Simone
Every March, I braced myself like the rest of Padua for the dreaded stampede of spring breakers rolling into coastal Florida. They was a wild bunch, came to rave and roar, but at least they brought cash to do it with. The only season we all knew there’d be work and customers, ragers and tan lines. Really, it was the only time of year anybody thought much of anything about Padua Beach.
We weren’t a hub or nothing, but a couple hundred college students stumbled onto our white beaches and settled in for a week or two or three every spring and the rest of us, the ones who’d been here since forever, resented them for their shrieking, their disregard of who and what we came from.
But they spent their money and so we smiled and welcomed them, like any good southern town would, while we gossiped about their willingness to pay twenty dollars for a drink and some fried oysters behind their backs in the secret pockets of town where none of them knew to holler.
This year, me and the Girls decided to get creative for spring break season: we decided to get rich. It was the beginning of spring, when warmth beckoned and all of us Girls gathered to spend the evenings and weekends together, without no more worries than any other mothers during flu season.
It was Adela’s idea. The jungle juice. We was sitting by the dune lake, cooling down as the sun set, and I was the one who said we should go on out to the most popular beaches and try to make some money off the thirsty fools. I thought we could sell bottled water. It was Adela who shook her head. “There’ll be plenty of other people with the same idea. You need something that sets you apart, a demand that isn’t being met. It’s the key to a thriving business.”
“What do a bunch of wasted students want that they don’t already have?” Emory asked. She was mad at Adela, had been for weeks. We could all tell, watched them sit nowhere near each other when before you couldn’t find ’em apart. None of us knew why, though, and so we let them hurtle hurting words back and forth and continued about our days.
Adela shrugged. “More alcohol, of course. On the beach, where they don’t have to go up to a bar or a store or anything. And something stronger than beer.”
I shook my head. “We can’t afford to buy none of that.”
“Don’t buy it, then. Make it.”
That’s when Emory shot up. “Jungle juice.”
The plan materialized quickly, just in time for the arrival of the spring breakers. We created schedules and divided up the tasks of who would get what when, and then, as we approached the first weekend, the jitters of all we’d poured into this plan keeping us frenzied in the night, everyone whose shift was scheduled for the second or third weekend begged to switch to the first one, and nobody wanted to trade.
Eventually, to quit all the quarreling, I said anybody who wanted to come that first weekend was welcome and so, on our first Friday selling jungle juice, all of us went together.
On Friday afternoon, I gathered the Girls, picked Emory and Adela up from school, and then we all swung by Crystal’s for the tub, Walmart for the soda and juice, and finally the old liquor store half a mile from the dune lake.
When we pulled up at the beach and opened the truck doors, the familiar sound of unruly folks going wild on land that was not their own and would never hold the consequences of their spills and stumbles roared. Lion held my hand and looked up at me. “Why they yellin’?”
“ ’Cause they don’t got no sense,” I said.
“But I do,” Lion said. “I’m not yellin’.”
“That’s right.” He nodded once and, proud of himself, walked ahead of me to follow his sister, the rest of the kids, April, Jamilah, Adela, and Tori. Emory, Crystal, and I climbed into the truck bed and poured gallon after gallon of liquid into the tub, stirring it with an old bat Jayden scrubbed the night before and loaned us.
He told me I had to give it back and it better not be broken, ’cause him and his son was gonna use that bat to play ball as soon as Kai could walk. Boys was so single-minded, so focused only on force and friction, never on the victory of a small boy learning to take a step, only on what he would step toward.
“It looks too brown,” Emory said.
“You add enough color and anything gonna turn brown,” I said. “Look at your son.” I laughed and so did Crystal. Emory didn’t.
“Add some more Fanta,” Crystal said.
I grabbed the last bottle of Fanta and poured it into the tub. It blubbered and fizzed until the bottle was empty. Now the liquid had a red-orange undertone to the brown.
“Nothing’s wrong with a little brown. Besides, they so crossed, they won’t even notice what color it is,” I said. “You got the cups?”
Emory nodded, holding the cases of red Solo cups.
“Y’all got the signs?” I called out to Luck and Lion. They held up the signs they’d each helped decorate, their little swirls and scribbles of cups beside the lettering Tori meticulously worked on for two hours: Jungle Juice $8 Per Cup. Cash or Cash App Only.
“Let’s go,” Emory said, tightening the straps on the BabyBjörn carrier Jayden got her for Valentine’s Day even though they still weren’t together, the Solo cups in her hands. Luck and Lion stood behind the wagon that held the tub full of jungle juice and helped push it while Adela pulled the wagon from the front.
