“I had a lot of firsts down here,” an old friend said about Long Beach Island last summer. Cristina and I had to agree. The small strip of land off the coast of New Jersey wasn’t just where we spent our summers growing up; LBI was where the growing up happened.
With my eyes closed, lightly nestled in Colin’s mom’s bed, I became conscious that I was no longer asleep. Without stirring, I opened my eyes. Fresh morning light streamed into the room through gauzy floor-length curtains. They swayed lazily in the breeze. I quietly slid out of bed and passed through them, out to the old wooden balcony, where I took a breath of the new day. From the second floor of Colin’s house, I could see a shoobie family already unpacking their minivan. They hauled their cooler; shade tent; and little beach wagon with big, stupid wheels—piled high with a plastic shovel and pail, bright balls and frisbies, a couple of brand new boogie boards still wrapped in plastic, and a huge rainbow umbrella. I watched them get smaller as they hobbled down the middle of flat, wide Sixth Street, taking breaks to shift their luggage around, until they escaped my view. I returned to the stagnant bedroom and noticed that Colin was asleep on the far side of the bed. I hadn’t felt him in my sleep and wondered what time he had come in.
The other three bedroom doors were shut: a reassuring sign of closure. Everyone had made it to sleep after all. Four of us—Mike, Steph, Cristina, and I—were living indefinitely with Colin in what people were calling his boarding house. We each kept some of our stuff in one of the four rooms, but that didn’t mean we considered the rooms to be divided up among us. We alternated beds and bedfellows, only prioritizing that no one sleep alone. Downstairs, I slipped on my flip-flops and ventured into the kitchen, where every surface was sticky with beer. PBR cans covered the table. With an industrial, black trash bag, I made my way through kitchen, living room, bathroom, and back porch, tossing out empties and pouring the half-fulls into other floaters so that Mike could “start his day wrong,” a wake-up ritual that recycled the leftover beer from the night before and gave him a head start on happy hour. I washed a couple of dishes, plastered with sappy gel. A black, gritty goo clogged the drain. The thought of plunging my hand through the murky, gray liquid to break up the goop was too much for my early morning head. I looked at the broken dishwasher, a dirty procrastination pit where we stowed dishes to delay the cleaning process, and decided not to add to the collection today. I would return to the sink after a walk on the beach. It was about eight o’clock. I had ample time for everything. No one would be up until the afternoon, anyway.
The first time my family rented the beach house on Taylor Avenue, the street between Eighth and Ninth, I was eight years old and not looking forward to it. My mom’s family had rented in Beach Haven, one of LBI’s more popular towns for families, for a couple of years when she was little. She wanted to continue the tradition for her children.
It seemed like a useless vacation. LBI was two or three hours from home, depending on who drove, and its mellow, static personality marked it as boring compared to other shore towns. If we wanted the shore, we could always day-trip to closer beaches like Manasquan or Point Pleasant in the traditional New Jersey style—with coolers full of sandwiches and cherries, and Bruce Springsteen buzzing through the radio, all set up on a big blanket. We could rinse off under public showers on the boardwalk and put our clothes back on when our bathing suits dried, being careful not to dress too quickly and scratch our sunburned skin. As the sun set, we could meander along the boardwalk, lit up with swooping, spinning rides, with the smells of funnel cakes and French fries wafting above the crowd of laughing teenagers in line to win big stuffed animal prizes from impossible games.
That would be fine beach trip, I argued. LBI was removed from all of this, stripped down to the essentials: an eighteen-mile strip of quaint touristy shops and restaurants, with the bay a couple of streets to the West and the ocean a couple of streets to the East. It had no boardwalk, just a long, broad boulevard to wander and a nighttime curfew of eleven o’clock for minors. LBI was boring for kids.
I didn’t even like the ocean itself the first few times we rented, back when it was just one week of each summer. I was afraid of the water and skeeved by the sand. I sat on a towel next to my mom every day and brought home souvenirs for my friends. Then I got the privilege of bringing a friend on vacation with us. In the early years, I took my best friend Gabby. Gabby was a sharp, quick, aggressively competitive girl who played sports year round. She was a shark about getting ahead. We both got straight As and kept each other focused. Each time one of us achieved something, it reminded the other to step up her game. Together we always had fun, but we were unemotional, maybe even cold, for young girls. We could communicate full sentences with the lift of an eyebrow.
Gabby and I both timidly overcame our resistance to the ocean in an unspoken pact. We stepped over the foamy water as it slid up the sand, and we ran in an awkward march into the oncoming waves, lifting our feet up out of the water and stomping them back down until we got past the hazardous zone, where waves break and crash and boogie boarders come sliding full force into the ankles of dry onlookers who wear hats and sunglasses, “testing the water.” After finding boredom in the gentle depths, we played the over-under game, not really a game but a quick decision we’d shout to either jump over an approaching wave or dive under it. We started body surfing and boogie boarding. We got obsessed with LBI and beach culture. We put LBI, Roxy, O’Neill, and Hurley stickers on our parents’ cars, on our duffel bags, on our school notebooks. We clothed ourselves in surfing brands, never having touched a surfboard.
My parents started booking a couple of weeks at the house. When we were thirteen, Gabby and I pushed black eyeliner along our lower lashes, pulled on white Hollister tank tops to accentuate our temporarily brown skin, and walked to Fantasy Island, a little amusement park about the size of a football field, with a bunch of bright lights, loud noises, a casino arcade, and fewer than a dozen overpriced rides—LBI’s pathetic version of a boardwalk scene. Oily boys in high school sports sweatshirts tried out pick-up lines like Where the parties at? and I lost my number. Can I have yours? I couldn’t stand those kids. I’d turn to face them and respond tersely, “Drop dead.” Gabby usually laughed, but sometimes she got frustrated. “His friend was so hot,” she’d remark yearningly as they walked away. When we got bored of walking in loops around the park with our temporary friends, we lingered outside, on the boulevard, and waited for someone interesting to give us something to talk about later. We were fifteen or twelve depending on who was asking, and we got home by ten or eleven.
