The Baddest Girl on the Planet Read online

  Charlotte grimaces and circles something on a paper. “Why do they insist on using the letters U-R instead of writing out y-o-u-r?”

  You traipse down the beach toward the fake lighthouse that’s really a bar. It’s fat and round with black-and-white horizontal stripes, cleaner than any lighthouse you’ve ever seen. You order a hamburguesa and walk around the resort nibbling on it. Music sways and trills from the buffet by the pool, and you do a salsa step you don’t remember learning. You decide to go to the room and grab a book. You walk past the sprawling blue pool, the log with pink orchids, the gazebo with flamingos in front of it. You run into Freddie as you’re walking down one of the open corridors lined with a pond and fountain. He asks how you’re enjoying your stay, dimples flashing when he smiles. He’s not staring at your bikinied rack, but rather at your hips. This unsettles you. You have a nice rack and you’re used to men staring at it. You tell him you’re having a lovely time and ask how they get the towels in such cute animal shapes. Freddie says the resort gives seminars on making animal towels. His favorite is the swan. He flirts with you, telling you about his apartment, his family, how beautiful his country is. You flirt back.

  Freddie skims a finger down the side of your left hip. “Fuerte,” he says. “Very strong.”

  You’re a little weirded out, but not because he touched you. You never really think about your hips. “Thanks,” you say. “I need to get my book.” You scurry down the corridor. The air smells musty.

  Charlotte’s still grading when you get back to the beach. She’s brought over a table and colonized it with stacks of papers weighted down with brain coral. She glances up. “Hey,” she says.

  You move her bag off your chair and sit down. “The craziest thing happened,” you say. You tell her about Freddie’s hip fetish.

  Charlotte says, “It’s a cultural thing.”

  You tell her you’re used to your boobs being the body part that attracts attention. “If I’d gone to high school here, I wouldn’t have gotten a reputation as Easy Evie,” you say. “No one here cares if you have excessive cleavage.”

  Charlotte pauses her grading, pen in midair. “It wasn’t just your rack. A lot of factors went into your reputation in high school.” She goes back to her papers.

  You cross your arms. “Enlighten me,” you say. “Go on.”

  But Charlotte just shakes her head, still looking at her papers. “I didn’t mean anything.”

  “I think you did. You meant I was slutty.”

  Charlotte looks up. She sticks her paper under a piece of coral. “Evie, that was a million years ago,” she says. “Besides, people only thought you were bad because they had nothing else to talk about.”

  You just look at Charlotte, your arms crossed and eyebrows raised.

  Charlotte sighs. “Do you want to go swimming?” she asks.

  Dominican Al comes to the rescue. You spend a day and a half drinking rum and flirting with Freddie when he comes by the fake lighthouse bar while Charlotte grades papers and writes. Then she agrees to go on a day trip to La Isla Saona. It’s a cloudy day, the tiny aqua waves bigger, but still nowhere near the height and power of a Hatteras wave. You and Charlotte board the boat and watch the fake lighthouse recede into the distance. You talk about other boat trips you’ve taken, how different this is from the ferry to Ocracoke, and Charlotte says boats still remind her of taking her father’s ashes out to sea. She says she’ll always remember the water changing as the boat rounded the tip of Hatteras Island, the way the Pamlico blended into the Atlantic and the waves roughened.

  You land on Saona, which is a fake deserted island. It’s a real island, but set up with buffets of food, picnic tables, and hammocks strung between palm trees. You and Charlotte sit beside a man with a white beard who turns out to be a professor of literature. He and Charlotte start talking about books. They talk about authors you’ve never heard of. Márquez. Allende. Carpentier. They keep talking. You finish your paella, your pastelitos, your tostones. By the time you finish your dulce de leche, Charlotte’s talking about how uncomfortable the resort makes her feel, how it’s as if she’s participating in thinly veiled colonialism. “We as the heterogeneous white majority are exploiting the traditions and values of the citizens here just so we can have a nice vacation,” she says.

  You put down your spoon. “Tourism does good things for the economy, too,” you say. “I’ve seen it firsthand.”

