"Y ep," Lila said. "He honks every time he misses a party for one of his dad's night charters."
"He was here earlier, though," Keke said, "searching for you, Zoey." She poked me on the breastbone. "Why does Doug hate you so much?"
I took a sharp sniff of ocean air. I'd known Doug wouldn't miss an opportunity for revenge on me.
"Doug doesn't hate her," Lila reprimanded Keke. "Don't freak her out." She turned to me. "Nobody hates you, Zoey. Who could hate you? Y ou're so beautiful."
"And blond," Keke offered.
"And so sweet to all of us." Lila pursed her lips and reached up to pinch my cheek like I was a baby. "Besides, Doug hates everybody." Lila was trying to smooth over what Keke had stirred up.
Keke, as the tipsy one, was also the one who pressed the issue. "No, he stormed in here all dramatic and upset," Keke insisted. "There must be something up between the two of you. What is it?"
"Doug storms everywhere," Lila told Keke, "and he's always dramatic and upset."
I hoped Lila's explanation would satisfy Keke. Maybe I could change the subject to our chances at the swim meet next Saturday.
Then Gabriel splashed past us on his way to the beer stash against the dunes. "Zoooey!" He wrapped me in an alcoholic bear hug. "Doug was here looking for you earlier. What's up between you two?"
"Nothing!" we three girls said simultaneously.
"Ooooookay." Gabriel gave each of us a look that said he did not believe us, but he was so drunk that he would not remember this conversation in the morning. Then he let me go and splashed away.
The way the twins were watching me, I knew I wasn't getting out of this now without a better explanation.
In my mind I was back in my mother's bedroom, trying to fix everything. With two fingers I brushed her blond hair away from her closed eyes so she'd look better to the paramedics when they arrived.
I struggled out of those dark thoughts and back to the reality of the starlit beach, the sound of the ocean, and a shadowy Keke and Lila expecting answers. Of course I had told them my mom was having trouble dealing with the divorce, and I didn't want to leave her alone during the summer nights to come to the Slide with Clyde parties. I couldn't divulge more than this to them. My dad had warned me at the emergency room not to tell "those little twins" what my mother had done, and his instincts had been right. I loved Keke and Lila, but they were not discreet.
Luckily I had secrets to divulge that wouldn't touch on Doug seeing me at the emergency room. Doug had a lot of reasons to hate me. I had not wanted to admit this, even to them, because employee matters at Slide with Clyde were supposed to be private. But they were forcing my hand here, and keeping my mother's secret was more important than keeping Doug's. "He sent in an application for Slide with Clyde along with the rest of the swim team last May, and I told Ashley not to call him in because he's been to juvie. Those records are sealed, so she would have had no way of knowing without me telling her. He probably figured that out when everybody got hired but him."
Doug had spent part of ninth grade in juvie. People in our town did not go to juvie. I'd never heard of anyone else who'd been there. I didn't even know where juvie was. I would have suspected it didn't exist except I remembered when Doug missed two weeks of school to go there. Ever since, he was as likely to be in the principal's office as he was to be in class.
"What did you rat him out to Ashley for?" Lila asked. "He could have saved that three-hundred-pound man drowning in the wave pool instead of me."
Keke nodded. "And we could have stared at him shirtless all summer. God, those abs!"
I did not want to think about staring at Doug all summer. And I did not want to talk about this anymore. I turned toward the horizon, the black sky barely discernible from the black ocean, where Doug's fishing boat had disappeared.
But I could see out the corner of my eye that Keke and Lila both watched me, waiting for my answer as to why I had not wanted to give all of us the opportunity to stare at Doug's taut, tanned swimmer's chest all day every day for three summer months. Finally I stated the obvious, which logically should have overridden even teenage girl-lust: "He went to juvie. He's a criminal. I thought I should warn my family's business against employing a criminal."
"What did you think he was going to do," Keke asked, "embezzle funds? Did he go to juvie for embezzlement?"
"What did he go to juvie for?" Lila asked. "He was only in the ninth grade. What could he possibly have done?"
