Beach Trip (9 page)

“Hey, who’s this?” Jemison, the all-state wrestler, had appeared out of nowhere, shirtless and pumped up like a silverback gorilla. His hair stood up wildly around his head. He leered at Mel and sauntered over. “Who’s this foxy girl?” he asked. Mel rolled her eyes and glanced at Sara, who gave her a quick
let’s go
look.

He slung one meaty arm across her shoulders and Mel quickly pushed it off, saying, “Take a shower, why don’t you?”

He laughed loudly. His beady eyes narrowed as he looked around the circle. “I like her,” he said. He noticed Sara then, and stuck his plastic cup out to her. “Have a drink,” he said.

“I don’t drink.” Sara looped her fingers around Mel’s belt in the back and gave a little tug to get her moving.

“She doesn’t drink, Jemison,” one of the boys said. “We already tried.”

“Yeah, Jemison, she doesn’t smoke either,” another one chattered, hopping from foot to foot and waving his long arms.

“Huh,” Jemison said, squinting at Sara. “She doesn’t drink and she doesn’t smoke. What does she do?” The others chuckled and looked around nervously. Jemison leaned in so close Sara could smell his sour breath, and growled, “Are you a narc?”

“Leave my friend alone,” Mel said.

“I’ll get to you in a minute.”

Sara stepped back. State champion or not, she figured they could outrun him as long as he didn’t take to the trees. As if guessing her intent, he put one hairy arm out to stop her but before he could grab hold of her shoulder a voice rang out across the clearing. “Leave her alone!” It was a voice of authority, deep and masculine, and Jemison stopped, his arm
hanging midair. The crowd parted and they could see him now, a lone boy sitting in the back of a pickup truck, one knee drawn up and one arm resting casually across the top.

The world stopped suddenly, or at least it did for Sara; everything became blurry and grainy, like a film in slow motion. The boy in the back of the truck seemed lit by a strange phosphorescence. Or maybe it was just a moonbeam, trained on him like a spotlight. The image made Sara dizzy. She felt like she’d been hit over the head and covered by something dark and heavy. He raised his hand and beckoned to them and Sara began to move toward him like a sleepwalker.

“Sorry, Radford,” Jemison shouted, stepping back, and the spell was suddenly broken. The crowd began to shift and disperse. Jim Morrison sang “Don’t You Love Her Madly?” and Jemison raised his hand and said again, “Sorry man, I didn’t know they were with you,” and turning, slunk off into the night.

John Thomas Radford. He was a third-year English lit student from Charlotte, North Carolina, and, climbing up into the bed of the truck beside him, Sara felt like she’d known him all her life. Mel sat down on the other side of him and later, when they got cold, he took off his jeans jacket and put it around Sara and made one of the other boys give his jacket to Mel. His hair was long and straight and fell just below his ears. He seemed lit by some kind of strange incandescence. Even in the shadows cast by the dancing fire, Sara knew his eyes were green, knew he had a small scar at the outside corner of his right eye, knew his lower lip was full and round, knew what it would feel like to kiss him. She had never, until this moment, believed in love at first sight.

A low-lying band of fog drifted off the river. Stars twinkled above the ridgetops.

“Your friend sure is quiet,” he said to Mel.

The moon was low in the sky and the fire had burned to embers by the time they decided it was time to go. The crowd had gradually broken up, slipping through the trees like wraiths, and the clearing was filled now with a cold gray light. J.T nudged Mel with his shoulder. “Y’all better get back to the dorm before you get caught and put on restriction.”

“Spoken like someone who knows how that works.”

He laughed and jumped down from the bed of the truck, putting his
arms up to help them. He held Mel a few seconds longer, Sara noticed, and she smiled slyly up at him and said, “What’s your girlfriend going to say about you hanging out all night with a couple of strange women?”

He let her go. “What girlfriend?” he said.

Sara made a move to return his jacket to him but he said, “No, you keep it until we get back to the dorm. I’ll walk you home. Two pretty girls like you shouldn’t be out alone in the woods at night.” It was a corny thing to say, of course, and normally they would have protested. But neither one wanted to let him go so they said nothing and followed him across the clearing.

“Where are you going?” Mel said, pointing at the sandy embankment they had run down. “We came this way.”

“Next time take the trail,” he said, pointing, and they could see the dim outline of a narrow trail rising from the beach and crisscrossing the ridge, several hundred feet from the embankment. “You’re less likely to fall if you take the trail.”

“Who says there’ll be a next time?” Mel asked.

He stood there in the violet light, grinning at her. “Oh, I think you’ll be back,” he said.

Sara led the way. The trail was steeper than it looked from the beach, and was covered in trailing vines that caught at their legs and feet. They were halfway up the ridge when Mel fell. Sara heard her go down like a sack of potatoes hitting a dirt floor. J.T. leaned over, picked Mel up, and set her on her feet, but she winced slightly and said, “Shit. I think I twisted my ankle.” He bent over to check her leg. In the sky above his shoulder, the faint rim of moon hung like a silver coin. He prodded her ankle gently with his fingers. Mel looked at Sara and grinned, her teeth gleaming in the darkness. “Ouch,” she said.

