her do this.
‘The only one they blame for letting Lucy go off with them,’ she says impatiently.
‘Off with who?’
‘If our folks knew their girls were laid out on the sand with their knees up just like Jessie Vukovich . . . Oh, that sounds terrible, but this is Fort Jude.’ Another long, time-sucking sigh. ‘Around here we drag our pasts around like Marley’s ghost, because whatever you do, if even one person finds out, everybody knows it. You’d have to move to Alaska to escape it! In Fort Jude people forgive, God knows we all do it every single day, but nobody ever, ever forgets,’ she says.
She says, ‘And if you’re a slut, that’s what everybody thinks of you.’
‘You’re saying my mother was a slut?’
‘Hardly.’ Something ugly breaks the surface. ‘She thought she was too good for us!’
The thing about period clocks is the pendulum. Every fucking tick.
Nervously, she zips and unzips the hoodie she threw on to go out tonight. Color keyed to the silk tank top, what was she thinking? Was she dressing for him? ‘Oh this is embarrassing. Girls like us, no matter what we did back then or where we did it or who we did it with, the day we get married we’re all virgins again.’ She rocks with anger. ‘Because it’s expected! If nobody finds out, it just – un-happens. It has to. Am I making any sense?’
‘Not really.’
‘It doesn’t matter. I’m sure up north things are a lot freer, but this is a small town locked up inside a big city and down here everybody minds everybody else’s business – that is, everybody that matters.’ She fixes him with her eyes. ‘It’s how we keep each other safe.’
He lies politely; anything to keep her going. ‘I see.’
‘We keep quiet.’ She spreads her fingers in apology. ‘It’s what we do, and I’m sorry. If the truth came out, it would ruin more lives than just Lucy Carteret’s. So I hope you understand, and I’m sorry.’
He doesn’t. He wants to pick this woman up by her hoodie and batter her with questions but he has to wait until her head comes back from wherever it’s wandered off to. It takes longer than it should.
‘OK,’ she says finally. ‘So what I wanted to tell you was, it got way too late that night; there were at hundreds of us there, everybody that mattered and all their friends, all the team captains, cheerleaders, prom queens and the whole May Court except, of course, for Lucy because she was beautiful but she was never one of us, which is why . . .’
He leans forward to catch what comes next.
Instead she takes him on a detour. ‘It’s like Lucy was above us all even in first grade, birthday parties in the club ballroom and we had to dress up for old Lorna’s little princess, unless . . .’
‘Unless?’
‘Unless she was her prisoner! Then Lucy’s dad died up in Charleston and she came into some money. All those years trapped in the tower. She bought a convertible! Came down on the beach at the tag end of houseparties, amazing body and her hair was perfect. It just was too much. We hated her. I’m sorry, that’s the way it was, like, if it had happened to another girl, we might have—’
‘What?’
‘Warned her off!’ Is she drunk or just used up? The girlish way Nenna rearranges her breasts inside the tight tank top makes clear that she’d have sex with him to keep from having to explain. ‘I must look awful.’
‘You look fine.’
‘I don’t, but thanks.’ Oh, lady, don’t sigh! ‘Sometimes I wonder how it would have come down if we’d been friends. But she was not like us!’
‘You said that.’
‘God knows what her problem was.’
Carefully, he leads her back into the interview, asking little, giving nothing – no hint of an agenda, framing a question from what he knows. ‘Shy?’
‘Like, we were never close. I don’t know if she was shy or just too good for us. She just didn’t do like we do. She lived in her own little world, and maybe if she’d stayed there, she wouldn’t have . . . And the saddest thing?’ Her face is all messed up.
‘Ma’am?’
She wails, ‘Not Ma’am!’
In the silence, he counts heartbeats.
‘Bobby Chaplin was in love with her. He begged her to come out in his car so maybe it was his fault, what happened. She came sailing down at the tail end of a long week fresh and shiny