The Storm
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 because she was 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.
Now that was somebody 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 see Jaws—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 always interesting, at least.
And a sleepover was, as far as Lo plans went, pretty mild.
It still took some convincing, though. The storm wasn’t supposed to hit us, but we’d still get bands of rain, probably some wind, and Mama was not crazy about me not being, as she put it, “in the nest” should the weather change.
“We’re staying at Ellen’s,” I told her. “And it’s extra safe since it’s a hotel, and it has to be because of insurance.”
“I mean, of all the places in town I’d want to be if the weather does get a little hairy, the Shipwreck is way up there.
” Dad had been smiling as he said it, my little brother, Sam, propped on one hip.
He was five that summer, and getting too big to be carried, but we all did it anyway because he was such a sweet kid.
So Mama had let me go with a promise to be safe, to come back early Friday morning before the rain had a chance to hit, and I had hugged her and told her I loved her and then said I’d be fine because I’d be at Ellen’s and everyone knew Ellen’s house was the safest place in St. Medard’s.
All those hurricanes, and there it still stood.
Not even the churches could say that—First Baptist was smashed up in Betsy back in ’54, and the Methodists got it in Delphine.
The Shipwreck Inn was just a short walk from my house by the road, but I always cut through the scrubby little woodland behind us and made my way to the inn via the beach.
It was about three o’clock in the afternoon that Thursday, and I remember that the air seemed so clear, the sky marred by only a handful of clouds. Whatever Audrey was doing, it was far away, and I was actually a little disappointed.
It would be cool, I’d thought, if it started raining really hard while we were in Ellen’s big bedroom—an actual hotel room she used as a bedroom, which always felt so glamorous to me—all three of us sprawled in Ellen’s king-size bed, eating Oreos and drinking Tab, telling the scariest stories we could think of while a big thunderstorm raged outside.
That’s really all I’d thought a hurricane was back then. Just a big storm.
I was maybe halfway down the beach to the Shipwreck when I spotted Lo and Ellen walking toward me, duffel bags over their shoulders, Lo wearing a pair of bright purple star-shaped sunglasses.
The three of us ran to one another like we’d been parted for decades, laughing and whooping, throwing our arms around one another, giddy in that way only twelve-year-old girls with a slumber party and a surprise three-day weekend ahead of them can be.
And then Lo had put a hand on each of our shoulders and said, “So. Frieda, your parents think you’re at Ellen’s. Ellen’s parents think Ellen is at my house, and Beth-Anne thinks I’m at your house, Frieda, so we are free as fucking biiiiiiiiirds until tomorrow morning!”
Like I said, Lo went through rebellious phases, and she was in one that May. Hence the calling her mama by her first name, the swearing, and the lying.
I glanced over at Ellen to see if she was as surprised by this as I was, but she was chewing her lip and not quite meeting my eyes.
“It’s dumb, and we’re probably going to get caught,” she said in a rush, but then she smiled, a big smile even though she was usually self-conscious about the way her front teeth overlapped just a little bit.
Her hazel eyes were shining as she said, “But, like, Lo has a really cool idea.”
“I do!” Lo crowed, then turned and faced the sea. It wasn’t as placid as it usually was, the waves a little higher, the whitecaps bigger, but there was nothing that suggested there was a monster miles away gathering strength, subtly twisting eastward.
“Okay, fucking ocean, you think we’re scared of you?” she cried into the wind.
“Lo,” I said, tugging at her shirt. I was giggling, but part of me was embarrassed that she was out here yelling like a lunatic, and another part of me was suddenly a little scared. Like she might actually piss the ocean off or something.
Shit, maybe she did.
“You might have fucked up this town years ago. You might have killed my daddy. But that was before we were here.”
She reached back for both of our hands without looking, and without hesitating, Ellen and I both clasped an upturned palm and let ourselves be dragged to stand next to her.
“We are the Witches of St. Medard’s Bay,” Lo went on, “and we protect this town now.”
I looked over at her, still giggling because this was still kind of embarrassing, but I had to admit, Lo looked …
powerful standing there. The wind was blowing her hair, and those sunglasses didn’t seem as garish or silly anymore, and whatever new game she was playing, it seemed like it had the potential to be exciting.
Twelve is a weird age for girls. On the one hand, we were starting to like boys, starting to have opinions on lipstick, and we were quick to shun anything “babyish,” whether that was Barbie dolls or a T-shirt with a cartoon cat on it.
On the other, we were still little girls in a lot of ways.
We still liked these games of pretend, we just felt embarrassed about it, and afterward, we swore one another to secrecy or pretended that we’d been enjoying it only ironically, of course.