The Baddest Girl on the Planet

by Heather Frese

  I squinted. “The sum I acquire for keeping your secret is paltry,” I said. I’d just learned the word paltry and was dying to try it out. It’s what made me think of asking for a raise.

  “You go to the library every other day, anyway,” Nate said. “A quarter is plenty.” He leaned back in his chair.

  “You’re supposed to be reading the Hardy Boys,” I said. “Boys don’t read Nancy Drew. Everyone knows that.” I took off my daisy sunglasses and stared at Nate. I had him, and he knew it.

  “Fifty cents,” he said. “And not one penny more.”

  I accepted the deal, but every so often I’d extort Nate again. He’d refuse, I’d threaten, and in the end, Nate would hike my pay. I made it up to two dollars per Nancy delivery before Nate balked. Drastic measures had to be taken.

  I waited until Mom set down the fried chicken and Dad said grace, then I speared a forkful of green beans and asked Nate if he’d read anything interesting lately.

  Nate took a savage bite out of his chicken leg. “Just some stupid thing with a dragon,” he said.

  “How very mysterious,” I said. I cut a dainty piece of chicken breast. “Nothing else?”

  Nate put down his fork. “Shut up.”

  “Hey now,” Dad said. “There’s no call for that.”

  I rolled my eyes and sighed. “Nate’s just grouchy because he’s in love.”

  “I said shut up,” Nate said.

  “With an imaginary woman.” I salted my green beans.

  Nate stood up, his leg jostling the table, and my iced tea sloshed onto my napkin. Mom gave him the stink-eye. “Sit down and finish your dinner,” she said.

  Nate sat. He glared at me.

  “Her name is Nancy Drew,” I said. “She has tits for hair. That’s why he likes her so much.”

  Dad’s eyes widened. Mom turned her head to look at Nate.

  “That’s not true,” Nate said. “She’s not—that’s not why—so what if I like her?” He stopped and took a drink of tea. “And that’s not true about her hair. It means redhead, you moron.”

  I sighed. “I wouldn’t be calling the one person responsible for your happiness with Nancy a moron, if I were you.”

  Dad twitched his eyebrows up and down. “I’d like to hear more about this Nancy,” he said. “She sounds like quite a catch.”

  Mom tried to summon her stern face, but her mouth flicked up at the corners. “Nate and Nancy does have a nice ring to it.”

  “Oh, I don’t know if he’s ready to be thinking about rings yet,” Dad said. “Give the boy time. Although, that hair does sound pretty singular.”

  Nate looked at me then, his eyes deep and pained, his shoulders rounding in a slump. He stared down at his plate, tapping his fingers on the table. My stomach twisted; I didn’t finish my dinner, not even the strawberry shortcake for dessert. I just kept seeing Nate’s eyes. I just kept seeing how, for the first time, love laid him bare.

  I know how to talk to my eight-year-old son about sex. Penis, vagina, whatnot. The mechanics are easy, and I have a book with little cartoon illustrations and everything. That conversation went fine. What I haven’t figured out is how to talk with him about love. He’s the same age I was when I had my first crush, and I wish someone had prepared me for it. How do I warn him about the rush, the geyser of endorphins that happens when that person walks into a room? How do I explain the way someone takes up occupancy in your mind, colors your entire world?

  Austin and I stand outside Conner’s grocery in Buxton waiting for Nate to finish buying a fishing lure. It’s August, and the parking lot is frenetic with cars and trucks with license plates from Quebec, Ohio, Virginia, everywhere. Barefoot tourists and residents dodge around fishing poles sticking out of racks on the fronts of trucks, hopping quickly on the hot pavement.

  Austin wipes his brow. “Sure is a hot one,” he says. He squints.

  I try to stifle my smile. He looks and sounds so much like my brother. I know it’s not an accident, the way Austin mimics Nate. I know it’s because Nate’s more of a father figure than his actual father ever will be. I’m about to agree with Austin about the heat when I see Rick Garcia trotting across Highway 12. I just sold him the motel across from Conner’s, and he’s moving in today. Dr. Garcia used to be my English professor, and during the motel sale, we’ve become friends, though I still can’t call him Rick. I wave, and he comes over to me and Austin.

