September Girls Read Online Free PDF Page A

hear Dad’s stomach making angry gurgling noises from across the table. We all just sat there looking at one another. Even Jeff had nothing to say.
    After we’d been waiting for several minutes in absolute silence, the waitress finally sidled up to us. She was angular and statuesque and had her hair piled on top of her head with a few ball-point pens in an elaborate origami. Her eye shadow gave her eyes an exotically trashy aspect, and her red spaghetti-strap tank was cut to reveal a supple, copious helping of cleavage in which a small necklace dangled, a curled seashell in sunset colors.
    More seashells. Another blonde. She was standing there, poised to take our orders. We stared up at her expectantly. She stared back.
    “Hi,” I said.
    “Hi,” Jeff said eagerly.
    “I’m Crystal,” the waitress said. I was glad she had cleared up the pronunciation, because her faded plastic name tag read “Kristle.” Like gristle, I thought. The name tag had a blob of dried ketchup on it: a rancid comma. There’s nothing sicker to me than the smell of ketchup—dried ketchup especially—but I’ll be real with you. Stupid name and dried ketchup or not, she was gorgeous. Maybe a little tan before her time, but hot nonetheless.
    “What can I get for you boys?” she asked, pulling one of her pens from her updo without disturbing it in the slightest. She had a slight accent—practically unidentifiable, but foreign for sure. I looked back down at my menu, still undecided between a burger and a steak and cheese—I was leaning toward the burger because I didn’t know about the wisdom of getting a steak and cheese in the American South—and that’s when I felt her hand on my shoulder. I looked up slowly and saw both my father and brother staring at me with expressions that were flipping between surprise, amusement, and what the fuck . Kristle gave my neck a tender squeeze.
    “Got a little sunburn there,” she said. I couldn’t tell if she was making fun of me.
    “Uh, burger,” I said, doing that thing where you stare straight ahead and look at a person at the same time.
    “One burger,” Kristle said.
    When she took my menu from me, her fingers brushed against my wrist, and I felt a tiny tingle shoot up my arm and into my chest.
    After she’d walked away, my father made an exaggerated face like, okay now , and Jeff gave me a look of befuddled consternation.
    When we were finished eating, my father and Jeff went down to look at the beach, and I paid a dollar to the gift shop girl for a ticket to the fishing pier. She took my dollar, reached into a drawer, pulled out a ticket, and ripped it in half before handing me the stub. As she gave it to me, it was like she let her fingers rest in my palm a split second longer than usual.
    I took it from her, weirded out, and walked away without saying anything.
    I walked out to the pier alone, past old grizzled fishermen with leathery brown skin and scraggly beards and those little hats and buckets of bait and everything. When I got to the end, I lingered against the side, just to look like I had some purpose for being out there, like maybe I was waiting for someone to deliver my fishing rod.
    I watched my father and Jeff in the distance. They were in the sand together and were now standing and chatting. It was weird. I was so sick of my father, and the last thing in the world I wanted to do was talk to him, but seeing him and Jeff talking so easily I felt left out. It looked like they were having some kind of intense conversation, standing facing the water, Jeff with his arms folded high on his chest as he nodded thoughtfully, the wind whipping his hair in every direction and the late-afternoon sun glowing on his face. I wondered what they could possibly be talking about. Maybe Dad was still talking about how great the fucking french fries were “down here.” (Mine had been soggy and unremarkable.)
    I watched them for a few minutes and finally—reluctantly—decided to join them.