It was a good thing J.T. stood between them, because if he hadn’t, Sara would have pitched Mel over the edge. All this over a boy. But not just any boy. As if to remind her of this he looked up, his face slightly luminous.

“I’d better carry you,” he said to Mel and swooped her up in his arms. She made a faint squeak, like a small rodent being squeezed. Sara headed up the trail, trying not to hear Mel’s giggles and the soft grunting noises J.T. made as he climbed.

“You’re a lot stronger than you look.”

“You’re a lot heavier than you look.”

Down on the beach someone was starting the vehicles. Headlights
clicked on, sweeping the beach. Sara picked her way up the trail, hearing Mel’s soft little cries like a knife turning beneath her heart. Almost to the crest, they stopped so J.T. could put her down and catch his breath. He stood there, tall and broad-shouldered against the fading stars, and quoted,

Mel said, “I hope you’re not comparing me to a tiger. Because that’s not very flattering.”

“Who says I’m comparing you to anything?” he said, grinning at her. “Who says it’s about you at all?”

“I like Blake all right,” she said, lifting her face to his. “But Yeats! Now there’s a poet.”

Sara swung around and plodded up the trail, trying to put as much distance as possible between her and them. A faint violet light bathed the eastern sky. Their voices became fainter. If they knew she was leaving them behind, they didn’t seem to care.

heir first morning at the beach they awoke to a breakfast of seafood crepes and fresh fruit. April, it seemed, was working her way through culinary school and had a notebook full of recipes she was dying to try out. She disappeared soon after they had gathered around the enormous breakfast bar, and reappeared a short while later dressed in a swimsuit and carrying a towel.

“Just leave the dishes in the sink,” she told Lola. “I’ll get to them when I get back.”

“Don’t worry about us,” Lola said. She was standing in a bright slash of sunlight looking sweet and cheerful, her thick-lensed glasses glinting in the sun.

April went out the French doors on to the deck and they watched her walk along the boardwalk and disappear over the dunes. A few minutes later she reappeared, a tiny figure moving across the wide expanse of beach. Captain Mike, Mel noted, was nowhere to be seen.

The women took their time eating breakfast, enjoying the opportunity
to be lazy. They were all still dressed in their pajamas. Lola wore a pair of red silk pajamas that looked comfortable and expensive, but seemed strangely out of place with her heavy-rimmed glasses. Annie wore a nightgown with matching robe and slippers. Mel had on a camisole and sleep shorts covered in yellow ducks, and Sara wore a pair of sweat pants and a Carolina Law T-shirt.

“Let’s stay in our jammies all day,” Sara said. “This is the most fun I’ve had in ages.”

“You don’t get out much, do you,” Mel said.

The kitchen and breakfast bar overlooked the cavernous great room and when they had finished eating they took their coffee into the great room and sat across from one another on two long sofas positioned on either side of the stone fireplace, Mel and Annie on one sofa and Sara and Lola on the other, their feet stretched out and resting on the big glass coffee table. Beyond the wall of soaring windows overlooking the beach, the Atlantic glittered in the sun. A blue haze hung over the distant horizon.

Mel looked critically at her long legs stretched out on the table. “I need to get some sun on these bad boys,” she said, turning them this way and that. They were perfect legs and anyone looking at them could see that.

“Do what I do and go down to one of those places where they spray the tan on,” Annie said, lifting her nightgown so they could see her own heavier, rather splotchy legs.

Lola picked up a controller and punched a button, and the flat-screen TV slid out from behind a painting on the chimney breast. She scrolled aimlessly through a series of channels, stopping briefly on one of those entertainment shows that spread gossip about Hollywood stars.

“This show is good,” Sara said.

Mel picked up a magazine and thumbed through it slowly. “Since when do you have time to sit around watching daytime TV?”

“I told you I was only working part-time right now.” Adam was settling into his third new school and she’d quit to spend more time with him, but Sara didn’t want to go into all of that. She picked up a magazine too. “Is this the Bedford alumni magazine?”

“Briggs gets those,” Lola said quickly.

Sara looked at Mel and Annie. “Do y’all get the alumni magazine?”

“I get it but I never read it,” Mel said.

“I don’t get it,” Annie said. “Or if I do, Mitchell throws it away before I see it.”

“They must have lost my address.” Sara yawned and tossed the magazine on the table, where it opened to the center page, a glossy roundup of Bedford grads, past and present. Annie turned it around with her toes. “Hey,” she said, pointing at a photo of a bride and her much-older groom, “didn’t we go to school with that guy?”

Mel leaned over and peered at the photo. “Oh yeah,” she said “Bart. Sara used to date him.”

“I never dated a Bart,” Sara said.

“Sure you did.”

“Well, okay, maybe once.” She shuddered at the memory, and Lola smiled brightly and said, “Sara’s never loved anyone but Tom.”