As a teenager, I sometimes brought Cristina to the beach instead of Gabby. Cristina was supportive, dramatic, and romantic. Cristina felt fulfilled if she played a part in other people’s satisfaction. She avidly supported me so that even the worst of my ideas got carried out. When Gabby and I were at the beach, our goals were deep, dark tans and attention from older kids on the boulevard. It was about us. When Cristina and I were at the beach, it was about getting outside of us; we would let ourselves float away and sink into the providence of the Island.
One year, I brought Gabby but ended up with Cristina anyway. Cristina’s parents had booked a couple of rooms at a popular beachfront hotel called the Sea Shell for themselves, Cristina, and her cousins visiting from Italy to overlap with our vacation—to give the Italian girls a chance to see the American coast and give all of us kids a chance to hang out, I suppose. Two boys from home got dropped off on Thursday to join the party. Our group of kids—me, Gabby, Cristina, two cousins, and two boys made seven of us in total—spent the sunny day on the beach. At dusk, Cristina’s parents took us all to dinner, gave us a couple of twenties for Fantasy Island, and set us free to wander until curfew. When the boys’ parents came to retrieve them at around nine, Gabby left with them to go to a party on the mainland instead of finishing the week with my family. Since I had no friend in the house on Taylor now, I decided to stay in the hotel room Cristina was sharing with her cousins.
It was Thursday night at Shell’s bar—Thunder Thursday, notoriously the drunkest public event of each week in Beach Haven. She and her family would leave the next day, but my family would stay on Taylor until Saturday. We lay in bed and tried to sleep. She had been in a mood for hours. It was a bad way to spend the last night together.
As I lay next to her in silence, I wished I had stayed in my own room, in my big, empty bed. There was no reason for me to be with her if we weren’t hanging out. Cristina must have felt the situation’s stupidity, too. She rolled over and mumbled, “I can’t sleep. I’m really mad.”
“Kinda. I don’t like the way you and Gabby always team up on me.”
I wondered what we had done this time to give her that feeling. One of us always imagined the other two were ganging up. Though we’d all been there before, the odd one out was usually Cristina. I tried to explain that we weren’t teaming up, that it was an illusion created by the best friend triangle.
“You guys ruined my night,” she replied, uninterested in my theories.
“How? You said you were happy that we were all together as a group at dinner.”
“Well yeah, I was happy then. But as soon as my parents go back to the hotel, you and her start making fun of Italians. Like really, Italians? You guys can’t pick anything else to make fun of, with my cousins here, and after my family takes us all out?”
“I didn’t even think of that. We were just impersonating your dad, Cristina.”
“Yeah, for being Italian, Lucie. I mean, really, it’s like you guys are my friends when it pays off to be my friend, and then you gang up when it doesn’t. I honestly don’t know if I want to hang out anymore. I’m sick of being the squid of the group when she’s around.” The “squid” was a Rocket Power reference. It loosely translates to lame friend.
“You’re not the squid. It’s just that she and I have this way of communicating, you know? I’m sorry if it made you feel bad.” She said nothing. “It wasn’t intentional.”
When Cristina was upset enough, she would become austere but betray her feigned indifference by frequently rolling her eyes and checking her phone. Seeing her anger develop was like watching someone try to maneuver out of some too-tight clothing. The further she got, the more she needed help, and the less likely she was to accept it. After a while, tearing and ripping would seem better to her than figuring out which arm goes through which hole—she would only care about getting out instantly. As she sighed and threw the covers off her body, I saw that she was reaching that point. Once she got there, it would be excruciating to try to solve the problem. She fumbled in the pockets of the rumpled shorts she had worn earlier, pulled out her phone, and started rapidly pressing keys, the light from the screen shining on her pursed lips and tense, raised eyebrows.
“Want to go outside for a minute? I feel like we have a lot to talk about and don’t want to have to whisper,” I said, jerking my head at the two sleeping Italian sisters in the bed next to ours. We quietly closed the door behind us, found a bench in front of the hotel, and renewed our best friendship vows after hours of hashing out anything that resembled resentment. We unlocked the safe of suppressed frustrations, released them into the humid air, and let them hang before us. In the pleasant safety of the Island night, we could clearly see where the misunderstandings started and who was at fault for what, as if some mystical judge was silently, lovingly guiding us to reconciliation.
“I’m so glad we didn’t just go to sleep!” Cristina laughed and clapped her hands against her thighs. Her emotions always beamed through her whole body. When she was up, she was way up, with giggly laughter and excited, jerky movements. Her brown eyes widened, brightened, and darted. I was happy, too. We felt elated, reunited and ready for the missions we did so well together, with me sparking ideas and her fanning the flame.
In sweatshirts and Soffe fold-over shorts, our first failed attempt at an interesting night was trying to sneak into the bar to dance. We tried from all angles, but, as sophomores in high school in pajamas, we couldn’t get inside. I didn’t even have shoes on. We sat outside on a ledge near the sidewalk and talked to the people shouting and stumbling across the parking lot as they slowly made progress away from the bar. A group of people would sing, “Strangers…waiting…up and down the BOULEVARD.” Then another group would come out a few minutes later and sing it again.
Out of boredom, we escorted two guys a couple of blocks home, soon returning to our ledge, and we laughed at their drunkenness and sat and talked about the Island’s magic of loneliness and recklessness and providence, about how the most poignant sadness mixes with a serene bliss and makes you feel like the mainland life is the one that’s not real. All Islanders, temporary and permanent, would cast away their rulebooks and schedules and just go along for whatever ride came their way. I forgot about Gabby and the friends she had left with. I forgot about our competition and the future success we imagined for ourselves. I had no goals at that moment but to trust the Island’s fate for us, to align myself with the gentle advancing and receding of new experiences that the Island offered.
“Excuse me, ladies, but I have a proposition for you,” a handsome man on a curvy beach bicycle interjected into our useless philosophical conversation. The blond man stopped in front of us, putting a foot on the ground to steady himself. I glanced at him, probably in his early twenties, then at his smaller mousy friend who caught up on foot, and back at him.
“Would one of you happen to have a piece or object through which we might be able to boge this evening?”
