Somebody Has To Stop It

We bought t-shirts from the gift shop next to our hotel. We were going to pick out one for each other and then wear it all day, but we ended up wearing the one we picked out ourselves instead. The one I picked out was red and with a picture of a white sailboat on it. Julie’s was blue with a yellow starfish.

It was early in the morning and my parents were still in bed. We walked down the empty beach in our new shirts and watched the waves roll onto the sand. Julie reached out and held my hand as we walked by an old couple in oversized beach chairs. “We should have walked closer,” Julie said after they were behind us. “Or maybe we could have stood in front of them and looked out at the ocean.” She stopped and looked out at the ocean. “Stand here,” she said. I stood beside her. She put her arm around my waist and pulled me against her; her hip pushed against mine. “Then turn our heads and look at each other,” she turned her head.  I looked at her. Her eyes aren’t pretty, but I always tell her they are. “Then we’d kiss,” she said and looked down at my lips. I thought of standing up on my toes and the way she would push me back down with her lips.

“That’d be too much,” I said. Julie pushed me away with her hip.

“It would be hilarious,” she said. “Old people hate lesbians.”



We walked down to the skinny pier that stretches out into the ocean just far enough so the beach is out of your peripheral vision. We walked to the end and sat on the edge with our legs bouncing around. We tried to make our legs bang against each other the way those little metal balls do on that toy. My dad has one on his desk at work. Four or five metal balls hang from strings and when you pull one of them back and let go, it swings down and hits the one next to it. The energy goes from the first ball to the second, from the second to the third, and from the third to the fourth, until the last ball flies out just like the first one did. The whole thing keeps going back and forth like that. For forever I guess, until somebody stops it. Somebody has to stop it.

“You think your sister’s going to come back?” Julie said while our legs banged against each other.

“Of course she will,” I said.

“What a bummer it’d be if you ended up an only child. You’re dad would follow you around all the time like your sister.” Julie stopped her legs and laid her head on my shoulder. “We’d have to run away together. Just like your sister.”

“She hasn’t run away,” I said. “She’s just mad or something.”

“We could get an apartment. In the city.”

“We’re supposed to leave tomorrow,” I said. “She’ll be back.”

“We could drop out of school and work at a strip club or something,” she said. “We could be a team.”

“A team?”

“On stage. Guys love that stuff.” She lifted her head and banged her right leg against her left. My right leg swung out then back against my left leg. Her left leg swung out. “This is so weird,” she said. “Like we’re one person or something.”

But we weren’t really doing it. We were only pretending. We just didn’t say so, but we both knew we were pretending. Eventually, it would all stop.