“What? Hi.” He turns and smiles. “You gonna swim?”
“What?”
“Come swimming.” He runs a hand through his wet hair and comes a little closer. I cannot believe he’s asking me to go swimming. Like I’m an acquaintance. Like nothing bad ever happened.
“I was hoping we could talk.”
George, now a bit farther out than Pfeff, ducks under a wave. When he comes up, he swims, putting some distance between himself and the conversation, seeming occupied with the water and his board.
Pfeff has come close enough to talk but stays knee-deep in the water. “I don’t want to discuss anything,” he says.
“Well, I do.”
“Look,” he says. “I’m impulsive. I make bad choices. That’s who I am. You knew that from the beginning.”
“Will you please come out so we can have a conversation?”
“I kiss a pretty girl in the moonlight with no warning,” he says. “I forget to set alarms. I forget to pack my socks and underwear. I don’t do my schoolwork.”
“I just want to know—”
Pfeff interrupts me. “There’s nothing else for you to know. I said I don’t want to talk. I’m sorry you got upset, Carrie, but I told you the truth up front. I’m going to college in four weeks. This is like, a surreal, enchanted summer that I stumbled into, and I never pretended it was anything else.”
“It’s not a surreal, enchanted summer,” I say. “It’s my life.” How infuriating that he’s standing there in the water and I can’t reach him without getting my pants wet. “I think you owe me an explanation.”
“I just gave you all the explanation you’re going to get,” he says, holding his board in front of his body like a shield. “I make bad choices and you always knew that.”
I want to scream in frustration. Or hit something. I want Major and George to take my side. I want Pfeff to break down in tears and explain why he’s a terrible person. I want him to be penitent and ashamed of himself. I want him to rush at me and scoop me into his arms and kiss me passionately and ask if I’ll forgive him. I want to slap him across his self-satisfied face.
Pfeff turns and flops onto his boogie board. He swims toward George.
I think he’ll turn back, regret how he’s acting, but he does not. He swims out, and out. As if I don’t exist.
I bite my lip to keep from crying. I turn and walk up the staircase that leads from the beach.
Back at Clairmont, I tell Luda I’m skipping the clambake and head to my room. There, I take double my usual dose of Halcion, hours before the sun goes down. I change into pajamas and sob until the drug knocks me out completely.
53.
I WAKE FROM Halcion sleep at one a.m. Bess is opening my door.
“Go away,” I tell her.
“Carrie.”
“Go. I’m sick.”
“No,” she says. “We need you.”
“What for?”
They used to always need me. “We need you” to help us condition our hair, to build a fort, to explain our schoolwork, to give advice about a boy, to give advice about clothes, to watch Rosemary.
But they haven’t needed me in weeks and weeks.
“Just come,” whispers Bess. “I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”
She is holding her hands to her chest, twisting them together.
I sit up. My head is fogged. “Are we going outside? Do I need shoes? A flashlight?”
“Yeah,” she says. “You need all that.”
* * *
—
QUIET AS COTTON, we go downstairs. Outside via the mudroom door. Along the walkways to the family dock.
I can see the outlines of the sailboat and Guzzler, black against the moonlit sea.
Bess turns and puts her finger to her lips.
PART SIX
A Long Boat Ride
54.
PENNY STANDS IN the water, near where the dock meets the shore. She is knee-deep. I can see her shoes on the sand.
She is washing her hands and face, getting her loose white shirt and jean shorts wet, scrubbing her cheeks urgently.
“Penny,” I call softly. “You okay?”
“No, no, leave her,” says Bess.
“But you brought me down to—”
“That’s not why we need you.”
She takes my hand and leads me to the end of the dock. The first thing I see is that missing wooden board, moved from where my father left it. It lies crisscross in our way, the nails poking through the wood in a sharp row of three.