“What,” Cristina said flatly, blinking her eyelids a few times.
“Hmm,” he considered, taking his other foot off the pedal and leaning his elbows on the handlebars, “does either of you have in your possession something that might be of use to what’s in our possession as a means for a blazing end?” he rephrased.
“Dude,” I said, “what are you saying?” They had successfully gotten our attention but wouldn’t hold it if they didn’t make sense quickly. As I looked at him and his friend, taking in all sensory information and analyzing it as quickly as possible to bet on whether they were dangerous or fun, I noticed he had locked his eyes on mine. I was starting to think we should pass on this pair. So far, there was nothing worth trusting.
His friend jumped in: “Do you have a piece to smoke marijuana?” Cristina and I laughed and said no. He clarified that it could be an apple or something nonconventional. We looked at each other, both holding nothing but cell phones, and shrugged no again.
The first guy, the blond one, asked our names. “Lucie what?” he asked me. “What’s your last name?”
“You just look so familiar. Do you hang out in Philadelphia?”
“Sometimes, not really,” I answered, staring back flatly to show him that his gaze did not intimidate me. We were engaged in some kind of battle of the eyes.
Cristina suggested, “Maybe you know her sister. She lives there. Her name’s Allegra.”
“Maybe,” he said, his eyes still focused. He introduced himself as Stokes.
At Stokes’s house, he asked us what we’d like to drink as his friend set up a record player in the Victorian living room. The whole house was dark except the two rooms we occupied, which gave it that eerie sensation that always hovers through large, empty homes. Soon Sinatra bellowed through the space and into the kitchen. The house was too big and old fashioned to be the two boys’ rental. It must have belonged to Stokes’s family, I guessed. I wondered what his parents did for a living. Maybe he didn’t have parents. None of it mattered. The mousy man came excitedly into the fluorescently bright kitchen, put one of his small, hairy hands on Cristina’s waist and took her hand with the other, waltzing her away to the music towards the living room, where a few shaded lamps cast a dim, yellow-brown glow on the furniture and carpet.
“To drink,” Stokes demanded, regaining my attention. “What can I get you?”
“I don’t know, water?” I said as I turned to him, meeting a disapproving gaze. “Vodka?” I suggested.
“And what? We have orange juice, probably some tonic somewhere. I’ll check,” he said as he opened a cabinet.
“Oh, just vodka’s fine,” I insisted.
“Straight?” he asked over his shoulder, looking startled.
I laughed. “I like it.” It was all I had ever tried.
“Alright, Russian weirdo. What would your friend like?”
I stepped into the other room. “Cristina! Drink?”
“Whatever you’re having!” she yelled as the man dipped her, her smiling face upside-down and bare neck stretching.
I reported to Stokes. “You both want straight vodka. On the rocks, with some lime?”
“Yeah, whatever.” I shrugged. While he mixed and chopped, he sent me to stop the old record and put on a CD. I drifted through the living room and found the stereo and its big speakers nestled in an armoire to my left. It was one of those CD players that holds several discs at once. I turned it on and pressed one of the CD buttons at random to get a mystery mix. Third Eye Blind came blasting out.
“Oh, come on!” one of the dancers protested from behind me.
“Orders are to turn off the record player,” I shouted over the chaotic discord of two songs playing at once. I reached the turntable in the nearest corner, lifted the needle, and turned it off. I addressed Cristina and her dancing partner sternly: “No more dancing. It’s hanging time.”
The three of us settled around the room, Cristina and the mousy boy each in a stiff upholstered chair and me on the couch, and tried to get to know each other. Cristina and I adopted new identities and invented stories to support them. We were seniors in high school, applying to colleges. Our acquaintance encouraged us with our made-up dreams, assuring us that we would have no problem getting into Rutgers and Temple. Soon Stokes appeared with four glasses in his hands, his back hunched over as he walked, as if leaning toward the drinks would help to keep them from falling. “Rob, These two crazy girls are drinking fucking glasses of vodka,” he said to his friend, as he bent further and gently released his load of drinks on the coffee table, sliding one toward the friend and one toward Cristina. He picked up the other two and, stepping over the table, joined me on the couch. He handed me a glass, and I admired the lime slices and salt around the rim before taking a coarse gulp.
The next time I noticed the glass, I was on the floor, on a raft at sea, bobbing over little waves and trying not to fall off. The stout glass sat on the table and held mostly melted ice at this point—that and the scrappy-looking limes whose guts had been squeezed out. The Ataris’ version of “Boys of Summer” played through the stereo. I didn’t know where Cristina and the other boy had gone, so I followed Stokes when he stood and pulled me by the hand. We left the music playing in the empty room.
The next day, back on Taylor Ave, Cristina and I brought Twizzlers to the lifeguard stand. They were always bored and hungry up there, so we tried to help them out when we could.
“Girls!” Smiley yelled when he spotted us coming. “And you come bearing gifts!” He introduced us to the two other young guards on the stand, telling us the one on his left would be a pro surfer soon and could take us out later, and the one on his right was a gifted chemist if we wanted to learn something about science.
“Nice to meet you both,” I said as Cristina held up the bag of red chewy straws and the chemist grabbed a handful.
“How old are you?” the other one asked.
“Fourteen,” Cristina answered, cringing at the sound of the word as it left her lips. “She’s fifteen,” she added, nodding towards me. The boys, one a senior and one already in college, looked at each other knowingly.
“What have you girls been up to? Wreaking havoc?” Smiley asked.
“Always,” I said. “We picked up some guys from the Sea Shell last night.”
“Whoa whoa whoa, backtrack. Today is Friday. Last night was Thunder Thursday, and you were hanging around the Shell?” Smiley asked. “Who are these guys?”
“Stokes?” Cristina offered. “They live down pretty far, past the number streets.”
Smiley stared at me and then at Cristina, taking his time to answer. “Stokes? Is that a first name?”
He paused again as he studied us. “I don’t think I know him, and I don’t like that. Are they locals?”
“Yeah, he said he works near Polly’s Dock giving windsurfing lessons,” I said. “Couldn’t tell you anything about the other kid. I think he was using a fake name. Introduced himself as Seth, but Stokes kept calling him Rob.” Cristina and I both giggled, remembering.
