September Girls by Bennett Madison Page A

hour—watching TV and picking sand from the crevices of the couch, getting slowly drunk by myself—I started to get bored. I decided to go for a walk on the beach. I took the flashlight with me and headed to the ocean, still just in my bathing suit.
    When I got to the shore, the moon was behind a cloud. I didn’t remember that it had rained during the day, but the sand was damp. I sat down anyway.
    I thought of my father with his metal detector and the fact that we were seeing him less and less lately. I thought of myself, and how untethered I felt, like I could float away at any moment. I thought of the boy outside the 7-Eleven, wandering off into the dunes, his shoes still lying in the parking lot.
    I thought of the girl we’d seen on the first night here, and I cast my flashlight out to the ocean, wondering if I’d see another one heading for land. But I didn’t see anything. Instead I heard a voice behind me: “Hey you.” That slow and twisting accent again, but this time with a different, still familiar timbre.
    I turned. It was DeeDee, standing in the sand with her shoulder cocked awkwardly, her hair wild and blue. I should have been surprised to see her but for some reason I wasn’t; I wondered if I had been expecting her this whole time. Maybe Kristle had told her to come find me after all. I sort of doubted it though.
    “Can I sit down?” she asked. “I just got off work. Sucky day.”
    “Yeah,” I said. It was so dark that she probably couldn’t see me smiling, but I was in fact smiling. She had found me. “I had a sucky day too. Or at least just weird.” I had already forgotten about Kristle’s warning not to trust her.
    “Weird is good. Weird is at least interesting. You wouldn’t believe how boring it gets here,” she said. “We watch a lot of TV.” She plopped down next to me in the sand with a sigh.
    “Yeah, I’ve noticed. Kristle’s really into those shows about the housewives.”
    “Who isn’t?” DeeDee said. “Being a housewife seems like it could be a lot of fun, right? Anything’s better than waiting tables—except maybe being a maid. Either way, housewives don’t have to do any of that. I mean, they’re free. Who could be freer?” She took off her cheap Chinese slippers and shook them out into the sand before placing them in her lap.
    “You should get more comfortable shoes,” I said, not bothering to comment on the relative freeness of housewives or the pure shit my mother had spouted about something called “the feminine mystique” in the weeks leading up to her escape.
    “I’ve tried,” she said. “It doesn’t help. These are actually the best. I have problems with my feet. We all do.”
    “If you were housewives you could just sit around all day with your feet in footbaths full of Epsom salts,” I said, half sarcastically. I only knew about the existence of Epsom salts at all because they were something my mom had been really into. I didn’t really understand what they were.
    “Exactly,” DeeDee said. “We talk about that all the time.”
    We sat there in silence at the very edge of the surf, the cold water creeping up on our ankles every few seconds and then receding. I’d already discovered that when DeeDee started talking she could talk forever, but I was surprised to discover that she was pretty good at being quiet, too.
    I was playing a game with myself where I tried to time my breath to the in-and-out of the water, but the truth is that I’m terrible at holding my breath.
    “Can you explain Kristle to me?” I asked.
    “What about her?” DeeDee asked.
    “She confuses me,” I said. “For one thing, is she your sister or not? Do you guys hate each other or are you friends?”
    DeeDee didn’t reply, and I looked over at her curiously. I could see vague reflections of waves rolling in her eyes. Her expression was blank and very far away. She appeared mesmerized. I wondered if I should kiss her again; I felt slightly guilty that she had been