Ferocity Summer

by Alissa Grosso

  “He went to Sparta High?” I asked, as Willow and Randy took turns filling me in on the day’s plans while Randy drove.

  “No, Tigue’s never seen the inside of a public school,” Randy said. “He’s a total rich shit. Went to Delbarton, I think. Had a DUI his senior year that kept him out of Harvard.”

  “Sounds like a charmer,” I said. I would like to say that at that point I was wishing I hadn’t agreed to go along, but I wasn’t. I was sitting in the back seat thinking about what a perfect day it was to go out for a boat ride, and how nice it must be to have such toys to play with.

  “He’s not so bad,” Willow said. “He’s kind of cute in a Nick Lachey sort of way.”

  I made gagging noises. “Do you have a lot of classes with him?” I asked.

  “I had a Basic Calc class with him last fall, but he never really went. I helped him cheat on the exam. But I see him at a lot of parties.”

  The air conditioning was on, but it didn’t really reach the back seat. I was damp with sweat. The straps of my bathing suit chafed against the sensitive skin of my neck. I watched the scenery fly by and dreamt of college, which to hear Randy talk was more about the parties than it was a learning experience. College was still a question mark for me. I had good-enough grades, but no money, and if I went it would either be as a charity case or as some part-time student at a community college while I waited tables or (please God no) worked at Johnny’s Quik Mart to pay for my textbooks. I went to school with people who took honors classes and got straight A’s and had no doubt that they would attend an accredited four-year college. I was not one of these people. The best I could hope for was that Allison Browning, class goddess, got caught drunk driving and I would help her cheat on our math exam at County.

  When Randy pulled the car into the driveway, my first thought was that he must have screwed up the address. This couldn’t be the right house. Whatever lived inside it had to be from a different species entirely. How would we communicate? How would we spend the entire day together on a small vessel?

  Then I laid eyes on Tigue. Nick Lachey, my ass. This guy was divine. I’d already formed an image of him in my mind as a straight-laced preppy boy who wore plaid shorts and Polo shirts with a capital P, with freshly trimmed hair and an obnoxious Ken Doll smirk. But Tigue looked like a real person. He had on a plain navy blue T-shirt (okay, he probably paid five times its real value at one of those rich-kid stores, but you couldn’t tell this from looking at it) with an ordinary pair of denim shorts. His hair was golden brown and overgrown in a careless, completely beautiful way. I wanted to touch that hair. I wanted to touch more than his hair.

  “Uh, you know Willow, and this is Scilla,” Randy said as we stood in Tigue’s foyer (and it was clearly a foyer, as opposed to an ordinary hallway).

  “Scilla,” Tigue said. He reached for my hand because he was, after all, the sort of guy who had been raised with such customs and could not escape them. He shook it casually, but I felt heat like an electric charge race all the way up my arm. “I’ve heard so much about you.” At this he smirked, but not in a Ken doll way at all. It was completely lecherous. “So, who wants a cocktail?”

  It was ten o’clock in the morning, but no one protested. Tigue led the way to the kitchen. Willow nudged me hard in the ribs as we trailed behind the boys.

  “What are you doing?” she asked in an angry whisper.

  “Nothing. What are you talking about?” I whispered back.

  She rolled her eyes. “I saw the way you were looking at him.”

  “He doesn’t look one bit like Nick Lachey.”

  “I don’t care if he looks like shit warmed over, at the end of the day I’m not winding up with my brother, okay?”

  Tigue served us microbrewed beer with assorted pastries. He told us that he was being punished.

  “At this very second?” I asked, looking around for possible implements of torture.

  “Yes,” he said with a laugh. “My parents decided to leave me home instead of taking me with them to visit my Great Aunt Harriet in Colts Neck. I am, in effect, grounded.”

  “Just think,” Willow said, all smiles and flirtation, “right now you could be sipping tea with Great Aunt Harriet and discussing your career goals.”

  “You’re grounded, but you’re allowed to use the boat?” I asked.

