I gestured for her to get off my bed. Dinah, too. They smiled with pretend confusion and stayed where they were.
“And C,” I said, “I don’t want to go home.”
“Go home?” Cinnamon said, her voice rising. She grabbed my phone. “Lars. Dude. What kind of crazy pills are you taking?!”
“Cinnamon!” I said.
She kept my phone out of my grasp. “Uh-huh ... uh-huh ... so?”
“You’re not helping,” I said through a clenched jaw.
“You? Hush,” she said, pointing at me as she rose from my bed. “And you”—this time, to Lars—“I don’t know what to say to you, except we’re at the beach, dude. The beach. And we’re in a house full of hotness monsters—”
I groaned and covered my face.
“—and we’re having the time of our lives—”
“Yeah,” Dinah said.
“—and I have nothing more to add, other than ... well ...” She worked her forehead, and then smoothed her expression and threw back her shoulders. “Nobody puts Baby in the corner. Dig?”
Oh. My. God. I got off the bed, strode to Cinnamon, and held out my hand.
She spoke quickly into the phone. “I believe I’ve made my point. And now, farewell.”
“Sorry, Lars,” I said. “She’s got sun poisoning.”
“Do not,” Cinnamon muttered.
Lars cleared his throat. “Hotness monsters?”
“That’s just Cinnamon,” I said. “You know Cinnamon.”
“I thought she swore off guys.”
“Yeah, well ...” I shrugged, not that he could see it.
There was silence. I walked to the far end of the room, leaned against the wall, and slid down.
“So you don’t want to come home?” Lars said.
“My parents have already paid for me to be here,” I said. “How would I, anyway? Mr. Devine just dropped us off. It’s a six-hour car ride from here to Atlanta.”
“My brother could come pick you up. I’d come with him.”
“Lars ...”
“All right, fine,” he said, abruptly backing off. “I get it.”
“I made a commitment.”
“I said I get it.” There was another silence, and it was tense. When he next spoke, his voice was tense, too. “So, it’s good? You’re having fun?”
“Yeah, I guess. So far.” I glanced at Cinnamon and Dinah and lowered my voice. “That doesn’t mean I don’t miss you.”
“I miss you, too,” he said stiffly. “But if you’re having fun—hey, that’s all that matters.”
“Um ... thanks.” I felt itchy with the pressure of not living up to his expectations. It was awful, and the thought of caving crossed my mind. But, no. No way.
“So, talk to you tomorrow?” he said.
“Absolutely,” I replied. “Only, it might possibly be slightly complicated, because we’ve, like, got this whole schedule, and—”
“Not a problem,” he interrupted. “Say no more.”
“I want to call you. It just might be hard.”
“Like I said, I got it.”
“Lars ... now I’m worried I’m making you feel bad,” I said anxiously. He sounded solid, but in a way that wasn’t exactly him.
“Well, don’t,” he said, shifting his tone to give the slightest tint of, Hey, babe, you’re kind of exaggerating your own importance here.
Subtle, but a cold splash of water nonetheless.
“Call when you can,” he said coolly. “Or text. Whatever.”
“Ok-a-a-y,” I said. “I probably can call every night. I’m just not positive.”
“Whatever.”
We said our good-byes. We were very cordial. And then I hung up and let my head fall back against the wall.
“Is everything okay?” Dinah asked.
“You got me,” I said, staring up at the skylight. We’d cranked it open since it was nighttime, but the inky, starry sky seemed millions of heartbeats away.
Make Friends with. Someone New
OVER THE COURSE OF MY LIFE, I have spent a fair amount of time considering what it would be like to be a boy instead of a girl. Some things would be great: Sitting all sprawled and casual and taking up all the room you wanted, without even a whisper of needing to keep your legs together or be “ladylike.” Belching with impunity. Being a smart aleck in school and having teachers (well, female teachers) find you delightful.
Other things would be interesting, like peeing while standing up, or not having to wear a shirt if you weren’t in the mood.
Other things would be just plain awful. Namely, erections. I mean, maybe they wouldn’t be awful in certain situations, but I’d read Judy Blume’s Then Again, Maybe I Won’t. I knew all about how erections could happen totally out of a guy’s control and in the most embarrassing of places. Like in math class, say, when you’ve just been called to the board to work out an equation.
