left it. She pulled her fist through her hair. She arched her back, stretching her arms to the sky, stretched her fingers until they looked like they were scraping the moon. They were translucent; you could see right through the tips of them and out into space.

  “Look what I found,” she said. She turned and picked up something next to her, something she’d had with her on the pier all along, a small back box with a retracted metal antenna. “It was in the sand; I tripped over it when I was coming here. It’s a radio. You never see these anymore. It’s always a surprise what you end up finding on the beach. Sometimes it’s just a weird shell; sometimes it’s a radio. Or something else.”

  I took it from her and fiddled with the knobs. It felt odd in my hands, mechanical and old-fashioned, like something from a long-ago beach. “Does it work?”

  Before she could answer, I flipped it on and it began to buzz. At first all that came out was static, but I pulled the antenna out and then music was coming in perfectly clear. It hovered above the roar of the waves. It was like nothing I’d ever heard on any radio in the past, nothing like I’d ever heard before, actually. It was barely music at all: it had no melody or rhythm or lyrics or instruments, but it was music anyway, the most perfect music I’d ever heard, being broadcast from someplace very far away. It sounded like it was coming from the other end of the universe, traveling all the way here just for us at this moment. It was the same song Kristle and DeeDee had sung together that night at the karaoke bar.

  “I guess it works,” DeeDee said. “You’d think the batteries would be dead by now. Like I say, you never know what you’re going to find around here.”

  We lay back together and just listened. After a few minutes I felt a warmth moving through my body, my muscles rippling like water from my toes to my chest to my fingers and then out again and back. It was sort of like the time Sebastian got supposedly really good weed from this person named King Koopa in exchange for a binder full of Ms. Smith’s quizzes from last year (she never changed them) and we accidentally smoked too much of it and spent an hour with MTV on in the background while we tried to say the alphabet to each other, except that DeeDee and I weren’t talking at all. We were just listening.

  And then I had this sudden urge to jump in the water and start swimming, to swim out past where the marathon runners could run, out past where the ocean dropped off with the horizon, swim out into space and keep going, arm over arm, kicking, breathing.

  I was almost about to do it. I could feel my toes scraping the water. It felt like home. I was just about to push off when DeeDee grabbed my hand and sat back up, pulling me with her.

  “So you’re going home soon, huh?” she said. “You have to be, right? You can’t stay here forever.”

  The music was still playing, but it felt distant now. Buried. It felt like music from another room.

  “Yeah,” I said. “No one’s said anything, exactly, but I get the sense. This morning I saw the keys sitting on the table in the kitchen and I could tell they wanted someone to pick them up. I passed the car in the driveway on the way to the beach and it was like an animal that had been tied up for too long. I know that sounds stupid. But I think you’re basically right.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” she said. “I wish you would stay. But I know you can’t.”

  “I have to ask you something,” I said. “It’s important.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Go for it, I guess.”

  “Is this real?” I asked.

  DeeDee laughed. “What’s reality, dude? That seems like a bigger question than I can answer. That’s some serious graduate-level philosophy shit, don’t you think?”

  “What I mean is, like, is this part of the spell? Is this really how I feel or is it, like, you know . . . magic?”

  “You mean do you like me because I put some kind of ancient love spell on you?”

  “On karaoke night. When you and Kristle were singing. That was when you did it, right? It was like a siren song or whatever. Right?”

  She hooted. “Sam. Is it that impossible that I’m just really good at karaoke?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It seems pretty spooky in retrospect. It seems like something was going on.”

  DeeDee sighed. “Would you believe me if I said I don’t really know?”

  I shrugged.

  “Well believe it,” she said. “Because I don’t. It’s possible. I’m pretty sure that we can
do things we don’t even know about. How could we not? Does it really matter though?”

  Of course it mattered. Didn’t it matter?

  Oh, fuck it.

  I was ready. We both were. This had been inevitable, of course, but it came to me that there was no way it could have actually happened until now.

  I wasn’t thinking about the curse anymore. Everything that had happened this summer was gone, over for good. All I was thinking about was how much I wanted to know who she was. I wanted to finally understand her. I wanted her to understand me. Not that I understood myself. Maybe I thought she could help.

  I was taking my shirt off. I was untying the halter of DeeDee’s dress. She stood and turned her back to me and let it drop to her ankles and looked out at the ocean before facing me again.

  Naked in front of me, on the pier, she looked surprisingly shy, but she didn’t cover herself. I should have been shy too, but I wasn’t.

  “There are so many things that don’t matter,” she was saying. Is this real? I had asked. But naked, she looked realer than ever; she was not magic. At that moment, she wasn’t a mermaid. She was real; she was a girl; she was flawed and singular and more beautiful than I could have possibly imagined.

  “Isn’t that what all of this has been?” she asked, sinking down next to me. “Just sifting through all the different things that don’t matter, tossing them aside and trying to figure out what we’re actually left with?”

  “What are we left with?”

  “This,” she said. She touched my face and made a circle with her thumb, letting it drift over my lips.

  “I’m going to miss you,” I said, and I touched her side and moved on top of her as she leaned back. She was very warm. I kissed her neck. “I mean, a lot.”

  “Same,” she said. “I’m going to miss you so much. But I don’t want this to be sad. I don’t want it to be about missing. It’s not about good-bye, or about magic, or about anything else that doesn’t matter. I just want it to be exactly what it is.”