Doug had spent part of ninth grade in juvie. People in our town did not go to juvie. I’d never heard of anyone else who’d been there. I didn’t even know where juvie was. I would have suspected it didn’t exist except I remembered when Doug missed two weeks of school to go there. Ever since, he was as likely to be in the principal’s office as he was to be in class.
“What did you rat him out to Ashley for?” Lila asked. “He could have saved that three-hundred-pound man drowning in the wave pool instead of me.”
Keke nodded. “And we could have stared at him shirtless all summer. God, those abs!”
I did not want to think about staring at Doug all summer. And I did not want to talk about this anymore. I turned toward the horizon, the black sky barely discernible from the black ocean, where Doug’s fishing boat had disappeared.
But I could see out the corner of my eye that Keke and Lila both watched me, waiting for my answer as to why I had not wanted to give all of us the opportunity to stare at Doug’s taut, tanned swimmer’s chest all day every day for three summer months. Finally I stated the obvious, which logically should have overridden even teenage girl-lust: “He went to juvie. He’s a criminal. I thought I should warn my family’s business against employing a criminal.”
“What did you think he was going to do,” Keke asked, “embezzle funds? Did he go to juvie for embezzlement?”
“What did he go to juvie for?” Lila asked. “He was only in the ninth grade. What could he possibly have done?”
They were making me feel more and more sheepish. I wished I hadn’t told them this after all. I wished I hadn’t come to the party. “Look,” I defended myself, “it wasn’t the only job in town. I didn’t go all over town and prevent him from getting a job anywhere.”
“Yeah, but the job at Slide with Clyde was his only chance to get away from his dad this summer,” Lila said, waving toward the spot we all gazed at now, where Doug was helping gung-ho tourists hold the line on big game fish beyond the horizon.
“I heard that from the guys on the swim team,” she said. “Lifeguard jobs were the only jobs a teenager could get that paid more than his dad’s fishing biz, and the pools around town were hiring college kids as lifeguards. It was Slide with Clyde or nothing for Doug.”
“What was so bad about working with his dad?” I asked.
We all looked at each other, feet sinking in the sand underwater. A wave knocked Keke off balance and she braced herself against Lila, and still we were quiet. Possibly they were thinking what I was thinking: could Doug’s situation with his dad be worse than mine?
I broke the silence. “Okay. For years there has been this weird tension between Doug and me because he asked me to homecoming in ninth grade, right before he went to juvie.”
“He did ?” Keke gasped.
“And you broke up with him because of that?” Lila asked, outraged.
“Of course not,” I said. “He was just gone.” I flicked my fingers in the air to show that he’d disappeared. “One day he was in junior varsity swim practice with me, hanging on to the side of the pool and asking if I’d go to homecoming with him. The next Monday he was gone. Around the middle of the week somebody had heard he was in juvie. By the time he came back to school a couple of weeks later, homecoming was over.”
“He couldn’t get a furlough to go to homecoming with you?” Keke asked.
“Not funny!” Lila told her.
“He never even mentioned it to me again,” I said. “I went to homecoming with somebody else, and Doug came back from juvie angry at me. Or maybe he was angry at the world, but it felt like me. Y’all don’t remember this, but before juvie, Doug wasn’t prickly like he is now. Juvie made him prickly.”
“I always thought his mother dying made him prickly,” Lila said.
I had not forgotten Doug’s mother had died in a car accident when we were in eighth grade. It was part of what kept girls staring at him longingly after he snapped at them. With tragedy in his past, they thought he must be vulnerable.
And come to think of it . . . maybe despite all the reasons Doug had to dislike me, he would honor my father’s demand that he keep to himself what my mother had done, because he empathized with me. Perhaps I’d misread him at the emergency room—not surprising, considering my state of mind. When he’d started toward me, he hadn’t intended to make a snide comment. He’d understood. This interpretation didn’t jive with the way Doug had been acting for the past few years. But it did make sense when I thought of him in ninth grade, hanging onto the cement wall in the lane next to me during junior varsity swim practice, making a joke about our awful uniform bathing suits emblazoned with the ugliest dog mascot either of us had ever seen, and asking me to homecoming. His voice was soft and his smile was kind.
