Maybe Grammy isn’t sick. Maybe she is.
But either way, she’s lying.
Julie was right, Claire thinks. They really are on their own.
The movie theater is small and shabby and smells like half a century’s worth of stale popcorn, but the movie’s full. Claire and Julie sit up in the balcony. It’s the first time Claire has been out of Grammy’s house since she rode her bike to the beach, and there’s something comforting about being here, with Julie, surrounded by people.
“I’m gonna try and talk to my dad tomorrow,” Julie says while they wait for the movie to start. “He’s supposed to get back in tonight.”
“Do you think he’ll help?” Claire asks.
Julie sighs. “Honestly? Probably not, not if the committee said no. But I might be able to get some advice out of him.” She brushes her hair out of her eyes and then looks over at Claire. “We’re going to come up with something, I promise.”
“I’ll let you know if anything—shows up.” Claire shivers. “But so far, nothing.”
“There’s hasn’t been much at the exterminator’s either. Just the ones that can’t talk, and they haven’t been coming into town, just wandering around by the beach houses.”
Claire is sure that Julie means this as a comfort, but it only puts Claire further on edge, like the monsters are planning something.
Julie glances over at her. “Hey,” she says. “Don’t worry. It’s going to be okay. And I promise the movie will cheer you up.”
Claire smiles, doubtful.
“I’m serious,” Julie says. “The best way to forget about monsters is to watch a monster movie. You’ll see.”
The lights dim then, and the audience falls into a quiet hush. When the movie starts, Claire stares at it, half comprehending, waiting for it to make her feel better.
Julie, though, leans forward through the entire thing, half draped over the railing, transfixed. When the movie gets too scary, the aliens gliding across the screen with slashing tails, Claire watches Julie instead, although she tries to be surreptitious about it, glancing at Julie out of the corner of her eye, at the light flickering across her face.
When the final alien is killed and the movie ends, scattered applause ripples through the theater. Julie pounds her hands together enthusiastically.
“That was awesome!” she says. “What’d you think?”
“It was good.”
“Did it make you feel better about everything?”
Claire considers this question. She has to admit there is something soothing about movie monsters, about the idea that monsters can be controlled at all.
“Yeah, it really did.”
“Perfect. I’m so glad.”
I’m so glad. Claire smiles at that.
The crowd shuffles out of the theater as the credits roll, but Claire and Julie stay seated, waiting for the path to clear.
“Do you have to go home right away?” Julie asks.
Claire checks her watch. It’s almost ten. “I wasn’t sure how long the movie would be, so I told Grammy midnight.”
Julie grins. “Sneaky.”
Claire pretends to preen.
“So we’ve got two hours to tear up the town.”
“Better make it good,” Claire says. Up on the screen, film company logos rotate by.
“The Pirate’s Den closes at ten,” Julie says. “We could go back to my place, but I don’t really feel like going home either.”
“We’re definitely not going back to my house.”
Julie laughs. “No way. We could always go to the beach.”
Claire doesn’t answer. The lights come up in the theater.
“Indianola Beach is closed,” Julie says, “but we can go down to the private beach along hurricane alley. My uncle has a house there and he’s cool with us hanging out.”
“Hurricane alley?” Claire looks over at her. “Isn’t that where you’re always catching monsters?”
“They haven’t been going to the south end.” Julie pushes back her hair. “I dunno, I just feel like being outside tonight. But we can go back to my house if you want.”
Claire thinks about the beach at night, the crashing waves and the moon-lined shadows. She wonders if they’ll see monsters, if those monsters will attack them. She’s surprised when the idea gives her a thrill of excitement along with a shiver of fear. Maybe the movie did help her, more than she realized.
“Let’s do it,” she says.
They leave the theater. Julie chatters about the film, reliving all her favorite parts. Claire listens, nodding her head like she agrees.
They climb into Julie’s car. Julie starts the engine.
“Lawrence always teases me about liking Aliens,” Julie says. “He says we get enough aliens in Indianola.”
Claire’s heart skips like a record. “You think they’re aliens too?”
Julie laughs. “I don’t know what the hell they are. Another side effect of no one ever talking about the stupid things.” They cruise down the empty street. Half the lamps are burned out, and the car creates long sliding shadows across the fronts of the shops. “When you’re a kid, you ask questions about them: Are they aliens? Dinosaurs? What? But no adults will give you a straight answer.” She frowns, staring ahead at the dark road. “And then one day it’s like a switch turns off, and you just give up. Like we were talking about the other day.”
Claire looks over at her. Every now and then the color from the traffic lights floods through the car, staining Julie like an Impressionist painting. She sighs, and her breasts swell beneath her tank top. Claire looks away, cheeks hot, wondering why she noticed something like that.
“You’re really the only person who talks about the monsters with me,” she says, because right now the monsters feel like a safer topic. “Everyone else acts like I should just ignore them.”
“That’s how they are.” Julie nods. “They pretend it’s totally normal. Even when new people move to town, after a while they just accept everything. Like, oh, it’s too hot to go outside during the summer, and we’re due for a hurricane this year, and monsters will creep through your backyard sometimes. Whatever causes it, I think it’s the same thing that makes people forget when they leave the city limits.”