Dozens of sun-scarred white folks were scattered on the beach, making out, titties busting from their swimsuits, ocean salt turning their hair even thinner and straw-like. A small group played volleyball with a net they’d set up too close to the water and every time the tide crashed, it pulled their feet out from under them and they were body-slammed to the sand, cackling in a drunken daze.
“These boneheaded motherfuckers gonna eat this shit up,” I said, low enough the kids wouldn’t hear.
“Let’s set up here,” Tori said, pointing to a clear patch far enough from the water it wouldn’t come close to touching us, but visible enough everybody would be able to see where we was.
I taped the signs to the front of the tub, Emory unwrapped the cups, and then we each took a seat on the sand beside the tub. I turned to Luck and Lion.
“Alright, y’all, you gonna help us out?”
They nodded, diligent.
“Go on over to whoever you can and ask them if they want a drink. Say your momma selling hooch right over here. And then I want you to point so they know where to go. You can even bring ’em over, but only if they seem like nice folks. Don’t be messing with nobody shady, okay?”
“Yes, ma’am,” they said, then spun around and marched off on their mission.
“You really think they’re going to remember all that?” Adela asked.
“Course they will. They my kids.”
And I was right. Luck and Lion went up to every single group on that beach and, one by one, brought them back to us. At first the slobbery drunks were all skeptical, asking about what was in the jungle juice and saying they just didn’t wanna say no to the kids, but once they had a single taste of that stuff, they was hollering about it to anybody they could find, back to get a refill before the booze even hit their stomachs.
It only took us an hour and a half before we sold out. By the end we were charging ten dollars a cup, just ’cause we could, and all these people was paying for it. I thought none of ’em would have cash but turned out most of ’em got cash for all the drinks and games at the water park in Destin and they happily dished out all the change they had.
We started by stuffing it in our swimsuits, but then we had to switch to putting it in one of the empty Pepsi bottles we cut the head off of with my pocketknife. By the time we ran out of jungle juice, we’d made a couple hundred dollars and we was all shocked. We’d known they was desperate for something to drink, but Adela was right. Give ’em something they want but don’t got, and they’ll get themselves in a frenzy just to have it.
We huddled up and counted the money. If we kept going, weekend after weekend for the next month, we could walk out of this with a couple grand.
“How’re we gonna split it?” Emory asked.
“We should split it evenly once we know how much we made,” Tori said.
We agreed we’d leave the money in one place till the end of spring breaker season and then we’d divvy it up later. But, for now, someone had to keep it.
Every one of us volunteered, except Adela. We argued over who was the most responsible, the most frugal, had the least nosy roommates, and had earned the most trust. Adela stayed out of the arguments, used her toe to draw patterns in the sand.
“Why don’t you wanna do it?” Jamilah asked.
Adela shrugged. “It doesn’t matter to me. I don’t even need a cut.”
“What? Why?” I asked. Sure, she might not need it, but who didn’t want some extra cash?
“If I want to buy something, I’ll use my credit card.”
“You have a credit card?” April gawked. “Are you in a bunch of debt?”
Adela laughed. “No, my parents pay it off every month. They say it’s good for building credit. I haven’t used it since I got here, though. My parents send my grandma money to take care of me and it’s not like you have anywhere good to shop here anyway.”
We all stared at her, even Emory. But none of us could ever, not even for a moment, fathom what Adela was saying. That she didn’t want any extra money ’cause there wasn’t nothing you could buy in this part of the world she couldn’t already have.
“Adela should take it,” I said. “The money.”
“I just said I don’t need it.”
“No, Simone’s right. Adela won’t spend it, she don’t really care about it, and she’ll pay everybody their fair cut at the end of the month.” Crystal agreed.
The other Girls looked disappointed, but even they nodded. It just made sense, after all. Adela would take each soda bottle full of money at the end of every weekend, setting aside enough for more ingredients, and then, once the spring breakers were gone, we would figure out how to split it and all get our share.
Before we started to pack up for the night, some of the Girls wanted to take a dip in the water. Jamilah started it but then Adela and Tori said they wanted to join and the kids who could talk all begged to go with. April hung back to nurse her son and Crystal returned to the truck to put Cece down, since she was getting fussy. It was just me left, sitting by our now-empty tub stained in orange-brown juice.
The beach was still swarmed. Scattered among all the young foreigners come down from South Carolina, Texas, Arkansas, were newly retired old women from Padua dragging their great-grandbabies through strangers’ burnt legs. An older guy stood under an umbrella in his swim trunks and a big fedora that he never took off, prob’ly ’cause he was embarrassed of the tan line rimming his bald scalp. Then, among the old locals and the spring breakers, were all the near and far bottle-blond moms.
