“You guys were pretty tight, huh?”
She sighs even as she nods. “We were, yeah. I thought we’d be friends forever, the three of us. Me, Ellen, and Frieda. Somewhere in these woods is a tree withELFcarved on it, our initials. We thought that was so funny for some reason.”
“Did you all just grow apart, or…”
I see Lo’s fingers tighten around the handlebars for a second. “After I took up with Landon, your grandparents didn’t want Ellen spending much time with me. She’d met your daddy by then, so she was all wrapped up in him. And Frieda never really forgave me for what happened during Hurricane Audrey. But she’s probably told you all about that.”
Confused, I stop in my tracks. It takes Lo a second to realize I’m not wheeling the bike alongside her. “I’m not sure what you mean. I don’t know anyone named Frieda,” I say. “And Mom never mentioned her.”Or you, I think but don’t say out loud.
Now Lo is the one who looks confused. “But she works foryou,” she says, and I can hear the waves crashing on the beach just over the sandy rise, and I know who she must be talking about, but it’s still a shock hearing the words that come out of her mouth next.
“The woman at the desk. Edie. That’s Frieda.”
AUDREY
May 5, 1977
I hate that the last thing I said to my mama was a lie.
And the thing is, I didn’t mean for it to be.
When I told her I was going to spend the night at Ellen’s house, that was genuinely what I thought I was going to do. It was early May, but the summer heat was already rising. It always felt like our seasons were out of whack down here. Fall was a few weeks at the end of November, winter ended by the middle of wet February, but our spring and our summer stretched out, starting in March, sometimes not ending until October. Maybe some people think that sounds great, but I hated the heat, the sun. Lo always teased me about wearing long-sleeved shirts over my bathing suit, but for one thing, I wasn’t tanned and sleek like Lo and Ellen. At twelve, they were already starting to look like women while I just looked like a sad, pale little boy, especially after that stupid haircut. Mama thought it was so pretty on that one figure skater lady, but maybe it was just pretty on her becauseshewas pretty.
It made me look like a mushroom.
Lo never teased me about that, though, and when anyone did, she’d be right up in their faces, asking who made them an expert on hair, saying that no one got it because “this is a hick town full of shit-kicking morons who don’t understand fashion.”
I loved her for that.
And Lo wasn’t all that easy to love. She could be mean sometimes, and she would go through these rebellious stages that nearly killed Miss Beth-Anne, who was the sweetest woman alive, sweeter than my mama, much as I hated to admit that.
She was in one of those moods that May. She’d started smoking, preferring Virginia Slims, which always looked too long to me. One time, I told her it looked like she was smoking a tampon, and she stopped talking to me for four days.
Ellen talked her around. Ellen could always do that. Nowthatwassomebody who was sweet. Ellen never talked back to her mama or to teachers, never asked why I was dressed like Wednesday Addams on the beach, and the one time she drank, it’s because they accidentally gave her the real wine at communion instead of the grape juice they used for the kids.
That wasn’t even her fault, but she still felt so bad about it that she told her parents immediately.
We were a funny little trio, I guess. The wild one, the sweet one, and then… me. The odd one, the one who didn’t quite “match.” But we’d been friends since we’d shared the infant and toddler room at the St. Medard’s Bay First Baptist Church Day Care, and that was a forever kind of love.
I thought it was, at least.
And then Audrey.
You didn’t grow up in St. Medard’s Bay without knowing about the hurricanes. Lo’s daddy had died in the last big one, Delphine back in ’65. Lo hadn’t even been born yet. Her mom had climbed a tree, but her daddy had slipped and fallen, drowning “in an instant,” Lo always said, even though, privately, Ellen and I sometimes reminded each other that you can’t drown instantly.
But I understood why she’d want to think that. It was too awful, imagining him struggling, trying to breathe, only to pull in filthy water, lungs burning, chest like a vise.
The thing is, though, none of us remembered Delphine. We weren’t born back then, and our parents didn’t talk about it because not talking about anything unpleasant ever is as much a Southern tradition as biscuits and gravy. So even though we grew up hearing these stories, they felt far away. Like a village that had slain a dragon decades ago, and sure, maybe the dragon would come back, maybe the dragon had babies that would grow up and come seeking revenge, but the more time passes without the beating of wings in the sky, the more the villagers start to think maybe the dragon was just a myth.
The day before Audrey hit, she was just a blob far out in the Gulf,barely a Category 1. The news was saying she would swing wide to the west, dumping rain and wind on Louisiana and parts of Texas.
St. Medard’s was still watching, though, and they canceled school for that Friday, the sixth, out of “an abundance of caution.”
All me, Lo, and Ellen heard was “no school on a Friday.”
“We’ll do a sleepover Thursday night,” Lo declared. She was the Plan Maker. Sometimes the plans were good—the time she somehow convinced the manager down at the Starlite Movie Palace to let us in to seeJaws—and sometimes they were bad—last Christmas when she spiked the eggnog at the Shipwreck Inn and one of Ellen’s parents’ guests got so drunk she took her sparkly reindeer sweater off—but they were alwaysinteresting, at least.
And a sleepover was, as far as Lo plans went, pretty mild.