They were making me feel more and more sheepish. I wished I hadn't told them this after all. I wished I hadn't come to the party. "Look," I defended myself, "it wasn't the only job in town. I didn't go all over town and prevent him from getting a job anywhere."
"Y eah, but the job at Slide with Clyde was his only chance to get away from his dad this summer," Lila said, waving toward the spot we all gazed at now, where Doug was helping gung-ho tourists hold the line on big game fish beyond the horizon.
"I heard that from the guys on the swim team," she said. "Lifeguard jobs were the only jobs a teenager could get that paid more than his dad's fishing biz, and the pools around town were hiring college kids as lifeguards. It was Slide with Clyde or nothing for Doug."
"What was so bad about working with his dad?" I asked.
We all looked at each other, feet sinking in the sand underwater. A wave knocked Keke off balance and she braced herself against Lila, and still we were quiet. Possibly they were thinking what I was thinking: could Doug's situation with his dad be worse than mine?
I broke the silence. "Okay. For years there has been this weird tension between Doug and me because he asked me to homecoming in ninth grade, right before he went to juvie."
"He did ?" Keke gasped.
"And you broke up with him because of that?" Lila asked, outraged.
"Of course not," I said. "He was just gone." I flicked my fingers in the air to show that he'd disappeared. "One day he was in junior varsity swim practice with me, hanging on to the side of the pool and asking if I'd go to homecoming with him. The next Monday he was gone. Around the middle of the week somebody had heard he was in juvie. By the time he came back to school a couple of weeks later, homecoming was over."
"He couldn't get a furlough to go to homecoming with you?" Keke asked.
"Not funny!" Lila told her.
"He never even mentioned it to me again," I said. "I went to homecoming with somebody else, and Doug came back from juvie angry at me. Or maybe he was angry at the world, but it felt like me. Y'all don't remember this, but before juvie, Doug wasn't prickly like he is now. Juvie made him prickly."
"I always thought his mother dying made him prickly," Lila said.
I had not forgotten Doug's mother had died in a car accident when we were in eighth grade. It was part of what kept girls staring at him longingly after he snapped at them. With tragedy in his past, they thought he must be vulnerable.
And come to think of it . . . maybe despite all the reasons Doug had to dislike me, he would honor my father's demand that he keep to himself what my mother had done, because he empathized with me. Perhaps I'd misread him at the emergency room--not surprising, considering my state of mind. When he'd started toward me, he hadn't intended to make a snide comment. He'd understood. This interpretation didn't jive with the way Doug had been acting for the past few years. But it did make sense when I thought of him in ninth grade, hanging onto the cement wall in the lane next to me during junior varsity swim practice, making a joke about our awful uniform bathing suits emblazoned with the ugliest dog mascot either of us had ever seen, and asking me to homecoming. His voice was soft and his smile was kind.
"No," I told Keke, "he wasn't prickly before juvie."
"There's something to this," Keke told Lila. "Doug rolls his eyes at everybody, but he has a special eye-roll whenever Zoey opens her mouth. Like this."
Her imitation was shockingly accurate. I laughed and slapped my hand over my mouth in horror at the same time.
"That is so true!" Lila exclaimed. "But I thought he did that because Zoey is cute." She turned to me. "Doug doesn't do cute."
Lila was right. Doug sympathizing with me rather than taking the opportunity to bring the rich girl down--that was wishful thinking, and no genie had granted me any wishes. I would have used them on something else.
"I wonder why he came looking for me here," I mused. "If he's come to these parties all summer, he knows I haven't been to one."
"He definitely thought you would be here." Lila shrugged. "Why are you here? How's your mom?"
"My mom," I said slowly, "is good for the rest of the night." In my mind I was back in her bedroom again. I straightened the covers on her bed and tucked her in more tightly, because she looked cold.
I'd come to the party to escape thoughts like this. Now that they'd chased me here, I might as well be home with my dad and Ashley. I felt like I was about to jump out of my skin, and I couldn't stand it.
"Zoey."
We jerked our heads toward the beach at the sound of a boy's voice, and all three of us relaxed our shoulders when we saw it wasn't Doug.
