September Girls

by Bennett Madison

  “I know,” I said. “I wasn’t.”

  “I just wish I knew my real name,” she said. “That seems like it would make everything easier, somehow.”

  I didn’t reply. I didn’t care what she said. Her real name was DeeDee.

  “You know,” she said. “We have this legend. It’s different from the other legend. It’s related, I guess, but it’s its own legend too. Maybe even older than ours, if that’s actually possible.”

  “What is it?”

  “It has to do with a mirror.”

  I tried not to show any trace of recognition or surprise, but she was tilting her head and smirking a little bit, staring right into me. “You know,” she said. “A mermaid’s mirror. Total old-magic shit. Very powerful.”

  “Oh,” I said carefully. “What does it do?”

  “It’s hard to say. There are different versions of the story. And legends can be wrong. But they say that if you find it, you’ll see the person you really are, the truest version of yourself. The one that really matters.”

  I decided it was better not to mention the mirror I’d given to Kristle. Why bring it up? I wasn’t sure if I believed in this kind of magic anyway. It seemed too easy. I had looked at the mirror myself, and it’s not like I’d had some huge revelation. Although maybe I just needed to listen harder.

  “Maybe you’ll find it someday,” I said. “It’s not too late.”

  “I have this theory that part of the spell is you can’t find it unless you don’t need it anymore. The only way you can find the mirror is if you already know what it’s going to tell you.”

  “Why is magic always so useless?” I asked.

  “Fuck if I know. But maybe it’s not totally useless. I wonder . . .” she said. She gave me a sly look, and I knew I was bearing a guilty expression. “Not for me, I don’t think. But I bet Kristle could have found a use for it.”

  I shrugged, noncommittal, and I knew she knew. “So let’s just say you found the mirror now,” I asked. “What do you think it would show you? Just try to guess.”

  She didn’t have to consider it for long before answering. She had already considered it. “I think it would show me on the beach with you a few weeks ago, when we saw that horse.”

  I felt a surge of happiness as the memory of that day came to me. I reached out for her hand. “Well that’s not so bad, is it?”

  “I guess not. But it’s not enough for me either. That’s why the mirror wouldn’t do me any good at this point anyway. Do you get that?”

  “I think so,” I said, although I wasn’t sure I did. Magic was complicated, but it was nothing compared to how complicated people were.

  “I can change my reflection now,” she said. “I can make it whatever I want it to be.”

  She sounded so much more grown-up now than she had the first time I had met her, and I knew that she had been right. I hadn’t known her at all. No—I had. She was changing, yes, but so was I. She was different and the same, and I had known her insofar as you can really know anyone, which is to say not much. But the not much was more than enough. It was everything. She had been a mirror.

  “You should go,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess I should.”

  And I kissed DeeDee for the last time. It was unmistakably final, which is not at all to say perfunctory. It wasn’t that I was holding back, or even that she was. She was kissing me and she meant it. The it that she meant was just a different it now.

  There was a weird comfort in that too. Just in knowing for sure. The first time I had kissed DeeDee, I’d felt the world unfurling at my feet, and now I felt nothing but the limitlessness of my own self. I felt myself expanding past the edges of my own body, past the boundaries of the ocean, out to the brink of a flat earth where the water spills out into big nothing in bright and crashing cascades.

  “Well, bye,” I said, when we had finally separated.

  I was about to go when she jumped to her feet.

  “Wait,” she said. “I want to show you something.” Before I could stop her she was shedding her clothes and racing into the water.

  “Hey!” I shouted, but she didn’t listen. She dove into the surf and I started to run in after her, still in my shoes and all my clothes, to save her when it became clear that it wasn’t necessary. She came up from the water ten feet in front of me and tossed her hair in a spray, a big grin on her face. “Check it out!” she yelled. “I can totally swim now. Awesome, right?” She flipped backward in a somersault and stuck her legs straight up in the air, then surfaced again on her back to glide around in an untrained backstroke. “It’s not like I’ll be going to the Olympics any time soon,” she said, dog-paddling toward me. “But still. It’s really not that hard.”

