One day when we walked further down the beach than usual with Jadranka and Mili for lunch, Bijoux’s eyes landed on a cute guy eating calamari by himself at the bar.
“Don’t I know you from somewhere?” my sister purred. The line was one of her signature introductions, even though rarely did she ever think she actually did know the person from somewhere. She explained it to me once as some kind of psychological trick of creating intimacy with a stranger. I thought that was a fancy way of just seeming like an airhead, but it seemed to work for Bijoux.
As it turned out in this instance, Bijoux did know the guy.
“You’re Bijoux Norfleet,” the guy replied, taking all of us by surprise.
Mili shot me a knowing look. Usually when a guy actually recognized Bijoux, it was because she had made a fool out of herself in a public setting and the guy had been present to witness it firsthand. Or because he was gay and followed Japanese fashion blogs. “We met at The Standard last year, at the Sigma after-party.”
I could see Bijoux flipping backward through her memories to that night, whatever night it had been in Los Angeles, and then suddenly recognition crossed her face. And relief.
“You’re Travis!”
“Close,” the guy said. His voice was kind of raspy and sandpapery. He wasn’t really Bijoux’s type; she usually chased after tall, muscular guys, the kind of guys who could model. This guy wasn’t unattractive, but he was only two or three inches taller than her, and he was more cute than hot. This guy seemed like a genuinely nice guy who probably practiced telling jokes in his mirror at home before parties. I actually remembered the party he was referencing; I’d been there with Bijoux that night as a guest because she was trying really hard to capture the attention of the band’s lead singer, Brice Norris. “It’s Tobin. Mitchell.”
Jadranka, Mili and I watched in shock and semi-horror as Bijoux proceeded to basically throw herself at this guy. I had never seen her put more effort into her magic before. Tobin Mitchell was an actor who had played a few character roles in action movies, always in the role of the sidekick or the wisecracking computer programmer guy. He had just wrapped shooting his first season of a comedy series for the Home Entertainment Channel that was being lauded as the next big hit, before the first episode had even aired. The series was going to be about a bowling league in Orange County, and he was playing the charming owner of a bowling alley. It was called, “Striking Out,” or at least that’s what Tobin had been told when they were editing the first season.
That night, Bijoux didn’t ride her bike back to the house with me for dinner. She told me to tell Mom and Danko that she would be heading into town with Tobin for dinner and she’d be home late. I sulked all the way home, planning to eat as quickly as I could so that I could hightail it back to the beach to meet Jadranka and Mili for the night. Having to sit at the dinner table with Mom and Danko when Bijoux wasn’t there was like being pressed against a brick wall with a spotlight shining on me.
“I got an email from your tenth grade English teacher,” my mother announced.
“Great,” I muttered, swallowing mashed potatoes.
“She wants you to turn in a one-page paper on at least four of the books from your reading list before the first day of school so that she knows you haven’t left the entire list until the end of the summer. I told her it shouldn’t be a problem since you’ve been reading every day at the beach. She’s expecting your paper on Death of a Salesman by the end of next week,” my mother informed me casually.
“Mom,” I objected. It was ridiculous that they were expecting me to do homework basically all summer.
“Don’t mom me,” my mother replied. “You have no responsibilities here, Betsey. No chores to do, no part-time job. The only thing you have to do is read the books on your list and write a one-page essay about their significance as works of literature. I think even you can handle that.”
“Couldn’t I do The Alchemist first?” I whined. At least that book I could stand to read.
“No, because you’re going to have to read Death of a Salesman at some point anyway, so you might as well do the hardest one first,” my mother insisted.
I sighed, annoyed. Our wireless connection in the house was unreliable so it wasn’t even like I could plan on just googling information on the book to aid in the drafting of the report. I was going to have to just write it the old-fashioned way, which was not typical of how I would do homework. My essays just plain old sucked. I rambled, had difficulty figuring out points I was trying to make, and inevitably just recapped the story when I wrote about books, which is not typically what teachers wanted.
