Beach Trip (8 page)

Still, as her mother so often pointed out, he was from a good family, he was blond and good-looking, and he was an ATO to boot. And Briggs was a Southern gentleman to the very core of his being. Most of the time he treated her like a princess, like a glass figure on a pedestal. So she should have felt guilty about deceiving him on this bright fall day as she left the library and hurried around the corner toward the administration building. But Lola wasn’t thinking about Briggs at all. She was thinking about Lonnie.

He was up on a ladder painting the second-story soffits. She stood for a moment with one hand on her hip and the other shading her eyes as she looked up at him. It took him a few minutes to realize she was there, but when he did, he grinned slowly and stopped painting.

“Hey, girl,” he said.

“Hey, Lonnie.”

He climbed down the ladder, holding the paint can and brush carefully in one hand. His overalls were covered in paint splatters. “What’d you bring me for lunch?”

Lola got so caught up in looking at him that for a moment she couldn’t think of anything to say. He had an earring in one ear and the tattoo of a dragon on his right forearm, and he was just about the most exoticlooking boy Lola had ever seen.

“Sorry?” she said.

He grinned slowly, his gray eyes kind but lively. “Just kidding,” he said.

She smiled and moved away so he could step off the ladder. “Do you have to work all day?”

“No. I get off at noon.” He took a rag out of his pocket and began to clean his hands with paint thinner. When he’d finished he stuck the rag back in his pocket. “Why?”

She wasn’t quite sure what to say, so she asked, “Do you like working here?”

He shrugged. “It’s a job. It pays the bills until the music thing takes off.” He was a musician, the lead guitarist in a heavy metal band called the Lords of Ruin. They played at various small clubs around town. He had invited her on a number of occasions to come hear them, but so far she had declined. She knew that if she saw him up on a stage with a guitar strapped to his chest it would be all over. Her life as she knew it, as her mother had planned it, would be over.

“My boyfriend might be able to help you out,” she said, noting the way his eyes turned from gray to pale blue depending on the light.

He arched one eyebrow. “Your boyfriend?” They spoke of Briggs now as if he was some kind of private joke between them.

“His frat’s having a party. They need a band to play.”

His smile widened. A dimple appeared deep in one cheek and Lola fought a sudden urge to kiss him. “We don’t play many frat parties,” he said.

When Sara got back from her walk, Mel and J.T. had already left for Sliding Rock. She felt relief wash over her, followed swiftly by a feeling of dejection as she climbed the front porch steps and went upstairs to her bedroom to lie down. The house smelled of disinfectant and citrus cleaner. She could hear Annie moving around in her bedroom. Lola must still be at the library.

Sara lay on the bed with her ankles crossed and her hands behind her head, staring at the ceiling. The window was open, and a sultry breeze blew through the room, flapping the edge of her Led Zeppelin poster that had come loose at one corner. Faintly in the distance, a leaf blower hummed.

She wasn’t sure she could last another year. She had made it through three years already and that had been torture enough, but this year, when she was a senior, when she should have been enjoying her last year of college before heading out into the big world, Sara wasn’t sure she could stand the anguish. She fantasized about taking her clothes out of the closet and throwing them into her suitcase; she imagined tearing her posters off the walls and heading for home.

But what would she tell her parents? That she was in love with the same boy Mel loved? That she couldn’t stand the strain anymore of trying to pretend that she didn’t feel what she felt?

She had never been in love before, and she was unprepared for the ruthless
misery of the emotion. There was no relief, even in her dreams, from the dull constant grief that afflicted her like an abscess. She had had other boyfriends. She had been popular enough in high school and had dated a steady stream of boys. But she had never felt more than a mild attachment to any of them. She had watched her friends contend with disappointment and heartache, and she had asked them,
What’s the big deal? Leave him. If he doesn’t love you, then stop mooning after him and just leave.
It had seemed so simple.

And then she met J. T. Radford and everything changed.