“No,” I told Keke, “he wasn’t prickly before juvie.”
“There’s something to this,” Keke told Lila. “Doug rolls his eyes at everybody, but he has a special eye-roll whenever Zoey opens her mouth. Like this.”
Her imitation was shockingly accurate. I laughed and slapped my hand over my mouth in horror at the same time.
“That is so true!” Lila exclaimed. “But I thought he did that because Zoey is cute.” She turned to me. “Doug doesn’t do cute.”
Lila was right. Doug sympathizing with me rather than taking the opportunity to bring the rich girl down—that was wishful thinking, and no genie had granted me any wishes. I would have used them on something else.
“I wonder why he came looking for me here,” I mused. “If he’s come to these parties all summer, he knows I haven’t been to one.”
“He definitely thought you would be here.” Lila shrugged. “Why are you here? How’s your mom?”
“My mom,” I said slowly, “is good for the rest of the night.” In my mind I was back in her bedroom again. I straightened the covers on her bed and tucked her in more tightly, because she looked cold.
I’d come to the party to escape thoughts like this. Now that they’d chased me here, I might as well be home with my dad and Ashley. I felt like I was about to jump out of my skin, and I couldn’t stand it.
“Zoey.”
We jerked our heads toward the beach at the sound of a boy’s voice, and all three of us relaxed our shoulders when we saw it wasn’t Doug.
It was Brandon. One of the Slide with Clyde employees who wasn’t on the swim team, he was the star of our school’s football team and looked it, big, blond, and clean-cut like a cartoon superhero. He wasn’t a lifeguard either. He sold ice cream and lifted things that were heavy. I’d asked him about this a few times because lifeguards got paid more than the workers at the concession stands. I could have gotten him promoted. He always brushed me off with a joke about staying out of the sun and preserving his complexion.
His lungs were another story. He cupped both hands around his cigarette to take a puff and keep it lit in the wind off the surf. Exhaling smoke, he said, “I heard you were here. I have to talk to you.”
“Come into the water.” Playfully I kicked a little splash at him.
“Come out of the water,” he called. “I have to talk to you alone.”
Lila leaned in and whispered, “Do you want us to distract him? He’s had a lot of beer, and he’s dangerous with that cigarette. He might light you on fire.”
“Thanks, but it’s okay,” I whispered back. I was sure he needed solace about his latest conquest gone sour—and if I could help him, at least I had helped someone tonight.
I waded out of the ocean with my arms out for him. “Sure,” I told him as I hugged him in greeting. “We can talk alone. Let’s go to . . .”
I glanced toward the water. I felt better just touching it. Keke, Lila, and the rest of the swim team had headed up the beach, toward the beer. Brandon and I could talk in the water now and have the ocean to ourselves.
His muscled arm curved around my waist.
I looked up at him. He gazed down at me earnestly, his too-handsome comic-book hero fe
atures softened by the starlight.
His hand stroked my back. I did not think he was touching me in a flirtatious way. I thought he was having a balance problem and teetering a bit.
But I wanted him to flirt with me. He was a muscle-bound football player and a playboy, but I knew him to be a softie, and in that dark moment I wanted more. This was crazy. I felt tingles of attraction for Brandon all the time. Who wouldn’t? But I never acted on them. This time the thoughts of my mother and the pressure from Doug seemed to push me out of the surf and against Brandon’s broad chest. I had come to this party desperately needing something I couldn’t name. Now I knew what it was.
I stroked my hand across his. “Could we go to your Buick?”
I HAD DATED A LOT OF nice boys in the past few years. I’d never gotten serious with anyone, and that had been okay with me. I was only seventeen. I was willing to wait for the good stuff.
