by Cathy Holton
And then she met J. T. Radford and everything changed.
It was during her first weeks at Bedford. She and Mel had come up to school together in Mel’s car while Sara’s parents followed behind, and after three weeks at Bedford they had begun to settle in. Mount Clemmons was beautiful, a rambling village of Victorian cottages clustered around the tall redbrick Gothic buildings of the campus. The overall effect was that of an English boarding school set down in the wilds of North Carolina. Mel and Sara were suitemates in Nordan Hall along with an amiable girl from Alabama named Lola, and a not-so-amiable girl from Nashville named Anne Louise. Nordan was the dorm closest to the woods, the one easiest to sneak out of after curfew, a fact it did not take Mel and Sara long to discover. On their third weekend on campus, they heard about a bonfire down by the lake and decided to go. Lola and Anne Louise were less enthusiastic.
“You’ll get caught,” Anne Louise said, sitting on the edge of Mel’s bed watching them dress. She had her hair wrapped around big curlers. Her face was covered with green paste. She looked like the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz, only without the hat and the long black dress. “You’ll get caught and then you’ll get expelled.”
“The only way we’ll get caught,” Mel said, looking pointedly at Anne Louise, “is if someone rats us out.”
Anne Louise, under her covering of green paste, managed to look offended. “Well, don’t look at me,” she said.
“This is so exciting,” Lola said, clapping her hands and gliding into the room in a floor-length nightgown. They had been here three weeks and Sara had not seen Lola wear the same nightgown twice. Where does she keep them all? Sara had asked Mel, who replied, I think she wears them once and then throws them out. The girl’s dad was governor of Alabama. She can afford plenty of nightgowns.
“Why don’t you come with us, Lola?” Mel asked. “It’ll be fun.”
Lola looked tempted but then frowned and shook her head. “I better not,” she said. “Y’all might get in trouble.” Lola had gone to an exclusive all-girl prep school and she still had the naive respect for authority engendered in such places. Four years with Mel and Sara would eventually cure her of that.
“They can’t expel all of us,” Sara said reasonably. “It’s going to be a big party. They’d have to expel half the school.”
Mel gave her a high five. “Good thinking,” she said. She turned to Lola and Anne Louise. “Come on, girls. Take a walk on the wild side. Live a little.”
In the end Lola and Anne Louise were not convinced, so it was Mel and Sara who ran barefoot through the wet grass toward the woods, giggling and shoving each other. Moonlight dappled the tall trees and fell in silver swells across the wide lawn. When they reached the woods, they sat down and put their shoes on, then followed a narrow twisting trail down a sloping embankment toward the river. All around them, mountain ridges wreathed in fog rose into the evening sky. Frogs sang in the swampy bottoms. The girls followed the trail through thick stands of mountain laurel, around boulders that glistened in the moonlight like the backs of slumbering beasts.
“How much farther?” Sara asked. “Are you sure you know where you’re going?”
Ahead they could hear distant music. Light flickered among the tree trunks, and as they got closer, it flared into a wide vista of dancing firelight. The trail ended on a low ridge. Standing there looking down a steep sandy embankment to the river, they could see a huge bonfire roaring on the beach, surrounded by a crowd of moving figures. Several cars were parked on the beach. Someone had opened the doors of one of the cars and “L. A. Woman” blared from the radio.
Mel and Sara stood up on the ridge for a while and watched the party.
“I don’t know about this,” Sara said. “I don’t see anyone I know.”
“We’re freshmen,” Mel reminded her. “We don’t know anybody. That’s the whole point of being here.”
“Do you think it’s safe?” Sara said, but Mel had already started down the embankment, her feet kicking up little clumps of sand. Sara stood for a moment listening to the eerie stillness behind her and then started down. She figured the chances of being abducted or assaulted were less likely in front of a crowded bonfire than standing alone on a moonlit ridge.
Once she got to the beach, however, she began to rethink this. Several boys had already noticed Mel, and by the time Sara reached the beach, they had come forward to greet them. There were girls, scattered here and there, but it was mostly a male crowd, which made Sara uncomfortable. It wasn’t that she didn’t like boys. She did. It’s just that, unlike most of the girls she knew, she wasn’t planning her whole life around catching one. Boys were okay alone but in groups they tended to be rude and nasty. They tended to treat girls like things that existed solely for their own plea sure.