It was during her first weeks at Bedford. She and Mel had come up to school together in Mel’s car while Sara’s parents followed behind, and after three weeks at Bedford they had begun to settle in. Mount Clemmons was beautiful, a rambling village of Victorian cottages clustered around the tall redbrick Gothic buildings of the campus. The overall effect was that of an English boarding school set down in the wilds of North Carolina. Mel and Sara were suitemates in Nordan Hall along with an amiable girl from Alabama named Lola, and a not-so-amiable girl from Nashville named Anne Louise. Nordan was the dorm closest to the woods, the one easiest to sneak out of after curfew, a fact it did not take Mel and Sara long to discover. On their third weekend on campus, they heard about a bonfire down by the lake and decided to go. Lola and Anne Louise were less enthusiastic.

“You’ll get caught,” Anne Louise said, sitting on the edge of Mel’s bed watching them dress. She had her hair wrapped around big curlers. Her face was covered with green paste. She looked like the Wicked Witch of the West from
The Wizard of Oz
, only without the hat and the long black dress. “You’ll get caught and then you’ll get expelled.”

“The only way we’ll get caught,” Mel said, looking pointedly at Anne Louise, “is if someone rats us out.”

Anne Louise, under her covering of green paste, managed to look offended. “Well, don’t look at me,” she said.

“This is so exciting,” Lola said, clapping her hands and gliding into the room in a floor-length nightgown. They had been here three weeks and Sara had not seen Lola wear the same nightgown twice.
Where does she keep them all?
Sara had asked Mel, who replied,
I think she wears them once and then throws them out. The girl’s dad was governor of Alabama. She can afford plenty of nightgowns.

“Why don’t you come with us, Lola?” Mel asked. “It’ll be fun.”

Lola looked tempted but then frowned and shook her head. “I better not,” she said. “Y’all might get in trouble.” Lola had gone to an exclusive all-girl prep school and she still had the naive respect for authority engendered in such places. Four years with Mel and Sara would eventually cure her of that.

“They can’t expel all of us,” Sara said reasonably. “It’s going to be a big party. They’d have to expel half the school.”

Mel gave her a high five. “Good thinking,” she said. She turned to Lola and Anne Louise. “Come on, girls. Take a walk on the wild side. Live a little.”

In the end Lola and Anne Louise were not convinced, so it was Mel and Sara who ran barefoot through the wet grass toward the woods, giggling and shoving each other. Moonlight dappled the tall trees and fell in silver swells across the wide lawn. When they reached the woods, they sat down and put their shoes on, then followed a narrow twisting trail down a sloping embankment toward the river. All around them, mountain ridges wreathed in fog rose into the evening sky. Frogs sang in the swampy bottoms. The girls followed the trail through thick stands of mountain laurel, around boulders that glistened in the moonlight like the backs of slumbering beasts.

“How much farther?” Sara asked. “Are you sure you know where you’re going?”

Ahead they could hear distant music. Light flickered among the tree trunks, and as they got closer, it flared into a wide vista of dancing firelight. The trail ended on a low ridge. Standing there looking down a steep sandy embankment to the river, they could see a huge bonfire roaring on the beach, surrounded by a crowd of moving figures. Several cars were parked on the beach. Someone had opened the doors of one of the cars and “L. A. Woman” blared from the radio.

Mel and Sara stood up on the ridge for a while and watched the party.

“I don’t know about this,” Sara said. “I don’t see anyone I know.”

“We’re freshmen,” Mel reminded her. “We don’t know anybody. That’s the whole point of being here.”

“Do you think it’s safe?” Sara said, but Mel had already started down the embankment, her feet kicking up little clumps of sand. Sara stood for a moment listening to the eerie stillness behind her and then started down. She figured the chances of being abducted or assaulted were less likely in front of a crowded bonfire than standing alone on a moonlit ridge.

Once she got to the beach, however, she began to rethink this. Several boys had already noticed Mel, and by the time Sara reached the beach, they had come forward to greet them. There were girls, scattered here and there, but it was mostly a male crowd, which made Sara uncomfortable. It wasn’t that she didn’t like boys. She did. It’s just that, unlike most of the girls she knew, she wasn’t planning her whole life around catching one. Boys were okay alone but in groups they tended to be rude and nasty. They tended to treat girls like
things
that existed solely for their own plea sure.

“Hey, do you want a beer?” one of the boys asked them, holding up a plastic cup. They had set up a keg in the back of a pickup truck and were taking turns shooting a stream of foamy beer into an endless supply of clear plastic cups.