  “Well, no,” Tigue said, starting in on his second beer.

  “But what Mom and Dad don’t know won’t hurt them,” Randy said.

  My ineptitude in picking romantic prospects has already been firmly established, so it should come as no surprise that I felt myself falling head over heels for this spoiled, egotistical, adolescent alcoholic. I wasn’t blind, and Tigue didn’t put up much of a front. I knew exactly what he was, and I wanted him anyway. For Willow’s benefit, I decided not to drool.

  I’d lived my entire life on a lake and had never been on a speedboat before. That’s not entirely true. After a particularly wild beach party during the summer after my freshman year, I’d sneaked aboard a moored speedboat with a girl whose extreme alcohol consumption had loosened many of her inhibitions, but that, of course, was different. We were interlopers, it was dark, and although we were going somewhere, the boat was not.

  Willow’s father had owned one of those pontoon boats when we were kids. The first summer he had it, we went for rides almost every weekend. The next year, we had to beg, and there was always some excuse—it needed gas, it might storm, he didn’t have enough time. Midge never went on the thing because she complained of seasickness. The boat didn’t last that long. It had to be trashed because improper maintenance had caused the bottom to start to rot.

  Our ride in Tigue’s boat, it turned out, was nothing like the long, lazy rides that Willow and I had enjoyed that summer of the pontoon boat. Tigue’s boat was a speedboat and our captain was a nineteen-year-old who’d been stoked by twenty-four ounces of beer. He ignored the posted marina speed limit and tore out of the boat slip at a reckless speed. I got my first flash of fear as we barreled into the crowded water just outside the marina. It sent a shiver through my whole body. We zipped past other boats with only a narrow margin, sending the other crafts rocking violently in our wake. Tigue’s laughter was infectious but disturbing. I wondered what he’d done to get grounded.

  When we got out onto more open water, my fear melted away. We were safe. The speed now felt good. The wind whipped our hair back as we bounced over the waves.

  “Woohoo!” Tigue shouted at the top of his lungs.

  “Praise the Lord!” Randy answered back.

  Tigue sprayed us with water by zigzagging left, then sharply right, the boat fishtailing like a car on a patch of ice. Then, still racing forward at full speed, he turned around to face me.

  “Want to take the helm?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Come on, it’s fun,” Tigue said. “I’ll help you.”

  My hormones took over. I stood up, bracing myself against the side of the boat. Willow muttered nearly inaudibly under her breath. When I met her eyes, she glared at me. We could discuss things later, I decided. Tigue gradually slowed the bloat down so that I could come up and take my turn.

  The boat was easy to drive. There were no lines to stay in—the whole lake spread out before me. I only had to steer clear of the other boats, which wasn’t hard. It was a big-enough lake. As promised, though, Tigue helped me. He stood behind me, one hand wrapped around me protectively in case I should forget how to work the steering wheel, the other punching up our speed so that soon it felt like I was flying as we leapt across the water. I had on only my bikini now, and Tigue had stripped off his designer shirt. His chest pressed against my back as he helped me drive. When his chest hairs brushed across my shoulder blades it sent a tingle over me. I could feel every single inch of my skin. It was taught and tense with anticipation.

  I was vaguely aware that Randy and Willow were there as well. Willow, of course, was fuming with anger at me for moving in
on what should have rightfully been her conquest. I tried to formulate a reasonable argument to smooth things over later when we would eventually talk about it, but with Tigue pressed up against me, my sensitized skin aware of the roughness of his shorts on the back of my thighs, it was difficult to think of anything else.

  And Randy. Oh yeah, Randy. Randy has always been forgettable. It’s this trick he has. He could be a modern-day superhero: Forgettable Man. It’s a bird, it’s a plane, damn, I can’t remember what the hell it is. For the couple weeks prior to our boat outing, Randy had been busy working at his “real” job. We hadn’t seen much of each other, and I’d even figured this was his way of ending things without having to go through the mess of a sticky breakup. So I didn’t feel bad. I kind of liked the idea of being rid of Randy, although I thought I might miss him occasionally. Still, here was Randy, on the boat with me and this guy who I’d become completely smitten with, whose body, pressed firmly against mine, seemed to be quite taken with me as well. Randy was my … well, I don’t even know what he was, but it would have been wrong to completely ignore him. I knew that much.

