The Storm
I can’t tell you about meeting Landon Fitzroy until I tell you what it was like to grow up as the prettiest girl in a very small town.
You’re rolling your eyes, aren’t you?
That’s fine, I get it. No one wants to hear a rich person bitch about a goddamn thing, and no one wants a pretty girl whining about how hard it is to have heads turn when she walks by.
It’s that whole “Oh no, my diamond shoes are too dang tight!” thing, right?
So I’m not complaining—this face is the reason I’m here, doing this book.
But you need to understand that when I was growing up, it was … well, lonely, I guess.
Actually, you know what? Let me tell you a little story.
I went to my school’s homecoming dance in the ninth grade—this would’ve been around ’79—and I didn’t even go with a date.
Just a couple of girlfriends because the thing about being the Prettiest Girl in Your Small Town is that boys your age are scared plum to death of you, and you’re scared plum to death of the men—and they were always men, baby, believe that—who are interested in you.
So I didn’t actually get asked on dates, at least not ones I’d want to go on.
But I was happy going to the dance with Ellen and Frieda since they were two of the only girls in town who genuinely seemed to like me.
Ellen’s family ran the Sand Dollar Inn, St. Medard’s Bay’s only hotel, and while I now know that the place was almost always in the red, back then it seemed so respectable to me.
My own mom ran a fucking souvenir shop selling the tackiest plastic shit you’ve ever seen, and Frieda’s family lived in a trailer off a sandy bit of road just outside town, so trust me, Ellen Chambers was high-class as far as we were concerned.
Anyway, we’ll talk more about them later. Right now I want to tell you about how at that dance, Tim Murphy, this jackass senior, tried to pull me into the boys’ bathroom. I can still hear the song that was playing faintly from the gym—“Love Will Keep Us Together.”
I still hate that fucking song.
Anyway, I was just getting water from the fountain outside the gym when he was there all of a sudden, his hands surprisingly strong, chin bristled, mouth tasting like fucking corn chips as he tried to kiss me, his voice in my ear saying, It’s just a kiss, come on …
The whole thing lasted maybe thirty seconds. I got a knee up fast, plus a couple of kids came spilling out of the gym, shouting along with the music, and that distracted him enough to let me pull away.
And right now you’re probably thinking, Some pimply-faced teenager tried to kiss you, and I’m supposed to feel sorry for you?
Maybe you do, maybe you don’t—I don’t really care either way. But I need you to understand that it wasn’t fucking Tim Murphy and his marauding tongue that made me understand that looking the way I did might not always be a good thing.
It was after, when I went to tell a teacher.
That’s what you’re supposed to do when shit happens, right?
Tell an adult. So, I went to the chemistry teacher, Mr. Oudine.
He’d been chaperoning that dance, and man, I made a beeline for him, telling him what had happened.
His smile made my stomach turn as he said, That’s just boys, sweetheart.
Especially boys all riled up at their first school dance.
You look fine to me, so why don’t you just go dance with your friends for a little bit, okay?
Shitty enough, but what was worse was how his eyes had dropped to my chest as he said it.
I’d picked out the dress with my mom in Mobile.
It was one of the rare times she’d torn herself away from the store long enough to leave town, and we’d had a good time, driving over the causeway, the radio loud in our crappy Ford Pinto.
We’d even gotten lunch somewhere downtown, the two of us giggling over crab cakes, Mama with her glass of Chablis, me with a Shirley Temple.
The dress I’d chosen was the same pink as that drink, I remember that.
Dotted Swiss, very big back then, and a scalloped neckline.
Frothy ruffles hitting me right at the knee.
It was a little girl’s idea of what a Fancy Dress might look like, but when Mr. Oudine had looked at me, it had suddenly felt too low-cut, too short, too much.
I hadn’t asked for a face that looked older than it was.
I hadn’t asked to need a bra by the time I was eleven.
I definitely hadn’t asked to be a 32C by seventh grade.
It was all just some fluke of nature, right? Neither of my parents had been super attractive people, but through some weird twist of genetics, I was beautiful. Worse than that, I was sexy, never mind that I hadn’t even kissed a boy before Tim Murphy attempted to shove his tongue down my throat.
