Soon we split from Eric and George, but the Tilt-and-Whirl would have been hard to miss. Its windows were lit up by red and green Christmas-tree lights that blinked on and off in a trance of madness.
Through the open door, noise poured out, down the gravel walk.
“You sure?” Gil asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I want to be around it.” It kind of thrilled me, being so far away from the pinched sameness of Jean and her friends, and the feeling that I had to be their designated token rebel because I wore cut-off jeans.
Here was something new and different, and I wanted in.
For a couple of minutes, we hung around in the doorway and peered in on a sea of mostly guys; tanned guys, dark guys, light guys, skinny snake-hipped guys, sleepy-eyed, shaggy Jesus guys in slippery silk shirts, guys in T-shirts and sarongs, with prettier hair than mine. There were enough girls that I wasn’t totally conspicuous, but I was feeling my femaleness, my straightness, and maybe even a clinging whiff of Sunken Haven-ness.
“Arright,” said Gil. “Like my mama says, ‘Move, don’t ooze.’ ”
We moved, bumping and jostling against bodies, heading for the packed bar, where three bartenders—two guys and a girl—were working. The girl’s back was to us. She was stacking beer mugs from dishwashing trays. Her muscles were flexed to capacity as she shelved the mugs, filled the ice tub, then topped off the mixer bottles. She had sweat marks on her shirt, and her bright red hair was cropped to her ears.
“Bet that’s Phoenix,” I said.
And yet there was something about the way she stood, the angle of her head, the shape of her ears—did I know her? I signaled to Gil to push in closer. We waited till there was a tiny opening, and then we forced and wedged into a spot at the wraparound corner of the bar.
“Hey!” I called. “Hey! ’Scuse me? Phoenix?” I was basically yelling into the small of her back. “I’m a friend of George Caruthers!”
“Got it, I hear fine—stop shouting!” The girl turned, her eyes amused, slapping her bar rag over her shoulder. It took me a second to realize.
It took her less time.
“O’Neill?”
“Tracy?”
“No way!”
“Oh, my God!”
Laughing, she ducked under the pocket of the bar, popped up by my side, and gave me a giant, gripping hug.
“What are you doing here?”
“Same question back atcha!” With a glance behind me at Gil.
“I’m asking first—wow, you look . . . you went red!”
Tracy tugged the bright, piecey ends at her chin. “I’m experimenting. I guess I’m in what you call an experimental phase.” She said it in a jokey way, and we laughed, but it wasn’t all a joke. We kept staring at each other. Happiness was bursting through me to see her face again.
For as long as I’d known her, Tracy had always copied her mother’s look, which was not the typical garden-party, crisp pink-and-green style that a lot of Sunkie moms liked, but more like soft, flowing wildflower-print dresses paired with tortoiseshell hair combs and spaghetti-strap sandals.
This Tracy was nothing like her mom. With her scarlet hair and heavy glasses, she was barely even recognizable.
“I never thought I’d ever see anyone from Sunken Haven here. Jeez, Tracy.”
“I’m Phoenix now,” she said, her voice shy, with a lift of her chin. “I mean, you can call me Tracy if you want,” she said. “But it’s my old name.”
“Phoenix,” I said, testing it out. It reminded me of those last days before I’d left Fort Polk, when as a hippie joke I’d been calling my parents Jim and Nancy. How it had reangled my perspective on them, making them seem both familiar and strange.
“This is Gil,” I said, as he leaned forward.
“Hi.” She gave him the up and down. “You’re related to Carpie Burke?”
“Nephew,” he said.
“I see that.” Phoenix smiled.
“And you pierced your ears.” She wore a stud earring in one ear and a long feather in the other. “Finally!”
Last summer, there’d been a whole big thing, because Tracy’s mom, who herself only wore clip-ons, had forbidden piercing. “Punching holes in your ears is cheap,” she declared. We’d all sided with Tracy, and had felt sorry for her—even Sara Train had been allowed to get pierced ears at age sixteen.
“Did it myself,” she said, touching the feather. “Ice and a needle. One of my many decisions about what I’d do for myself this summer.”
“But you need to come back,” I said. “It’s not the same without you.”