Claire stares past her reflection in the window, out to the darkened town. She thinks about all the adults who have dismissed her concerns. Maybe accepting the monsters is a part of growing up. She’s not sure what that means about growing up, though.
Julie turns off the main road, into a neighborhood of beach houses lined up on stilts. The world feels empty, and Claire shivers.
Julie parks at a house on the corner. The porch light is on, sallow yellow, and an old Buick from the 1970s sits lopsidedly among the weeds.
“Is this your uncle’s house?” Claire asks.
“Sure is. He’s probably asleep by now, but he won’t mind if we park here. He knows my car.”
They get out. The wind sweeps through the neighborhood, stronger than it had been down at the theater. It’s late enough that the night’s already starting to cool down, and the air’s balmy and almost pleasant. Julie loops her arm in Claire’s. The touch is startling.
“This way!” Julie says, pointing off toward the sand dunes. They lope forward with their arms entangled. Claire feels light, as if the wind could blow her away. It’s not like the dizziness she gets when she sees the monsters. It’s more like the dizziness she got whenever she saw Josh.
They creep through the dunes, Julie whispering that they need to watch out for rattlesnakes.
“Rattlesnakes and aliens,” Claire says, but the wind whips her voice away. She can already hear the waves rushing along the shore. They sound louder at night than they do during the day.
She and Julie step out of the sand dunes. The water glitters silver in the moonlight, and the waves are high and frothy, the closest Texas comes to surfing waves.
“Wow,” Claire whispers.
“I know, it’s beaut
iful out here at night.” Julie stares out at the sea, her hair rippling around her shoulders. “One of my favorite places in town. Even though technically we’re trespassing, you know.”
“But you said your uncle didn’t care!”
“He doesn’t.” Julie laughs. “C’mon, let’s go down to the water.”
The sand looks silver in the shadows, as if they’re walking across the surface of the moon. When they come to the waterline, Julie kicks off her shoes and splashes into the shallow film of water. She stomps around in it, laughing.
“I haven’t been out here in forever,” she says. “My mom would bring me to visit Uncle Michael, and she and him would sit out on his porch smoking while I came down to the water.” She looks up at Claire, the wind whipping her hair around. “I used to pretend to be a monster-hunter.”
Claire smiles, imagines a younger Julie creeping through the dunes, looking for clues. “Now you actually are a monster-hunter.”
“Yeah, and it sucks.” Julie grins. “Way more fun to pretend. Hey, which character from the movie are you?”
“What?”
“From the movie—regular ol’ monster-hunting sucks, but what about hunting super-monsters?”
Claire laughs. The salt-tinged air makes her woozy, the way she felt when she had wine at a wedding two years ago. “You want to pretend we’re in the movie?”
“Well, yeah. It’s what I always did when I was kid to make me feel better about living in a monster-infested town.” Julie grins. “What do you say? Want to try it out?”
Claire nods. “I guess.”
“I call Vasquez. You want to be Ripley?”
“The main character?”
“Yep.” Julie turns back to the dunes. “This is what I used to do when I went fake monster-hunting. Any dune without vines on it, that’s a monster. You have to try and destroy it.”
“How do you destroy a dune?”
“Kick at it and stuff.”
Claire shakes her head. She feels silly and self-conscious, but there’s something freeing about it too, being out here alone in the dark, under threat of monster attack, and instead of acting scared you just act brave.
Julie’s already making her way across the beach. Her steps leave hollow trails in the sand. She tosses her shoes off to the side and then turns around at the start of the dunes.
“You coming?” she shouts.
“Is that how you talk to Ripley?”
Julie’s laughter echoes down the beach. It makes Claire feel like they’re the only people in the world. She runs over to Julie’s side, the wind damp and cool against her skin. She never wants the sun to come up.
Together they survey the dunes.
“Nothing but vines,” Claire says.
“Nothing but empty hallways,” Julie corrects.
“Corridors. Isn’t it corridors on a spaceship?”
“That was a planetary colony.”
“Whatever.”
Julie steps into the dunes themselves, and Claire follows, cautious. In the moonlight the dunes do sort of look like monsters, even the vine-covered ones—hulking and eerie, lying in wait. They rise up around Julie and Claire like a fence. At least they don’t say anything about astronauts. At least looking at them doesn’t make Claire feel like the world is leaning at a tilt.
Claire trips over a loose patch of sand and bumps up against Julie, her hand brushing the back of Julie’s hand.
Julie intertwines her fingers with Claire’s.
The movement is as natural as the wind, and although Claire is startled, she doesn’t pull her hand away. She doesn’t want to.
“There’s one!” Julie shouts, pointing with her free hand.
“Get it!” Claire shouts, and they run forward, still holding hands, and kick at it.
Sand showers over their feet, glittering like diamonds. And there is one bright flash of a moment when the dune really is a monster, when it represents that constant miasma of anxiety that’s been a part of Claire’s summer since that first monster rose out of the grass and called her girl. When she looks at the dune, she sees the monster that launched itself at her window, that hissed astronaut and tried to crawl inside. She lets go of Julie and plunges her hands into the sand and flings it out onto the surrounding dunes. She’s not just tearing apart a monster, she’s tearing apart her fear. Anything that frightens her, she flings into the night air.
