Alexa, sitting on a couch in the living room, wished she could be elsewhere. How many parties had she attended over the course of her high school career, each one the same as the last and the next? Tyler handed her a plastic cup. She could tell by the shiny look in his eyes that he had been drinking a lot already, or smoking weed, or both, and she wondered how she’d get home. She wondered how he’d get home. The cops had been out in full force on the causeway this summer and Tyler couldn’t risk getting caught. She should take his keys and get them both a ride.
She took a sip of the drink. Vodka and cranberry. Tyler had been kind enough to put a slice of lime in it for her but even so she could hardly stomach it. The taste of cranberry juice reminded her of a series of urinary tract infections she’d had when she was young, nine or ten, when her mother poured her a glass every morning and wouldn’t let her leave the table until she’d finished it. It was a gesture that came from a combination of love and Internet medical knowledge, no harm intended, but still Alexa was positive cranberry juice was a drink she would never enjoy in this lifetime. She had told Tyler this more than once.
“You can’t drive,” she said combatively. “And I want to go home.”
“Let’s just crash here. Come on, babe.” Tyler snaked his arm around her waist. Alexa disliked the word “babe” almost as much as she disliked cranberry juice, and Tyler knew this too, but sometimes when he was drunk or high he forgot.
She removed his arm and sat back on the couch. “Negative on that,” she said.
“Why not?” He returned his arm to her waist, tighter this time. “We can sleep on the beach!”
Nothing sounded less comfortable to Alexa than sleeping on the beach. Her hair was very thick; she would never get the sand out. She removed Tyler’s arm again, and this time he resisted more strongly. Say what you will about the #metoo movement and all the rest of it, tell Alexa that times were changing and women could speak up, she knew it was still a very, very fine line that she was walking, that all girls were walking. The line between being attractive and being a tease. The line between needing and not needing. Between independence and desire. If she could give Morgan one piece of advice it would be, Don’t grow up.
“I don’t want to stay here, Tyler,” she said. “Just leave me alone.” Besides the fact that she would much rather sleep in her own bed, there was the not-small matter of her virginity, which for some reason, against all odds and contrary to what most people at school and probably in town and probably online thought, she had managed to hold on to for so long that now it seemed awkward and meaningful to let it go. But whatever. It was her body; these were her choices. She stood.
“I get it,” Tyler said. “Take it easy, Lex.”
“Don’t call me Lex,” she snarled, sounding like the bitch that she felt like, that she feared, sometimes, she actually was. The next thing she knew, she was steeling herself and knocking back the cocktail, cranberry juice or no cranberry juice. Forget it, she thought. Forget Tyler. Forget Zoe Butler-Gray. Forget everybody. On her way out the back door she grabbed a can of beer, a Riverwalk IPA, which had probably been brought out because Zoe Butler-Gray’s father worked for the brewery and always had stacks of it in the garage. She opened it and carried it onto the back deck.
High tide and it felt like the waves were going to come all the way up to the furniture. The moon was almost full, but not quite; it looked like somebody squished it between a thumb and a forefinger. Alexa sipped the beer. She hated IPAs—they were so heavy, they sat in her stomach like a stone. She drank it anyway. Her sips got bigger, and they turned into gulps. When she stood, she felt dizzy. Experimentally she lifted her face to the sky and turned around and around. She felt like she was one with the moon. She felt like she was spinning through the night.
When she stopped spinning, she ran smack into a sweatshirt.
“Sorry,” she muttered, and the guy inside the sweatshirt caught her elbow and said, “Hey, hey.” Fantastic, was her first thought. Another guy grabbing at her, just what she needed. She lifted her eyes.
“You okay?” said the guy. The sweatshirt was white, or off-white—she couldn’t be sure under the dim outdoor lights—and said “Saint” in purple and “Michael’s” in gold. It was wildly unfashionable. She had seen this guy earlier, with Shelby McIntyre, who was a year ahead of Alexa, and some sort of cross-country star at UVM. (Cross country was a sport Alexa had never understood—it seemed hard and cold and messy—although the coach at the high school was said to be legendary.)
“Yes,” she said. “Fine. Just going inside.” It was then that she remembered the reason Zoe Butler-Gray always brought out the IPA at parties—not the pilsner—was because it had an alcohol content of about a million percent. She remembered that just about the same time she remembered that she had eaten neither lunch nor dinner before the vodka. She felt herself beginning to fall.
6.
The Squad
We took the center table at Plum Island Grille, the only one long enough to accommodate us. Some of us, arriving early, had met beforehand in the bar on the other side of the restaurant, from which you could see the famous Plum Island salt marshes and the turnpike (a grand name for a short stretch of road) we had just driven over to get there. Except for Esther, who lived on the island and had walked down. It was the only time of year it was in any way convenient to be Esther.
In the distance, if we squinted, we could see, or imagined we could see, the Pink House, long empty, much speculated about, which sits in the center of the marsh, paint peeling, roof leaking, cupola choked with birds’ nests. The Pink House was built in 1925 as part of a divorce settlement by a disgruntled husband for his ex-wife. You want your own house? the husband is rumored to have said. I’ll build you a house! And, bam, he built a house, in beautiful isolation.
After a time we repaired to our table to meet those who had just arrived. One of us couldn’t make it, and we were somewhat surprised to find that Brooke Kearney had taken it upon herself (without consulting the rest of us) to invite the new woman, Katie’s mother, to fill the spot. Sherri. With an i. Sherri from the beach.
We were surprised, but we weren’t going to be rude about it. We are nothing if not welcoming. Even though the look Esther shot Brooke when she realized what had happened . . . some of us agreed after the fact that that was borderline impolite.
It was a birthday! We started out with tequila shots, twelve of them, with twelve slices of lime and four salt shakers to share. That is how we always do birthdays. It was a good tequila, a Clase Azul, which had just come on the scene for us, and was so smooth you didn’t really need the lime. Then appetizers: tempura oysters, shrimp cocktail, crab cakes.
Sherri didn’t seem to have any compunction about ordering the surf and turf, we all noted. The rest of us stuck to the grill board with swordfish and pineapple salsa. It was bathing suit season, after all.
With the tequila, and the cocktails that followed, Sherri became a little more animated. Her clothing choices were just this side of okay—when one of us tucked in the label to her dress for her (It was sticking out! We weren’t snooping!), we noticed that it said Ann Taylor Loft. That’s just an observation, not a judgment. She’d worn lipstick, which was brighter than the rest of ours, and mascara, though studying her some of us thought that eyelash extensions would do wonders. Her mascara was clumping. It was hard to put a finger specifically on the rest of what was wrong. Well, nothing was wrong. But something was off. That’s the best way to put it. Something desperate in her laugh? Yes, that’s just it, that’s what it was. Something desperate.