  Charlotte and the professor of literature exchange looks. “But it doesn’t change the fact that wealthy Americans are swooping in, buying all the beachfront property, and making a killing while the local population works for a pittance,” Charlotte says.

  “It’s a pittance they wouldn’t otherwise have,” you say. “Freddie says he has the nicest apartment of anyone he knows. At least he has a job.”

  “It’s still an imbalance of power that has its roots in colonization,” she says.

  You stand up. “You mean the way you colonized my island every summer? How come that never made you uncomfortable? How come you think you have the right to exploit the locals there but not here?”

  Charlotte stands up, too. The literature professor says he has to go find his wife and that it was nice meeting Charlotte. He scurries off. Charlotte says, “It’s not the same thing. We all have the same rights at home, the same history. It’s an equal playing field.”

  You stalk off and look at a pelican sitting on a log. Charlotte follows you. “You’re on crack if you think you and I ever had an equal playing field,” you say.

  Charlotte looks genuinely puzzled, her brow puckering. “What do you mean?”

  You sit down in the sand. It’s damp. “You had the perfect little family, while I had a mother who fucked Bob the lighthouse mover from Buffalo. You had campfires with your dad playing games of charades and your mom leading sing-alongs in three-part harmony. I had asthma from Aunt Fay’s cigarettes and a stoned older brother and a father who was drunk for half my childhood. How is that the same history?”

  Charlotte starts to answer, but the crew from the resort is shepherding people back onto the boat. You climb to the upper deck and sit down. Charlotte sits beside you, her spine straight and stiff. The boat takes off, and you watch Saona fade away. The sky is blanketed with gray clouds, the water dark blue and choppy. “At least you’ve still got two parents,” Charlotte says.

  “That’s not fair,” you say. The dead dad card trumps anything you could say about how rough your life is.

  “That’s my point.”

  A crew member comes by and says they’ll stop the boat above a coral reef if anyone wants to snorkel. Charlotte says she will. You go down and get a mask and fins, too. You’ll be damned if Charlotte McConnell sees a coral reef and you don’t. The crew member dips your mask in a bucket of chemical-smelling liquid, saying it’ll keep it from fogging up. You put the mask on and it makes your eyes water.

  The boat stops and piles of tourists jump into the Caribbean. You plunge in and swim hard for a few minutes, pissed. You see a bright yellow fish with a frilly fin and don’t show Charlotte. You see pink-and-blue-striped fish, and you keep them to yourself. You kick and swim until you begin to calm down and breathe evenly through the snorkel. You love being underwater, love the sense of otherworldliness, the way everything above the surface disappears. You paddle and splash. You watch Charlotte dive again and again. She talks to a little boy holding a sand dollar and then dives some more.

  You decide to look for a sand dollar, too. You dive down, down, down, the water pushing past your face like silk, the thrum of pressure mounting in your ears. You run your hands along the soft sand, feeling for the grittiness of a sand dollar. You dive seven times before you find one, thick and fat and unlike any sand dollar you’ve ever seen, and take it to the surface.

  Now that your head is above water, you look around. You hadn’t realized the sky was clouding darker, the water getting choppy. Most of the other tourists are already back on the boat, which looks far awa
y. You hear thunder. You see Charlotte dive.

  You wait for her to surface, treading water impatiently. “Get back to the boat,” you shout. You start to swim toward her.

  “Just one more try. I really want a sand dollar,” Charlotte yells back.

  “Trust me,” you say. You tread water, legs bicycling under the surface. “I know the water.”

  But Charlotte’s diving again. You wait. She dives three more times, and you finally shout, “I’m going now.” Charlotte waves her assent. You begin the swim back toward the boat, Charlotte behind you. And just like that, the world changes. Thunder claps and rolls in a guttural Spanish R. Rain falls against your snorkeling mask, cold on your head. Waves rise and splash, rise and splash, the current pulling you away from the boat. You’re a strong swimmer, a Hatteras islander, after all. You paddle and kick, fighting the water, fighting the storm, fighting it all. You swim solidly even with a fat sand dollar in one hand. You’re almost to the boat before you think to look behind you. Charlotte’s head is a small, blurry dot in between gray water and gray rain. You call her name. You’re mad at her, but you can’t let her drown. You turn back and swim toward her, your arms heavy.