  “So,” I said, in some pathetic effort to diffuse a situation that had the potential to make more than one of us uncomfortable, “should we go for a swim?”

  We anchored in the middle of the lake. Tigue executed a perfect dive off the side of the boat. Willow and I slid into the water gracefully. Randy fell in, then tried to make it look as if he’d meant to do that by clowning around in the water.

  “It’s really a simple equation,” Willow said quietly as she and I tread water. “Anyone can see it. Brother, sister, and two friends of the opposite sex. If you were going to pair these four off, there’s only one way it should go.”

  “I must protest your heterosexual narrow-mindedness,” I said.

  “Well, I didn’t see you drooling all over me,” Willow said. “Would you have some common courtesy, please? If not for me, then what about Randy?”

  I looked over at him. He and Tigue had swum far away from us and the boat, racing each other, doing first the breast stroke and then freestyle.

  “Do you think they can make it back?” I asked. “If they drown, then the pairing off will be pretty much decided.”

  “Maybe I’ll take things into my own hands,” Willow said. She lunged toward me and made as if to pull me under. She dunked me. I dunked her back. We both came up laughing. Our voices were like siren songs pulling Randy and Tigue back to us. They were racing again, and when Randy reached us first, I understood the fierce look of determination on his face. He grabbed my shoulders and pulled me underwater with him. When we came up he kissed me hard. This wasn’t easy to do, with the both of us treading water and bobbing up and down, not necessarily in sync. I didn’t pull away because I was turned on, although it hadn’t been Randy who’d put me in that state. That was when I realized that nothing would turn out the way I wanted it to that day. But I had no idea how far reality would diverge from my desires.

  Back aboard the boat, Tigue raided the galley, which was really just a storage closet below deck, and came up with a cornucopia of half-finished bottles of alcohol, a bouquet of plastic champagne glasses, and a sleeve of stale saltine crackers. He poured stomach-churning combinations of peach schnapps, gin, and vodka into the glasses, cutting it all with a trickle of flat club soda. He passed the drinks around and we toasted the foolishness of youth or something like that. We ate the soggy saltines to calm the rumbling in our guts, then drank some more, basking in the afternoon heat. The sun’s rays boiled the alcohol in our bodies and, just like some sort of chemistry experiment, changed its principal nature. Instead of the mirth-inducing, inhibition-releasing quaff that so many devoured for its feel-good properties, it became something else. It became fire. It became venom, liquid poison.

  Afternoon turned to twilight turned to evening.

  The four of us lay in various positions of discomfort about the boat. On the floor lay the emptied bottles of alcohol, their glass bodies and foil labels laughing at us. Tigue had puked twice over the side of the boat. The last time, he hadn’t projected far enough into the water and left a trail down the side of the boat. He hadn’t had the energy to splash water on it to rinse it off. Shortly after this last vomiting, he’d passed out in the little seating nook near the prow of the boat. Randy sat on the bench on the side of the boat, his head tilted back and his mouth opened wide. He snored. Only Willow and I remained in the world of the living, and this only barely. The swaying of the boat didn’t help our abused stomachs. I felt very ill. Seasickness? No wonder Midge had never gone out on that boat. But this wasn’t true seasickness—this was the self-imposed sort.

  The night sky over the lake was dark. There were no stars or moon. The sky had clouded over and threatened rain. The whole setting, which had seemed so bright, so delicious only a few hours before, had now grown hopelessly bleak.

  “I’ve got to go back,” I said.

  “Screw your mother,” Willow said.

  “Screw yours. I need to get to a bathroom.”

  “Just hurl over the side, like Prince Charming.”

  “No, not that. It’s the other end.”