One of them, the wife of the manager of the Alvin’s Island water sports store farther up the highway, snickered to the women next to her through her gummy lip gloss about how maybe Johnny Boy Dive was the one who dug the crater on the other side of the beach all their kids were sliding into and climbing out of, with how we all knew Johnny loved to get deep inside someone. The ladies beside her all hooted.
And then, sitting a few feet to the left of me, were two women who looked familiar but I didn’t know their names, just that they were locals and somebody’s mom. They discussed what at first I was sure was a pyramid scheme for patterned leggings but now I was fair certain was about how horny they was. I started listening in.
The woman closest to me still had a hair bump, just couldn’t let go of the early two thousands, and the other one had left her hair dye in so long her platinum blond was bordering on white, smoky eye a sickly purple that continued beyond the eye itself and all the way to the bridge of her nose.
The hair bump woman, who I was pretty sure worked as a nurse at the doctor’s office I took Luck and Lion to, tugged at the ends of her hair. “I just want something more. I’m tired of all these people thinking they can take advantage of me, you know?”
“I know what you mean.” The smoky eye lady smacked her lips and dug around in her bag till she found a cigarette and a lighter and once she’d had one good long drag of her cigarette, she gestured across the beach. “This could be it for us. Last month, when Tim asked me if we could take the risk, I wasn’t too sure, but this…this could be good right here. What’s a husband for if he can’t support you, huh? We’ve been so strapped for cash, I’ve been holdin’ off on getting a Brazilian for months and I just can’t keep the forest tamed no more, if you know what I mean.”
The other one cackled. “Didn’t you know, Carmen, all the young girls these days been letting their bits grow out? At least that’s what the doctor told me about all the girls she’s examining. Course, I sure hope none of them have any reason to be shaving nothing.”
“I’ve seen it too,” Carmen said after the smoke exited her lips, blowing back to me with the breeze. “At the Center, over half of ’em shedding hair all over the examination table. Now, I’m in the business of God, first and foremost, but if a girl’s gonna give herself up like that, how’s she going to turn around and not even keep things clean and tidy?”
When I first heard them talking, I felt the smallest prickle in my sternum, but I wasn’t sure where it came from till the hair bump woman said the Center. Sure, she could’ve meant the community center or something, but I knew women like these two. I’d met a woman like Carmen before, at the Center, where women like Carmen go to feed off what someone like me didn’t know until I knew.
I was fifteen when I went into the Center for the first and last time. You don’t go to the Center unless you have a reason to and, by then, you’re probably too late to know better than to not walk through those doors at all.
It was my second week without a place to sleep after Momma and Pops told me to go and I was still sneaking into Beach Row and crawling under Pops’s old rowboat to sleep until just before the sun came up, when I would slip out, my whole backside covered in orange dust, my mouth sticky with dirty bayou water and my own sweat. I spent my days with Tooth, watching him work, crying in the bathroom at the bait shop when he was with a customer. All I wanted to do was fix the mess I’d made. Go back to how it had been.
So I walked to the Center, tucked away in a strip mall that also housed the Methodist church and an electronics supply company I’d never seen nobody go into. I’d passed by the Center a million times in my life, and it seemed like the perfect place to go when you didn’t know what to do, when you found yourself in a situation like mine. I’d heard a girl could get the kind of operation I needed at this sort of place and the sign looked friendly: Padua Pregnancy Resource Center, with a little blue heart around each P.
When I walked in, I approached the older lady at the front desk, and she looked up at me like I was the first person to willingly walk in that door all year.
“Hi, dear, how can I help you?” she drawled, and her gums showed crimson.
Her desk had a little jar full of lollipops on it and I’d been expecting condoms or something, so that made me feel a little better, that at the end of all this at least I’d get something sweet.
“I, um, I’d like to have the operation.”
“The operation?” The woman’s mouth purred but her eyes didn’t move, not once.
I nodded, skittish. Afraid to name it.
The woman seemed to understand and smiled. “Let me take you back and Mrs. Harris will help you out, hmm?”
She stood from her chair, crucifix pendant tangled and heavy on her neck, and as she took me through the door, down the hallway, into the one box of a room where Scripture quotes lined the walls, my stomach felt the slippery mass of what I’d done and I started to laugh. I laughed like the old woman had made the funniest joke I ever heard and as she slipped out of the room to get Mrs. Harris, I saw her lips move, her Hail Mary.
Mrs. Harris was a God-fearing woman. That was the first thing she said to me when she sat down on a stool in front of me and took my hands, her skin so thin I was sure it could tear off like wet paper. I stopped laughing.