But something happened to me in June when my dad told my mom about Ashley. I couldn’t stop thinking about sex, my dad having sex, Ashley having sex, everyone at Slide with Clyde having sex, everyone having sex except my mom and me.
You might think my job as a lifeguard was sexy. But I spent most of my time on a platform with sunglasses on and a whistle in my mouth, poised to prevent tragedy. The tourists accepted me as part of the scenery, like the cement mountains spewing waterfalls piped in from hoses, or the stacked crates with labels I’d stenciled another summer: BANANAS BY THE BUNCH and DANGER: ANACONDA!
The tourists didn’t notice me, so I observed them unabashedly. While the little kids splashed in the fountains and peed in the pools, their parents eyed each other and spread each other with oil. No question what they did in the hotel room after Junior went to sleep.
The teenage tourists didn’t have a place to do it. Unlike the locals, they didn’t know about the city beach for parking. But it was clear what they wanted. The dance clubs in Panama City looked like Sunday school compared to what Slide with Clyde brought out in people. A few piña coladas bought by college kids and slipped to underage teenagers for fun. Cool rushing water. Hot bare skin and lots of it. Whether you got any or not, Slide with Clyde sold sex.
The employees felt it. And to hear them talk, most of them got it at their beach parties every weekend, the ones I missed because I stayed home with my mom. I was concerned for my friends. Or feeling left out. Or very angry at my dad for impregnating the human resources manager while my mom slept longer and longer every day and slowly ground to a halt. The next time my dad sent me to the wholesale club for paper towels and soda straws for Slide with Clyde, I also bought the world’s largest box of condoms. My dad never checked the receipt anyway. He just wanted me to show up with the toilet paper and the pickle relish. I gave condoms out to anyone who asked. I also gave condoms to people who didn’t ask. If I heard rumors about them, I slipped condoms through the vents in their lockers in the break room.
Brandon found me poking a packet into his locker one afternoon. I was mortified. We were friends at school and I’d gotten him the job, but I didn’t know him well enough to stuff his locker with condoms. He was really nice about it, though. He asked me for advice about the chick he was doing. I wanted to help him. And that’s how we became buddies.
For the rest of the summer, chicks winked at me and said, “Yeah, you and Brandon are just friends,” meaning, How could you be just friends with a piece of meat like that? But we honestly were. He came to me for advice about a new girlfriend every week.
Girls fell all over Brandon. Threw themselves at him. It rained girls through the sunroof of his Buick. A lot of his complaints had to do with girls he went out with getting mad at him about the other girls he went out with. I didn’t want a boyfriend like that. And he didn’t want a girlfriend like me. All the boys at school knew I was just Zoey, everybody’s friend, and I didn’t put out.
Until now. “Just a sec,” I said as we passed my Bug on our stroll through the parking lot. “Let me get something out of my car.” While he finished another cigarette, I unlocked my trunk and leaned into it for the king-size box of condoms. I pulled one out and poked it into my pocket, hoping Brandon wouldn’t notice. Not yet. I turned around.
He stared at my pocket. Then he looked straight at me with blue eyes I would have sworn were innocent as a baby’s if I hadn’t known him so well. He seemed to see me with perfect clarity.
He didn’t say a word about it, though. He just turned toward his Buick again and asked as we walked, “You know that girl Phoebe who does the airbrush tattoos at Slide with Clyde?” He unlocked the passenger door of the Buick and pushed it open a little for me. We couldn’t open it wide because it was huge and would ding the car in the next space. Carefully I squeezed inside and closed the door behind me.
Brandon sat in the driver’s side, still talking. I suspected he’d been talking outside the car too, and hadn’t noticed I wasn’t there to listen. “—down at the beach right now with her cousin from Destin who is hot, Zoey, and somehow I have to find a way into that without scaring both of them off.” He put his elbow on the steering wheel and his chin in his hand, staring into space with his brow down, perplexed.
