Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

Charlotte had been furious. Furious and confused. Why would Gary want to be with the adults when he could be with normal people his own age? she had asked Willow and Gwen rhetorically as they wandered across the fairway. Where was her father? she had wondered, as if there was something inappropriate about her mother chatting with the lifeguard.

Willow had expected that her own parents would leave early with Patrick and Grandmother, but they hadn’t. Patrick had fallen asleep a little after seven in a corner of the clubhouse in his canvas baby seat, and her mom had decided it was best to let him rest. Normally her mom didn’t seem to like the crowd at the Contour Club-at least not the way her dad and her aunt and uncle did-but she seemed to be having a pretty good time tonight.

Someone had brought a portable CD player to the bonfire, and a few of the older girls were trying to convince a couple of the boys to dance. When Charlotte realized that Gwen was leaving them once again-when she saw the girl put an arm casually around Connor Fitzhugh’s shoulders and then start to move him around like an immensely supple marionette-she sat down in the grass and pulled Willow down with her. Connor, though younger than Gwen, was handsome and athletic and the very same lad whom Charlotte had implied at breakfast had suggested that the two girls come to the bonfire in the first place. So far he hadn’t said a word to either of them.

“In my school in New York, by now someone would have gotten the party going with a little beer,” Charlotte murmured, and her voice was dripping with condescension.

“The party seems to be going just fine… if you’re fifteen,” she answered, and immediately she regretted what she had said. It had sounded clever to her in her mind, but when she saw Charlotte look down at the grass between her legs and start ripping at the small strands as if they were weeds in the vegetable garden, she realized it had only been hurtful.

She wondered briefly why Charlotte hated being twelve so much, why she desired so madly to be older. “You know,” she went on, “we don’t have to stay.”

“You can go any time you want,” Charlotte said.

“I know.”

Connor was moving a bit on his own now, and sometimes he was holding Gwen’s hands as they danced and sometimes there was a wide corridor of air between them. Gwen was wearing a sweatshirt and baggy shorts, and she didn’t look nearly as heavy as she did in only a bathing suit.

Behind them they heard a small group of boys arriving, three of them with baseball caps on backward, and they were laughing a little too loudly. When the boys got closer to the circle Willow saw why: They were holding open bottles of beer in their hands, and two of them had cases of beer under their arms. They put the cases down on the grass-one of the boys nearly dropped his, which caused everyone around them to laugh even more boisterously since those beers would now erupt like geysers when they were opened-and the teenagers descended on the cartons as if they were burlap sacks of grain at a refugee camp. A moment later the crowd dispersed and the music began to seem strident and angry to Willow.

Beside her Charlotte stood. She watched her cousin brush the grass off the back of her shorts and then stroll casually over to the ransacked cardboard cartons. There she bent over, pawed briefly among the bent and torn flaps-and among something near the cartons as well, a bag or a large purse of some kind-and then seemed to find amid the pillaged boxes what she was searching for: two bottles of beer that had been overlooked when the hordes had started seizing the alcohol. She glanced briefly, nervously, around to see if any of the teenagers cared that she was procuring a little beer, but no one was taking any interest in her.

When she returned to her spot in the grass beside Willow, she smiled knowingly and offered her one of the bottles.

“No, thanks,” Willow said.

“Suit yourself.”

“You’re not really going to drink that, are you?”

“What do you think, I just got it for show?”

As a matter of fact, I do, Willow thought, but she kept her mouth shut this time. She didn’t want to challenge her cousin, to dare her in essence into consuming the whole bottle. Perhaps Charlotte’s big plan was simply to hold the bottle in her hands, either so she could feel older or so that one of the teenagers would see her with the beer and start paying her some attention. A lot of what Charlotte did, in Willow’s opinion, was about getting people to pay attention to her.

“No, I didn’t think that,” she said simply.

Still, Charlotte unscrewed the top and took a small sip and then, after pausing for just the briefest moment with the lip of the bottle at the edge of her mouth, she took a second one. Willow realized that as bad as the beer probably tasted, Charlotte planned at the very least to polish off that first bottle-and maybe, if the opportunity presented itself, that second one, too. She didn’t think that was a good idea at all, and so she reached over for the unopened bottle in the grass between Charlotte’s legs and said, “Here. Let me have that one.”

It was more difficult to unscrew the lid than she had expected-she saw in the light from the bonfire that she had given herself a sliver of a cut on the inside of her thumb, and a little blood was just starting to puddle in the small split in the skin-but the beer didn’t taste quite as horrible as it smelled. She told herself that it would be better for everyone if she drank one bottle than if her cousin drank two.

“You like it, don’t you?” Charlotte asked.

She shrugged. “It’s okay.”

“Only okay. Yeah, right. I got something else, too.”

“Food?” Willow asked hopefully. “I’m starved.”

“Better than food,” she said, and then she told Willow about stumbling just now across the canvas bag beside the cartons of beer in the grass. It was Gwen’s bag-the small sack the high school student carried around with her like a purse-and it was on its side on the ground, the contents spilling haphazardly out onto the manicured fairway lawn: A lipstick, Gwen’s bathing suit, a small can of lavender-scented aerosol body spray. A disposable lighter. Tampax. A plastic Ziploc bag with loose flakes of marijuana and three thick, tightly rolled joints. Charlotte said that she had set the large canvas bag upright, and carefully put everything back inside it except for one of the joints. Now she cradled the dope in her hand like a rolled hundred-dollar bill.

“I can’t believe Gwen would do drugs,” Willow murmured, at once appalled and entranced. She had never before seen an actual joint. Certainly she had seen images in health class and on antidrug commercials on TV, but never before had she glimpsed an honest-to-God spliff up close and personal.

“It’s not drugs,” Charlotte said, correcting her. “It’s just marijuana. Cancer patients and people with AIDS smoke it all the time. And, if you want, we can, too.”

“Charlotte!”

Her cousin mimicked her, repeating her name in the singsong voice of a little girl crybaby: “Charrrrrrrr-lotte!”

“Come on… don’t be like that.”

“Gwen had three of them. She won’t miss one. It’s okay.”

Charlotte patted the pockets of her shirt and her shorts, and Willow wondered what she was looking for. Then, without saying a word, the girl stood up again and walked casually back to Gwen’s canvas bag. She reached in, and Willow presumed she was taking a second (or even a third) joint, but then she understood that her cousin was swiping-borrowing, she imagined Charlotte would say-the teenager’s matches or lighter.

When she returned, Willow saw that the girl had indeed brought back a lime-colored Bic, and she was flicking the striker with her thumb. She considered teasing Charlotte about that ridiculous bit of pantomime she had performed a moment earlier: patting herself down like she actually expected to find a lighter of her own in her pockets. But she restrained herself, and then she found herself watching enrapt as Charlotte proceeded to light the joint. She inhaled, hacked loudly and powerfully, rasped… and then inhaled again. This time she didn’t cough, and then slowly she exhaled. The smell was sweet, vaguely reminiscent of both blueberries and an exotic herb she had once smelled at an Indian restaurant. She liked it, and when her cousin turned toward her and raised her eyebrows invitingly, she accepted the joint and took a drag, too. Then she took another. And there in the grass the two girls proceeded to smoke and sniff and rasp until the burning paper scorched the tips of Charlotte’s fingers, and she dropped it onto the ground as if it were a wooden match that almost had consumed itself.