Adrift Read online

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  SAILOR’S ALMANAC, LONG-RANGE FORECAST, NORTH ATLANTIC CORRIDOR: Summer will be lovely with mild winds through August, heading into hurricane season.

  The surfers called it The End for its killer waves. To everyone else it was the end of Long Island. Montauk. It’s a town of beaches and bluffs on the tip of the south fork. My best friend, John Costello, and I landed summer jobs at a state park out there. My parents owned a flower shop, and one of their customers was a big deal in the parks department. I’d just finished junior year. The plan was to apply early decision to Yale as a forestry major. I dreamed of being a ranger in the Utah canyons or Alaska glaciers. I had to get out of the city. Everywhere I looked I saw Mr. Costello’s ghost.

  The name of the park was Heron Hills. I fixed boardwalks and lifeguard chairs and the dock struts rotting away in the saltwater marsh. When the tide was out, the seaweed crackled beneath a sun hot enough to melt your mind. My head ached no matter how much Gatorade I drank. I loved it, being deep in the quiet, near the water. From the bluffs I saw the earth’s curve.

  After work on the hottest day in August I met up with John in the park’s vehicle maintenance shop. He’d been working in gas stations since the day after his dad’s funeral, when he grabbed a job filling tires. Iceman. That’s what everybody called him. We hadn’t been able to hang out as much since we started going to different schools freshman year. I took the test for Hudson, a selective public school in Manhattan. It was a forty-minute train ride and a world away from Woodhull, a working-class neighborhood that straddles the Brooklyn–Queens border. John and I grew up there, right on the borderline. The high school in Woodhull was pretty rough, but John didn’t care. All he needed was a diploma for trade school. He had his heart set on being an electrician, like his dad. Not his heart, his mind. Electrical work was sensible, steady.

  The vehicle maintenance shop was stifling. John hoisted an engine out of a Land Rover with two other guys. They were sweating so much they looked like they’d gone swimming. John worked just as hard, but he was dry until one of the trucks backfired. I flinched too.

  We hit the beach and swam out past where the waves broke and the water turned silky. We came in clear-eyed and hungry and stopped to say hi to a man who fished from knee-deep water. He gave us a pair of blues. I smothered them with butter and hand-mashed lemon and pan-cooked them in the fire pit behind the trailer where we bunked.

  After dinner the harmonicas came out. Mr. Costello had taught us how to play, and John was good. The stars curved out of the dusk into the night. We never said much. We were good at being alone together. But that night it was on my mind. “You don’t talk about it ever,” I said. “About him.”

  John tended the fire with a broken slat he’d pulled from the dune fence. “Not until you make me anyway,” he said. He checked his beat-up Timex and headed for the trailer. “The bugs are getting bad. Don’t fall asleep out here again.”

  I buried the fire with sand. The waves caught the moonlight. One rose higher than the others, rolled toward me, and faded into the shore. The mosquitoes chased me into the trailer. I cracked my laptop to study for a little while before bed. I was taking a certified first responder course with the lifeguards. I wanted to know how to bring somebody back to life. I was learning what I already knew: Most times you can’t. Anyway, it would look good on my Yale application.

  We were at the mini-mart when it opened. Sundays we made extra money selling soda and ice cream. We packed the coolers with Klondike bars. The mini-mart was one of the few places you could raise a Wi-Fi signal. I texted all’s well to my folks and downloaded a library book. The old man behind the counter scrambled us some eggs. “What are we reading this week, my friend? Another travelogue?”

  “I keep telling him, he can run but he can’t hide,” John said.

  “He’ll do as he pleases,” the old man said. “I suspect your friend’s a genius.”

  “Not even close,” I said.

  “Own your greatness, son. False humility doesn’t become a gentleman.”

  It wasn’t false. Yes, I got good grades, but only because I studied as if my life depended on getting into Yale. I was average with an above-average ambition to break out of my neighborhood.

  Blankets and bikinis covered the sand. Kids and gulls screamed. We lugged the coolers up and down the beach. “Ice cream here. Get your ice cream here.” The heat in the sand went through my flip-flops. By noon I had five hundred dollars in my pocket. Yale money, if I got in. My grades and scores put me at the borderline. Always the borderline.

  We restocked the coolers, but by the time we got back to the beach another hawker team was working our territory. We were taller, they were wider. They wore trendy shades and went shirtless and slick with Hawaiian Tropic. John and I wore T-shirts, hats, and sunscreen. We were dark anyway, the typical Woodhull mix, Irish and Italian. We both had black hair, but my mom is northern Italian, and my eyes are blue. John’s dad was from the south, Sicilian, and John’s eyes were black. He squinted at the muscle-heads, then at me. “Breathe,” he said.

  “You’re officially done for the day,” the bigger one said. “Dude, you deaf?”

  John edged me back. “We’ll make more money at Sully’s anyway,” he said.

  I turned east toward Sully’s Inn and the private beach where we could hawk our sugar for twice as much.

  “Slow it down,” John said. “Matt?”

  “What?”

  “Like we’re walking underwater, right? Nice and easy.”

  “You see me running?” I said.

