“You can even spell it all screwed up and it corrects it and you just click on the correction.”
“I’m not going to say anything that will make me sound old. I’d be depressed like you young people, then. Best not to verbalize every feeling.”
“Don’t you want to get out of this place sometimes?” she said, twisting the loose part of her hair she’d dyed pink the same day she cut bangs.
“I have a secret life. I’ve broken almost every commandment,” Raleigh said. “As your mother will be the first to tell you. Thing is, I’ve run out of steam.”
“You don’t get to admit that if you’re my age,” she said over her shoulder on her way down the steps. He turned on the porch light for her, though it wasn’t dark yet. Now they were on the downside of the longest day of the year. Soon the days would be like riding a roller coaster. She’d taken one of Raleigh’s Tylenol 2s once and given it to T. G., the cutest boy, whose taste ran more to simple things, like Red Bull and vodka to wash down a few antihistamines. He was really peculiar. Still, he’d appreciated the gesture. She wouldn’t dare steal another. Bettina probably had hidden cameras in the house, she was so possessive. It was totally awesome that Becca had gotten to go to Australia and even went out on a boat to the Great Barrier Reef, which her father had dived into. While everyone waited for him to surface, Becca had thrown up in a bag. Jocelyn had no update, because her mother was totally opposed to her texting on vacation and had turned off the messaging on Jocelyn’s phone.
* * *
Down at the beach, only the pretty girl, Angie, and her constant companion, Zelda, were standing where the water met the sand, Zelda with one of those dramatic Indian scarves her mother bought blowing from her neck like someone asking to be hanged. It was white with some sparkly things sewn on, she saw, as she came closer. “Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” Angie said. One of her strategies was to pretend she wasn’t extremely pretty and that she was happy to see other girls. She was the same whether or not boys were around.
“Cool scarf,” Jocelyn said. “How many of those do you have, Zelda?”
“They’re mostly my mother’s. She like hates to actually give one away so I just borrow them all the time. I’m tired of all of them. I don’t wear blue anymore, anyway.”
“It is so boring in that house,” Jocelyn said, stepping out of her flip-flops, tossing them behind her on the sand. “I’m sure they haven’t had sex for forty years. My mom told me Bettina almost went into a convent when she was a teenager. I don’t know how he stands being there. He says he’s tired.”
“Me, too,” Zelda said. “I slept five hours last night. I am completely living for the last day of class. I don’t care if I never go to college, all I want to do is get out of this town any way I can, waitress, stripper, like I care. My mother’s writing this person she knows at Yale, like Yale takes losers who get C pluses on their essays. Makes sense to me.”
“You scored genius on your math SAT,” Angie said. “Eight hundred. Fucking eight hundred! Nobody does that. My brother’s a biologist, and he scored seven hundred forty or something.”
“Big deal,” Zelda said. “I got another C on my last English essay.”
“I don’t think you were meant for English, I think you were meant for math,” Angie said.
“Sure. Maybe I can teach it at Yale.”
“You are so down on Yale!” Jocelyn said. “Do you realize how many times you bring it up?”
Zelda shrugged. The scarf blew across her face and probably got some pink lipstick on it. She didn’t really try to keep up with Angie, but most nights she applied one thing: one night mascara, another night lipstick.
“So what did you write about?” Angie said, her eyes downcast. “I can’t even believe this is what we have to talk to each other about. I guess we could just shut up and not say anything.”
“I thought T. G. was coming down tonight,” Jocelyn said.
“Tell her,” Angie said to Zelda.
“What? Like you can’t? He’s in the ER getting his stomach pumped. He texted me. He put down a bottle of Ambien, or something, and barfed it all up on Stoli. The dog was licking his face when his father walked in.”
“No way,” Jocelyn said.
“Your boooooooyfriend,” Zelda said. “Or at least, one of the few guys in the class who isn’t a sociopath, or something. That kid that cuts himself? Way gross! All that blood getting flicked around under the desk. We could get AIDS.”
“The ER,” Jocelyn echoed. “Wow.”
“He’ll text when he’s out.” Zelda shrugged.
“Should we visit him, or something?” Angie said suddenly.
“They don’t let friends visit each other in the ER,” Jocelyn said.
“Well, I would,” Zelda said. “It would be good for morale.”
“That’s the Army or something,” Angie said. “Mo-raaaale,” she drawled.
The stars were out over the water. Jocelyn thought the slight heavy feeling in her stomach might be because she was about to get her period. Her mother had had a hysterectomy. It was one of the reasons she’d sent Jocelyn to her aunt and uncle’s. She felt so weak and sick. And Bettina had made such a pitch for the “accelerated” summer program. What did that mean? Like you never put on the brake? If she could, she’d pull up a hand brake. Just WHAM! and even with the seat belt she’d be nose to nose with the windshield, the car would stop so suddenly.
“I wrote about Lupine,” she said. “I couldn’t get the Magical Realism part about them, though. I’m also so retarded, I got the wrong word, but my uncle knew what flowers I meant. I think I’m going to figure out a way the whole field can lift up and become the sky, or something.”
“It gets Raptured?” Zelda said.
“And it would turn out that we’re really walking in the sky and then there’s this flash of Earth, and then the planet revolves, or something. I mean, she’d go with anything, if the grammar was correct.”
Zelda laughed. Jocelyn noticed that she’d painted her toes pale green.
“When I was little, my parents had a sleeping porch. We’d all three of us be out there in July and most of August. Then my father closed it in,” Angie said.
“My mother’s worried about losing our house. She says she’s getting a reverse mortgage, but Uncle Raleigh says she is not. He’s trying to find a job. He quit the other one because he had to stand up all day, but now he wishes he hadn’t.”
“What age are those people?” Angie asked.
“He’s like ten years older than my mother. He’s sixty.”
“Sixty. I can’t even imagine my parents at sixty. They had me when they were twenty, so they’re thirty-six. Sixty!” Angie said. “I guess people live longer now.”
“That’s Cassiopeia,” Zelda said, twining her scarf around her throat, then tugging it down. “Why wouldn’t the Big Dipper be out?”
“It’s too depressed. It’s at home, writing an essay: ‘My Life as the Big Dipper,’ ” Jocelyn said. “I’ve got to fix the end of my essay. I said I’d be back in an hour. That gives me how much time before I have to go?”
Zelda checked her cell phone. “Twenty-five minutes, more or less,” she said. “I didn’t notice exactly when you came.”
Jocelyn thought she might just drive past the hospital. She could go in and ask if he was okay, even if they wouldn’t tell her anything. When her own mother was hospitalized, they wouldn’t tell her anything. They’d only tell Bettina. And Raleigh, too, though he was never at the hospital because he had an anxiety thing if he walked into one. He had to carry smelling salts in sealed packets, like substitute sugar. She and Raleigh had gone to matinees — he was pretty great about that; he’d watch anything — and they’d eaten wherever she wanted, so she’d ordered a lot of really fresh, tasty stuff at Chipotle, and then they’d bought takeout for BLT, which always leaked out of the container, though neither Raleigh nor she could ever figure out how that happened every time.