September Girls Read Online Free PDF Page B

not make any move. I was suspicious. I didn’t know what to make of any of it. Girls had never looked at me like this before—they had always turned to Sebastian or Jeff or whoever first, with me as a second choice if not necessarily a last resort. Now, even with Jeff right next to me—even with him casually flexing his pecs for show—it was like I was the only guy left on earth.
    If I was the only one who had noticed what was going on that might be one thing—you could chalk it up to my imagination, hubris, wishful thinking, whatever. But Jeff saw it too. In fact, it was pissing the hell out of him. He was used to commanding all attention.
    “You wearing some kind of special cologne or something?” he asked. “You’re working some crazy voodoo on those bitches.” He was trying to sound obliging, but there was annoyance in his voice. In the week since our arrival at the beach, he had started primping before we left the house, taken to wearing sleeveless shirts and swimming laps in the ocean out beyond the breakers every day, going for jogs—the whole drill. He was trying to keep himself in fighting form, maybe attract a few glances of his own. It was no use. The girls wanted me.
    Okay, maybe I’m overstating things a little bit. It wasn’t all of them. The thing that’s hard to explain is that there were other girls too. There were girls, and then there were Girls. You could tell the difference. It’s hard to say exactly what separated them, except that the other girls were just regular girls—I mean, the kind I go to school with. Some were pretty; some were busted. Some were fat; some were thin; some were a little of both. Blondes, brunettes, whatever. They were on vacation. They were with their families, with their boyfriends, walking along the beach, whatever, and they would be leaving in a week or two. Those girls didn’t pay any attention to me.
    It was the Girls who cared. The Girls who were all tall and blond and a little strange looking, all of them young and beautiful but odd. Who seemed sort of alien, who worked in the stores and the restaurants and at the surfboard rental shacks. These were girls you wouldn’t be able to imagine living anywhere else but here, except that they seemed out of place here, too. Not just because of that weird accent, but also because of the way they drifted without purpose, hesitant and distracted looking, almost like they weren’t ever sure where they were going. DeeDee. Kristle. The gift shop girl. The rest.
    When they passed me, they stared and smiled.
    Again, it was fucking weird. I couldn’t piece it together. So I didn’t bother. I just tried to ignore it, just went on doing my thing. For our first week and a half at the beach I continued waking up early and taking walks alone, always to the pink hotel, where I would sit for a few minutes before returning home.
    It was a ritual that I enjoyed. I liked the melancholy of it; I liked the solitary feeling of being alone against the backdrop of peeling paint and happy vacationers. It was like being the last survivor of a civilization, like the crowds around me weren’t even real but just lingering echoes from other, beachier times. Sometimes I would try to eavesdrop on their conversations, but they all just sounded like squawking birds.
    I would often return from my walks to find Jeff in the sand on the shore near our cottage, sometimes asleep, sometimes playing some dumb-ass game on his iPhone, sometimes squinting to read a book (he was halfheartedly working his way through Infinite Jest , although when I asked him what it was about, all he said was, “Hell if I fuckin’ know”). Something seemed to be bothering him. I figured it had to be the lack of sex, which he’d previously made a point of indicating he was used to on a very regular basis. He had stopped bothering with his plans for getting me laid. He had himself to worry about now.
    One morning I woke early, ready to go walking, only to see Jeff waiting