“So hold on. You found these guys leaving Thunder Thursday, so they’re older, and they were already probably in bad shape, and one was using a fake name, and the other was most likely also using a fake name he’s going by Stokes. And you went back to their house?”
Cristina looked at me, and we both laughed. “Yeah,” she confessed.
Smiley didn’t laugh. “I don’t like that,” he said.
“It was fine,” I assured him. “Nothing bad happened.”
“Except that I was looking for you for about an hour with the Seth-Rob guy,” Cristina interjected, “and he kept telling me, ‘She’s probably having a good time, wherever they are.’” She chuckled as she said, “I was actually freaking out until I found you guys in his little apartment-garage thing. Do you think he owns that house?”
I looked at Cristina, embarrassed by the implications, and up at Smiley, who wasn’t smiling. “I don’t like that,” he repeated.
“Your boredom is going to get you into trouble one day,” Smiley warned me. A year had passed but his guidance was the same. I was now sixteen, and he was my twenty-seven-year-old lifeguard on Taylor. Water was dripping from his white-blond hair that came down a couple of inches past his broad, muscular shoulders. His light features made his tanned skin always a pinkish bronze, never the deep orange-brown with which other young lifeguards glowed after the first week of sun. His clear, bright blue eyes shone in contrast to the rest of his sun-weathered and salted body. Smiley was a legendary figure on Taylor and the whole Island. He left his old Crown Victoria, named Midnight Smooth, parked unlocked with the windows down, with a baby blue long-board strapped to the top. The middle console had a compartment completely stuffed with cigarette butts. On the seats were more butts and bags of first-aid equipment for his work as a medic in Brooklyn three days a week. On the floor were lighters and cigarettes and reggae CDs he’d bought from street performers he’d particularly liked in the city, along with probably hundreds of various editions of The Idiom, a free underground literary magazine that his friend The Publisher edited and promoted. Some of Smiley’s own poetry was in a couple of them. His car was almost a social experiment. Everyone knew it to be his, and no one would ever touch it or the things it contained out of respect and admiration.
I knew that Smiley was right: my boredom could be destructive. But I also knew that it was temporary. I wanted to see and feel everything under the pretext of excusable teenage nuisance. If reckless decisions were to be made, it was now that they had to happen, before college and career, while I was expected to rebel against a family, not to be responsible for one. I approached youthful idiot recklessness like souvenir shopping: I might not want this stupid thing now, but looking back, I’ll wish I had gotten it.
Smiley was standing against the white wooden lifeguard stand, where two younger kids were perched. I looked at him and then towards the rough, choppy ocean. Cristina was reading Cosmo on her towel in the distance. While I watched her turn pages, I asked, “You guys want anything from anywhere? We could like…channel this boredom into some beneficial mission, maybe. I’m losing my mind.” I looked back at his eyes—unblinking and intense.
“I could use coffee. Take my car. Go to 7/11. Also get me a snack.” I smiled, but he kept his strict tone. “I don’t know what kind of snack. Use your judgment.”
“Well, you know how to drive a car, though, right? My wallet’s on the floor on the driver’s side, keys are on the seat.”
“How do you like your coffee?”
“Like I like my life: light and sweet.”
Malcolm Gladwell talks about “Connectors,” a small handful of people with extraordinary networking skills, in The Tipping Point. Smiley is a good example of a Connector. Between his full schedule rescuing beachgoers from the dangers of the ocean and saving New Yorkers from accidents in the city, he saves Islanders from a monotonous life. He introduces everyone to everyone else. A couple of bored, lazy boys want to throw a party in an empty house, and a group of hopeful girls walk the unchanging boulevard. Either party runs into Smiley, with his shirt and shoes off even after sunset, and he solves their problems. He started sending Cristina and me to parties at Colin’s house.
The first time I walked into Colin’s, it was Cristina’s birthday, and we were bored out of our minds but trusted that the Island would make it a good night. Colin’s was the old style of beach house, not the new kind with eight bedrooms, elevators, pastel colored vinyl siding, and balconies jutting out from every story. Colin’s house had been there for generations, with its dark, grayish wooden boards for siding, distinguished from its neighbors by an illuminated artificial palm tree on the front porch. That first night, we could hear the voices and laughter swelling as we got close. The back porch was crowded with young bodies—people sitting on the railing, lounging in chairs, standing around, smoking. We were accepted gaily and brought inside, where loud hip-hop couldn’t drown out the happy voices of boys and girls drinking beer, smoking hookah, and bullshitting. We became instant regulars.
The next summer, after a week with just my family, I brought Gabby to meet Colin and his friends. She appraised them as funny and good-looking, but they were too much for her. Some of their jokes made her uncomfortable. She saw one boy, Joe, do too many things she thought crazy and decided they weren’t her type of people. The risks outweighed the benefits. Joe maybe was a little bit crazy. Once, when we were all sitting around on the back porch, I watched him scale Colin’s house and enter through the second-story window, just to get a pack of cigarettes he had left upstairs. Another time, I rode in the backseat of Colin’s wood-side-paneled Jeep Wagoneer to do some midday errands with the two boys. Joe, in the passenger’s seat, had stolen a melon from the farmers’ market, and as we passed a younger boy we knew, riding in the bike lane beside us, Joe pelted him with the melon, knocking him to the ground as the melon busted open.
Joe and Colin—and all of us, really—depended on each other for attention and entertainment, which gave each similar, lazy day an aim. Life became a game of heightening the risks. That summer, when Gabby said she didn’t feel like coming to a party at Colin’s, I’d go alone and leave her in my room to video-chat with her boyfriend. She had nothing to talk about with the kids at Colin’s—nothing to contribute to the game—and if she couldn’t win, she wouldn’t play. I missed Cristina that summer—her openness, her willingness to try new things, her eagerness to form deep bonds with people. Little by little, I started to value the time spent with these kids on the Island more than most of my relationships at home. Joe and Colin were silly and energetic, but, like most entertainers, they were serious, even severe, at the core. I loved them for it. They were raw, real. Cristina and I started keeping in touch with them during the school year, occasionally making plans over the winter. I waited all year for summer, for when beach-me could come back to life. And then, after a few years, my family stopped renting.