“Hey, do you want a beer?” one of the boys asked them, holding up a plastic cup. They had set up a keg in the back of a pickup truck and were taking turns shooting a stream of foamy beer into an endless supply of clear plastic cups.
“Sure,” Mel said.
“No, thanks,” Sara said.
Maybe it was because she’d grown up with younger brothers. She’d grown up with stained underwear scattered across the bathroom floor, with pinup girls and Matchbox cars, and with bedrooms that smelled faintly of dirty socks and old cheese. Boys were predictable. Sara knew male code intimately; it was not a hard code to crack.
“So you girls go to Bedford?”
“That’s right,” Mel said.
Sara stood at the fringe of boys surrounding Mel and tried not to feel self-conscious. She stuck her fingers into the pockets of her jeans and stared at a couple of guys who had broken into an impromptu wrestling match. A crowd gathered quickly to egg them on.
“That dickwad Jemison,” one of the boys said to Mel. “He took state last year and thinks he’s tough shit.”
“My dad watches the WWF,” Mel said. “I hate wrestling.”
Sara tried to catch Mel’s eye but Mel was obviously ignoring her. When Mel had asked her earlier if she wanted to go to a bonfire, Sara had pictured something a little more sedate, with maybe a few cheerleaders and several clean-cut members of the football team gathered around singing school songs. She hadn’t imagined the raucous, long-haired dopers she saw congregated here. Not an athlete among them, she thought, looking around the crowd, unless you counted sprinting from the law as a track-and-field event. (Except, of course, Jemison, the all-state wrestler, who now had his opponent pinned up against the tire of one of the cars.)
“Hey, assholes, watch out for my car!” someone shouted above the blare of the music.
The air was thick with the sweet, acrid aroma of grass. Sara watched a doobie make its way slowly around Mel’s circle of admirers. “Toke?” the boy next to Sara asked, offering her the joint.
“No, thanks,” Sara said.
“Sure,” Mel said, reaching for it.
Sara had partied in high school; everyone in Howard’s Mill drank, even the Baptist minister (surreptitiously, of course, and never in front of his own flock. He drove to Nashville to booze it up). But Sara didn’t like to lose control of herself, and she didn’t like the taste of alcohol, so usually two beers were enough for her. After that she took care of everyone else who didn’t seem to know when to stop, Mel included, holding their hair while they were sick, making sure they didn’t pass out in dangerous places, making sure she was the one who drove everyone home. She never did drugs. She’d gotten used to her role as designated driver in high school but it wasn’t something she’d wanted to carry over into college life.
“If you get shit faced,” she said to Mel, “how’re you planning on getting back to the dorm? I can’t drive you and I sure as hell can’t carry you.”
“She can spend the night here,” one of the boys, a big red-faced guy named Darrel, said. The others snorted and showed their teeth like a troop of chimpanzees.
“Good luck explaining that to the R.A.,” Sara said, ignorin
g them. Mel took another hit and giggled.
It wasn’t that Sara minded having a boyfriend, although certainly not one like these idiots, she thought, looking disparagingly around the circle at their red hairy faces. Her last boyfriend, Heath, had been the high school quarterback and he’d been nice enough. (The rumor was that he’d gone out with Sara to get back at the cheerleader who’d dumped him; he’d figured the best revenge was dating a “smart” girl.) Heath was good-looking and clean, and he smelled of Old Spice and shaving cream. He’d picked her out of the yearbook because Sara was photogenic and took a good picture, and he thought she’d looked “pretty” and “nice.” (She didn’t mind about the revenge rumor.) He was nice, too, and the things they did together were nice (some were downright enjoyable), but despite his being good-looking and charming and popular, she still didn’t trust him completely. She still couldn’t give herself to him. Heath didn’t handle rejection well. He pouted and sulked and became overbearing and obsessive. He couldn’t seem to comprehend that she didn’t want what other girls wanted: marriage out of high school and three children by twenty-five. He couldn’t seem to see the big picture as she so patiently explained it to him.