When it came to erections, I was definitely glad to be a girl. I was glad to be a girl most of the time, actually, though I suspected I’d always be fascinated by the squillions of boy/ girl differences out there.
This morning, as I silently got dressed while Cinnamon and Dinah slept blissfully on, I found myself contemplating hair. Plenty of guys had long hair, but the majority had normal, short boy hair. As I put on Bo’s baseball cap and pulled my own hair through the hole in the back, I thought about how those short-haired boys never got to experience the comforting jounce of a ponytail. I loved the feel of a jouncy ponytail. It just made me happy.
On my way downstairs I made a pit stop at the bathroom, where I did not pee standing up, thanks very much. I didn’t squat, either. I was so not a squatter. But when it came time to flush, I had a small crisis of conscience. Or of prudishness? Because there was a framed sign above the toilet, and it was needlepointed, and it said, IF IT’S YELLOW, LET IT MELLOW. IF IT’S BROWN, FLUSH IT DOWN. And there were butterflies and sweet little flowers.
Last night, Dinah had gone into the bathroom, promptly reemerged, and with tightly knitted lips, dragged me in and said, “Look.”
She pointed at the needlepoint sign. I read the curlique letters, and my eyebrows shot up.
“What does that mean?” she said, but the panic in her tone suggested she knew full well.
I could either giggle or be mortified. I wasn’t yet sure which was going to win out. “Um ... well ...”
“Cinnamon!” Dinah bleated. “Get in here right now please! ”
She wandered in, brushing her hair. “Yeah?”
For the second time, Dinah pointed. She was like one of those hound dogs that stood rigidly “at point” when they sniffed a rabbit. Dinah wasn’t sniffing rabbit, however. The tingle in my own nostrils prompted a quick peek into the pot, where—gross!—the mellowing of somebody’s yellow was already taking place.
“Whoa, ripe,” Cinnamon said. She pushed past me and Dinah and flushed the toilet.
“Uh-oh, you naughty kitten, now you shall have no pie,” I said. The giggling had won out, though the mortification hovered just below the surface.
“You didn’t read it,” Dinah said. She jabbed her finger, still in pointing position, at the needlepoint sign.
“If it’s yellow, let it mellow,” Cinnamon said. “If it’s brown—” She broke off, overcome by chortles. “Dude! Wrong-ness! We’re not supposed to flush when we pee?”
“Only if your pee, um, has a friend,” I said.
Cinnamon pondered. “Well, when I take a crap—”
“Please,” Dinah begged, possessed by a rising hysteria.
Cinnamon eyed her to say Wait your turn, young lady. “When I take a crap, there is usually pee-age as well.” She furrowedherbrow. “In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever just plainly crapped. I do plainly pee, though. Quite a lot, actually.” She patted her stomach, presumably in the general vicinity of her bladder. Her air was that of a farm girl complacently admiring a flock of geese.
Dinah’s chest heaved. “I can’t. I can’
t go to the bathroom and just ...”
“Leave it for all the world to enjoy?” I said.
She paled.
“Whose do you think that was that we just flushed?” Cinnamon said.
“Ryan’s?” I said, hazarding a guess. “Out on the beach, he drank a lot of Mellow Yellow.”
“You mean Mountain Dew,” Dinah corrected me.
Mischief flashed in Cinnamon’s eyes. “Actually, we just think it was Mountain Dew. For all we know, it could have been Mellow Yellow.” She chortled. “Bottled at the source.”
“Ew!” Dinah said.
“They’re the same color,” Cinnamon said. “Mountain Dew and Mellow Yellow and”—Cinnamon waggled her eyebrows at the commode—“the fine specimen we have here.”
“I wonder if we’ll all get to know each other by the color of our pee,” I mused. “Like if I’ll go to the bathroom and say, ‘Why look, Brooklyn must have just stopped by.’ ”
Dinah, her eyes big and round, pushed us out.
“Don’t forget—no flushing!” I called through the door.
“Unless you poop,” Cinnamon said. Her voice reverberated in the hall. “Are you pooping in there, Dinah?”