Colin hung up the phone and rolled onto his stomach, facing my feet. “Luce, guess who’s coming tonight. A little surprise you’re gonna like.” I propped myself up on my elbows to look at him. His wavy blond hair stood up in tufts where the salt had dried it. He held his bearded mouth open and smiling in expectant excitement. His face was contagiously agreeable, like a laughing baby’s.
“Uh…I don’t know. Don’t tell me,” I said. I scooped a handful of sand and let it drain through my fingers. Mike and Cristina were coming back up to our towel colony from the water. She stopped, put her hands on her hips, and scanned us—about eight to ten lifeless-looking bodies, some face-up and others face-down, some towards the end of teenage years and others a couple years out of college—as Mike plopped himself into the sand between my towel and Colin’s and rolled around, coating himself like chicken to be fried, sanding our towels.
“Not on the towel, come on,” I whined.
“COME PLAY,” Mike commanded. “I bought a raft that has the potential to be the most fun. Ever.” Colin was now in the sand, too, play-fighting and cuddling with Mike, both of them hysterical. Their silly energy made me smile, and I lay back down flat.
“Oh, Mike!” Colin remembered, halting from play. “Dave and Willie are coming from Brooklyn tonight!”
“Yethhhh,” he said with an affected lisp. “Beth newth evuh.”
They lay down for a few minutes until Mike’s restless boredom popped him back up. “You know, I don’t think I could ever commit suicide unless I were ugly.” This worked to stir the group. A few heads strained uncomfortably to scowl at him. “I’m just saying. If you’re ugly and your life goes to shit, you can say, ‘Well, fuck it, I guess. I have nothing left.’ But otherwise, you always have a last resource. Think about it,” he insisted.
“You really think you’re that good-looking?” Colin prodded. “You are so narcissistic that you think your own appearance would save your life in a suicidal situation?”
“No, it’s not a matter of being that handsome. I don’t think I’m the best looking guy in the world, but I know that I’m not ugly.”
As the sun slowly lost its power and gave way to the chilly evening, the lifeguards blew their whistles and waved goodbye from the dunes. Steph, the small, cute girl in our group stood and said, “Time to shift! The sun moves, so do we.” She picked up her towel by two corners and let it billow and flap in the wind for a few seconds before squatting, lowering her two corners to the sand and waiting for the rest of it to settle neatly. Cristina and a few others followed her model. The rest of us lazily stayed put, forming an odd mosaic of rectangles slanting all different ways. This was my favorite time on the beach, when there were no rules in the ocean and the sunny cheerfulness had faded. There was something sad and mysterious, like loss, in the quieter air. I sat up, pulled my feet into a butterfly stretch, and looked out at the water, where Colin and some other kids straddled their boards, waiting for the ocean to send the right wave.
In the evening, we all separated. Cristina and I went back to Colin’s to collect our thoughts. Cristina didn’t mind being together constantly, but she knew I did and, accordingly, allowed me a few hours of personal space every day. After we both showered, she napped, painted her nails, and read period dramas that bordered on erotica while I roamed the streets, ending up by the dunes in something like meditative thought. Colin surfed and then disappeared for hours. Sometimes he went to work; sometimes he didn’t. I usually didn’t know where he was. He was hard to reach by phone but always charmingly reassured us that it wasn’t intentional; it was just stupid neglect of technology. Mike walked to his family’s beach house two streets over.
I had seen enough to imagine a typical evening for Mike: he would shower, rinsing off the grit from today and the grime from last night, and get dressed, pulling on a clean, gray, v-neck Armani t-shirt and denim cut-off shorts he wore with a sense of humor. Once he was certain that he looked and smelled beautiful, he would open the door to face his mom and her little white poof of a dog. His mother locked up the Westchester County house and reigned as queen of the beach house on Fourth Street from May to October. Mike had his own room, closet, and belongings in the comfortable, modern, and clean three-story house, but he couldn’t handle being there. So he lived at Colin’s on Sixth and only went back to freshen up and take food, which was worth the annoyance of his mom yelling, “Again to Cawlin’s? Listen, Mai-chael, rehab was nawt just for pills but alcohawl, too. You can’t just pick and choose what you wawna keep doing. You take nothing or you’ll end up sliding back into awll the garbage again. It’s a slippery slope, Mai-chael. Mai-chael, don’t walk away from me.” The fit, tanned Italian woman with bobbed hair dyed platinum blond would pick up her glass of white wine and follow Mike out to the balcony as he walked down the steps with a backpack of fresh clothes. He would turn around, suggest alcoholism runs in the family, give her a kiss on the cheek, and escape in his new racing-striped Camaro to Colin’s, two blocks over.
Dave and Willie, who were close with Colin in college, before they graduated and moved to Brooklyn, were unpacking groceries from a Trader Joe’s bag in the kitchen when Cristina and I came downstairs.
“Dave!” I yelled and ran to hug him. “I thought we’d never meet again, cous’!” I said into his shoulder, instantly reminded of the irrational familial love I had for him. Willie, meanwhile, pulled a plastic bottle of whiskey and a jar of moonshine out of a paper bag, clanking them against the countertop.
“Should we try this now or save it for tonight?” Dave held up the jar and asked in his cute voice that almost rolled the Rs but not quite. He reminded me of—looked and sounded like—a grown-up Kevin from the Wonder Years whose eyes were perpetually bloodshot and wide open. We had met years ago, at that first night at Colin’s. After a couple of hours in that first meeting, we felt a vague sibling relationship that made us giggle together. We bonded over our shared struggle of being born with pothead-looking eyes and Polish last names, Lozinski and Lapinski.
“Moonshine? Yes,” Mike affirmed, striding into the kitchen from the porch. “Dave, Willie, dude, nice to see you; I’m pumped you’re here. How’s the new apartment?” he asked. We went outside to the porch and passed both bottles around, chasing whiskey with moonshine, wincing and coughing and laughing at the stupidity and at the daylight.
