The Cars song broke into a frolicking guitar riff as an expression of piqued interest crossed my best friend Maureen’s face. My pretty roommate and fellow co-captain of the Gators women’s varsity softball team was apparently game. So was her boyfriend, Big Mike, judging by his enthusiastic nod. Even our studious, usually pessimistic, sunburned pal Cathy looked up from her paperback at the interesting suggestion.
“Jeanine?” Alex said as my friends turned to me in silent deference.
The questionable decision was all mine.
I pursed my lips in worry as I looked down at the sand-covered bar floor between my sun-browned toes.
Then my face broke into my own mischievous grin as I rolled my eyes. “Uh… definitely!” I said.
All around the bar, people turned as my friends whooped and high-fived and pounded playfully on the sandy table.
“Shot, shots, shots,” Mike and Alex started to chant as our waitress quickly turned to get them.
As a responsible 3.9 GPA English major and student athlete, I was well aware that vodka and gelatin was a highly hazardous afternoon snack. But then again, I had an excuse. Actually four of them.
I was a college kid. I was in Key West. And not only was spring break ’92 quickly coming to a close, but it was three days after my twenty-first birthday.
Yet as I sat smiling, looking through the happy, crowded bar out over the endless Tiffany blue Gulf, I still had the slightest moment’s doubt, the slightest moment’s wonder if maybe I was pushing my luck.
The feeling was gone by the time Maggie returned with our drinks.
Then we proceeded to do what we always did. We raised our paper cups, tapped them together, and screamed, “Party till you drop, man!” as loud as we could.
Chapter 2
I SAW a video once of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. It was recorded at some beachfront resort in Sri Lanka, and in it, as the ocean bizarrely recedes, a group of curious tourists wander down to the beach to see what’s going on.
Staring at the screen, knowing that the receding water is actually already on its way back to kill them, what disturbs you the most is their complete innocence. The fact that they still think they’re safe instead of living out the very last moments of their lives right in front of you.
I feel that same sick way whenever I go over what happened to me next.
I still think I’m safe.
I couldn’t be more wrong.
Several hours later, the Jell-O shots had done their job and then some. By seven thirty that evening, my friends and I were sardined into the packed Mallory Square for Key West’s world-famous outdoor drunken sunset celebration. The gold of our last sunset warmed our shoulders as cold beer splattered and stuck our toes to our flip-flops. Cathy and Maureen were on my right. Alex and his Gator outside linebacker buddy, Mike, were on my left, and with our arms around one another, we were singing, “Could You Be Loved” with as much gusto as Bob Marley himself.
In front of the outdoor reggae band, I danced in my floppy bush hat, bikini top, and cargo shorts. I was as drunk as a skunk, laughing hysterically, forehead to forehead with my friends, and the feeling I’d had at the beach bar returned, on steroids. I had everything. I was young and pretty and carefree with my arms around people I loved who loved me back. For a fleeting moment, I felt truly ecstatically happy to be alive.
For a split second.
Then it was gone.
When I woke, the cheap hotel room clock read 2:23 a.m. Turning over in the cramped, dark room, the first thing I noticed was that Alex wasn’t beside me. I quickly fumbled through my last memories. I remembered a club we went to after the sunset, loud techno, Alex in a straw cowboy hat he’d found somewhere, Alex twirling beside me to Madonna’s “Vogue.”
That was about it. The intervening hours, how I had gotten back to the hotel, were an impenetrable alcohol- induced fog, a complete mystery.
A ball of panic began to burn at the lining of my stomach like guzzled vodka as I stared at Alex’s empty pillow.
Was he OK? I thought groggily. Passed out somewhere? Worse?
I was lying there, breathing rapidly in the dark, woodenly wondering what I should do next, when I heard the sound.
It was a giggle, and it had come from the bathroom behind me on my right. I rolled myself up onto my elbows and tilted my head off the bed to look through the crack of its slightly open door.
In the light of a strange, low glow, I spotted Alex leaning against the sink. Then I heard another giggle, and Maureen, my best friend, appeared in front of him holding a lit candle.
At first, as Maureen put the candle down onto the counter and they began to kiss, I truly wondered if I was still asleep and having a nightmare. Then I heard Maureen moan. Realizing that I was very much awake, the enormity of what I was watching walloped into me like an asteroid into a continent. It was my worst fear, everyone’s worst fear.
Crippling waves of anger and fear and revulsion slammed through me. Why wouldn’t they? Primordial betrayal was being enacted right in front of my locked-open eyes.
I heard Maureen moan again as Alex began to peel off her T-shirt.
Then they were cut from sight as the bathroom door closed with a soft, careful click.
A T. S. Eliot quote from my last Modern Poetry class popped into my mind as I blinked at the closed door.
If my premed boyfriend wasn’t currently busy, he could have marked it down.
I didn’t scream as I sat up. I didn’t look for something heavy and then kick the door in and start swinging.
In retrospect, that’s exactly what I should have done.
Instead, I decided not to bother them. I just simply stood.
Barefoot, I grabbed my jacket and stumbled out of the bedroom and through the hotel room’s front door, closing it behind me with my own soft, careful click.
Chapter 3
I WAITED until I was outside the hotel’s empty lobby before I started jogging. After a minute, I broke into a sprint. Down the middle of the pitch-dark street, I huffed and puffed, sweating like a marathon runner, like an action movie star escaping an impending nuclear explosion.
I was fast, too. Maureen was the tall, blond, long-limbed pitcher. Cathy was the short, tough catcher, and I was the lean, mean, in-between fast one. The now-you-see-her, now-you-don’t, lay-one-down-the-third-base-line- and-beat-you-to-first-base fast one.