Something in Phoenix’s face lost its jokiness. “Yeah, I got tired of being the life of the party,” she said. “But why are you here? Or should I ask, why are you here?”
“We’re celebrating freedom. Bicentennial and otherwise,” said Gil. “I heard this place had some killer potato skins?” He turned to me. “I was too deep in the guitar, earlier. I kinda forgot to eat.”
Phoenix nodded. “I’ll ask Sean to cover for me.”
Fifteen minutes later, we were at a far table, happily eating cheddar-bacon–topped skins, which lived up to George’s recommendation and then some.
As I added a blob of sour cream to the bubbling, browned, melted cheese, I looked across the table, my eyes reclaiming Phoenix’s face—her deep listener’s eyes behind her glasses, her upturned mouth that made her look like she was two seconds from either telling or hearing a punch line.
“I heard stories about you this summer,” I said.
Phoenix smirked. “And I bet those stories got halfway around the world before they came close to telling the truth.”
“The one I heard most is you came out to Sunken Haven and almost drowned in a hot tub,” I said. “Then you went to rehab. Another story, you were exiled to your grandmother’s house on the Cape. Last thing I heard you were at Smith College, taking summer classes.”
“Wow,” said Phoenix. “That’s a lot.”
“So . . . any truth to any of it?” asked Gil carefully.
She gave him the hint of a nod. “Some,” she admitted. “I broke up with my . . . with my . . . special friend . . . this past March. And I got depressed. And I sort of tried to drown myself on purpose.”
Phoenix hadn’t said girlfriend. So it was slightly different than George. But in a way, it was even more rattling, because I’d known that girl Tracy, who’d talked crushes and boyfriends, who’d once spent a whole afternoon with Julia and me deciding the five hottest guy bods in Hollywood—when underneath, all the time, she’d been thinking about her “special friend.”
“Sounds like a rough spring,” said Gil, filling up my silence. “I’m sorry.”
“Thanks.” They were sizing each other up. “I don’t know that I meant to do it. I was so bombed,” she said, softly. “But trying to kill yourself has the unfortunate side effect of really scaring people. Mom and Dad packed me off to rehab in two snaps. Even though, for the record, I wouldn’t say I had an alcohol problem. I had a heartbreak problem, and a breakup problem. I had a being in love with the wrong person problem.” She smiled unhappily.
“Were your folks at least kind of understanding about that?” I asked.
“They were okay to talk about my drinking.” Phoenix took off her glasses to deal with a couple of smudges on the lenses, using the corner of her T-shirt. “For my parents, having a drinking problem isn’t as shameful. I mean, let’s face it, half of Sunken Haven needs to dry out.”
Isn’t as shameful as a girl being in love with a girl. I still couldn’t figure out the right thing to say. So I said nothing.
“So after I finished with the clinic, I did go to the Cape for a while,” Phoenix continued. “I lived with Gran in May and June. And then I came here.”
“Would you ever go back to Sunken Haven?” asked Gil.
“No,” she answered, her voice firm. “They don’t want me there. They don’t want anyone who’s different, right?” She looked right at me.
>
“I guess.” Was I in shock, missing the Tracy that she used to be? Or was I having a hard time separating her from my own sugarcoated summer memories, now that I had to think of Phoenix in all that secret pain and confusion?
“Because you’re different, too, Fritz,” she added. “In all the best ways, of course. And this summer you’ve even got a Burke drooling all over you.” This made Gil laugh, a touch self-consciously. “But Sunken Haven is a closed place. You’re tolerated, but you’ll never be one of them. Just like me. And tolerated isn’t good enough for me.” She finished her beer and clonked the mug on the table. “Scratch the surface of tolerated and you’ll find plenty of uglier feelings underneath.”
“You think you should be here, then?” I asked. The bar had become more crowded with boisterous drag queens, dressed in caftans and stilettos, all made up in Cleopatra eyes and red lips.
“Hell, yeah. Fritz, this is celebration, what’s happening here.” She paused to look around. “I heard something pretty heavy went down today. A few weeks ago, some queen wasn’t allowed into a bar over in the Pines, so this afternoon, he and like a hundred of his buddies took a ferry over and basically stormed the Pines—like an invading army.”