  “Have you seen a little girl?” Dr. Garcia asks. He holds his arm out, mid-chest. “About this tall? Brown hair in little, you know—” He makes pigtails with his hands on the sides of his head. “Thingies.”

  “Pigtails?” Austin offers.

  Dr. Garcia snaps his fingers. “Yes. Pigtails.”

  I remember that his daughter was coming down today after having been with Dr. Garcia’s brother in Chicago. “Fiona?” I ask.

  Dr. Garcia runs a hand through his hair. “She’s not handling the move well. She freaked out earlier, and I thought she went out back, but she’s not there.”

  I touch Dr. Garcia’s shoulder, briefly. His t-shirt’s heavy with humidity. “We’ll help you search,” I say. “I’m sure she’s around here somewhere.”

  Austin squares his shoulders. “Mom, I’m going to go look for her in the store.”

  I pat Austin on the head, but he shifts away and stands tall. “Sounds good,” I say. “Why don’t you cover the right side and Dr. Garcia and I’ll check the left.”

  Austin walks into Conner’s and turns down the aisle of lawn chairs and over-the-counter medication. Dr. Garcia and I go past the checkout lanes and wind our way to the ice cream section. Dr. Garcia takes quick strides, and I pace my gait to his. The only tenseness in the air between us is his worry for Fiona; otherwise it’s neutral, not charged like when I walk with someone whose bones I want to jump. “She can’t have gone far,” I say. We walk past the bologna and turkey lunch meat, jostle a woman in a hot pink muumuu, cruise past the diapers and then the potato chips.

  Nate runs into us as Dr. Garcia and I walk by the deli counter. My brother looks dissonant against the fluorescent grocery store indoors; his rumpled hair and tan skin and bare feet belong outside. “Austin’s looking for you,” he says to me. Nate motions over his shoulder, and we follow him past the canned vegetables and into the Coke aisle. There, sitting on a green plastic pallet, are Austin and a pigtailed little girl. Dr. Garcia rushes to Fiona, hugs and scolds her, and she starts to cry. But what makes my chest twist is the look on Austin’s face, the softness and wonder in his eyes, the wide-open admiration as he follows Dr. Garcia instead of Nate to the door, then darts to Fiona’s side.

  His eagerness to stand beside her reminds me of the way Stephen used to wait for me after class in college, jumping out to grab my books like I was some schoolgirl from the 1950s, a delicate damsel just waiting for a big strong man. I don’t want Austin to grow up to be the kind of guy who hurts women.

  I should, I know, be more worried about him getting hurt, about seeing his endorphin geyser tamped down by a woman who doesn’t feel the rush. But somehow, my own hurts are still so fresh. Somehow, all I can imagine is Fiona, ten, fifteen years from now, her face mottled from a different kind of crying.

  When a female lobster wants to have sex, she pees, her urine a cloudy stream mingling with the salty waters of the ocean, to attract a dude lobster’s attention. It works. The dude lobster arrives, clicking his dude lobster claws together in anticipation. Click click clack.

  He whisks her into his lair, and she molts her hard outer shell, setting her bare lady lobster parts out for the taking. They get it on. Maybe it’s good for the lady lobster. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe the dude lobster romances her, makes her feel special. Maybe he doesn’t.

  And then, the lady lobster, naked, vulnerable, pink and bare without her armor, is forced to stay in the lobster lair until her shell regenerates. She can’t hunt; she can’t even go outside for a breath of fresh air. Maybe she likes the dude lobster’s decorating style.
Maybe she doesn’t. Maybe his retro ’70s shag carpet was charming at first but soon grew old. No matter her current opinion, she’s stuck there, dependent on the dude lobster to bring her food, dependent on the dude lobster to protect her from the briny menaces of the deep. Dependent on the dude lobster for everything.

  Because the dude lobster always keeps his armor on. Always.

  Charlotte McConnell. She’s the second woman my brother loved. Sure, there were girls in high school that Nate dated, one who crushed his ego by dumping him at his first school dance. There were girls in college, even one he brought home for an entire spring break. But he didn’t love her. Nothing lit up inside Nate when he was around those girls. His eyes weren’t sad and resigned when they broke up, his shoulders slumped toward his dinner plate. He didn’t love any of them, not like Charlotte McConnell. He loves her still, I think. I love her still, of course.

