In front of the outdoor reggae band, I danced in my floppy bush hat, bikini top, and cargo shorts. I was as drunk as a skunk, laughing hysterically, forehead to forehead with my friends, and the feeling I’d had at the beach bar returned, on steroids. I had everything. I was young and pretty and carefree with my arms around people I loved who loved me back. For a fleeting moment, I felt truly ecstatically happy to be alive.
For a split second.
Then it was gone.
When I woke, the cheap hotel room clock read 2:23 a.m. Turning over in the cramped, dark room, the first thing I noticed was that Alex wasn’t beside me. I quickly fumbled through my last memories. I remembered a club we went to after the sunset, loud techno, Alex in a straw cowboy hat he’d found somewhere, Alex twirling beside me to Madonna’s “Vogue.”
That was about it. The intervening hours, how I had gotten back to the hotel, were an impenetrable alcohol-induced fog, a complete mystery.
A ball of panic began to burn at the lining of my stomach like guzzled vodka as I stared at Alex’s empty pillow.
Was he OK? I thought groggily. Passed out somewhere? Worse?
I was lying there, breathing rapidly in the dark, woodenly wondering what I should do next, when I heard the sound.
It was a giggle, and it had come from the bathroom behind me on my right. I rolled myself up onto my elbows and tilted my head off the bed to look through the crack of its slightly open door.
In the light of a strange, low glow, I spotted Alex leaning against the sink. Then I heard another giggle, and Maureen, my best friend, appeared in front of him holding a lit candle.
At first, as Maureen put the candle down onto the counter and they began to kiss, I truly wondered if I was still asleep and having a nightmare. Then I heard Maureen moan. Realizing that I was very much awake, the enormity of what I was watching walloped into me like an asteroid into a continent. It was my worst fear, everyone’s worst fear.
My boyfriend and my best friend together.
Crippling waves of anger and fear and revulsion slammed through me. Why wouldn’t they? Primordial betrayal was being enacted right in front of my locked-open eyes.
I heard Maureen moan again as Alex began to peel off her T-shirt.
Then they were cut from sight as the bathroom door closed with a soft, careful click.
A T. S. Eliot quote from my last Modern Poetry class popped into my mind as I blinked at the closed door.
This is the way the world endsNot with a bang but a whimper
Or a moan, I thought, turning and looking at the clock again: 2:26.
If my premed boyfriend wasn’t currently busy, he could have marked it down.
Time of girlfriend’s death.
I didn’t scream as I sat up. I didn’t look for something heavy and then kick the door in and start swinging.
In retrospect, that’s exactly what I should have done.
Instead, I decided not to bother them. I just simply stood.
Barefoot, I grabbed my jacket and stumbled out of the bedroom and through the hotel room’s front door, closing it behind me with my own soft, careful click.
Chapter 3
I WAITED until I was outside the hotel’s empty lobby before I started jogging. After a minute, I broke into a sprint. Down the middle of the pitch-dark street, I huffed and puffed, sweating like a marathon runner, like an action movie star escaping an impending nuclear explosion.
I was fast, too. Maureen was the tall, blond, long-limbed pitcher. Cathy was the short, tough catcher, and I was the lean, mean, in-between fast one. The now-you-see-her, now-you-don’t, lay-one-down-the-third-base-line-and-beat-you-to-first-base fast one.
And at that moment, I needed every ounce of my speed to take me away from what I’d seen.
Because what I’d witnessed wasn’t just the two-for-one end of my relationships with my boyfriend and my best friend.
I guess you could call it the proverbial last straw.
My dad, a Maryland state trooper, had died in the line of duty when I was eleven. All dads are special, of course, but my dad actually was an extremely special human being. Exceedingly kind, deeply moral, and a gifted, natural listener, he was the person everyone he came into contact with—coworkers, neighbors, the mailman, complete strangers—turned to for comfort and advice.
Which was what made his unexpected death even more devastating. It tore something deep and fundamental inside of my mom. Once an intensely religious teetotaler, she started drinking. She put on eighty pounds and stopped taking care of herself. Everything came to a head in the spring of my junior year in college when she committed suicide in my dad’s old Ford F-150 with the help of a garden hose.
Maureen and Alex had bookended me throughout my mom’s funeral arrangements. Since I had no brothers or sisters or close relatives, they had been more than best friends to me. They had been the only family I had left.
The trip down here had actually been Maureen’s idea. She knew the anniversary of my mom’s passing was approaching, and she wanted to cheer me up.
It was all too much. The pain of the betrayal I’d just witnessed hit me again like a wrecking ball. I began crying as I ran. Tears mixed with the sweat that began to drip off my face and onto the sandy blacktop and the tops of my bare feet.
I dropped to my knees onto the sand when I arrived at the beach. It was empty, just me and the dark ocean and the star-filled sky. Staring out at the black water, I remembered when I’d almost drowned at an Ocean City beach when I was nine. I’d been caught by a riptide, but my dad had saved me.
I breathed the night air in and out and listened to the lap of the waves, feeling more alone and desperate than I ever had in my entire life.
There was no one at all to save me now.
About twenty feet to the right beside me, I noticed a fat, concrete buoy-shaped marker.
SOUTHERNMOST POINT, CONTINENTAL U.S.A., was painted on it. 90 MILES TO CUBA.
I was standing, soul wrecked, about to take a shot at swimming those ninety miles, when I stuck my hand into the pocket of my shorts and realized something fascinating.
I had Alex’s car keys.
The keys to his Z28 Chevy Camaro, which had brought us down here from the University of Florida in Gainesville. He’d gotten his “baby,” as he called it, from sweating four summers at his dad’s landscaping business. I’d sweated four years, trying to get his numb jock skull through premed, so the sudden idea of taking the sleek red car out for a little spin instead of going for a swim seemed eminently logical. To my shattered heart, it seemed downright brilliant.
I ran even faster back to the hotel parking lot. After I sailed one of Whore-reen’s bags out the window, I gunned the Z28’s engine like I had pole position at the Indy 500.
Then I did what any self-respecting, suicidal, recently orphaned, currently being-cheated-on twenty-one-year-old girl would do.
I neutral-dropped my boyfriend’s Camaro out of the lot in a cloud of rubber smoke.
Chapter 4
AFTER A FEW FISHTAILING TURNS, I found an open road next to a beach and drove the Camaro properly—namely, like I’d stolen it. I didn’t drop the hammer. I very nearly busted it through the meticulously vacuumed floor.