“You have to take your class work more seriously,” Danko interjected his opinion. “We pay a lot of money for you to attend the finest schools, and it’s not play time.”
I looked down at my plate of food, my temper blistering. My performance at school had nothing to do with money. In fact, I happened to know for a fact that my dad paid all my tuition bills because I had heard my mom arguing with him on the phone once when he’d missed a tuition payment while he was on tour in South America.
Luckily, Mom and Danko went out later that night to play cards in town at the home of their friends, so no one said a word when I rode my bike back down to the beach. One of Mili’s friends had access to his dad’s motor boat, and a small group of us went out into the harbor beneath the moonlight. We blasted dance music and passed around a chilled bottle of champagne, earning the ire of other vacationers passing in boats who honked their horns at us and yelled. We shook our fists at them in retaliation. Didn’t they know it was summer, and time to party?
It was odd to be out at night without Bijoux, but it made me feel cool that the older kids would include me even in her absence. “We need to find you a boyfriend,” Jadranka slurred, pinching my nose. “You’re too cute.”
“She’s got time,” Mili told Jadranka, studying me. “Betsey’s still a little girl. She doesn’t need a boyfriend yet. Once she has a boyfriend, she’ll be angry and cynical all the time.”
“Like me?” Jadranka teased him, elbowing him in the ribs.
“Like you,” Mili assured her, planting a big kiss on her mouth.
I loved it out there on the boat, listening to music. The older kids lit up cigarettes and offered me a smoke, but I declined, hating the smell. We took turns writing messages on each other’s backs with our fingertips. Adrian, one of Mili’s friends, who was hideously ugly and unbelievably skinny but very funny, began telling us stories about the constellations in the starry sky above, and it took almost twenty minutes for us to realize that he was completely making them up.
“You’re so full of it, Adrian!” Mili yelled when Adrian spun a story about a constellation’s reputed depiction of a sheep that killed its owner in a spiteful, jealous rage over the beautiful daughter of a nearby farmer.
“It took you long enough!” Adrian laughed, pleased with himself that he had held us all captive for so long with his elaborate fabrications.
There was drunken talk about sailing around the world but of course eventually sensibility set in and we floated back to the dock. I was sad to step back out onto land again. I knew that Mom and Danko wouldn’t be back at the house before my curfew to catch me if I got home late, but even still, I was a little freaked out as I rode my bike home, tipsy, just after one in the morning.
Jelena was still awake when I walked in the house through the sliding glass doors in the back, entering through the sun room that opened up to the pool area. She was wearing her robe and looked startled.
“Betsey! It’s so late!” she exclaimed.
“Sorry,” I said sheepishly, realizing that her room was next to the sun room and I had probably awakened her as I was fumbling with my keys outside. “Please don’t tell my mom and Danko.”
Jelena waved me toward the stairs, shaking her head at me in disappointment. Jelena and some of our other staff members lived at the house during the year while we were away, so she had
every right to be mad at me; it was in many ways more her house than mine. I wasn’t really drunk and I wasn’t home any later than Bijoux usually rolled in. I really hoped she wouldn’t rat on me. By morning I had forgotten entirely about breaking curfew, and unfortunately, I had pushed the commitment my mother had made on my behalf to writing the report about Death of a Salesman to the very back, murky channels of my brain.
That weekend, Danko’s brother Viktor and his wife Maria arrived, bringing with them Magda and Kristijan. The house was full of noise and energy around the clock, and everything felt somehow safer. Bijoux was largely absent around the house, spending most of her time with Tobin either at the beach or at the apartment he was renting a few miles away. Mom, of course, never questioned for a second why her eighteen-year-old daughter had basically shacked up with a semi-famous stranger in less than a week. No one ever questioned what Bijoux did, because Bijoux never got into trouble, had her feelings hurt, or disappointed anyone. Thankfully, Magda and Kristijan filled the void that she left; having them around was almost like having a part-time brother and sister. It seemed much less likely that I would find myself in a room alone with Danko when so many other people were present.