  All I could do was smile. As she got closer, I splashed a handful of water in her face. She splashed me back and soon I was soaking wet, freezing, still in my sweatshirt and jeans and sneakers. I didn’t really care.

  “Well,” she said. “Bye. I’ll think of you a lot. I promise.” She wrapped her dripping arms around me and leaned her head on my shoulder for the last time. Then I was standing in the surf and she was walking up the beach in her wet underwear, carrying her clothes in a bundle under her arm. She was going away.

  And then all I wanted was for her to look back, to look at me one more time. All I wanted was to be written on her, a final answer tattooed onto the tiniest aspect of her person. Say, to become a ring of gold in just one of her green eyes. But her path was already decided for her. Even if it was still invisible to her, I knew that she had taken a step, and that it was the right one. Every step would be the right one for her now.

  She didn’t remember the word for regret anymore; it was now just something baffling and troublesome that blocked her from moving in any direction except straight ahead. And with 123 ways of saying it, how can an Eskimo walking up the beach ever truly express: What is cold; what is white; what is ancient; what falls from endless gray and then just, I don’t know, lingers?

  When I got home and flopped into bed, my phone rang for the first time all summer. The horrifying mariachi of my ringtone jarred me, and I made a note to change it to something else. It was Sebastian.

  “Dude, dude, dude!” he said before I’d said hello. I barely recognized his voice. “Are you ever coming home? Where have you been? I’m going crazy here. I don’t even know what I’m doing with myself!”

  “Hey,” I said. “I mean, you could have called.”

  “Dude, I did!” Sebastian said. “Like five hundred and twenty fuckin’ thousand times. What, you don’t get service down there? Wherever that even is? Everyone’s fucking out of town! You, Val, Nick Whitney—I’ve been talking to the fucking wall. I jerked off four times today, bro. Four times! It’s not even fun anymore; I just don’t have anything better to do. My dick’s about to fall off.”

  “What about Alexis?” I asked. “Isn’t she keeping you busy?”

  “Who?”

  “Alexis,” I said. “Your girlfriend.”

  “Oh, her. I don’t know. I haven’t seen her in months. She had, like, some issue. It made no sense. Anyway, who cares, yo? Bros before hos, right?”

  I knew too much about hos by now to respond to that in any concise or reasonable way, but Sebastian was barreling on anyway.

  “Dude, what happened? Did you have fun? Are you coming home? Did you finally get your ass laid? Don’t answer that; I don’t want to make you feel worse than you already do. It’s okay. I’ve seen some of the new freshmen already and some of them are hot as shit. You’re going to have plenty of opportunities.”

  I just laughed.

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  HarperCollins Publishers

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  TWENTY-NINE

  I WOKE UP earlier than ever the next morning and decided to wander down to the beach for one last swim. There was probably a part of me that was hoping DeeDee would
be waiting for me there again, but I guess I knew that there was really no way.

  The sun was just rising and I decided to get naked. It was a little chilly out, but I didn’t care. I ventured into the water, knowing it would be the last time for a while.

  As soon as it touched my feet, the ocean felt different. It was cold, but that wasn’t it; the ocean is always cold, especially at first. It sort of tingled, sent a static shock through my body, all the way to the tips of my fingers and my nose and my dick, which had retreated into itself upon exposure.

  I took another step and felt the strange sizzle again. It felt like a warning, but I didn’t take it; I jogged forward into the surf and dove right into the first wave that came at me, just launched myself into it without hesitating. I wasn’t afraid of anything anymore.

  The water chewed me up. The water entered my nose and mouth as if it was trying to flood my lungs. I waved my arms furiously, trying to paddle, but found that I no longer knew how. All I could do was try to find my legs and stand.