“But don’t you miss your family?” I blurted. I didn’t know why I kept harping on it—it seemed like the choices that Phoenix had made were so hard and lonely. Had she really, truly needed to make them?
Her face fell. “Yeah, of course. I miss Mom and Dad and Tiger. Sometimes I feel like I’m in witness protection. I write them letters about how I’m auditing classes at Smith. I send the letters to Gran, who drives over from the Cape and posts them from Northampton.” She exhaled. “But those are the lies I’ve got to tell so I can breathe, you know?”
“And you’re not lying to your gran,” I reminded.
“Hey, cheers to Gran!” Gil raised his mug and slopped in some beer for Phoenix for the toast, but I knew he was trying as hard as I was to hold on to his low-key Southern cool, to put the pieces of Phoenix’s world together into an understandable whole.
I stared around. Strange as it was, my need to bolt was leaving me. Maybe I didn’t exactly get drag queens, but I did get army kids. We came into base schools from all sorts of situations. The people at this bar, maybe they weren’t like army kids in their style, but they were army in their lonerness, in the ways they always had to push into a new frontier and never look back.
Phoenix had turned her full attention to Gil. “So you’re like a new-discovered nephew? The ultimate toy surprise inside Carpie Burke’s box of Cheerios?”
“Yeah, I’m the secret decoder ring,” drawled Gil, smiling, playing along. I watched him the way I always did when he got circled with these types of Burke questions. I saw the notch flex in his jaw, watched him slowly crack a couple of fingers. He masked his tension so smoothly, you could hardly tell.
Phoenix nodded her approval at me. “What a fun summer romance. I hope you get to keep him after Labor Day.”
I kept my smile tight as poker cards, though I squirmed in my chair. People always joked about summer romances because they didn’t last. Summer romances were made out of ice cream and cotton candy, intensely sweet before they melted into nothing. But I’d never thought of Gil as a summer thing.
Gil was my real love, my real first.
After we said our good-byes—with lots of promises not to blow Phoenix’s cover—we walked along the boardwalk in silence, weaving past noisy partiers, our fingers linked. The things I wanted to say to Phoenix were still stuck inside me —You’re wrong, I’d wanted to tell her. Your difference is way unluckier than mine. You have to hide and push back and crumple up everything that your heart wants. But Gil and I are outsiders together, we have each other, we don’t care that we don’t belong.
“Whatcha thinking?” Gil asked.
“I’m thinking I’m glad we went outside tonight. It was complicated, but it’s good to return to the real world past that fence, right?”
“Amen,” Gil answered solemnly. Which made us laugh, which led to a kiss, and a pinwheel of excitement began to spark and spin inside me.
When we reached George’s, we tiptoed upstairs. The bedroom was the same as when we saw it yesterday—only with a couple of folded bath towels on the edge. It seemed so grown up, having those towels. Like a real hotel. We both got quiet. The only thing left to do was the thing that mattered most. I sat on the bed, which gave up a squeak so loud that I jumped. That made Gil burst out laughing. Which lead to more kissing.
Gil snapped off the bedside lamp and pulled down the paper-thin blinds on our one-story view of the boardwalk, in an attempt to block the streetlamp and the noisy foot traffic.
“Kind of feels like the whole world’s in on this night with us.” He eased into place next to me. “With all these sparklers and noise blowers and kazoos.”
“High on life,” I said.
We leaned against the creaky wicker headboard and we passed the beer back and forth as we kissed and joked and then touched. Careful, quiet, slow.
Every time we’d gotten together, as hot as our chemistry always was, we hadn’t been able to deliver each other any other finish than frustration. Tonight, amazingly, our bodies could meet and stay together.
Back in Fort Polk, Stephanie Ewart had given me an earful about the physical pain of her first time. On the other hand, Julia had said that with Tiger, it was hardly anything.
In the end, when I felt his weight, felt him in me, melded into this brand-new balance of our bodies connecting in ways that felt incredibly different from anything we’d done before, and yet also felt so natural, it wasn’t exactly painful. But it wasn’t “hardly anything,” either.