Even dinners at the house became less hateful, because Danko’s brother Viktor insisted on cleaning out the big grill by the pool and using it nightly, giving our kitchen staff some time off. He had a big chef’s hat that he wore whenever he barbecued, and he had a whole suitcase full of Hawaiian shirts. Of the two brothers, Viktor was younger than Danko, and the difference in their personalities was striking. Viktor and Maria loved to drink and play cards even more than Mom and Danko, and tried every night that week to convince us kids to stay home by the pool with them for a while instead of running off to the beach after dinner.
“Come on, Betsey,” Viktor pleaded with me as Kristijan, Magda, and I headed toward the gate in our fence that led toward the road. “Have you ever played Preference before? It’s a classic Croatian card game. Very competitive. You’re going to love it.”
I wrinkled my nose. Playing card games with old people who were doing shots of vodka on a hot summer night was not my idea of fun. “No, thanks.”
We rode our bikes toward the beach, the sky still periwinkle, hinting at remaining hours ahead for us to hang out on the sand before we had to be back for curfew. Kristijan and Magda rode rickety old bikes from the garage. Magda’s had to be at least thirty years old. It had a blue glittery plastic banana seat like the bike I’d had when I was a little girl and Mom taught me how to ride my bike in Central Park. She was twelve that summer and had grown almost a foot since the last time I’d seen her. Her gangly legs were too long for the bike and her knobby knees hit the handle bars when she pedaled, so we had to ride extra slowly so that she could keep up.
We locked up our bikes and scouted the beach for three empty seats together. Seats on the beach in Okrug weren’t free; you had to pay about $20 just for the right to sit on them. The payment was the local custom to keep vagrants from hanging around. As soon as we put our beach towels down on chairs as if we were preparing to sit down, a skinny guy in his early twenties with a deep tan approached us to collect payment.
“Look,” Kristijan announced as we sat back in our chairs. He dug through his backpack and pulled out a strange circular liquor bottle filled with a tawny-colored liquid.
“What is it?” I asked. I had learned my lesson (or rather, lessons) with liquor the hard way, having tried too many glasses of strange, sickly concoctions offered to me by my sister in my fourteen years of life.
“Slivovitz,” Kristijan stated, twisting the cap off the bottle and taking a swig. He handed me the bottle and I took a sniff. It was obnoxiously sweet-smelling. The smell coated my nostrils and dripped down the inside of my mouth, and I could tell just how potent and intoxicating the liquor producing it must have been.
“What?” I asked, positive that I had heard Kristijan incorrectly.
“Slivovitz,” Magda repeated on her older brother’s behalf. “It’s a kind of fruit brandy.” She looked to Kristijan to remind her of the word in English that she was missing. They exchanged some words in Croatian.
“Plums,” Kristijan filled in the blank. “It’s a plum brandy.”
I held my nose and took a huge gulp, fearing I would regret it. The alcohol coated my throat and burned, reached my stomach and fired up my guts. It was a strange sensation to be drinking something with such a warming effect on a night when it was still so hot out. Even the breeze was warm, offering no refreshment from the sun’s rays. Since we had arrived at the beach, I had started feeling tense, like I was having a premonition that something bad was going to happen that night. The water just seemed too still, the breeze too soft. It was like the present tense had already become a memory, and I was just watching everything happen as if it already had.
“I took it from the liquor cabinet,” Kristijan boasted.
I shivered, experiencing an odd moment of déjà vu.
It made me nervous that Kristijan had taken the bottle from Danko’s house, but I had never seen my stepfather or my mom drink anything like that before. They were far more likely to notice the absence of a bottle of red wine or champagne than a bottle of strange local liquor. And the fact of the matter was that they blazed through so many bottles of wine and champagne during the summer that they probably wouldn’t notice one missing bottle, anyway.