But I saw what was in Mr. Oudine’s eyes as they swept over me that night—What does she expect, walking around like that?
He died in a car accident five years later, by the way. Mr. Oudine. On the same causeway that Mama and I drove over so happily that day we bought my dress.
Is it gonna make you hate me if I say not only was I not sad about that, baby, I was downright gleeful?
Well, even if it does, I can’t really give a shit.
I learned a long time ago that you have to value honesty over everything else.
Can’t worry if people are going to hate you, can’t give a fuck what people might say, because trust me, they’re gonna hate you if they wanna, and they’re gonna say what they wanna, and once people have an idea of you, of the person you are, they won’t let it go.
I guess that’s why it was so easy for people to believe I was a murderer on top of being a slut.
If you’ve broken one of the Ten Commandments, why not another?
Thing is, though, I’m neither. Not a murderer, not a slut.
In fact, when Landon Fitzroy showed up at The Line that windy September night in 1983, I’d only recently shed my virginity, giving it up to this sweet guy I was dating at the time.
He was a busboy at The Line, and I wish I could remember his name, but it’s one of those things that just got blotted out in the supernova that was Landon.
I still feel bad about it, actually. Forgetting that boy’s name.
We dated for almost six months, and he had the kindest smile and the reddest hair, and when I finally decided that we could indeed go All the Way, he was sweet as sweet can be about the whole thing.
Asking if I was sure I wanted to do it (I was), asking if I enjoyed it (I didn’t, but I still appreciated him trying).
I guess I broke his heart, and he deserved better than that.
So if you’re out there, Red-Headed Boy, let me apologize about forty fucking years too late.
You were a good guy, and you might have made me happy, but then fate blew Landon through my door, and that was that.
Now, I know if you ask certain people in St. Medard’s Bay, they’d tell you I’d had my eye on Landon Fitzroy for years.
The Fitzroys were Alabama royalty, after all.
Landon’s daddy, Beau Fitzroy, was the governor, and his daddy, L.
B. Fitzroy, had been a senator. L. B.’s daddy had been the richest man in Mobile once upon a time, and there were people in the state who followed the entire family’s lives like they were characters in a soap opera.
But I wasn’t one of them, scout’s honor (yes, I was a Girl Scout, and fuck you if that makes you smirk—I have the sash to prove it!).
I knew of Landon, of course. The governor had a big mansion over in Gulf Shores, and the family kept their boat docked in St. Medard’s, so I was aware of him, but probably in the same way people who lived in Hollywood were “aware” of Marilyn Monroe back in the day.
We might have occasionally shared the same air, but we were basically on different planets.
My best friend, Ellen Chambers, was the one who always knew when Landon was in town, who’d breathlessly report that she’d seen him driving around in that Chrysler LeBaron, the one he’d had custom-painted Crimson Tide maroon in honor of his alma mater, the interior a buttery soft cream leather that I can still feel under my fingertips if I think about it.
Ellen’s parents ran what was then known as the Ship Wreck Inn because there was a shipwreck just about a half a mile offshore, almost directly in front of the inn.
The boat that had sunk there in the ’20s had been called the Rosalie, and according to Landon, it had belonged to a relative of his, a bootlegger who was the black sheep of the Fitzroy family.
He loved that story for some reason, and whenever he was in town, he’d stop by the inn to have a beer with Ellen’s dad and talk local history.
I can still see Ellen, her dark ponytail hanging down to the seafoam-green carpet of my bedroom as she draped herself across my bed, her hands resting on her chest, her neck and cheeks flushed.
“He’s just so interesting, Lo,” she said with a sigh one afternoon, about a week or so before Landon came into The Line to change—and ruin—my life. “He’s been everywhere, he knows everyone … I don’t know why he’d want to keep coming back to St. Medard’s Bay, but I’m glad that he does.”
Ellen had a boyfriend by then, Tim Corliss. He was cute and, more important, he was tall, but Ellen certainly never described him as “interesting.” Tim was “sweet” and “funny,” and “super good at basketball,” but that was about as effusive as her compliments got.
That was Ellen, though. I was the Wild One, Frieda was the Smart One, and Ellen was the Nice One.
But even Ellen’s sighs and pink cheeks didn’t make me all that curious about Landon Fitzroy because, in my mind, he was old.