“Anyone seen Colin?” Mike asked.
Dave answered, “He said he was working until eight.”
“Is Chowder Hut even open until eight?” Mike asked, taking a swig from the nearly empty jar and then clenching his teeth. “Someone go get him. What time is it?”
Dave and I teamed up as the Colin fetchers, telling everyone to hang tight. We each hung an arm over the other’s shoulders, supporting each other while we walked a couple blocks to the boulevard, turned right with a pivot, and then thrust along, passing all the well dressed dinner-goers and shoppers, fresh and clean with shirts tucked in and makeup smoothed over their sunned faces. Dave and I talked loudly about our reunion and walked conspicuously fast, as if being pushed from behind.
We finally got to the wooden steps of the Chowda Hut, and when the ordering window slid open, we both shoved our heads in and leaned our elbows on the counter, spilling our whiskey breath into the old little walk-up restaurant. Customers could either take home the food they received through the window or eat it at one of several picnic tables in the broad adjoining alleyway. The building itself was secretive. I wondered how many rooms it had and whether the owner, who lived above, had to enter through an upstairs apartment door around the back or simply walk up a flight of steps inside. “Is Colin here?” Dave asked the old man who owned the Hut. He simply laughed at us and disappeared into the back, sending Colin to the window.
“Duuuuude, hahaha, what a treat!” he shouted when he saw us and touched our heads in the little window. We all talked animatedly, inches from each other’s face, and held hands in the middle of the threshold. “Moonshine?! Haha, how I love you, my brother. I’m so happy you and Wille came down!” he laughed to Dave. “I’m gonna see if I can leave early. Who cares, fuck it, it’s a slow night.”
“Yay! Fun-time! Ohmagad, it’s still light out,” I noticed. “Oh, Col, you gotta come home. Every single day, every time I pray, we be missin’ youuu—” I sang, and Dave harmonized.
“Alright yeah, I wanna come get my speakeasy on with you lovely beauts. Or should I say speak-difficult, perhaps? Ah-ha-ha-ha,” Colin fake-laughed like the Count and then snapped back to a straight face. “A’ight, I’ll be out in a minute. Be good and patient for a sec, maybe a couple secs. Ew, did he just say a couple’s sex?” he asked in a Staten Island woman’s raspy smoker voice. “Oh, honey, I’m not tryna hear about anyone’s sex life but my own. And if you wanna get in on that, you can ditch this window and come inside. Deep inside.” I cringed as he continued, “Oh, the old lady don’t interest the young folk? Well then don’t tease Big Colina like that, OK?” He grabbed Dave’s jaw and shook it as he spoke. “OK, David?” He dropped the character and let out a cheery waterfall of laughter. “Sorry. For real, I’ll be out soon. Just gotta go work some magic on the boss man.”
The night spun on for hours. A muscular boy with curly blond hair came through Colin’s front door wearing a Tar Heels jersey and glow-sticks around his wrists and neck. He carried a tall, full cup flashing different colors in one hand and a bottle of Pinnacle Whipped in the other. I glanced at Cristina, and she returned my disapproving look. I wondered where this kid, this embodiment of club drugs, came from. Cristina joined a group of girls, talking loudly and excitedly with them in the kitchen. I leaned over Willie’s shoulder as he scrolled through the iPod running through the speakers, frowning until I saw “Tootsee Roll.” Willie put it on, and we danced—to the left, to the right, dipping, and sliding—and got the girls doing it. Colin briskly walked through the kitchen. The momentum in his pace worried me, so I followed. He hurried past the circle of people on the back porch, descended the couple of steps, and disappeared into the driveway. I lingered on the porch for a minute. Mike was the center of attention in a circle of smokers, telling stories about the dumb designer purchases he had made when he was high on roxies. “Two printed Louis Vuitton belts, five hundred dollars each. Moncler beanie. My yellow Gucci blazer. Every time, I walked in and was certain that this thing was made for me, that I looked like the man in that yellow jacket. Saw it the next day in my room and just wanted to kick myself in the face.”
I smiled at Mike and then went to follow Colin, walking into the driveway and seeing him ahead, in the street, with the curly blond-haired boy who was still flashing and glowing different colors. I caught up slowly on my bare feet, and they stood watching me fearfully. As I got close, Colin urgently leaned to whisper something to the boy, and then, as if pulling off a mask, turned a completely new, warm, bright, welcoming face to me. “Lucie, my angel, is everything OK?” he asked, extending an arm as I approached and pulling me close by the waist. “I’m so sorry I keep disappearing at my own party. Terrible manners. I hope you’re not mad. You’re not upset, though?”
I studied his eyes under the artificial light of the streetlamp, his pupils small like specks in his bright eyes. “Why would I be mad?” I asked.
He turned to the boy and put his other arm around his shoulders. “Brandon, this is Lucie—she’s always down, never upset. That’s why I love you,” he said to me, rubbing his nose against mine. “You get me.” He now pulled me and Brandon even closer, making a tight huddle. “Listen, you wanna come with us real quick? Gotta run an errand with Brando.”
I balanced on the handlebars of Brandon’s bike, terrified of crashing, while Colin stood on the pegs. We dismounted a few streets away, and I followed the boys through a fence gate, into a dark house, up the stairs, and into a room on the left. In the darkness, all I could see was the illuminated fish tank that divided the room. Brandon flipped on the lights, and I now saw that on one side was a bed with a tapestry and an intimidating bear’s head, mid-roar, hanging on the wall. On the other side of the room, some couches and beanbag chairs surrounded a low table that held some thin papers, a little box, and a long hunting knife.
“Come on out, lil buddeh,” Brandon coaxed, and I turned to watch him lure a three-foot snake out of a tank on the floor by the bed. It slowly slunk up his tattooed arm, coiling its lower half around his elbow as it made its way to his shoulders. “That’s rah-eet. Brando’s hihr, big gah-ee,” he assured the snake, lifting his arms to allow it more space to wind and dangle. It loosely hung around his neck, its head erect and alert. “You wonna hold ‘em?” he asked me.