We eased back on our wooden chairs, catching up on things. Kristijan and Magda lived in Zagreb most of the year in a fancy apartment like ours back in New York. Sometimes during the school year I talked with Kristijan on video chat (but not often, because of the time difference), so I had seen his bedroom even though I’d never been there to visit. They had a big brown dog named Omar who stayed in Zagreb with their housekeeper when they were at the beach. Even though Kristijan and I were technically in the same grade, in Croatia he went to a four-year gymnasium where he was already taking classes in finance for a career following in his father’s footsteps. Everything he told me about his school schedule made it seem a lot more serious and grown-up than the junk that I did at my school. I could hardly imagine the boys at his private gymnasium putting on silly musicals like Oklahoma! as we did at the Pershing school. They were already learning about interest rates and capital investments, and we were still snickering like children over health class lessons about ovaries.
So rather than tell Kristijan about my own life at school, which he kept claiming he was so curious about, I told him about my recent trip to Virginia with Bijoux. Of course he knew who my biological dad was. Guys in Croatia were really into rock & roll, but not as interested in celebrity gossip as American guys, which was kind of a relief.
I was envious of both Kristijan and Magda, with their long skinny legs. It was an item of serious curiosity to me that I didn’t have a crush on Kristijan since he was really good-looking, by anyone’s standards. He and Magda both had stick-straight dirty blond hair, huge turquoise eyes and sharp cheekbones. It was easy to imagine what Danko must have looked like when he was fourteen, like his nephew. But miracle of miracles, I had no romantic interest in Kristijan at all. To me, he was like a brother. Not older, not younger, but like a twin, if I had one. Even when our fingers brushed together as we passed the bottle of slivovitz between us, I felt nothing. No spark. No energy. I wondered that night what it might have been like if we were real cousins, and if I were Danko’s real daughter. The mere thought made me really uncomfortable because I loved my dad, but it was something to consider, how incredibly fortunate it would have been to be born with the genes for those long limbs and pale hair. I tried to imagine Danko harassing Magda the way he’d approached me, or Viktor treating his own daughter like that. I simply couldn’t. Viktor treated Magda like a princess and always told Kristijan to knock it off when the two of them were arguing, even when Magda was the one who had started the trouble.
I was feeling particularly sentimental that night, partially due to my strong sen
se of impending doom, which I mentioned earlier. I studied Kristijan and Magda closely, the streaks of white in their sun bleached hair from our afternoons near the water, the flecks of sand stuck to their cheeks and blond eyelashes. All of the details of that night were striking me as noteworthy and precious, from the faded blue stripes of Kristijan’s swim shorts to the garish pink and purple flowers on Magda’s beach towel, brought with her all the way from a fancy department store in Zagreb. Her eyelids were growing droopier as she sipped more and more from the bottle. I was wearing a turquoise bikini, a hand-me-down from Bijoux, only I felt a little self-conscious wearing it when my waist was so much thicker than hers. It tied in the back with long strings that I thought were very European and sophisticated.
It was almost as if I knew during those final moments of sunlight on the beach that everything was about to change that night. Looking back later on that night with more clarity, it was as if I felt my childhood ending, minute by minute. Somehow, I just kind of knew that after that night, nothing would ever be the same again.
By the time the sun set, the three of us were intoxicated, although I wouldn’t have said at the time that I felt drunk. It was hot enough outside that I felt dizzy, but still coherent. Kristijan and I knew that going to a bar with Magda was out of the question, and neither of us had the heart to send her home alone on her bicycle. When the sun began setting, we wrapped our towels around our waists and walked further down the beach toward the beach bar where we could see Jadranka and Mili sitting at a table beneath a straw umbrella to block the sun. As we approached them, my heart was pounding. I just kept feeling like something was about to jump in front of me and terrify me, only I wouldn’t be terrified when it happened, because I sensed its inevitability.
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