“They’re quite delicious. I’d offer to make you one, but then I’d get in trouble when people saw you tottering around the garden with a martini in your hand. What’s in your glass there?”
Joan’s glass was mostly ice at this point, plus a wedge of lime and two cherry stems. “It’s just ice,” she said.
“Well, here you go, then,” Angus said, stepping carefully toward her and tipping the full contents of his martini glass into hers. “Drink it very slowly. And know that I will deny this interaction ever happened.”
She’d returned to the garden and began to sip her martini. It was so incredibly strong it made her eyes water, but there was also something so pure and adult about the way it tasted. It burned her tongue, but in a good way. It was gone too soon, and when she got up from her patio seat and walked across the party, everything was heightened. The smell of the flowers, the snippets of adult conversations, the sun on her hair. She felt as though she could levitate if she’d wanted to, that she was weightless.
“What shows do you watch, if any?”
She turned, and three of her mother’s friends were looking in her direction. They’d been talking about TV shows—she’d heard them earlier—and she stepped into their circle, still holding the ice-cold glass, and joined the conversation. At first, she’d wondered if they could tell she was drunk, but they didn’t seem to be able to. They were all talking about ER, and then Friends, and Joan was telling them how Joey and Phoebe were secretly the smartest ones on the show, and they were all laughing.
Later, she thought about how easy it was to be an adult, how easy it was to make other people like you. She was no longer drunk, but she felt powerful, like she’d gotten away with something. It had been an electrifying day, and there had been a moment, lost now, where she remembered knowing something that no one else in the world knew. It had both thrilled her and filled her with a kind of righteous anger. But now she couldn’t remember exactly what it was she had known.
And that was oddly how she’d felt the night before in the library at the Windward Resort, listening to Richard talk about killing his cousin, and offering up suggestions. Being free to say those words had felt like drinking a martini in front of a gardenful of adults, all who had no idea how the world actually worked.
Because if Richard had been saying those things to an adult, they would think he was kidding. But down deep Joan knew Richard had been serious, and it hadn’t bothered her at all.
A greenhead was biting her thigh and she slapped at it. It lay dazed on her blanket and she flicked it away. She watched it struggling in the sand for a while, then lost interest. She stood up, then walked down to the water. A woman in a black skirted bathing suit stood hip high in the ocean, gently splashing herself with water, girding herself to go all the way in.
Joan waded in, annoyed to find the water really was that cold, numbing her ankle bones. She took a few steps out to where there was a dip in the sand then sank in past her hips. She made a tiny gasp, and the woman in the one-piece laughed and said something about how cold it was. Joan shrugged and dove under the approaching wave, then swam out to where the waves weren’t breaking, the water starting to numb her skin all over. She swam back and forth for a while until her lungs hurt then tipped her head back and floated on the surface, closing her eyes. She could hear kids screaming, but they sounded as though they were far away.
As she stepped out of the surf she scanned the beach, looking for her blanket, and that was when she spotted Richard—she was pretty sure it was him—walking high up along the edge of the dunes. When she reached her belongings, he was about a hundred yards down the beach, but she could still see him. She dried off quickly and began to follow. He must have been walking slowly, since, in just a few minutes, she wasn’t that far behind him. Suddenly, she felt self-conscious and slowed down. What was her plan? Was she going to catch up with him, see if he wanted company? Or did it make sense to just bump into him randomly?
He stopped up ahead of her, crouching down to look at something in the sand. She slowed too, but he didn’t stay crouched for too long. He got up and kept walking. She reached the place where he’d crouched. It was hard to see at first but there were the bleached bones of a gull, and a few feathers. She placed her feet in his footprints and crouched, as well, studying the exposed spine of the bird, the way it curved to its head, picked of flesh, but with its beak half covered with sand.
“Oh, hey,” came the voice, and she looked up at Richard. “Were you following me?” he said.
If anyone else in the world had asked her that question she’d have denied it, but somehow, because it was Richard, she said, “I was swimming, then saw you walk by. Wanted to know what you were up to.”
“I’m just walking. Want to come with me?”
They walked down to the end of the beach, to where a pile of black, seaweed-fringed rocks jutted out into the ocean. “Do you like tide pools?” Richard said, peering down into a pool of water, half obscured by one of the black rocks.
“I can’t honestly say I’ve given them that much thought.”
He smiled at her. “I only like them because they’re filled with things.” He crouched down, and Joan stood over him. With Richard crouched, and her standing, they were practically the same size. She looked at his dark neck, one of the few parts of him that was truly tanned. He wore a black T-shirt today, and not one of his striped polo shirts. She watched, fascinated, as he submerged his arm into the water, putting it in the dark crevice formed by the rock. When he pulled his hand out it was cupped and he showed her a small green crab he was holding delicately between his fingers. “See?” he said.
“I don’t know how you stick your hand in there.”
The crab’s small pincers waved angrily, and Richard slid it back into the tide pool, where it darted away. He stood back up, and Joan saw a thin ribbon of blood was coming off his hand.
He looked at it, surprised. “Oh, it got me,” he said, washing his hand in the tide pool. Then he looked more closely at the ragged cut between his thumb and index finger. “Do you want to go swimming?”
Joan wasn’t particularly interested in getting back in the water, but said, “Yes,” anyway, and watched as Richard, after pulling off his T-shirt and leaving it on the sand, bounded out into the waves, spun so that he was facing her, then fell backward into the water. She joined him, the water still shockingly cold, and together they floated for a while.
“I’ve been thinking about what we talked about last night,” she said.
“About Duane?”
“Yeah.”
“He told me last night that he fucked you on the beach.” Richard made air quotes when saying the word fucked.
“What?” Joan said, although it was more like a scream.
“He didn’t say your name or anything, but he mentioned you were a gymnast so I figured he was talking about you.”
“What did he say?”
“Not much. First he was talking about the girl who works behind the desk, and what he wants to do to her, and then he said he’d already fucked the only other hot girl at the hotel, and how you were a gymnast and everything.”