The lock clicked.
Cinnamon and I grinned at each other.
“She’s going to flush,” Cinnamon said.
“I know—even if she doesn’t poop.”
“Go away! Dinah cried.
“It’s probably for environmental reasons,” Cinnamon reflected. “You think that’s the deal? Virginia wants us to be green?”
“Virginia wants us to be yellow,” I clarified.
“I mean it! ” Dinah said. “I can’t do”—there was a pause loaded with frustration—“anything with the two of you standing there! ”
“You can’t pee or poop?” Cinnamon queried, just to make sure anyone within hearing range understood. “Are you constipated, Dinah?”
Down the hall, a door opened, and footsteps sounded. Footsteps which were coming our way.
“Oh no,” Cinnamon said. We huddled close. I clutched the sleeve of Cinnamon’s shirt.
“Here,” Ryan said, tossing us a small box. Cinnamon fumbled, but managed to catch it, which impressed me mightily. If it had come my way? It would have hit my body and ricocheted to the floor. “Dem marshmallows can gum up the works.”
Cinnamon blinked. Other than that, her face was motionless and betrayed very little.
“Um ... thanks?” I said.
“Duffenetly,” Ryan said, all Mafia-like. He sauntered back down the hall. “Night, ladies.”
As soon as he was out of sight, we looked at the box. DULCOLAX STOOL SOFTENER, it said. GENTLE, SOFTENING RELIEF.
“Why?!” I whispered, meaning Why would Ryan have such a thing?
“Winnie?” Dinah said from within the bathroom. “Cinnamon?”
In a hushed, almost reverential tone, Cinnamon read the fine print. “It doesn’t make you go, it makes it easier to go.” She lifted her eyes to mine.
I took the box from her hand. I placed it outside the bathroom door and gave it a quick pat. “We’ll just leave it here for her.”
“Excellent idea.”
Our whispers didn’t sit well with Dinah, who said, “Who’s out there? For real, y’all! ”
Cinnamon tiptoed back to our room. I followed. Two minutes later we heard the toilet flush (of course).
Cinnamon held up her index finger. “Wait for it ...”
Seconds ticked by. Dinah was washing her hands. Dinah was drying her hands. Dinah was unlocking the door and stepping into the hall ...
A yelp pierced the air, then cut off abruptly and was replaced by the pounding of feet on the stairs. She was flushed when she appeared in the doorway.
“You guys!” she exclaimed, giggling wildly.
She cocked her arm and let the box of stool softeners fly, aiming for some reason at me instead of Cinnamon. I squeaked and tried to shield myself, but she missed me by a mile.
That was last night. Now here it was the next morning, and the toilet was full of my pee. Anyone on this floor of the house—Cinnamon, Dinah, Mark, Ryan, Erika, and Brooklyn—could easily figure out that it was my pee, since I was the one on pre-sunrise turtle crawl duty.
Did I really want that? To let my pee “mellow,” at the possible expense of my dignity?
But ... it was a house rule. Virginia had taken the time to needlepoint it, for heaven’s sake. And if I was all, Ooo, I’m too un-wimpy to squat, squatting is for girly-girls who wrinkle their noses and never go barefoot and worry about their hair getting windblown ... Well, if I was bold enough to be a seat-sitter, shouldn’t I be willing to throw dignity out the window and follow the when-to-flush rule?
It was a test of character, that’s what it was. So ... fine. I pulled back my hand from the toilet’s handle. I did not flush. It was hard, but I did it, and as I washed up, I very briefly identified with my own urine, idling brazenly in the pot.
I am Winnie’s pee! I thought. Hear me roar!
It was times like these when I wondered if everyone really was as strange as I was, or if I was just a special case.
I went downstairs and found Alphonse in the kitchen, rinsing out a glass. He had his long hair held back, I noticed, but I wasn’t sure it would classify as a ponytail. Even if it did, I knew it didn’t jounce, because his dreads were so thick. I liked the leather cord he used instead of an elastic.
“I made you some peanut butter toast,” he said. He went to the toaster oven and opened it. “You want?”
“Sure,” I said, although my stomach wasn’t awake yet. “Thanks.”
“Good protein boost.”
“Okay. Uh ... cool.”