“As a God-fearing woman, it is my right and duty to tell you that despite the way you’ve sinned, in the eyes of God, it isn’t too late to make the right choice and save yourself from damnation. If you murder this baby, then you and this child’s sweet innocent soul will forever be doomed to an eternity in Hell. But, if you keep this baby, God will find it in his heart to forgive you.” She let go of my hands. “Now, go on and lift up your shirt so we can meet your angel baby.”
I didn’t know what to do, didn’t understand why we was talking about God when all I was thinking about was Pops’s face as he opened the door to the trailer to let me back inside. She told me to lay back and so I did. Just stared up at the ceiling, where a portrait of this baby-faced white man holding a one-year-old Jesus was taped, and when I didn’t lift my shirt up, Mrs. Harris did it for me, turning on a machine older than the guy swaddling baby Jesus. She squeezed gel on my abdomen and started moving the little tool around like in the movies.
I told myself not to look at the screen. I focused on the tremor in my chest, the tight ball caught in my throat like when I was a kid and forgot to chew my food, praying for God to make the clump of dry meat go down and find my stomach. I didn’t wanna feel what was happening below my ribs, where Mrs. Harris was pushing hard on my stomach. I hadn’t even thought much about how there was something in there and now I was staring up at baby Jesus and trying hard to swallow while a woman looked for a baby in my body.
A baby. It was sorta funny, until Mrs. Harris turned to the machine and fiddled with something, adjusting the sound on the sonogram, I think, and then the doppler caught a heartbeat and she turned the volume up until the sound filled the whole room like smoke.
And then one quick pounding of rain turned to a tumult of sound and Mrs. Harris beamed. “Looks like you’ve got twins!”
Then it wasn’t so funny anymore. I swallowed and it made my chest burn.
I looked up at the screen, even though I told myself not to, but it didn’t matter ’cause the screen was nothing but fuzz and gray and Mrs. Harris said, “Don’t worry, these babies are just too small to look at yet. Wait a few weeks and you can come back, hmm?”
“But…but what about my operation?” I wanted the sound to stop. My thoughts couldn’t penetrate the parade of little raindrops hitting the ground inside me, two torrential storms.
When Mrs. Harris turned the sonogram machine off, the sound still echoed inside me till her voice cut through it. “You don’t need an operation. You need to remember what happens when you go against the Word of God.”
She stood and went to a cabinet drawer, where she retrieved a stack of pamphlets and brought them back to me. One on fetal heartbeats and pain, another on saving marriages, another on the merits of baptism. I didn’t know if I could even stand to touch them. I came in here thinking I was going to leave with no baby and a home to return to and now here I was with two babies and three pamphlets that threatened to ferment inside me and come up in my midnight bile.
“I don’t want these,” I whispered.
Mrs. Harris gritted her teeth into a smile and shoved them into my lap. “What you don’t want is to kill these babies and find out ten years from now that the operation ruined your chances of having another one. What you don’t want is to suffer the wrath of God when you destroy an innocent life. Are you that heartless, honey?”
“I didn’t—I don’t. I don’t know.”
Mrs. Harris patted my knee. “From one God-fearing woman to another, how about you go home, spend another few weeks thinking about the blessing of these babies born out of a sin so reprehensible, and then come back in a month and we can take another look. By then, these babies will have fingernails and everything!”
I left with a stomach still sticky with gel and, on my way out, the old lady with the bleeding gums offered me a lollipop. When I shook my head, she grinned and said, “Maybe next time. God bless you, sweetie.”
But there wasn’t a next time and they must’ve known this, looking at the untamed forest of my body, the wild lines growing on my hips. Years later, during a cold winter with the twins, I was in the library reading a book about Florida and all it’d been, when I started crying right there on the floor in the stacks while my toddlers slept wrapped in blankets beside me ’cause I got to the section about our little part of Florida and it broke my heart.
West Florida had been split and swapped so many times, exchanged between all these countries and warred over the borders, only to be given up, left alone to wither where no folks ever thought of it again.
I was West Florida, tricked into thinking I was important, grown weary in the war of weeks and heartbeats, and then suddenly left on my own to rot.
By the time I would think to go back, Tooth had already convinced me to keep them. And even if I had returned to the Center, even if their sonogram had finally been able to see fetus instead of static fluid, they wouldn’t have done nothing. And if somehow I’d gotten myself to Planned Parenthood instead, they would’ve told me I needed my parents to sign a form and there wasn’t no world where my parents would’ve done that. So, in the end, I was the flapping sliver of Florida nobody knew what to do with, and my babies became my babies.
Carmen was not a doctor, but she understood enough to know no fifteen-year-old girl scared and burdened with time would be able to withstand the fallacy of that God-fearing room, little baby Jesus wrapped up in some saint’s robes, a lollipop threatening to turn my Florida mouth red.