  “I’m getting tired,” Charlotte says. She looks scared, her eyes round.

  You grab her wrist and pull, swimming hard, kicking hard. Her weight drags, even though you can tell she’s kicking, too, trying to help. Rain splashes and waves thrash. You pull and kick and swim. You lose a fin, break Charlotte’s yellow bracelet. You kick each other. You keep your eyes on the boat, its hazy outline your only thought.

  You climb up the ladder to the boat, reaching down to grasp Charlotte’s hand and pull her on board. It’s not until you and Charlotte are huddled under the eave of the boat’s roof, wrapped in towels, shivering, that you realize there’s still the broken, ragged edge of a fat sand dollar clasped tightly in your hand.

  The next day, the weather changes. It’s like there was never a storm, never even a thought of a storm. Small white clouds puff along the sapphire sky, soft ripples of teal water caressing the sand. The sand, still damp, is the only sign that anything ever went wrong. After you and Charlotte had recovered from the boat trip by sitting in the hot tub, you’d gone back to the room and taken a nap, then dressed up and eaten at a hibachi restaurant. Freddie gave Charlotte a new yellow bracelet. It looked crisp and starched next to your worn one. You and Charlotte didn’t fight anymore, didn’t talk about anything important. You thought saving Charlotte’s life changed things, made her grateful to you, and that the trip would be fun from here on out. You went to a bar and watched soccer, yelling loudly with the rest of the crowd even though neither of you followed the game.

  That day, you fall into a routine. Breakfast at the buffet, where Charlotte makes a big show of letting you go ahead of her in line and have the last serving of chorizo, saying she owes you, then head to the beach. Charlotte writes while you read a mystery novel. You convince Charlotte to go swimming topless by reminding her you’d saved her life. “Fine, you were right. I should’ve gone back earlier,” she says. But she unhooks her bikini and bares her perky breasts; you take off your top, and the two of you stride into the sea. You feel brazen, exotic. You glide through the water. When you swirl to the left, your breasts follow. You and Charlotte eat lunch, topless, at the fake lighthouse and then put your bikinis back on and go to the pool. You swim and read, drink and eat. You talk about weather; you talk about food. That night, you and Charlotte and a healthy dose of Dominican Al go to the resort’s nightly entertainment, which turns out to be a live game show called “How Well Do You Know Your Mate?” Freddie is the emcee, and he shines a spotlight on you and Charlotte, winking and asking the newlyweds to play. You think Charlotte will have stage fright and not want to, but she turns to you and grins. “Let’s do it,” she says.

  So you both trot up onstage with Freddie, and he makes Charlotte go behind a curtain so he can ask you questions, explaining that she’ll come back and answer the same questions and then compare the results. You’re left with two brides, both young and tan and nervously smoothing out their sundresses. Freddie seats you all and cues some tacky game show music, then starts firing questions at you and the brides. What’s your partner’s favorite season? Vacation spot? Food? What was the name of your partner’s first pet? Of the two of you, who drives the worst? How old was your partner when he or she was first kissed? What’s the last book your partner read?

  You’ve got this. Summer. National Seashore campground at Frisco. Lasagna. Bear Minimum the teddy bear hamster. Definitely Charlotte. Sixteen. Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary.

  Charlotte and the newlywed men are paraded out and shown to seats beside their partners. You nod confidently to Charlotte, and sure enough, when she answers the questions, you’re off to a perfect start. You’re asked to go backstage, and when you come back you answer that your favorite color is red, comfort food is Bubba’s barbeque, flower is a daisy, that Charlotte takes longer to get ready in the morning, your car’s four-wheel drive, you’d travel to Brazil if you could go anywhere, and your closet is a disaster. Charlotte’s answered them all correctly except for the travel question. “I thought you’d want to go to the Himalayas,” she whispers. “You used to want to be a Sherpa.”