Nobody else was up. Outside the big kitchen picture window, the marsh was dark and ghostly looking, thanks to a low ribbon of fog. Alligator eyes, half-submerged, could be watching me and I wouldn’t even know it.
“You can eat it on the way,” Alphonse said. “Let’s go.”
I followed him through the back of the kitchen, which connected to the green staircase, which, like the blue staircase, led both up and down. Going up would take us first to a screened-in porch, then to the level where the den was, and finally to the Crow’s Nest. Going down, as Alphonse now did, took us to the bathhouse, where people could shower and change after coming in from the beach. Cutting through the bathhouse was another way to get outside.
“So ... what do we do?” I asked Alphonse, after we took the short trail to the beach.
“Well, first we take a moment to enjoy,” he said in a tone just sanctimonious enough to rub me the wrong way.
Oh, please, I thought. You’ve been here, what? One whole week longer than I have? That doesn’t make you Mr. Ocean-Appreciator-Extraordinaire.
But it was lovely. The first rays of the sun were creeping over the horizon, way out at the impossible-to-discern end of the ocean. Seagulls swooped through the sky, crying “Ahhahh!” in lonely bird voices. The surf advanced. The surf retreated. The foamy dregs of the waves reminded me of lace.
“Nice, isn’t it?” Alphonse said.
“Yeah,” I said.
Not another human was visible in either direction. It felt like we were the only people in the world.
Alphonse started walking, heading north toward the undeveloped stretch of beach I’d spotted from the Crow’s Nest.
“When turtles lay their eggs, they’re more likely to do it away from the houses,” he explained. He pointed to the dunes, where a strip of fluorescent orange tape fluttered in the breeze. “See up there? That’s a nest we’ve already marked.”
“Can we go look?” I said. “Is that allowed?”
He veered right. I followed him up into the brambles. We reached the slim wooden stake marked with the orange tape, and he knelt beside it. I knelt, too, but all I saw was normal old ... normalness. Sand, sticks, reeds. Bracken, which wasn’t a word I used often (if I’d ever used it at all), but which seemed like the right term for what
was before me.
“I don’t see anything,” I said.
Alphonse carefully dug down. The pale sand coated his skin like cinnamon-sugar, and the muscles of his forearm were ropey and lean.
“There,” he said, shifting his weight and shaking the sand from his arm. He lifted his head to see my reaction. Only he was so close, and his gaze so warm and steady, that instead of looking at the nest, I found myself sucked into his brown, brown eyes. It wasn’t a boy-girl flirty moment. At least, I didn’t think it was. Even though things between Lars and me were slightly ... complicated, we were still together. We were totally together.
And yet, maybe guys and girls couldn’t help it sometimes? Couldn’t help the quickening heartbeats, or the way the air grew charged, as if molecules of me were bridging the gap to Alphonse, while molecules of him did the same thing in reverse? Like circus fleas, or static electricity. Or maybe just biology.
I tore my eyes from his. I looked down, and in the sand I saw a hundred eggs, maybe more, all the size of Ping-Pong balls.
“Whoa,” I said. “There’s so many,” I said.
“A mama sea turtle can hold five hundred eggs inside her,” Alphonse said. “That’s called a clutch. She lays them in batches of a hundred or so. She lays them in different spots to increase their chances of survival.”
“Why does that help?”
Alphonse shrugged. “A fox could find the nest, or a raccoon. Even a dog’ll dig up a nest for the fun of it. A dog won’t eat the eggs, but it could crush them, or leave them exposed to predators.”
“So it’s like hiding treasure,” I said. “Hide it in lots of different spots, and it’s less likely to all get found.”
“Yeah.” He lifted an egg from the nest. It wasn’t oval like a chicken’s egg, but perfectly round. Its shell was the color of cream. Alphonse brushed off most of the sand and held it out to me.
I was nervous, but I cupped my palms and accepted it so very carefully. A teeny life was in my hands. A teeny, growing, unborn sea turtle.
“It’s warm,” I marveled.
“The sand acts as insulation,” Alphonse explained.
I lifted the egg to my ear. I listened.
Alphonse regarded me as if I were odd, but amusing. “Hear anything?”