I turned to the table across the room, where Colin sat fumbling with the box and knife, slicing strips and putting them aside. He looked up and smiled at us. “Lucie, don’t touch the snake if you don’t want to; he is kinda scary. We’ll leave in three minutes. Come over here.”
Later that night, my back twitched incessantly, and I coughed lightly every few minutes. I was wide awake in a bed with Cristina. I finally got up and stood facing the bed, declaring, “I know my coughing is bothering you; you don’t have to pretend it doesn’t. I don’t want to keep you up. Are you mad at me?” I was high and paranoid.
“I’m not mad at you,” she mumbled.
“Right there, see? You’re speaking angrily. Please don’t lie to me.” I felt her bitter frustration hovering in the room like a mushroom cloud.
“Go back to sleep. It’s fine.”
“OK,” I agreed, taking a step forward before hesitating. “No, I can’t. I’m going to have to sleep in the empty room tonight. I’m sorry,” I urged as I closed the door. I was so sorry that I felt like going back in to tell her a second time, but I resisted. Downstairs, the party was dwindling. I pushed open the screen door and addressed the handful of late-stayers on the back porch.
“Couldn’t sleep,” I explained to the group. They laughed.
“I told you. I don’t know what you were thinking. This girl,” he said, beckoning me to come sit a while.
Two summers ago, I got invited to go down with some friends from high school. One boy’s family rented a house with another family, and they were letting him have a couple of people over for the first weekend. It was me and four boys—future father figures who, even in high school, had played poker, gone golfing, and worn loafers. I had started hanging out with them because I had thought their fatherly quirks and dry, witty jokes so odd and different from my other idiot friend groups. Now that it had been a couple of years since high school, they acted like a bunch of Ivy League frat guys reuniting at a family barbeque—so many handshakes and slap-on-the-back-hugs; so much standing around with their feet planted wide apart and their hands in their pockets, talking about some of their “buddies” from school and chuckling at each other’s fratty war stories. One of them brought a new girlfriend from college, who smiled and rolled her eyes at particularly stupid pranks of which they bragged. Thinking themselves real badasses now, they brought a couple of flasks to the beach and got stiff-faced and dumb. When the sun set, we got dinner and then returned to sit around the table on the rooftop patio and play Kings. I hate drinking games in the same way I hate icebreakers. They take something that’s naturally fun and relaxed, and they speed it up and organize it into a set of forced drills.
I got bored and texted Smiley. “You guys can’t plan on just staying up here in isolation all night, right? Best thing about being down here is the people,” I suggested to the group.
“Yeah,” the boy who invited us said, “don’t you have like a thousand friends down here? Could you see if anyone’s throwing a party or something?”
Honestly, I didn’t know of any parties. Colin’s house had been boarded up with the electricity shut off for months. He had tried a semester of commuting to school from the Island instead of going back to his college apartment in Philly. It had started as a continuation of the summertime lifestyle into the fall, and it had ended with a car accident that landed him in prison. His parents had bailed him out of his cell. They had tried, too, to bail him out of the deep crevice he’d slunk into: the comfortable position he had created over the years that took an apathetic view towards danger and prioritized feeling and experience over everything. Colin had been held captive in his childhood home while his parents called his friends to try to understand what had happened to their son. Themselves as worried about Colin as his parents were, these friends had filled in the gaps—mostly drug stories—for them. Before they could try to fix him, he had gotten away, had slithered back to the Island, and had moved in with another girlfriend and her mom—both users; Colin was now considering it a success story. Mike, Cristina, and I didn’t know how far to let him in these days. We saw him around the Island, whenever we could get away from the mainland, but I could never tell if he was really there when I spoke to him. His jokes never came back down; his characters never shut off. Colin’s house was dead, and Colin seemed to go down with it.
But even if it were still swelling with all of its unorthodox, vulgar glory, our parties at Colin’s were not what my friends from high school had in mind. Our parties were Mike and Colin competing for the best—really, worst—spot to wake up after blacking out and passing out. Mike held the record with facedown on the stairs, as if he had been sliding down headfirst and couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer. Our parties were Colin’s heroin-addict girlfriend fingering the veins in Cristina’s arms, complimenting them, telling her she would love to use them. That girl would disappear into the shower for three hours, with a syringe we’d find later, and stumble out, planting herself facedown on the table covered with ash, beer cans, and empty bottles I’d throw out the next morning. Our parties were some guy named “Ted with the dreads” sauntering, unannounced, into our house one afternoon, extending his hand to me without closing his fist once I shook it—just leaving the fingers erectly outstretched—and telling us we needed to try DMT because it would change our world, that now he could see his girlfriend’s love visibly, like an aura. We had invited him to the kitchen, where Colin had smoked it from a bowl and told us what he saw. The results weren’t spectacular, so everyone drifted to happy hour, locking up by pushing a brick against the front screen door. Our parties were me coming down for water in the middle of the night and seeing Mike DMT-ed out, naked on the kitchen floor, telling me he’s in a puddle—he’s so wet and can’t get dry no matter how many layers he takes off—and me touching his arm, assuring him there’s no water, and going back to sleep.
I hadn’t noticed—none of us had—that things were escalating. It had been gradual and yet sudden: I got the call about Colin’s accident when I was back in the mundane routine of real life, and only then did I consider the beach house with a straight head. The shenanigans had always ended when the seasons changed, wistfully idealized until the next summer. To carry the camaraderie into the fall was unheard of; of course it hadn’t worked. Anyway, the welcoming culture of open parties every night just wasn’t available like it once was, even if these fatherly fraternity boys had been comfortable with it. Things had fallen apart. As a group, we had ridden a wave too big, and now those of us who had dismounted and survived had to wait carefully for the rest to resurface.
I was sitting back in a folding chair, wondering whether this metaphor was clever, with my feet crossed at the ankles and resting on the glass table. I stared out over the rooftops at the Ferris wheel’s bright lights in the distance. Every few seconds I saw the bow or stern of the Sea Dragon swing above the dark obstructions of the skyline. “I don’t know about parties,” I said finally, rousing from my daze, “but you guys gotta at least meet Smiley while you’re here. He doesn’t drink,” I clarified, “but I might go get coffee with him later if anyone wants to go for the walk and meet some people.”