  I managed to get my head above water a few seconds later, flailing and sputtering and gasping for breath. The water was not deep and I was finally on my feet, but I felt like I was drowning.

  Then an image entered my mind. It was DeeDee on a clear and sunny day, somewhere in a place beyond the waves, a place with no land in sight, floating on her back. Her face was radiant and resolute and complicated and different than I’d known it, older, maybe, or more solid.

  I saw her doing a little somersault into the water, then coming up, hair plastered to her body, laughing. I laughed too. I was happy for a second.

  Like the Girls—like my father—I could no longer swim.

  When I made it back to the shore, I felt a sharp, stabbing pain in my foot, like I’d stepped on a shell and gotten it stuck in my heel. I lifted my foot up to examine it, and it was bleeding. There was no sign of a shell.

  We left a few hours later: me, Dad, and Jeff in the Accord, with Mom trailing somewhere behind in her Volvo. I’m not sure where she was going. It wasn’t out of the question that she would be coming back to Connecticut with us, but it also wasn’t unlikely that she would be headed off to somewhere else again. If she came home with us, I couldn’t say who she would be this time; I couldn’t say what shape she would take. Animal, vegetable, mineral; maiden, mother, crone. None of it was really my business anyway.

  So we three put the beach behind us, Dad in the driver’s seat and the ocean at our backs, the breeze through the windows salty and cool and the sun just starting to come up. Traffic hadn’t broken out yet and Dad was speeding. He was whistling as usual, but I didn’t mind anymore. Jeff wasn’t saying anything, but I turned to look at him and he smiled at me, a smile that was very far away.

  I was glad he was in the front and I was in the back, because if I’d been able to, I probably would have embarrassed myself by leaning over and giving him a hug. I just don’t think I would have been able to help it.

  I tried to picture DeeDee: what she was doing, how she was spending her day, what she was thinking about. It took a while for me to summon her, but when I closed my eyes and concentrated, she appeared, fatigued and somewhat monochrome, climbing out of her bunk bed and stepping over her sisters strewn out in sleeping bags and blankets on the floor, yawning on her way to the shower, turning the spigot and then hesitating before stepping in, shutting it off again and dressing lazily, and then leaving the apartment onto the open walkway outside, where the air was gray and cool and heavy with dampness and she pulled a cigarette from thin air and lit it and sucked it down, staring at the ocean for what felt like the first time.

  Then the weather swirled around her and it was winter. The sky on the balcony was so white you could hardly look at it. Then it was nearly spring, and she was in a pilled wool sweater in the driver’s seat of her own busted junker—probably something maroon and ancient with the passenger-side door secured with a fraying cable of twine—her hand dangling out the window with a burning cigarette as she hit this highway herself, hurtling off to a lonely destination where she could begin her next journey, a quest to pick up the trail of the girl she thought she had been looking for. I thought it could have been a pretty short quest if she wanted it to be, but I knew there was no convincing her of that.

  She sighed and tossed her cigarette, the last one she would smoke, and she began to sing along to the radio. I couldn’t hear her, but I imagined it was James Taylor.

  I can’t say I wasn’t sad. To see her like that: headed off for a life that was beyond my knowledge. I was sad. But as soon as we hit the interstate and rolled up the windows—as soon as the dusty, cutting smell of AC replaced the saltwater air—I found that I had a hard time remembering her face. Sea foam bubbling into wet sand.

  At a traffic light, Mom pulled up next to us and waved from the Volvo, and when the light turned green, she honked twice, jauntily, and sped off ahead of us into her future.

  “You know,” my father said. “I went on vacation here when I was your age.” He smiled at me. “Best summer of my life. It’s where I forgot how to swim.”

  “I know,” I said.

  I was glad to be leaving. I was eager to get back home, back to our place in the exact center of the circumference of the round part of the planet, knowing now that, like my father, I would carry with me a certain understanding in my gut: a knowledge of a place where the earth was flat, where there was no dimension to reason, where water fell into space and sprayed off into stars. Where the Deepness and the Endlessness could have a daughter who thought they were both real assholes.