When I’d first discussed such matters with Brandon, I’d thought he was kidding. No real person could take problems like this seriously. But Brandon did, and once you realized this about him, it was easy to like him. He had no malice. He just loved girls, and sex.
I leaned back against the door and pointed my knees toward him. “Can I ask you something?”
“I know, I know,” he said. “Why can’t I hit on Phoebe and be satisfied with that, instead of chasing her cousin? Why do I always want the one I can’t have? I don’t know, Zoey. If I knew, I wouldn’t need you.”
“You wouldn’t?” I slid my hand onto his bare thigh—the hand without the chip in the fingernail polish.
A lot of boys would have asked me what I thought I was doing. Brandon did not. Either he knew exactly what I was doing, or he was easy. That’s why he got as many girls as he did. I wanted to be easy for once.
“That’s not what I was going to ask you.” I smoothed my hand down the crisp blond hairs on his tanned leg. “Why haven’t we hooked up?”
He laughed. “Because I want to keep my job?”
“My dad doesn’t care.” It hurt to say this. I kept smiling.
Brandon shrugged. “I only see you at work. You’ve hardly come out with us a single time all summer.”
“I’m here now,” I said.
His brow furrowed. I was busted. He knew there was something wrong with me, and he would refuse to help me make it worse, some line like that.
But no. Rising from the steering wheel and scooting closer across the wide seat, he reached behind my head and pulled his fingers along the length of a lock of my hair. “I don’t know, Zoey. I guess I figured you’d say no. You’re such a nice girl.” He leaned in and kissed me.
My body was there in the car with him, making out with him. My mind raced through a lifetime of warnings about sex. Before this night I’d assumed I wouldn’t be doing it for a while. I had too much to look forward to—graduation, college, a job, travel. I couldn’t risk losing it all to satisfy my raging hormones.
But as he pulled my shorts down, these lessons didn’t make sense to me anymore. Where was the risk? We were only doing it. It was amazingly easy. His fingers found the condom in my pocket and pulled it out. I kept kissing his neck as plastic crinkled, and then he scooted me down until I lay on the long seat.
He paused at the edge of me, not pushing in but maintaining pressure there, threatening. I was putting up barriers, even now, that were hard for him to get past. I tried to relax for him. I visualized opening for him, letting him into me.
Something inside me screamed Noooooo, this is crazy. Something else inside me reached up with one hand to cover my mouth. It held me down so I couldn’t escape until the damage was done. Brandon slid himself all the way inside me, the point of no return, so swiftly and so d
eep that I gasped. I felt a little sick to my stomach, and my arms had gone tingly and cold, like I had some strange disease.
“That’s it,” he whispered, pushing farther in.
I hadn’t realized how far in he could go, but it was best to trust him since he’d done this before. I let him push into me, pull out, push in again, until he found a rhythm, and the sex turned into every pornographic snippet I’d ever walked in on boys viewing on the computer in the break room at Slide with Clyde. This was familiar. It wasn’t comfortable, but at least I recognized it. I was doing what everybody else had already done, which made me normal. My arms still tingled, but my whole body flashed from cold to hot now, and I understood the animal nature of it, doing it to reproduce. Brandon was the biggest, best example of my species, and I felt an animal pride in having caught him.
LATER, HOLDING HANDS, WE CROSSED THE bridge over the sand dunes and sat on the wooden stairs, looking out over the party. This was perfect. We were part of the party but apart from it, above it, because of what we’d just shared.
Then he asked, “You want a beer?”
The question struck me as funny. I never drank. I was afraid of losing control that way. All my friends knew this about me, except the one I’d just lost my virginity to.
“Why’re you laughing?” he slurred. “I take that as a yes?”
“No thanks. Not while I’m in training.” I put my hand on my belly and phrased my refusal in terms Brandon would accept. As an athlete, he would understand abstaining for the sake of training, even if it would never occur to him to abstain himself.