“Sure,” Mel said.

“No, thanks,” Sara said.

Maybe it was because she’d grown up with younger brothers. She’d grown up with stained underwear scattered across the bathroom floor, with pinup girls and Matchbox cars, and with bedrooms that smelled faintly of dirty socks and old cheese. Boys were predictable. Sara knew male code intimately; it was not a hard code to crack.

“So you girls go to Bedford?”

“That’s right,” Mel said.

Sara stood at the fringe of boys surrounding Mel and tried not to feel self-conscious. She stuck her fingers into the pockets of her jeans and stared at a couple of guys who had broken into an impromptu wrestling match. A crowd gathered quickly to egg them on.

“That dickwad Jemison,” one of the boys said to Mel. “He took state last year and thinks he’s tough shit.”

“My dad watches the WWF,” Mel said. “I hate wrestling.”

Sara tried to catch Mel’s eye but Mel was obviously ignoring her. When Mel had asked her earlier if she wanted to go to a bonfire, Sara had pictured something a little more sedate, with maybe a few cheerleaders and several clean-cut members of the football team gathered around singing school songs. She hadn’t imagined the raucous, long-haired dopers she saw congregated here. Not an athlete among them, she thought, looking around the crowd, unless you counted sprinting from the law as a track-and-field event. (Except, of course, Jemison, the all-state wrestler, who now had his opponent pinned up against the tire of one of the cars.)

“Hey, assholes, watch out for my car!” someone shouted above the blare of the music.

The air was thick with the sweet, acrid aroma of grass. Sara watched a doobie make its way slowly around Mel’s circle of admirers. “Toke?” the boy next to Sara asked, offering her the joint.

“No, thanks,” Sara said.

“Sure,” Mel said, reaching for it.

Sara had partied in high school; everyone in Howard’s Mill drank, even the Baptist minister (surreptitiously, of course, and never in front of his own flock. He drove to Nashville to booze it up). But Sara didn’t like to lose control of herself, and she didn’t like the taste of alcohol, so usually two beers were enough for her. After that she took care of everyone else who didn’t seem to know when to stop, Mel included, holding their hair while they were sick, making sure they didn’t pass out in dangerous places, making sure she was the one who drove everyone home. She never did drugs. She’d gotten used to her role as designated driver in high school but it wasn’t something she’d wanted to carry over into college life.

“If you get shit faced,” she said to Mel, “how’re you planning on getting back to the dorm? I can’t drive you and I sure as hell can’t carry you.”

“She can spend the night here,” one of the boys, a big red-faced guy named Darrel, said. The others snorted and showed their teeth like a troop of chimpanzees.

“Good luck explaining that to the R.A.,” Sara said, ignoring them. Mel took another hit and giggled.

It wasn’t that Sara minded having a boyfriend, although certainly not one like these idiots, she thought, looking disparagingly around the circle at their red hairy faces. Her last boyfriend, Heath, had been the high school quarterback and he’d been nice enough. (The rumor was that he’d gone out with Sara to get back at the cheerleader who’d dumped him; he’d figured the best revenge was dating a “smart” girl.) Heath was good-looking and clean, and he smelled of Old Spice and shaving cream. He’d picked her out of the yearbook because Sara was photogenic and took a good picture, and he thought she’d looked “pretty” and “nice.” (She didn’t mind about the revenge rumor.) He was nice, too, and the things they did together were nice (some were downright enjoyable), but despite his being good-looking and charming and popular, she still didn’t trust him completely. She still couldn’t give herself to him. Heath didn’t handle rejection
well. He pouted and sulked and became overbearing and obsessive. He couldn’t seem to comprehend that she didn’t want what other girls wanted: marriage out of high school and three children by twenty-five. He couldn’t seem to see the big picture as she so patiently explained it to him.

When she broke up with him, he’d shouted, “You can’t break up with me! I’m the quarterback!,” which Sara thought was childish and pathetic, really. But by then she’d become enamored of Faye Dunaway’s character in
Chinatown
(
I don’t get tough with anyone, Mr. Gittes. My lawyer does
)
and saw herself ten years into the future, a powerful woman navigating the treacherous male-dominated waters of corporate law like a sharp-toothed barracuda.