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  HarperCollins Publishers

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  WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SOCK

  I’m becoming certain that I’ve hidden myself away somewhere. For safekeeping. Unfortunately, I’ve forgotten the hiding place.

  Please bear with me as I try to explain. If I sound stilted or confused, remember that language still sometimes comes funny to me. Being not from around here. But I am getting better about it. And what I’m trying to say is important.

  There’s a jewelry box in the freezer in the restaurant, behind the Hershey’s ice cream where no one would ever think to look. (Because Kristle always made me scoop the ice cream.) It’s in this box that I keep a few things I picked up after my arrival at this edge of your world. A few things I didn’t want to share:

  1. A blue, irregularly shaped shell I found on the beach

  2. A bracelet I stole from the gift shop, with horseshoe and clover charms; plastic, never worn

  3. A few strange coins I got in tips, which may or may not have any value and probably don’t, but who cares?

  4. One dangly earring to which I’ve lost the pair, and—although this is kind of embarrassing to admit—

  5. The sock you thought you lost, which I took from your foot when you were asleep in the fake pirate ship, just to have something of yours, even something small and stupid and frankly smelly; you had to go home with only one sock, but it was foolish of you to be wearing socks in the first place, as who wears socks at the beach?

  Well, I could have just asked you, and you would have given me something else. I’m sure you would have given me anything. But I didn’t want to ask, so I just have your dirty sock with a hole in the heel. I’m sorry I took it like that, but I’m happy I have it. If you asked for it back I would not return it, because I cannot afford generosity the way you can. It’s beyond my means, and the sock belongs to me.

  I do have other things of course, besides the crap in my jewelry box. I mean, in a sense. I have some clothes and a blue lighter and a pack of Gauloises, and several earrings (with pairs!), and things like that. But the clothes and earrings will be loaned out before I know it, the lighter will be stolen (because, see, I’m not the only one who steals around here), and the cigarettes will probably all be bummed by tomorrow, which is fine because I’m not going to smoke anyway.
Cigarettes, like beauty, don’t really count as a possession.

  The things in my jewelry box are the things that I know are mine for a while. They are the sum of it. I know the other girls have their own jewelry boxes, too. We don’t talk about it.

  I never even look in the box much. I just like to know it’s there. But a few months ago, the week before Kristle’s final birthday, I had to open it up. She was out on a smoke break, and I had a little bit of privacy for a few minutes. So I dug into the back of the freezer and looked inside, hoping to find something that had slipped my mind. It wouldn’t be the first time something escaped me; we are practical but scatterbrained.

  I don’t know what I was looking for. It could have been anything. A photograph, maybe, of the thing I once was? A nameplate necklace bearing the name that belonged to me, before I took this name that isn’t really mine? I don’t know.

  All I found was a blue shell, one earring, strange coins, a plastic charm bracelet, and a smelly sock. And I knew then that if I had somehow been forced to choose—if I’d really had to make a decision—I would have sacrificed all the other items in order to keep the sock.

  Because in rifling through my jewelry box I was looking for the thing I love most. Although it was not in there, the closest thing I have ever had to myself is you, which makes your old sock a clue or maybe even something like a treasure map.

  What you have to understand is that I’d never even considered most of this until I saw you for the first time—or rather, until you saw me. It’s not that I was content before, exactly—we are not content—but rather that I was unquestioning in my ignorance. It did not occur to me that I could be anything beyond “we.” It just did not occur to me that I could be something other than “one.”

  Then at some point you looked at me, and somewhere in the space of your gaze (your gaze that is bold and unguarded and searching, both sharp and vulnerable), I saw a shape unfurl itself. It was a ghost-impression of something unraveling and reforming into a girl who resembled me and only me. In a voice I didn’t even know I had, I thought, I could be her. For the first time, I thought, I.