“Smiley, haha, I remember you and Cristina always talking about him in high school,” said one boy, a skinny soccer player who studied engineering. “Yeah, as cool as he sounds, I’m not sure how much I’m trying to hang out with some thirty-year-old dude tonight.” I let my eyes trail from the colorful lights to the bland people around the table, studying each one coldly. Colin and his friends were older than these kids by only a few years, so it wasn’t age, but there was something so much more open and knowledgeable about their views of people and the world—a disinterestedness that let them accept more and judge less. Sometimes they were so open that their life filter stopped working, but I felt like my high school boys were missing out on life. My phone rang while I sat contemplating them.
“LUCAY, it’s Smiley. What’s goin’ on, babe?”
Alone I walked to the Boulevard and up a couple of blocks to Cool Beans, where I found him talking to another lifeguard’s father about what the kid was going to do after college. Smiley offered some advice from Aristotle and introduced me to the man.
Inside the coffee shop, I pumped out a small cup of Chunky Monkey, my favorite coffee flavor of bananas and chocolate that tastes incredible with soymilk, and he ordered a Java Jolt and told me to put my money away. The Jolt wasn’t on the menu, but Smiley had been ordering the insane iced coffee and espresso drink for years and had recently spread the secret to Mike, who, following in Smiley’s footsteps, had quit drinking and all drugs except nicotine and caffeine. I once asked Mike what’s in the Jolt, and he said, “Coffee extract. Meth.”
Smiley and I went outside to the old-fashioned brick alleyway lined with Cool Beans, Country Kettle Chowda, and Crust and Crumb Bakery. We sat at one of the wooden picnic tables and stared at each other.
“So what’s new?” I broke the silence. “Anything exciting happen over the winter? What’s your schedule like now? Tell me something.”
“Well, there’s not a lot. I’m in Brooklyn three days riding around in an ambulance, then here the other four days, then back. My last day off was five months ago.”
“You’re nuts. I would just choose one place for the season.”
“I like my profession, but I don’t like to be in the city when I’m not working. Miss the sun. Miss the surf,” he said plainly in his deep, direct voice, his icy blue eyes drilling mine.
“Would they let you take summers off to guard down here and go back in the fall?”
“Maybe later. I’m already asking a lot to have four days of the week away. But it’s awesome,” he said and smiled. “What else is there to do in this world after you’ve seen someone die and known how to bring them back to life? I’ve done a lot of traveling. Climbing down the Grand Canyon, surfing twenty-foot waves in Peru: it’s nothing compared to seeing death in front of you. And being able to beat it.”
“Yeah, I guess you’ve always liked to save people. I mean, yeah, that sounds incredible.” He let the silence linger for a couple of minutes, a habit of his that always made me uncomfortably grasp for something to say, but I usually came up with nothing.
“I just deliver the medicine. I don’t save them.” He was back to complete seriousness. “Sometimes there’s nothing we can do; we get there too late. An eight-year-old boy was dying in my arms on Tuesday.” He paused. “There was nothing we could do.”
We finished our coffee in silence as people we knew drifted through our corner. Brandon, the curly blond-haired boy, sat for a solid forty minutes with his dreamy girlfriend and scrawny friend. He showed us his newest tattoo, a mermaid with his girlfriend’s face, on his bicep, and he bugged out as Smiley offered philosophical questions, some what-ifs about size and space. “Yer bluh-win’ ma mind, duhhhd,” Brandon nervously confessed in his surfer’s accent. Everything he said seemed to spill from an irrational paranoia. “Duhd, ya gotta stop, Smah-ley,” he said and started laughing in a high pitch. “Ah can’t handle et,” he squeezed out through the high nervous giggles.
“I should go back to my friends, anyway. I’ll see you guys on the beach tomorrow?” I said as I put my sweater on and then pulled my bag over my head to the opposite shoulder. Smiley stood from the picnic bench, bumped the two boys’ fists, and ruffled up the girlfriend’s smooth hair.
“See ya, guys. I need to go to sleep, too, trying to get out early tomorrow; surf’s supposed to be nasty,” he told Brandon. “You want a ride back to the house? Where are you guys staying?” he asked me.
The Crown Vic had died in flames on the Parkway sometime in the past couple of years and been replaced by a silver Hyundai sedan. I opened the passenger door and looked at the heaps of unidentifiable stuff on the seats and floor. “Just sit on top of it. You’re small,” Smiley said. We drove the eight blocks back to Dan’s rented house.
“How is this your real life?” I asked as I saw the reincarnated cigarette-butt-stuffed compartment in the center console under the stereo.
“Relationships don’t do too well on this Island,” Smiley says one night this summer in a conversation about my current boyfriend back on the mainland. We sit together on the wooden lookout near the dunes at the end of Taylor Ave. We’ve gone for a walk to check the surf.
“Yeah, I guess not,” I say after listening to a couple of waves crash. We sit for a few minutes without speaking. “It doesn’t really matter to me,” I say, pressing ignore again on my vibrating phone.
“You can take the call if you want. I don’t mind,” he says. It’s my boyfriend, calling over and over in short intervals. I’ve already sent him a text saying I’m with Smiley and will call when I get home, but it only catalyzes his paranoia.
“I don’t really want to. He’s driving me nuts,” I say. “Everything’s gotta end eventually, I guess.”
“Wanna come feel the water?” he asks.
I hop down from my perch, slip off my sandals, and follow him away from the street, to the ocean, which hurls and smashes its water so loudly at night. A wave breaks and crashes, its foamy sheet slipping up the sand and lapping our ankles. I feel the sand give way beneath my feet, and I sink an inch into it, as the water now hurriedly slides back into place, ducking under the next wave. I look at Smiley, who gazes at the glassy, black, rippling surface that stretches out forever, and then I watch a new wave, stronger than the last few, smack the sand and spray and spit its splash in a misty explosion. Its rushing foam layer hits my calves in its powerful course, spreading far over the beach onto dry sand, but even this one, like the others, recedes again, regained by the great body of water.
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