  “Inside you are,” John said.

  The coolers weighed sixty pounds each. We stopped to catch our breath. A beat-up gull swooped in and pecked at a cigarette filter. Broken mussel shells spiked the beach. A mile later the sand smoothed out, combed clean and white. Painted hand fans waved like the wings of heat-doped butterflies. We couldn’t be calling out like vendors working the cheap seats. We walked along the rows of chaise lounges and waited to be summoned. Back at the public beach the bathing suits were hot pink and yellow. At Sully’s the bikinis were black. The women wore wide-brim white hats, except for this one girl down by the water.

  Her dreadlocks dropped to her waist. She dressed them with light blue beads. She was tall, curvy, dark. Her smile was crooked in the most perfect way. Her eyes were the color of the ocean that day, the lightest green. She was so pretty I stopped walking. I wiped the sweat from my eyes and pretended the heat was making me dizzy.

  She was helping this little kid build a simple sand castle, fast, between when the waves rolled up the shore. It was a turret
really, a flipped sand bucket and then a flipped Dixie cup on top of that. The wind blew their laughter my way. “Hurry,” the girl said. She helped the kid put a shell on top of the castle just before the wave destroyed it. She and the little boy screamed. “It’s just completely gone,” the kid said.

  The girl smoothed his hair. “That’s why you have to remember it. Then it lives forever.”

  My phone buzzed. I’m by the pool. Out of Coke.

  I found John and restocked him, and we split up to cover the beach. I looked back to the shoreline for the girl, but she was gone.

  “I’m over here,” she called out. She was sitting with a girl and a guy. The other girl was pretty too but thinner and blond. The guy was blond too, a giant with a giant smile. I figured they were my age, maybe a little older.

  The skinny girl waved me over. “Let’s see what you got there,” she said. She had an accent, French maybe.

  I lifted the cooler top. “Cokes are five bucks and Klondikes are—”

  “Whatever you are charging is fine,” the guy said. “Three of each, please.” He had the same accent. He held out a credit card.

  The girl with the blue-beaded hair said, “What’s he supposed to do with that, slide it through his butt crack?” Her accent was prep school, Upper East Side.

  “Either of you have any cash then?” the guy said. “Of course not.” He winked at me. “They think I should pay for everything.”

  “That’s what you’re here for,” the skinny girl said.

  The one with the blue beads eyed me like she was studying the model at the Cro-Magnon exhibit. There’s something here I recognize as vaguely human, but …

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “You can catch me next time.” That was it. Giving away three slightly melted Klondike bars. That’s what started the wild ride that remapped the course of my life.

  “That is amazingly sweet of you,” the girl with beaded hair said.

  The skinny girl asked, “You don’t have any Diet?”

  “This nice boy gives you a soda, and you trample his gift?” the nice girl said.

  “Trample?” Skinny said.

  The giant laughed, not in a nasty way. He had a good laugh, real.

  John had Diet in his cooler. I waved him over, plucked a can from the soupy ice, and handed it to the skinny girl.

  The more beautiful girl thanked me and said, “Driana. That one over there is my extremely obnoxious cousin Estefania. Her long-suffering boyfriend is João.”

  “JoJo,” he said, shaking our hands.

  “Matt and John,” I said.

  “That’s cute,” Estefania said. “Like Mutt and Jeff. This is how you say it, yes?”

  “Where you guys from?” I said.

  “Você não falam Português?” Estefania said.

  “Portugal?” I said.

  Estefania rolled her eyes, JoJo chuckled. “Rio,” he said.

  “That’s in Brazil,” Estefania said to let us know she thought we were uncultured morons, and we were. The farthest south I’d been was Staten Island.

  “I’m from New York,” Driana said, as if she wouldn’t be caught dead coming from Rio.

  “Us too,” I said.

  “I know,” she said. Her lips curled into that killer smile.

  I looked at John. He checked his Timex.

  “John doesn’t say much,” Estefania said.

  “Stef, run on up to the pool and dive to the bottom,” Driana said. “We’ll meet you there in twenty minutes.”

  “Come surfing with us,” JoJo said.

  Neither of us had ever touched a surfboard. “We have to sell this stuff before it melts,” John said.

  “When you’re done,” JoJo said. “Please, I want to thank you for the ice creams.”

  “He doesn’t want to trample your gift,” Stef said.

  “We go out later,” JoJo said, ignoring Stef. “When the beach empties and there aren’t any little kids in the water.”

  “They don’t know how to surf. Right, John?” Stef extended her long, tanned leg to kick a little sand at John.

  JoJo didn’t seem to mind that his girlfriend was flirting with another guy. “I’ll teach you,” he said. “It’s a flying dream, except it tastes salty. You don’t have to be afraid of us. We’re the nice kind of rich people.”

  “No, we’re not,” Stef said.

  “Nicer than the rest of the people here,” JoJo said.

  Stef put her hand to her mouth to whisper to John, except she shouted so everybody at Sully’s would have to hear her. “They don’t like us because Dri is brown.” She pronounced her cousin’s name like dream without the m. “Thank God we have more money than they do.”

