Senior Skip Day. We’re at the beach, a clash, rubble-and-trash-strewn excuse for a shore. The seaweed’s thick as stew and our class settles into its usual clans and cliques. The bikini-bottomed Stray Cats and I are tossing a Frisbee with some of my track-Jacks and I find a dead stingray by the water’s edge. I feel happy and sinister and the gravity of Eve’s moon pulls at my watery parts, so I drag the ray up to where the Pretty Pennies are perched on their matching towels by the boardwalk, sunbathing in a row of perfectly roasting flesh, Lycra, hair ties, coconut body oil, and studded cat-eye, movie-star shades. I cross battle lines. I’m an imposter in foreign lands, and I leave my offering of stinking white ray with Ms. Ancient History.
Bowing dramatically, I say, “Your Lordship, Ms. Ancient History,” and place a dried seaweed crown on her golden curls. The other Pennies ignore me as they would a green beach fly, the backstabbing, heart-Jack-snatching brunette giving me the death-stare once-over before turning back to the glossy pages of her magazine. But Eve is smiling as she pulls me down by my wrist, hands me chilled cantaloupe and grapes on toothpicks from a cooler.
“Beatstreet,” I say, grinning, taking the cold fruit in my mouth.
She laughs. “We simply must stop meeting like this.”
I grin and shrug, O-R-S-H-O-U-L-D-W-E, spelling out crisp and neat inside my mind. I tug at the neck of my Bettie Page one-piece, smooth down my bangs. “So, what’s on the switch, Eve Brooks? I mean, I’ve wanted to ask you since forever ago. Ahh…” I lower my voice. “How’s your eggs?”
“Eggs?” she whispers. “What’s eggs?”
I scowl, draw two circles in the sand and under them an arc.
“How’s my happyface?”
“Eggs,” I hiss. “Like, ovaries.”
“Oh!” she says, cracking her sunset smile. “The pregnancy test. Yeah. That was hell.” She brushes sand from her leg. “It was legit, though. Got my period that night.”
“Oh, word?”
“Yeah. But my happyface is good, too.”
I smile. I tell her a story. I say, “D’you remember when we were in sixth grade and we went to Roller-Planet and that schemey, pube-’stached Jack camped out at the water fountain and was lunging in to spit-swap the little innocent antelope betties sipping from the watering hole? And you saw it all and heeled it up to the bubbler and, when he pounced on you, you hit him with this massive mouth of chewed-up red hots, leaving the whole mucous-coated fireball in his skeezy oral hole? ’Member?” She nods and I take a breath.
“And then that time we got on the city bus after school to see where it went and it held us hostage for like, three flippin’ hours? And the bus driver got off and was all smokin’ tars and scratchin’ his balls and said, ‘I don’t give a rat’s tail where you live, no way I’m turnin’ this goddamn bus around.’ And your mom had to cut a wheel practically across the state just to get us?”
She’s laughing. “’Of course I do.”
I pull a tar from behind my ear and stick it between my lips, but I have no light. I pat my bathing suit like I’m shaking myself down, and shrug, smiling from behind the tar. She rifles through her large straw bag and finds a loose set of matches.
“Smoking’s clash,” she says, giving me a light.
“Word,” I agree, one eye closed as the smoke wafts up into my mug.
“You should stop.”
“Think so?” She nods. I flick the ashes away and then flip the tar around into my mouth. I open my eyes wide and look down with big Ophelia eyes as smoke billows out my nose. My best and most classic party trick.
She’s laughing again but says, “Crank, Lu. For real,” and I’m blasted with jumbles of words I shift and edit and sort. A poem:
As gulls cry, aloft
Taken by a whispered wind
My name on her lips.
Haiku, courtesy of Lu I-Love-You Butler. I chill easy and dam the words fighting to spill from my mouth as I spin the tar back around and pull it from my lips, studying it. “I’m beatstreet,” I say. “I quit,” and flick it into the sand.
Eve sighs and picks it up, stubbing it out on a small stone and dropping it into an empty water bottle. “A-plus for dramatic effect, but that doesn’t mean you can be some littery little litterbug.”
“You always were a better person than me.” I take another grape from the plastic plate in her lap.
“Litterbug, litterbug, shame on you,” she sings, her outstretched palms moving back and forth in front of her. “Shame on the terrible things you do. You spoil the soil and the wonderful view. Shame shame shame shame shame on you.” She looks up over her sunglasses, beaming, her shoulders skipping with giggles.
I shake my head. “You live in a fantasy land, Ms. Ancient History,” and I pour sand grains through my fist. “So I’m a bug, huh? A litterbug?”
“Bugs are massive pesky,” she says, pulling off her shades. “So yeah, that’s what you are.”
I laugh and she’s squinting in the sun, her oiled skin glaring and shimmering like the sea’s whitest caps. She says something but I’m counting the freckles on her nose.
“Ground control to Major Lu. What ever happened with that sweater?”
I shrug, transfixed.
She says, “What’re you doing?”
“Research.” I say, “Nothing,” and pop another cantaloupe into my mouth, fixing her with my best stony-eyed gaze.
“What?” She laughs loud, her voice rippling, shimmering in waves over the hot sand, and the Pennies cock their ultra-tweezed brows and glare at us over superfreeze shades. Eve looks at them, laughing, and turns her back to them, her singing giggles like a thrush’s liquid call. I’m beside myself. Beyond.
I look into her gray-ocean eyes and she smiles. I quickly look away, but again, my mouth is opening, my brain on total revolt. “‘Once she hears to her heart’s content, sails on, a wiser Jack.’”
My chest burns. I’m pouring it on like syrup over Sunday-morning pancakes. Eve furrows her brow, her cheeks flushed and rosy, and I shake my head, laughing it off. I look away, mutter, “The Odyssey. Reading humor.”
“O-kay?” she says and reaches out her hand, lays four impossibly long fingers across my wrist. And it’s like the whole world is okay. Like everything is all right. And I know I should tell her about Nate. Now would be the perfect time. I take a breath, look up again, and then catch two of the Prickly Pennies eyeing me sidelong. Though it literally slays me, I slide slowly out from under Eve’s warm hand.
“Um, I gotta jet,” I say, standing, hold up two peace sign digits. “Things to see, people to do. You know.”
“Too bad.” She frowns and I feel my cheeks go beet-borscht red.
“Rinse and repeat,” I smile.
“Later, Beatstreet. Keep it on the real,” and I wave, heel it down the beach, back to my Jacks, where Zoë, Maya, and I powwow and decide to go out for pizza. As we’re heeling it to Zoë’s whip, we pass Amelia Long, sitting on a towel at the end of a row of other misfit betties. She waves and smiles and I smile and, for some unconscionable reason, invite them all to come with. My apple-Jacks give me the massive stink eye, but I’m actually glad I invited her and her crew ’cause by the looks of her big mop grin and blissful seesaw eyebrows, I’ve just about made her life.