SOLANGE TURNS TOWARD the passenger side window as they pass over the causeway, the water a navy field trembling with lights. “I’m going to come back here.”
“I’ll take you anytime,” Avis says.
Solange looks at her again with her cool, curious gaze, then something seems to release in her eyes, as if she were looking right through Avis; turning back to the window she says, “I have to go get him.”
Avis glances at her, but a kind of heavy, silencing drapery seems to have fallen over the car, separating the two women. She drives Solange back to her home, pulling into the driveway behind a black sedan. The house lights glow and a form moves behind the curtains. Solange doesn’t get out of the car right away. She stares at her lap, then mumbles “Bonne chance” as she kisses Avis’s cheek.
“Bonne chance?” Avis smiles, but Solange climbs out of the car in silence. Avis sits with her hands draped on the wheel, a wisp of melancholy in her chest as she watches the woman walk to the door of her house, enter, and close the door.
Felice
HEAT LIGHTNING FLICKERS IN THE NIGHT, FLASHES with a violet after-image. Felice walks the empty beach with Reynaldo and Berry, the three of them bumping into each other, their voices absorbed in the salt air. She feels light as the dry lightning, casting no shadows. She spent the day lying out on the beach with Berry, dozing and eating candy, just as if the two of them were college girls on vacation. Only the vacation doesn’t end. If she were home… For a moment, she allows herself to imagine the sort of birthday cake her mother would make, the scent of baking, the rosettes sculpted in fondant. For all she knows, everyone from her old life could be dead — like Hannah used to say. Everyone that she’s ever loved vanished.
They walk to the public restrooms, a squat cinder-block building, and enter the women’s room. It’s deserted and echoing at this hour. There’s a grit of sand coating the sinks and masking the mirrors. They wash themselves with the trickle of cold water at the sinks under beige-green lights: Reynaldo’s and Berry’s skin looks mottled and scaly along the backs of their arms. Felice frowns at her own hazy reflection, tries to smooth her hair, but then Reynaldo shakes his head and says, “You’re not allowed to look at yourself. You’re such a freak of nature — it’s disgusting.”
Berry makes snatching gestures at Felice. “I’ll take your eyes, skin, hair, lips, and body — thank you very much.”
Felice grabs Berry’s hand and they play wrestle. “What’re you even talking about?” She laughs, pushing on Berry’s hand. They dance around, stamping in the gray puddles on the floor. “You guys are way cuter than me.”
Reynaldo snaps his fingers. “Do not do that. Do not even say that to me, bitch. I’m a have you arrested.”
Felice feels hungry and good from all the pot they’d smoked and a little baggie of cocaine they’d shared with Heinrich — a couple of birthday snorts. They leave the restroom and walk up the cool carpet of sand in the moonlight, and Felice feels like they own the beach. She’s put Emerson out of her mind: a distant figure, he might be one of the flakes of moonlight sparkling on the waves. Felice skips into a scissoring jump, throws down her board and tries to do a cartwheel. After a few attempts both Berry and Felice manage crude cartwheels. They laugh wildly and turn one after another, kicking up sand. Reynaldo sits on the beach, watching. Finally Felice picks up her board and they head toward town, shaking sand out of their hair and beating it from their hands.
There’s the usual din of people parading along Ocean Drive. Felice can feel the throb of a bass a full block before she hears the music. It’s hot out but there are still long lines for outside tables at the cafés; rental cars ease down the street, girls sitting on top, legs dangling into sunroofs; music blares out of the Versace mansion, the Time café, a row of expensive boutiques. Even just a year ago, Felice still enjoyed this scene, the stalk through the crowd with her friends, all of them long-legged, hair bubbling down their backs. Now she feels remote from everything. Some college kid in a T-shirt that says no limitZ lets an enormous plastic cup fall from his fingers to the sidewalk. Black fluid sprays everywhere. She has started to notice the garbage. When she was fourteen, the beach was enchanted. But now she sees that people come for a long weekend, a week perhaps, that it’s a temporary enchantment, that people behave here in ways they never would back in Naperville and Houston and Scranton. Felice once talked to a girl at a bar who was amazed to hear that Felice had been born and raised in Miami. “No way, you’re from here?” The girl’s face was sun-scorched with pale rings around her eyes. “This isn’t a place where people really live.”
They leave Ocean Drive and walk over to Washington where the sonic boom of the clubs intensifies. Velvet-roped lines stretch along the sidewalks and girls in lingerie dresses and towering shoes eye Felice with arch faces. The night swishes with languages: Portuguese, French, Russian, Arabic, intertwined with cigarette smoke and the smell of alcohol and perfume. Everyone awaiting the moment of entry. When Felice’s friend William, at Cloud 9, stashes her board and unhooks the rope to let them pass, the waiting girls’ eyes narrow; cigarette smoke streams between manicures. In their jeans and tank tops, Felice and Berry never wait for entry and never pay an admission fee. They enter the club’s bolus of dancing, pulsating lighting and noise. The place is a Roman circus of floors and lobbies: there are circular metal staircases and semi-private nooks for snorting and smoking and screwing. A series of spotlights synced to the music strobes the crowd, so amplified Felice feels its throb in her rib cage. She’s happy to be here again, inside the animating charge. The music pauses, shifts, and Felice watches the crowd pause and shift, as if jolted by a live current. Just the way silvery schools of small fish swerve in tandem. The dance floors are tidal — all movement and turbulence — swept into an internal sea.
They club-hop, visiting a series of dance floors, a series of velvet ropes unhooked. Berry tells their friends that it’s Felice’s birthday and Reynaldo crows, “She’s eighteen—you believe that shit? She’s one of them now.” People buy them shots. They see kids from the beach, from the tattoo shop, from the Green House — including one of Emerson’s skinhead friends, Anders. He tells Felice, “Emerson’s really worried about you, man.”
In the ladies’ room at the third or fourth club, Felice and Berry are offered E, then something that’s dripped on the tongue from an eyedropper. Felice nibbles at the sour edge of a pill and gives the rest to Berry. After Berry squeezes the eyedropper under her tongue, her pupils dilate to the outer rims of her irises. “Mmm. Yeah.” She says to Felice, “Have you noticed how everyone here is super ugly?” She sits on the edge of the shelf of sinks, her body long and narrow as an insect’s. Like Felice, she could make money if she showed up more often for shoots. “Don’t you think they’re such trolls?” She hunches over, hunting in her jeans pockets for a cigarette. A flurry of women rush in and out, crowding the long mirror, applying mascara, shaking out their hair, chattering, tugging at their clothes. Berry could say or do anything, Felice marvels, and they wouldn’t notice a thing. Felice has lost track of how many Cuba Libres she’s consumed this evening; there’s a smoky tang in her sinuses and the floor seems to slope. She leans against Berry’s sharp knees. “I think they’re sweet,” she says plaintively.