September Girls by Bennett Madison Page B

the one to kiss me at Ursula’s. But it seemed wrong to kiss someone who may have forgotten I was even there.
    I was still debating it when she snapped back. “Ugh,” she said. A cigarette had appeared between her fingers, seemingly from nowhere, and she had to fuss with her lighter before it would light. “I hate the ocean. You want to, like, go somewhere?”
    “Like where?” I asked.
    “I don’t know,” she said. “We could break into the mini-golf course.”
    I’m generally a law-abiding person. Not out of any sense of morality, but because I’m sort of a pussy. I don’t even like skipping class; it makes my stomach hurt. But I looked over at DeeDee, who wiggled her eyebrows in a way that was at once sarcastic and entreating, in a way that made lawbreaking seem totally worth it, and I was just like, “Okay.”
    She sprang up and dusted her beautiful ass off. She forged a curling and mysterious trail up the beach, cigarette burning from her fingers, and all I could do was smile and scramble behind her. It didn’t strike me then that a person can get lost even when following a path.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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    NINE
    “SO TELL ME about you,” DeeDee was saying. “I want to know everything.”
    The golf course was closed for the night—we’d crawled in through a hole in the chain-link fence—and now we were bathed in the eerie, bluish, almost underwater light of the garden lamps as we perched atop a fake lagoon overlooking the seventh hole of Cap’n Redbeard’s Hole-N-Fun. Between us, a fiberglass mermaid reclined in a way that was meant, I think, to be seductive but actually made it look like she had a problem with her spine. DeeDee had pulled a small flask of whiskey from her bra, and we were passing it back and forth.
    “Like what?” I asked, more drunkenly than I would have preferred. “Like what should I tell you?”
    DeeDee looked over at me with an exasperated smile. “I don’t know,” she said. “God, you’re hopeless. Tell me anything. Take a shot and then you have to tell me one thing about yourself, without thinking. Something secret.”
    She passed me the flask and I swigged. For the first time, I didn’t flinch at the burn of the undiluted liquor.
    “Um,” I said, seizing the first thing that came to me in my wobbly state. “When I was little, I went through this phase where I peed in the sink all the time. You know, like instead of the toilet. Afterward I would always feel super-guilty about it—I thought there was something really wrong and maybe perverted about me. But then it turns out that it’s a thing that basically all guys do when they’re little. My friend Sebastian still does it when he goes to parties, because why not? It’s like, primal, one of those things left over from when we were monkeys that evolution forgot to get rid of. Also pinky toes and male nipples.”
    “Of course. I love how when boys have a completely unacceptable habit like peeing in the sink, science actually goes to all the trouble to come up with a justification for it.”
    “Well it’s true,” I said. “It’s a biological imperative.” Although then it occurred to me that I didn’t even know if it was true at all; Sebastian was the one who had told me about the whole Darwinist theory behind pissing in sinks, and he wasn’t the most trustworthy person.
    DeeDee grimaced. “God. Last summer I was stuck cleaning houses. Houses with little boys were always the worst of all—you know, even if you rinse it down, piss eventually starts to leave a smell that’s impossible to get out. I’m lucky I got the job at the Fisherman’s Net this year. Waitressing sucks too but at least I’m not dealing with body fluids very often.”
    “Do you ever get sick of it?” I asked.
    “Of what?”
    “Of you know, cleaning houses and waiting tables and stuff? Of working all the time I