  “Oh shit,” Willow muttered.

  “Bingo.”

  “Should we wake Tigue?”

  He’d fallen into a heap at the front of the boat. He looked almost dead. I no longer felt any attraction to him. It wasn’t just his hair, which had grown dull and unhealthy-looking, or his skin, which now glowed in the dim light with a sickly sheen of sweat. Even someone with as little sense as I had could take a hint when it was shoved down her throat—Tigue really didn’t have a single quality to recommend him. I’d reached the same conclusion that Harvard had, and like that Ivy League institution, only accepted the obvious when no other possibility remained.

  “I don’t even think he’ll be able to stand up,” I said. “It’s not hard. You could do it.”

  “Maybe you should,” Willow said.

  The air had turned to mist. It would turn to a drenching rain soon. If we were lucky, it wouldn’t be a thunderstorm.

  “I’m not sure I can move,” I said. “I really have to go.”

  “Fuck,” Willow said. She got up and walked to the steering wheel. “I don’t even know how to get back.”

  “That way, I think,” I said, pointing vaguely toward the right, but it was just a guess. I didn’t have a clue. The day’s events were nothing but a blur.

  Willow started up the boat, played around with the controls, and began to get us moving at a snail’s pace in a direction that may or may not have been where we had come from. My stomach groaned.

  This Summer

  I knew for a fact that the weave pattern from the waiting room chair had permanently imprinted itself into my butt. I worked on memorizing the entire contents of the three-month-old Time magazine on my lap. My mother checked her watch again.

  “What the hell is taking so long?” she demanded of no one in particular. I saw the receptionist look over at us, then quickly turn away. “We had an appointment for 3:30. It’s now 4:22.”

  “Maybe something came up,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Mom said, “like a paying client. This is ridiculous. You know she doesn’t keep paying clients waiting this long. You know that, right? This is wrong. I should write a letter.”

  “If you want to leave,” I said, “just go. You don’t even need to be here. I’ll call you when I’m done.”

  “Oh, no, I don’t think so. Somebody’s got to give a shit about your welfare, and it’s clear I can’t rely on either you or this piece-of-crap lawyer.”

  I tossed the Time magazine down on the table and picked up a dated copy of Newsweek. It had an article about teenage drug use with a special checklist for parents to use in determining whether or not their child might be on drugs. It included such symptoms as increased truancy and tardiness to classes, a drop in grades, behavior problems in school, dropping old friends and the sudden influence of a new c
rowd, appearing listless or hungover, more combativeness at home, and personality changes. Willow could have been the teenage drug use poster child—there wasn’t a symptom she didn’t exhibit. Not that I needed the stupid list to tell me what I already knew about my best friend; it was just that, as I reread the list of warning signals, I realized that according to the checklist, I too was a dead ringer for a drug-using teenager. I hastily shut the magazine before my mother’s prying eyes could wander over to the incriminating page.

  A few seconds later, S. Louise Killdaire appeared in a rumpled celadon green suit with a tortoiseshell hair-clip holding back her disobedient mane of hair.

  “I apologize for the wait,” she said as she led us back to her office. “It’s been a really hectic day.”

  I waited for my mother to start bitching, but she kept her mouth shut. Apparently she’d thought better of giving Killdaire a piece of her mind. Maybe she really did give a shit about my welfare.

  “So, how’s your summer been?” Killdaire asked when we were all seated in her office.

  “Fine,” I said. My mother glared at me.

  “Quiet and uneventful, I hope,” Killdaire said.

  “Sure,” I said.

  My mother rolled her eyes. “I think we should look at this from a worst case scenario perspective,” she said.

  “I hardly think—” Killdaire began.

  “Has the prosecution offered us a deal?”

  Strands of Killdaire’s hair had flown loose from her hair clip. She swatted at them and tried to smooth them down with her hands to no avail.

  “While it’s purely your decision, I don’t think that’s necessary,” she said. “We’ve got the makings of a good defense.”

  “We’ve got nothing,” my mother insisted.