  How do I describe Charlotte, or at least the version of Charlotte that Nate loved? Think sea siren, all long hair and sad songs. But no, that’s not right. Think delicate lady lobster, pink and bare. But that’s not right, either. She wasn’t purposely alluring in her fragility. She didn’t mean to molt in front of Nate. I know that now. Think sad, pretty girl—smart as hell, funny as hell—lost, lost, lost. He wanted to take care of her, bring food back to the lair, kick the ass of any attacking octopi.

  All she wanted to do was regenerate.

  But I’m getting too abstract. It happened like this: Charlotte and I were nineteen. I’d just gotten pregnant, and her father had just died. It was a time period of large-scale fucked-up-ness. Charlotte ran away from home, basically. She said she couldn’t stand to be near her mom and brother without her dad there. She withdrew from college and stayed at my parents’ inn, where she worked for part of a year while I grew a baby. Nate had finished school, moved back to Hatteras, was trying to figure out what to do with his life, and there she was. Charlotte McConnell. Broken and raw and beautiful, standing there on our pier with her cinnamon hair blowing around her face.

  I suspected something was brewing between them the day I got sick with some placenta craziness and Nate and Charlotte took me to the hospital. I wondered when Nate touched Charlotte’s elbow in the waiting room, when Charlotte didn’t pull away. But I was busy being sick, so I convinced myself I’d made it up. A few weeks later, when I was better and definitively back in the business of growing a baby, whether I liked it or not, Nate and Charlotte and I went to the Sandbar and Grille for dinner. It was one of those howlingly frigid Hatteras winter days, with the kind of wind that felt like it’d blow your skin off. We stomped inside and sat at the bar even though the restaurant was empty. Charlotte sat between us.

  She twirled a piece of her hair around her finger. “I wonder what the soup is?” she asked.

  Nate stretched across her and plucked a menu out from behind the bar. He placed it in front of Charlotte, flipped it over, ran his finger to the soup of the day. “Potato,” he said.

  “How Midwestern,” I said. I didn’t mean anything by it; it’s just that soups around here usually involve some sort of fishy or clammy business. But Charlotte’s from Ohio, and I guess mentioning the Midwest made her think of home. Anyway, something shifted in her body, a combination of stiffness and softening at the same time. The air around her changed. Her grief was so new at that point, surfacing unpredictably like a gushing freshwater stream in a salty pool. Nate didn’t quite get it, though. He kept pointing to things on the menu that he’d tried, dishes he thought Charlotte would like.

  She smiled at him, but it was the pasted-on kind. “How’s the halibut?”

  “You should try it,” Nate said. “You know, just for the halibut.” He nudged Charlotte in the ribs. I rolled my eyes.

  Charlotte laughed, but then it shifted into a little squeak. She lifted her hand to her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she said. Her shoulders shook. “I’m sorry. I hate breaking down in public.”

  I turned to put my arm around her and tell her that everything was okay. I had a story ready about the time I peed my pants in the Red and White grocery when I was five, which was infinitely more embarrassing than crying in public. But when I reached out, I saw Nate’s hand on Charlotte’s shoulder, his fingers peeking out from under her hair. Charlotte was still, indrawn. She looked like a painting. She leaned into him then, closed her eyes, and took a breath as if she was absorbing something through Nate’s skin. Then she shifted away, stood up, and went to the bathroom.

  I asked her about it later. “So, you and Nate?”

  Charlotte blushed in the way I imagined Nancy Drew would, a delicate pink flush blossoming across her cheekbones. “I don’t know,” she said. She shook her head and played with her fingers in her lap. She looked at me, her eyes clear for a moment, and then the stream of grief surfaced. “It’s just that he’s so solid.”

  I remembered that later, after Charlotte and Nate had had a thing for months, but then Charlotte fell in love with a research scientist living on the island and Nate found out. It was one of those tangled scandals that you’d read about in Us Weekly if they’d been movie stars and not just regular people. On the moonless evening when Nate first found out, he knocked on the door of my little white house on Elizabeth Lane.

  “Did you know?” he asked.

  I was uber-pregnant at that point, so I motioned Nate inside and waddled after him to the living room. We sat down. “I guessed,” I said.