Outside, fireworks showered brightly around us. Explosions hummed at our skin and bones as we touched and tasted each other. The fireworks’ reflections drenched our bodies in sapphire, ruby, and emerald.
“You,” he said softly, and it was the best word he could have said.
It happened. It was almost too much to think about all at once. For a while, I didn’t know if I was lying there in peace or in shock. A little of both, probably. But I knew I was different now. I might still look like a girl to some people, but I wasn’t. I was a woman. This summer, I’d learned things, real things, private things, about love and seduction and romance, that I hadn’t known before.
“Hey.” My own voice sounded sleepy and far away in the darkness. “I’ve been wondering about something. I’ve almost asked you about it a couple of times before.” A few stray fireworks boomed, warming us with a glow of light through the room. I could feel Gil listening intensely. “It’s like, in my mind, there’s been this mystery to you—that you really are kind of that decoder-ring prize.”
“Oh, yeah? Decode me, then.” But I could feel in his inhale, in the shift of his body, the way he suddenly pulled me deeper to fit the crook of space between us, that maybe he knew what I was going to ask.
“Is Carp your dad?”
He pulled me a tiny bit closer. Was quiet a while before he spoke. “It was hard on Weeze to learn about me. And Junior . . . he still doesn’t know.” Gil’s voice was slow and deliberate, owning the secret now that it was out. “But I grew up knowing. Carp sent my mom money, sometimes. I met him twice, when he was traveling through Atlanta. Mom took me to see him. He told Weeze last year—I’d always been a good student, but I was starting to win school prizes, made the regional debate team, things like that. I guess I was always hoping my work would pay off. That he’d claim me.”
“Wow,” I said. I let go of a breath. “That’s . . . a lot.”
“I’m his nephew, officially,” he said. “That’s what they’ll give me, right now. I respect that.”
“Do you feel weird that I know?”
“I guess so, but I’m relieved,” he said. “The fact that you can see this side of me so clear—I reckon that’s a big reason I love you, Fritz.”
“I love you, too.” I waited a moment, letting myse
lf hear those words. I hadn’t said them to him much; every time I did, it made me feel funny, a joy and a pang, like releasing a favorite balloon. “Was that your first time, too?”
In the silence, I wondered if Gil was deciding to tell me the truth.
“No,” he whispered.
Why had I thought he’d answer different?
Because I’d hoped for . . . what?
JEAN
My last apology, done.
It should be me, whispered my most childish voice. The bratty-little-sister voice who screeched at Daphne, who stomped up stairs and slammed doors.
But it was never going to be me.
After I said good-bye to Gil, I left the von Cott house and began to walk. I knew every trail and footpath of Sunken Haven. I could walk for hours up and down this island and know exactly where I was at any moment without giving it a thought. And so I let myself drift, numb, zombielike, down the stiles to the beach, and I tried to accept that Gil was floating away from me, tried to feel this new loss and emptiness of Without. We had been strangers, and then we had been so much better than strangers, so close—I’d wanted to be closer to Gil than to anyone, really—and now he wanted me to be a stranger again.
Find something else to think about. Figure out someone better to be.
Fritz and Gil were devastating together. One look at them this morning had made my own time with Gil, as much as I treasured it, feel almost unbearably naïve. Their intimacy had been a fist that gripped my heart, but I could have justified and rationalized and somehow withstood even that—it was Gil who’d squeezed out whatever last bit of hope I’d been holding.
“I really want us to be cool about this,” he’d said.
And of course he’d been perfectly cool about it. His eyes on me were as calm as pond water. Leaving me to tremble at their chill, to push myself through the rough currents of my own emotions. I’d left in a hurry. I didn’t want him to see me cry. I’d cried enough in front of Gil Burke.
Afterward, I just couldn’t go to the beach and join the celebrations. I kept myself to quiet, unused trails. I walked for miles, aimless and aching, and when my feet were tired and my skin burnt and my mouth dry, I went back to Lazy Days and crawled upstairs to bed, pulling the covers over me as if I could create another layer of time, a dark cave where nobody could hurt me, where nobody would point a finger at me and call me the loser, the Other Custis Sister.
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