Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

Instead, she bent and helped, they all did, and deep into the morning when it was done, they sat in silence, huddled against the cold wind, and watched the tide swallow it whole. Everything had changed, somehow. They went home.

The next day, Sunday. Sunrise sandwiches eaten over the sink, bleed of yolk. Bed until three in the afternoon. When she came out to eat, Chollie had sunburn blisters on his face, but he smiled. “I scored some acid,” he said, the only way to bear the party at the abandoned house beside the swamp that night. She felt a pang of fear. “Great,” she said coolly. They took burgers to the beach again. Where the lifeguard’s chair had been buried at the end of their spiral jetty, it was dug out, set upright, like a raised middle finger. She abstained from the drug, but the boys partook. The strange thing between Lotto and her sharpened. He stood close to her. Chollie climbed atop the lifeguard chair and stood against the stars, shouting, holding up a handle of rum. “We are gods!” he said. Tonight, she believed it. Her future was one of those stars, cold and brilliant and sure. She would do something world-bending. She knew it. She laughed at her brother, shining in the bonfire and starlight, and then Chollie gave a shriek and jumped, hovering for a long time like a pelican, with his flabby neck, his awkward limbs, in midair. He landed with a crack. And then her brother’s screams, and she held his head, and Lotto sprinted off to get his aunt’s car, and when he drove up the beach, Michael picked Chollie up in his arms and threw him into the backseat and jumped into the driver’s side and took off without Gwennie or Lotto.

Desolate, they watched the taillights go up the ramp to the road. With Chollie’s screams removed, the wind was too loud.

She asked Lotto to come with her to tell her dad, and he said of course. [Lo, that sweet young heart.]

At home, she washed off her makeup, took out the piercings, braided her hair in two tails, put on a pink sweatsuit. He’d never seen her plain but he held in his laugh, kindly. The father’s flight came in at seven, and at seven-twenty, his car pulled under the porte cochere. He walked in the door with discontent pouring off him: it must have been a bad weekend with the twins’ mother, their marriage as thin as a thread. Lotto was already inches taller than the older man, but her father filled the room and Lotto took a step back.

Her father’s face, so furious. “Gwennie, I told you, no boys in the house. Get him out of here.”

“Daddy, this is Lotto, he’s Chollie’s friend, Chollie jumped off something and broke his leg, he’s in the hospital, Lotto just came a second ago to tell you because we couldn’t get in touch with you. I’m sorry,” she said.

Her father looked at Lotto. “Charles broke his leg?” he said.

“Yes, sir,” Lotto said.

“Was alcohol involved? Drugs?” the father said.

“No, sir,” Lotto lied.

“Was Gwennie present?” the father said.

She held her breath. “No, sir,” he said smoothly. “I only know her from school. She hangs out with the smart kids.”

The father looked at them. Nodded, and the space he took up in the room was suddenly smaller.

“Gwendolyn,” the father said, “you call your mother. I’ll go to the hospital. Thank you for telling me, boy. Now out.”

She shot a look at Lotto, and the father’s car pulled out fast, and when Gwennie came out the front door, she’d put on her miniest skirt, the shirt cropped below the boobs, makeup slashed on her face. Lotto was waiting in the azaleas. “Fuck him,” Gwennie said. “We’re going to the party.”

“You’re trouble,” he said with admiration.

“You have no idea,” she said.

They rode Chollie’s bike. She sat on the handlebars and Lotto pedaled. Down the tunnel of the black road, frogs singing mournfully, the rot of marsh rising. He stopped the bike and put his sweatshirt over her. It smelled nice, like fabric softener. Someone at home loved him. Lotto stood on the pedals when they got to coasting, and rested his head on her shoulder, and she leaned back into him. She smelled the astringent on his ravaged cheeks. The house was lit by bonfires, headlights left burning. Already hundreds here, the music deafening. They stood, backs to the splintery siding, drinking beer that was mostly foam. She felt Lotto looking at her. She pretended not to notice. He came close to her ear as if to whisper, but he was, what? Licking her? A separate shock went through her and she marched toward the fire. “What the fuck,” she said, and punched a shoulder very hard. The head rose, the mouth smeary, Michael. He had pulled his face away from the blond head of some girl.

“Oh, hey, Gwennie,” Michael said. “Lotto, my man.”

“What the fuck?” Gwennie said again. “You’re supposed to be with my brother. With Chollie.”

“Oh, no,” Michael said. “I booked it when your dad got there. He’s one scary-ass dude. This chick gave me a ride,” he said.

“I’m Lizzie. I’m a candy striper on the weekends?” she said. She nuzzled her face into Michael’s chest.

“Whoa,” Lotto whispered. “That’s a girl.”

Gwennie seized Lotto’s hand and pulled him into the house. Candles on the windowsills and flashlights that cupped light on the wall and bodies on mattresses someone had dragged in here for the purpose, bare asses and backs and limbs shining. Knot of music from separate rooms. She took him up the stairs to the window that led out to the porch roof. They sat in the cool night, hearing the party thump, able to see only a glare of firelight. They shared a cigarette in silence, and she wiped her face and kissed him. Their teeth knocked. He’d spoken of makeout parties wherever he’d come from in the boonies, but she hadn’t really expected he’d know what to do with his mouth and tongue. Indeed he did. She felt the old swoon in the joints. She took his hand and pressed it against her, let him slide his fingers beneath the elastic to feel how wet she’d gotten. She pushed him on his back. She straddled his legs, took his penis out into the air, watched it grow, put him in. And he gasped up, astonished, then grabbed her hips and really went for it. She closed her eyes. Lotto’s hands pushed her shirt up and bra cup down so that her boobs pinched out like rockets. There was a new thing, a terrific heat, heat like the center of the sun. She didn’t remember such heat from all the other times. He lurched into her and she felt him leaving and she opened her eyes to see him rolling, face full of terror, over the side of the porch, and falling down. She looked around and saw in the window a curtain of fire. She jumped, her skirt flipping up, what he’d left in her leaking as she fell.

[Something wrong in getting turned on, summoning this dead girl, this dead boy, so they can fuck.]

At the jail, she shivered all night. Her mother and father were grim, set, when she came home.

Lotto was gone for a week, then two, then a month, and Chollie found a letter on his nightstand saying that Lotto’s mother had sent him off to an all-boys’ boarding school, poor sucker. He told Gwennie but she’d stopped caring. The entire party, the firemen, and the police officer had all seen the way Gwennie and Lotto had monkeyed themselves. The whole school knew she was a slut. End-stop. Pariahed. Michael didn’t know what to say; he drifted away, found other friends. Gwennie stopped talking.

In spring, when her condition became impossible to ignore again, the twins stole the neighbor’s car. His fault for keeping the keys in the ignition. They came up the drive, pondering the sago palms and grasses, the tiny pink box on stilts. Chollie made a sound of disappointment; he’d hoped that Lotto’s family was insanely rich, but it didn’t appear so. [One never can tell.] Sea oxeye daisies taunted, nipplelike in the grass. They knocked on the door. A tiny and severe-looking woman opened it, her mouth pressed thin. “Lancelot’s not here,” she said. “You should know that.”