  You whisper back that Sherpas are still pretty sweet, but ever since you watched a documentary about Carnival, you’ve wanted to go to Brazil. Your streak is broken. You guess that if Charlotte won the lottery she’d buy a house, when she’d rather take time to write and pay off student loans. She thinks you don’t want any more children, your dream job is a biologist, your pet peeve is men who don’t call back. Charlotte, it turns out, would rather go shoe shopping on an ideal weekend than see an art show, and she thinks you, if stranded on a desert island, could not live without your hair dryer. “Seriously?” you whisper. “There’s not even electricity on a desert island.”

  “It was supposed to be funny,” Charlotte says.

  “Just because you don’t need to blow-dry your hair for it to look good doesn’t mean we’re all so lucky,” you snipe.

  Charlotte rolls her eyes.

  Freddie sends her backstage and asks you another question. “If your mate could go back in time and do one thing over in their life, what would they do?”

  When Charlotte comes back, she does not answer correctly that she would decline to make your brother fall in love with her and then completely fuck him over.

  You go offstage, coming back to answer the question “What is your biggest regret?” You say not finishing college, but Charlotte has expanded that into dropping out of school to marry a controlling asshole. You get partial credit.

  You guess Charlotte will say her biggest fault is her pretentious use of big words and inability to have fun, while she answers a lack of assertiveness. Charlotte guesses the thing you’d change about yourself is your aimlessness and absence of ambition; you think you’d like to control your temper.

  You lose the game. Freddie hands you each a bird of paradise flower as a consolation prize. Charlotte carefully places hers in a discarded water bottle and sets it on the nightstand, adjusting the flower so it looks toward her side of the bed. You throw yours at a flamingo.

  You stand in the lobby by a life-size metal sculpture of a bull, your bag packed. You and Charlotte have sufficiently ignored each other until checkout, and your flight leaves before hers. You stand there looking at the bull’s flared nostrils, debating whether you should go back to the room and tell her goodbye or go back to the room and tell her goodbye, have a nice life, and fuck you very much. You’re planning what to say when your stomach rumbles. Something isn’t right. Your stomach rolls and growls again, a heaving pack of Spanish Rs in your gut. Something is very wrong. You leave your bag and run as fast as you can back to the room, banging on the door until Charlotte opens it. You hurl yourself into the bathroom just as the explosive diarrhea begins.

  “I think I have Montezuma’s revenge,�
�� you say.

  “I told you not to drink the water,” Charlotte says.

  You tell her you’ve been careful.

  “That’d be a first,” she mutters.

  You throw open the bathroom door, but Charlotte’s out of your line of sight. You can’t get off the toilet, but you strain your neck around the door to see her reflection in the floor-length mirror. She’s slung herself across the king-sized bed, arms crossed.

  Your stomach cramps some more. “Why’d you even come if all you were going to do was work and tell me what an idiot I am?”

  You crane your neck and see Charlotte sit up on the bed. “You knew I had to work. And you’re not an idiot.”

  “I know,” you say. “But you seem to think I am.” Then you remember you are an idiot—you’ve left your bag in the lobby. Shit.

  “I don’t think that,” Charlotte says. “Besides, you think I’m a pretentious snob.”

  You lean your head back against the wall. “Only a little.” You sigh. “Would you go get my bag from the lobby and buy me some Imodium?”

  Charlotte doesn’t answer, just strides out the door. You sit on the toilet in your room at the spectacular all-inclusive Hacienda Paradisus Resort and Spa and have diarrhea for three solid hours. Charlotte’s a snob, but she’s a snob who brings you Imodium and a bottle of water; she’s a snob who calls the airline and reschedules your flight. She brings you a crossword puzzle, a Sudoku game, and your mystery novel, and when those are exhausted, a copy of Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary. You never realized how complicated teaching poetry was. You give Charlotte your credit card so she can call your mom to reschedule your pickup time in Norfolk. When the four doses of Imodium have finally kicked in, you crawl out of the bathroom and curl in a ball on the bed. Charlotte sits beside you.