  JoJo laughed; Driana rolled her eyes. Stef’s assessment might have been right though. Take away the tans, that beach in front of Sully’s was Mayflower, top deck.

  “Meet us in an hour,” JoJo said.

  “They won’t come.” Stef pouted. “Dri, make John come. I’ll be devastated if he doesn’t.” She looked genuinely sad.

  John frowned. “Matt, let’s go.”

  “Thanks anyway,” I said.

  A kid a few chairs down called to us. He couldn’t have been ten. “Over here,” he commanded. I felt like a dog that had been caught stealing table food. The kid wanted me to keep the change though.

  Driana jogged up and pressed something into my hand. “Tuesday night,” she said. “Party at my house. Please come, okay?”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “You’re sad,” she said. “I like sad boys.”

  Her sand-castle partner called out to her. She sprinted past him and dove into a collapsing wave. She’d written her address and “Come play with me” on a gum wrapper. She signed it Dri. “Is that a smiley face or a cross-eyed heart?” I said.

  “Chuck it,” John said.

  “She’s too pretty for me, right?”

  “Too rich.”

  I watched her swim. The sky was clear, except for way out there, where the clouds were stacking up.

  SMALL CRAFT AND SURF ADVISORY: Expect steady rains for the next 48 hours. After the storm passes, strong winds will continue to make waters unpredictable.

  The storm beat up the beach for two days straight. The rains washed away the heat, and by late Tuesday afternoon the sky sparkled. Colors popped: the gold in the dune grass, the silver in the sand, the green in the sea. The waves were big as buildings, rising from far out. I watched them through the binoculars as they pounded the shore. I couldn’t stop thinking about Dri’s sand castle. “I have to go,” I said.

  “You really don’t,” John said.

  “Maybe you’ll meet someone.”

  “We’re going home in two and a half weeks. The last thing I need is to start something with a spoiled rich girl who wants to go slumming.”

  “Everybody out here is from the city anyway.”

  “Not from our part of it. I’ll end up working for these people someday. What happened to you? I thought you were Mr. I Like to Be Alone.” A gust shook the trailer.

  “I’ll look like an idiot, standing around by myself.”

  “You’ll look like an idiot either way. Matt, she’ll rip the sweetness out of you, right through your rib cage. You’ll never be able to squeeze it back in there. Look at him mope now.” He chucked his study guide for the electrician’s exam and grabbed a fresh T-shirt. “We’re not staying late.”

  One of the lifeguards let us borrow his clunker. I tried not to be embarrassed as we pulled up to Dri’s villa. The caretaker’s cottage was twice as big as my house back in Queens, and the mansion itself was from a movie. The front door was open. The music was skin-shaking. Dudes in polos and button-downs hung out on the steps. John and I wore black tees. “Hope they don’t think we’re hit men,” I said.

  “Or waiters,” John said. “If somebody hands me a dirty glass and asks for a refill, I’m out. I’m telling you, Matt, one hour, and then we go.”

  “I hear you.”

&nb
sp; “But you’re not listening to me.”

  Somebody pointed us toward the buffet in the library. I served myself some turkey. John grabbed a cookie from a side table. He bit off an end and spit it up. “It’s soap,” he said. “Tell me that doesn’t look like a Lorna Doone. Why do they have soap on a table?”

  I stopped laughing long enough to say, “The scent, moron.”

  “Let’s get out of here, Matt. Seriously.”

  “Hey!” JoJo swung his giant arms over our shoulders. “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing, man,” John said.

  That got me laughing harder. JoJo laughed harder than I did.

  “You don’t even know why he’s laughing,” John said. John laughed now.

  “I’ll laugh at anything,” JoJo said. “I’m thrilled you came. Dri prayed you would. ‘Do you think my sad, sweet Matthew will come? Do you?’ Or do you prefer we call you Matt?”

  “Matt’s good,” I said.

  “Is he, John?”

  “He’s an idiot,” John said.

  “Come.” JoJo led us to the patio. Driana was the DJ. Her fingers tapped and swiped at two iPads. Her dreadlocks whipped across her face. Another girl hammered a laptop.

  “I have to warn you about Dri,” JoJo said. “She has a heart condition. It’s too big. It gets her into trouble sometimes. You’re not trouble, are you, Matt?”

  “Not the kind you have to worry about.”

  “Then go to it.” He pushed me toward the DJ table and pulled John away.

  Dri screamed when she saw me. She hugged me. “I thoroughly soaked your shirt,” she said. I was sweating plenty anyway. She smelled like vanilla soap. She yelled to her DJ partner, “Kris, sweetie, you have the table.” She grabbed my hand and led me toward the cliff.

  We walked barefoot along the beach. “I’m taking the year off,” Dri said. She’d just graduated from Blessed Heart. It was the most expensive high school in the city and one of the most selective. You had to be supersmart to go there. Or superrich. She was still seventeen, almost eighteen. I had just turned seventeen. “In September I start work at animal control.”

  “The dog pound?” I had to yell, practically. The waves bombed the beach.

  “Cats too. The odd potbellied pig. Ferrets, chickens.”