Bustins

This one is a fantasy based on a true story. I guess that makes it fiction.

via Pinterest

They were at Charlotte’s family’s cottage on Bustins Island for Charlotte’s 13th birthday. There were, like, six or eight girls altogether. Charlotte’s dad had to make two trips on the motorboat from the mainland dock to get them all there. They were completely unsupervised except for Charlotte’s dad who stayed at the cottage and cooked them a big pot of pasta for dinner. 

They walked barefoot down bushy paths, covering the little island in an hour or less, pasing old Victorian houses with widow’s walks and talked about being widows to sailors, a fate completely unfathomable to 13-year-old girls in 2008. They found an old shed in the trees where island kids went every year and signed their names, so they signed their names also. Then they rubbed sunscreen on each other’s backs and jumped off the dock and took pictures in their bikinis on disposable film cameras.

When they got back to the cottage the pasta was ready and they ate it out of the pot on the porch, just a bunch of girls gathered around a pot with forks, mindlessly flicking tomato sauce onto peach-fuzzy thighs. Then they sat on the porch for a while and just talked. It was August, they were on the cusp of high school. When it got dark they all piled into three beds and giggled until Charlotte’s dad shushed them from his post on the couch downstairs. There were taper candles in brass holders burning on the bedside tables like it was the medieval times. Their fleshy girlhoods all converged for one night under hand-knit quilts; their growing limbs tangled around each other in the summer humidity.

Someone told a ghost story, and with the candlelight and the creaking old floorboards, everyone was more scared than they wanted to admit. They could see the water outside and it was shining in the moonlight. There were dead flies in the window sills. It was eerie but it was also good. In their heads, they were witches hiding from the townspeople who wanted them dead. They would have made potions if they’d had a cauldron; would have cast spells if they’d known how. They sang songs and shared hairbrushes instead, all of them abuzz with a divine femininity that they didn’t have the words for yet, though words probably would have ruined it anyway. 

Then it was morning and that meant they must have fallen asleep at some point, but when that was no one knew for certain. Someone said they pulled an all-nighter and that got everyone very excited even though it wasn’t true. They took turns going to the little bathroom with just a toilet and a sink and they reveled in their badness for having not brushed their teeth before bed. Then they went downstairs in their pajamas and their matted hair and sat on the porch in the same configuration they’d sat in the previous evening to eat the pasta but this time there were bagels with a few kinds of cream cheese and they all took turns tasting each one and rating them. Herb was the favorite. When Charlotte’s dad said it was time to go home they gathered their clothes and their unused toothbrushes, left the beds unmade and left the cottage still in their pajamas. 

They walked the path to the dock in their bare feet the same way they’d come in, but they felt different. What would they say to their parents when they saw them again? How would they convey to them that they’d changed without having the vocabulary to say how? They could have never gone home, they could have started a commune, Charlotte’s dad visiting from the mainland every once in a while to deliver supplies. They could have written letters to their families, Dear Mom and Dad, thanks for everything, see you never. They would have been fine. 

The boat seemed even smaller this time and it took three trips to get them all back instead of two, like when your suitcase doesn’t fit as much stuff on the way home from vacation as it did on the way there even though it’s the same amount of stuff. Some of their parents were already there to pick them up, which was done with nothing but a friendly wave at Charlotte’s dad. Some of them had to stand there in their pajamas and their bare feet, waiting, and suddenly they felt self-conscious. It was like they knew this was the end of something—like they knew they would never be together like this again.

When their parents asked them how the party was, they said it was fine.