The Adults by Alison Espach Page A

said.
    “Girls,” her mother scolded. We laughed, then apologized.
    We didn’t let our mothers stay at the beach with us anymore because my god, we were grown women with breasts, and standing around in our bikinis was like standing around in our underwear, and we couldn’t act naturally at the beach, or anywhere really, with our mothers looking at our bodies.
    Instead of staying, our mothers dropped us off with the same warning: “Don’t stick your head under!” and a newly added, “Don’t talk to any of the boys!” This was always Janice’s mother though, as my mother was at home watching The People’s Court. Her only warning before I left the house was, “Emily, don’t ever lend your cheating boyfriend your brand-new Pontiac.”
    “Okay,” I said. “Noted.”
    “Actually,” she said, “don’t ever buy a Pontiac new.”
    This was supposed to be a sad joke, but I was impressed. My mother knows things about cars, I thought as I ran out the door.
    “Aha!” Janice said, pointing her finger. “There they are.”
    We sat down with the Other Girls. They were in striped bikinis. One of them was peeling the skin off an almond with her teeth. One of them had pubic hair coming out the side of her bottoms. One of them looked like a young Barbara Walters, which was Martha, chomping on a hot dog.
    “God, Martha,” said one of them, her teeth grating at the almond.
    “What?”
    “You’re so fat in your intent sometimes.”
    “Huh?”
    “You’re like, not actually fat, but you desire all the things fat people desire, like hot dogs and ice cream,” she said. “So really, you’re, like, fat in intent.”
    The Other Girls, of which there were six including Martha, were thin with arms that looked like needles. They could prick and deflate you with one word. They were the kinds of girls I desperately wanted to like; life would be so much easier if I just liked them, I thought.
    One of them licking salt off a rice cracker asked, “Uh, what’s a tenor sax?”
    I got up and walked to the edge of the beach. The water cooled my shins.
    There were certain things I could see more clearly now. The Sound sat at the margin of the Atlantic to collect things. Nitrogen levels were on the rise. Mercury was being dumped, and the jellyfish were growing like tumors in pockets along the shore, the clear ones that slipped into our baggy bathing suits and made us scream for no reason.
    I could still hear the girls from their towels.
    “This is how you know a guy is a liar,” one of them said. “He shrugs his shoulders a lot and creates an obstacle between you and his mouth.”
    “Like a fence?” another one of them said, to which I heard Janice exclaim, “Wow, that’s so true actually. Mr. Basketball always puts a Coke can up to his mouth, especially after we’ve slept together.”
    The Other Girls laughed. Mr. Baskette, a teacher at our school whom Janice started calling Mr. Basketball for fun, was the most Fuckable teacher at Webb High, determined by poll. He had an Irish nose, a classically Greek jawline, and so did Janice. Janice belonged with him, everyone decided, at least facially; “Your kids would have the best faces,” Brittany said. But he had eyes like mine, I thought as I submerged myself in the water. I could feel the fish mutating at my feet, the insecticides nesting between my toes. My hair spread out around me. The water flooded my ears until it felt like an invasion.

5

    O n Sundays, Richard and Mark chucked crab apples at each other across the street. From my window, I was able to see the objective of the game: they were trying to hurt each other.
    Five years ago, Richard, Mark, and I would have been at the cold spring that ran through our woods, where Richard held one of my Barbies facedown in the water until I was positive it had drowned, until I said, “Richard! Stop!” and he looked at me and said, “Emily, it’s just plastic.” Richard was the boy who knew things like this, and I was the