When she broke up with him, he’d shouted, “You can’t break up with me! I’m the quarterback!,” which Sara thought was childish and pathetic, really. But by then she’d become enamored of Faye Dunaway’s character in Chinatown (I don’t get tough with anyone, Mr. Gittes. My lawyer does) and saw herself ten years into the future, a powerful woman navigating the treacherous male-dominated waters of corporate law like a sharp-toothed barracuda.
“Hey, who’s this?” Jemison, the all-state wrestler, had appeared out of nowhere, shirtless and pumped up like a silverback gorilla. His hair stood up wildly around his head. He leered at Mel and sauntered over. “Who’s this foxy girl?” he asked. Mel rolled her eyes and glanced at Sara, who gave her a quick let’s go look.
He slung one meaty arm across her shoulders and Mel quickly pushed it off, saying, “Take a shower, why don’t you?”
He laughed loudly. His beady eyes narrowed as he looked around the circle. “I like her,” he said. He noticed Sara then, and stuck his plastic cup out to her. “Have a drink,” he said.
“I don’t drink.” Sara looped her fingers around Mel’s belt in the back and gave a little tug to get her moving.
“She doesn’t drink, Jemison,” one of the boys said. “We already tried.”
“Yeah, Jemison, she doesn’t smoke either,” another one chattered, hopping from foot to foot and waving his long arms.
“Huh,” Jemison said, squinting at Sara. “She doesn’t drink and she doesn’t smoke. What does she do?” The others chuckled and looked around nervously. Jemison leaned in so close Sara could smell his sour breath, and growled, “Are you a narc?”
“Leave my friend alone,” Mel said.
“I’ll get to you in a minute.”
Sara stepped back. State champion or not, she figured they could outrun him as long as he didn’t take to the trees. As if guessing her intent, he put one hairy arm out to stop her but before he could grab hold of her shoulder a voice rang out across the clearing. “Leave her alone!” It was a voice of authority, deep and masculine, and Jemison stopped, his arm hanging midair. The crowd parted and they could see him now, a lone boy sitting in the back of a pickup truck, one knee drawn up and one arm resting casually across the top.
The world stopped suddenly, or at least it did for Sara; everything became blurry and grainy, like a film in slow motion. The boy in the back of the truck seemed lit by a strange phosphorescence. Or maybe it was just a moonbeam, trained on him like a spotlight. The image made Sara dizzy. She felt like she’d been hit over the head and covered by something dark and heavy. He raised his hand and beckoned to them and Sara began to move toward him like a sleepwalker.
“Sorry, Radford,” Jemison shouted, stepping back, and the spell was suddenly broken. The crowd began to shift and disperse. Jim Morrison sang “Don’t You Love Her Madly?” and Jemison raised his hand and said again, “Sorry man, I didn’t know they were with you,” and turning, slunk off into the night.
John Thomas Radford. He was a third-year English lit student from Charlotte, North Carolina, and, climbing up into the bed of the truck beside him, Sara felt like she’d known him all her life. Mel sat down on the other side of him and later, when they got cold, he took off his jeans jacket and put it around Sara and made one of the other boys give his jacket to Mel. His hair was long and straight and fell just below his ears. He seemed lit by some kind of strange incandescence. Even in the shadows cast by the dancing fire, Sara knew his eyes were green, knew he had a small scar at the outside corner of his right eye, knew his lower lip was full and round, knew what it would feel like to kiss him. She had never, until this moment, believed in love at first sight.
A low-lying band of fog drifted off the river. Stars twinkled above the ridgetops.
“Your friend sure is quiet,” he said to Mel.
The moon was low in the sky and the fire had burned to embers by the time they decided it was time to go. The crowd had gradually broken up, slipping through the trees like wraiths, and the clearing was filled now with a cold gray light. J.T nudged Mel with his shoulder. “Y’all better get back to the dorm before you get caught and put on restriction.”
“Spoken like someone who knows how that works.”