The sand makes a whispering sound as it falls, and that sound, that whisper, pulls Claire away from the beach. She’s standing in Audrey’s bedroom, a maze stretching out in front of her.
“Don’t let its blood get on you!” Julie shrieks delightedly.
The vision evaporates and then Claire doesn’t even remember having it, only a vague sense that she stepped out of herself for a moment. She kicks at the dune, hopping around on one foot.
Claire and Julie have created a large, shapeless indentation into the side of the dune when they give up, collapsing down on their backs. To Claire it feels like being in their own world together, a place made out of soft moonlight and the sound of the ocean.
“Well, that was silly,” Claire says.
“What, you don’t want to be a kid again?”
Claire drops her head to the side and finds Julie looking at her. A dune vine is twisted against her cheek and tangled up in her hair, and it reminds Claire of a picture of nymphs she saw in her Latin textbook at school.
“I don’t know,” Claire says. “Seems there are some perks to being a grown-up.”
Julie grins, and her whole face lights up and it’s beautiful. “Yeah, I guess you get to do whatever you want. But you’ve already seen how worthless the adults are around here. They just go with whatever the town wants from them.”
“Whatever the monsters want from them?” Claire says, her uneasiness about being out at night returning. She thinks of Audrey’s house again. Why does she keep thinking of Audrey? She doesn’t want to.
“Maybe.” Julie falls silent, still watching Claire, and then she sits up. Claire’s skin prickles. Her breath feels short. The night is perfect.
Julie leans forward. She puts her hand in Claire’s hair. Claire doesn’t understand what’s happening.
And then Julie kisses her.
For half a second, Claire kisses back, and there’s a flash of light behind her eyes like a supernova.
But then panic floods through her. This isn’t right this is wrong this is unnatural. She squirms away, tearing through the dune vines. Julie sits back and she doesn’t look angry or sad or disappointed, only resigned.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t have done that. I thought you—”
“I-It’s okay,” Claire stammers. She hears an ocean inside her head. I thought you wanted me to, was that what Julie was going to say? “I’m not mad or anything, I just—I like boys.”
She remembers the supernova flash behind her eyes. She thinks about Julie’s bare shoulders and bare legs and tangled hair. The curve of her breasts beneath her shirt.
But Claire does like boys, she’s certain of it, she’s been pining over Josh since last year.
Julie stands up and dusts the sand off her shorts. Even now, even with embarrassment churning up her stomach, Claire doesn’t want to look away, her movements are so graceful and lovely. But that’s a normal thing, to admire another girl. It doesn’t mean she likes her.
Julie tucks a piece of hair behind her ears, crossing her arms over her chest. “I’ll take you home,” she mutters, not looking Claire in the eye. “I’m really sorry.”
She leaves, picking her way through the dunes. The sun didn’t have to rise for the night to come to an end.
But Claire doesn’t follow her right away. Instead, she sits there in the vines and thinks, I’m straight, I like Josh, I’m straight, while at the same time replaying the kiss in her head, that half second when she kissed back, when it was everything a kiss should be.
CHAPTER
Fourteen
JULIE
>
Julie drives through a red light at the intersection on Main Street. She has her music turned up too loud, Exene howling about how the world’s a mess. Julie gets it.
Stupid. Stupid stupid stupid.
Julie tears around the corner. Her stomach feels like it’s falling into pieces. The movie, the beach—everything had been so romantic and perfect and Julie ruined it by taking a chance that she had never dared to take before. She doesn’t blame Claire. It’s Julie’s fault. She knew better. She’s known all her life that this is the way things are in Indianola. Like the monsters, like the treaties. Girls don’t kiss girls here. In Austin they do. But not here.
Julie thinks about all the girls she’s liked, all the way back to Mary McNally in second grade, which was when Julie figured it out. They used to walk around the playground together after lunch, running through the circuit of slides and jungle gyms and seesaws. They always ended up at the merry-go-round, which was Mary’s favorite. On Valentine’s Day Julie gave Mary a card she made out of construction paper and lace; Mary gave her one too that said Best Friends, and Julie, even at eight years old, understood that Best Friends wasn’t exactly how she felt about Mary, although she didn’t know any other way to put it into words.
Later, when she figured those words out, she still didn’t say them. Not in this town, where the Pentecostal preacher shouts his sermons so loudly you can hear them from Julie’s backyard on Sunday mornings. And her father, being a pillar of the community like he is—that’s how Julie’s mom put it when she found the Hustler in Julie’s room last fall. Lawrence had kept the magazines secret for years, which made Julie lazy about hiding them. “Your father’s a pillar of the community and you wouldn’t want anything to disrupt that, would you?” She had the magazine rolled up so you couldn’t see the woman on the cover. “This sort of thing—it’s not what we want getting out. It could be very troublesome for our family.”
That was all her mother had said about it. She didn’t even seem angry. But it was clear she expected Julie to keep it a secret. Even Lawrence has told her she ought to keep it to herself until she goes to college.
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