It was Brandon. One of the Slide with Clyde employees who wasn't on the swim team, he was the star of our school's football team and looked it, big, blond, and clean-cut like a cartoon superhero. He wasn't a lifeguard either. He sold ice cream and lifted things that were heavy. I'd asked him about this a few times because lifeguards got paid more than the workers at the concession stands. I could have gotten him promoted. He always brushed me off with a joke about staying out of the sun and preserving his complexion.
His lungs were another story. He cupped both hands around his cigarette to take a puff and keep it lit in the wind off the surf. Exhaling smoke, he said, "I heard you were here. I have to talk to you."
"Come into the water." Playfully I kicked a little splash at him.
"Come out of the water," he called. "I have to talk to you alone."
Lila leaned in and whispered, "Do you want us to distract him? He's had a lot of beer, and he's dangerous with that cigarette. He might light you on fire."
"Thanks, but it's okay," I whispered back. I was sure he needed solace about his latest conquest gone sour--and if I could help him, at least I had helped someone tonight.
I waded out of the ocean with my arms out for him. "Sure," I told him as I hugged him in greeting. "We can talk alone. Let's go to . . ."
I glanced toward the water. I felt better just touching it. Keke, Lila, and the rest of the swim team had headed up the beach, toward the beer. Brandon and I could talk in the water now and have the ocean to ourselves.
His muscled arm curved around my waist.
I looked up at him. He gazed down at me earnestly, his too-handsome comic-book hero features softened by the starlight.
His hand stroked my back. I did not think he was touching me in a flirtatious way. I thought he was having a balance problem and teetering a bit.
But I wanted him to flirt with me. He was a muscle-bound football player and a playboy, but I knew him to be a softie, and in that dark moment I wanted more. This was crazy. I felt tingles of attraction for Brandon all the time. Who wouldn't? But I never acted on them. This time the thoughts of my mother and the pressure from Doug seemed to push me out of the surf and against Brandon's broad chest. I had come to this party desperately needing something I couldn't name. Now I knew what it was.
I stroked my hand across his. "Could we go to your Buick?"
I HAD DATED A LOT OF nice boys in the past few years. I'd never gotten serious with anyone, and that had been okay with me. I was only seventeen. I was willing to wait for the good stuff.
But something happened to me in June when my dad told my mom about Ashley. I couldn't stop thinking about sex, my dad having sex, Ashley having sex, everyone at Slide with Clyde having sex, everyone ha**g s*x except my mom and me.
Y might think my job as a lifeguard was sexy. But I spent most of my time on a platform with sunglasses on and a whistle in my mouth, poised to
ou prevent tragedy. The tourists accepted me as part of the scenery, like the cement mountains spewing waterfalls piped in from hoses, or the stacked crates with labels I'd stenciled another summer: BANANAS BY THE BUNCH and DANGER: ANACONDA!
The tourists didn't notice me, so I observed them unabashedly. While the little kids splashed in the fountains and peed in the pools, their parents eyed each other and spread each other with oil. No question what they did in the hotel room after Junior went to sleep.
The teenage tourists didn't have a place to do it. Unlike the locals, they didn't know about the city beach for parking. But it was clear what they wanted. The dance clubs in Panama City looked like Sunday school compared to what Slide with Clyde brought out in people. A few pi�a coladas bought by college kids and slipped to underage teenagers for fun. Cool rushing water. Hot bare skin and lots of it. Whether you got any or not, Slide with Clyde sold sex.
The employees felt it. And to hear them talk, most of them got it at their beach parties every weekend, the ones I missed because I stayed home with my mom. I was concerned for my friends. Or feeling left out. Or very angry at my dad for impregnating the human resources manager while my mom slept longer and longer every day and slowly ground to a halt. The next time my dad sent me to the wholesale club for paper towels and soda straws for Slide with Clyde, I also bought the world's largest box of condoms. My dad never checked the receipt anyway. He just wanted me to show up with the toilet paper and the pickle relish. I gave condoms out to anyone who asked. I also gave condoms to people who didn't ask. If I heard rumors about them, I slipped condoms through the vents in their lockers in the break room.