  Nate nodded, slowly. “I really love her.” I patted his back. “I’m sorry.”

  My brother leaned his head back on my sofa, and we sat there, quiet, the air around him thick like tar.

  The next day, I brought Nate a latte on my lunch hour to cheer him up, but he was brisk and quick-moving, tossing supplies onto his boat, jotting down reservations in a notebook. “It’s fine,” he said, when I asked him about Charlotte. “It’s fine. It just wasn’t meant to be.”

  Because Nate was solid. His armor had only slipped, gotten cockeyed. Or maybe it was that he’d forgotten for a moment that he had any armor at all. That he didn’t have to wait to harden back up.

  A few days after we meet Fiona, Austin and Nate stand in the frothy water of the Atlantic, casting their lines into the sea. I’m sitting in the shallows just behind and to the right of them, drowsy, cool water rushing up and over my bare legs and then back again, the sun warm on my shoulders. Nate’s line arcs into the water, barely visible, a silver fissure in the air. He squares his shoulders, settles his feet in the sand, and waits. Austin mimics him, casting, settling, standing. They look at each other and nod. The water shushes and I close my eyes.

  “Fiona said she’s never been fishing,” Austin says to Nate.

  “That so?” Nate asks. “Maybe we can show her the ropes sometime.”

  “What ropes?” Austin asks. I open my eyes and see that he’s squinting seriously at Nate.

  Nate jiggles his pole around. I imagine a school of tiny fish darting around for his bait. “It’s a figure of speech,” Nate says.

  Austin nods. He and Nate stand quietly for a while. I release my body back onto my elbows and dig my fingers into the thick, wet sand.

  Nate reels in his line. He looks at the naked hook, then walks to the truck, coming back with a plastic container of bait. He punctures a piece of chum and casts again.

  For a while it’s just waves and sunshine and the caw of seagulls. The sun sinks past my skin, its deepening warmth throbbing into my bones, my marrow.

  “Only boys like fishing. Right, Uncle Nate?”

  Nate shrugs one shoulder. “Your Aunt Fay was the best fisherman I ever knew.”

  “Why isn’t it fisherwoman?” Austin asks.

  I’ve always wondered that, too. Fisherman. Postman. Mankind. Where’s the credit for the ladies?

  Nate shakes his head. “I suppose it should be. But people just say fisherman.”

  Austin tugs on his fishing pole. “I felt something.” He reels in, but his hook pops out of the water empty. />
  “Must’ve got away,” Nate says.

  Austin cranks in the rest of his line and reaches for the container of bait. He hands it to Nate. Austin’s been fishing since he could stand up, but he’s never baited his own hook. He used to have nightmares about mutant ballyhoo, their fiercely pointed noses stalking his sleep. Nate weighs the container in his hand. He sets it down, reels in his line, and places his pole on the sand. Then he picks up the bait and holds it out to Austin.

  “It’s time you learned how to do this, man,” he says.

  Austin’s mouth tightens into a straight line. “I don’t want to,” he says. “You do it, Uncle Nate.”

  Nate puts his hand on Austin’s shoulder. “I know you don’t like this part,” he says. “But sometime you might want to fish without me.”

  Austin considers this. I shift to get a better look at them. I’m curious what Austin will do. He reaches into the container and pulls out a small silver fish. Nate hands him his hook and Austin stands there, ballyhoo in one hand, hook in the other. His thinking crease appears between his eyebrows, and I wish, as I often do, that I could get into his head. Finally, Austin takes a breath and punctures the fish onto his hook. “Like that?” he asks Nate.

  Nate pats his back. “Just like that.”

  Austin looks up at Nate, his face serious in a way I’ve never seen it before. “If Fiona wants to come fishing with us, I can show her how to do it.”

  They both pick up their poles and cast out, arcing their lines into the sea.

  There’s weather underwater. Even at sixty feet, there’s sunlight, choppiness, wind. Even at a hundred feet, you can tell when it’s raining, when the skies change and the sun disappears. There’s weather everywhere. Even in a lobster lair, where a bare lady lobster impatiently taps her claws against a rock, waiting, waiting, waiting for her dude lobster to return.

  She’s hungry. She’s lonely. She’s trapped, and she’s starting to have second thoughts.