He laughed and jumped down from the bed of the truck, putting his arms up to help them. He held Mel a few seconds longer, Sara noticed, and she smiled slyly up at him and said, “What’s your girlfriend going to say about you hanging out all night with a couple of strange women?”
He let her go. “What girlfriend?” he said.
Sara made a move to return his jacket to him but he said, “No, you keep it until we get back to the dorm. I’ll walk you home. Two pretty girls like you shouldn’t be out alone in the woods at night.” It was a corny thing to say, of course, and normally they would have protested. But neither one wanted to let him go so they said nothing and followed him across the clearing.
“Where are you going?” Mel said, pointing at the sandy embankment they had run down. “We came this way.”
“Next time take the trail,” he said, pointing, and they could see the dim outline of a narrow trail rising from the beach and crisscrossing the ridge, several hundred feet from the embankment. “You’re less likely to fall if you take the trail.”
“Who says there’ll be a next time?” Mel asked.
He stood there in the violet light, grinning at her. “Oh, I think you’ll be back,” he said.
Sara led the way. The trail was steeper than it looked from the beach, and was covered in trailing vines that caught at their legs and feet. They were halfway up the ridge when Mel fell. Sara heard her go down like a sack of potatoes hitting a dirt floor. J.T. leaned over, picked Mel up, and set her on her feet, but she winced slightly and said, “Shit. I think I twisted my ankle.” He bent over to check her leg. In the sky above his shoulder, the faint rim of moon hung like a silver coin. He prodded her ankle gently with his fingers. Mel looked at Sara and grinned, her teeth gleaming in the darkness. “Ouch,” she said.
It was a good thing J.T. stood between them, because if he hadn’t, Sara would have pitched Mel over the edge. All this over a boy. But not just any boy. As if to remind her of this he looked up, his face slightly luminous.
“I’d better carry you,” he said to Mel and swooped her up in his arms. She made a faint squeak, like a small rodent being squeezed. Sara headed up the trail, trying not to hear Mel’s giggles and the soft grunting noises J.T. made as he climbed.
“You’re a lot stronger than you look.”
“You’re a lot heavier than you look.”
Down on the beach someone was starting the vehicles. Headlights clicked on, sweeping the beach. Sara picked her way up the trail, hearing Mel’s soft little cries like a knife turning beneath her heart. Almost to the crest, they stopped so
J.T. could put her down and catch his breath. He stood there, tall and broad-shouldered against the fading stars, and quoted,
“When the stars threw down their spears,
And water’d heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”
Mel said, “I hope you’re not comparing me to a tiger. Because that’s not very flattering.”
“Who says I’m comparing you to anything?” he said, grinning at her. “Who says it’s about you at all?”
“I like Blake all right,” she said, lifting her face to his. “But Yeats! Now there’s a poet.”
Sara swung around and plodded up the trail, trying to put as much distance as possible between her and them. A faint violet light bathed the eastern sky. Their voices became fainter. If they knew she was leaving them behind, they didn’t seem to care.
Chapter 4
MONDAY
heir first morning at the beach they awoke to a breakfast of seafood crepes and fresh fruit. April, it seemed, was working her way through culinary school and had a notebook full of recipes she was dying to try out. She disappeared soon after they had gathered around the enormous breakfast bar, and reappeared a short while later dressed in a swimsuit and carrying a towel.
“Just leave the dishes in the sink,” she told Lola. “I’ll get to them when I get back.”
“Don’t worry about us,” Lola said. She was standing in a bright slash of sunlight looking sweet and cheerful, her thick-lensed glasses glinting in the sun.
April went out the French doors on to the deck and they watched her walk along the boardwalk and disappear over the dunes. A few minutes later she reappeared, a tiny figure moving across the wide expanse of beach. Captain Mike, Mel noted, was nowhere to be seen.
The women took their time eating breakfast, enjoying the opportunity to be lazy. They were all still dressed in their pajamas. Lola wore a pair of red silk pajamas that looked comfortable and expensive, but seemed strangely out of place with her heavy-rimmed glasses. Annie wore a nightgown with matching robe and slippers. Mel had on a camisole and sleep shorts covered in yellow ducks, and Sara wore a pair of sweat pants and a Carolina Law T-shirt.
