Authors: Ty Roth
“I don’t know this Indian guy, but in the time I’ve known Gordon, I’ve watched him go through girls like Kleenex. I’d hate for you to be the next tissue out of the box.”
Shelly rolled her eyes. “That’s a pretty shitty metaphor, John.”
“Sorry.”
“Besides, I’m not just some
girl,
” she said. “It’s different
with Gordon and me. We’ve been best friends since we were kids. He wouldn’t treat me like one of the Gordonettes.”
“Well, maybe that’s just it. You’ve been
friends
a long time. Maybe that’s all you can ever be.”
“He told me he loved me.”
“I know, but.” I trod softly. “Love can mean a lot of different things to different people, and I’m not sure there’s room in his heart for both of you.”
Shelly’s defensiveness regarding Gordon’s sincerity told me all I needed to know of her intentions. Gordon had finally summoned her into his world. No summer romance, however intense, and no litany of Gordon’s past imbroglios (Annesley, Caroline, Mrs. Guiccioli, the Trinity girls at the clinic, Ms. Yancey, and Claire) had the power to dissuade her from answering his beckoning call.
When she arrived home late that afternoon, still stewing over her dilemma and exhausted from lack of sleep, Shelly went immediately out back, sat on her dock, selected her R.E.M. playlist on her MP3 player, inserted her earbuds, and waited for Gordon, just where they’d meet when they were kids. Hours passed. Exhausted, she fell asleep curled up on the warm wooden planks with her arm extended beneath her head and with her cell, set to vibrate and cupped in her hand, next to her ear.
“Shelly … Shelly … Shelly.” Each pronunciation of her name was accompanied by a gentle shake of her arm, each repetition clearer than the last. “Shelly.”
“Gordon?” she said through her grogginess as she brushed her hair from her face and removed her earphones.
“No, silly. It’s me, Augusta.”
“Augusta?” Shelly repeated in sincere bewilderment mixed with obvious disappointment.
Hands on her hips, Augusta pouted her lips and feigned hurt. “Gee, thanks.”
“No. I’m sorry,” Shelly said, and rose to hug her long-separated fellow musketeer. “It’s been so long. I didn’t recognize your voice, and”—she hesitated as she looked Augusta up and down—“you’re beautiful.”
And she was. A feminized version of Gordon, she’d grown quite nicely into her father’s genes. Having lived three years removed from her brother’s long shadow, she oozed the warmth and confidence that she’d lacked as a child.
“It’s been …” Shelly paused to do the math.
“Three years,” Augusta finished for her.
“You must be in college. Right?”
“William & Mary.”
“And you’ve been living …”
“With my aunt and uncle in Virginia. When Cousin Annesley moved out after college, they offered me her room. They were very insistent, really. I’m fairly certain Catherine jumped at the chance to finally be rid of me.”
“Oh, I don’t think—” Shelly began a halfhearted defense of Catherine.
“It’s okay,” Augusta interrupted. “I never really belonged here. And other than Gordon … and you”—she added this last as an afterthought, and then turned and surveyed the water—“and this, I haven’t missed it.”
“Gordon didn’t tell me.”
“He didn’t know. That was one of the conditions Catherine insisted on before giving up guardianship. I wasn’t allowed any contact with my brother or you—or anyone, for that matter, who might disclose where I was living.”
“What about now?”
“I’m an adult now. I can go where I want. Besides, Catherine still receives income from my father’s family’s boatyards. My aunt applied the pressure that gave Catherine little choice but to allow me to come.”
“Well, how long have you been home? How long are you staying? Have you seen Gordon?” Shelly fired the questions.
Augusta answered them in order, “I got in this afternoon. Just a few days. And I just woke him too. Oh, look. Here he comes.”
Shirtless, in a pair of frayed khaki cargo shorts that sagged at the hips and sat a hand’s width beneath his belly button, Gordon ran his fingers through his mussed hair as he navigated, barefoot, down the sloping back lawn to the bay shore.
Shelly’s gasp at the sight turned Augusta’s head. “He’s beautiful, isn’t he? He can’t help it. You should have seen him when I woke him. He sleeps in the nude, you know.”
Shelly could only nod in response to Augusta’s evaluation, and mutter “Yeah,” as odd as that might have sounded coming from his half sister. Then Shelly said, “I mean … I didn’t know that … that he … you know … sleeps … I mean, I know he sleeps, but … Yes, he is … beautiful, I mean.”
“Look what I found,” Gordon said through a smirk and a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth—a habit
he’d picked up in Europe. He pulled three rolled joints from his front pocket. “Didn’t even know they were in there, but it looks like our lucky night.”
With the sun setting purple and orange directly in front of them, Gordon lit and took a long drag from the first joint, clamped between the thumb and index finger of the “okay” sign he pressed to his lips. He passed it left to Augusta, who, unlike Shelly, was no marijuana virgin. Two hours passed. They reminisced. Two more joints were smoked. The mood was mellow, the conversation increasingly uninhibited. Their circle, in the spotlight of a full moon, became continually smaller until their bare knees touched. Augusta told of her onetime experiment with ecstasy, which led to her first, only, and awkward girl-kiss. Shelly shared the story of her short-lived wrestling match with Brandon Sullivan. The truth was, he’d “finished” before he could pull his “thing” from out of his pants. And she told of her romantic kiss on the beach with Neolin. Gordon, not interested in Shelly’s Indian summer, interrupted her telling with a dare.
“What do you say we swim like when we were kids?”
“You mean …,” Shelly began.
“Naked!” Augusta was already up, untying her bikini top, which she proceeded to swing like a double-barreled slingshot three times around her head before shimmying out of her cutoff jeans and thong. “Now you,” she said, turning to Gordon as if Shelly weren’t even there.
Gordon took a long, deep drag, flipped the blunt hissing into the water, rose, and dropped his shorts to his ankles. He kicked the shorts into his hand and swung them three times over his head in mock imitation of his half sister.
“Well?” Gordon said, holding Augusta’s hand with his left and reaching out for Shelly’s with his right.
She had yet to change out of the oversized black concert T-shirt she’d picked up at an alternative band festival in Cleveland a summer back. As she began to lift her shirt, she was mortified, remembering the old maximum-support bra she was wearing beneath, and the granny panties she had on under her athletic shorts. “Turn your backs,” she said.
“What?” Augusta laughed.
“You heard me.” Shelly held firm.
“C’mon,” Gordon said to his sister.
After tossing her unsexy underthings into the dark perimeter, Shelly said, “Okay.”
When they turned, Gordon’s eyes sparkled with appreciation while Augusta’s glared with envious acknowledgment of Shelly’s nearly commensurate beauty, but after they had joined hands and jumped in unison into the water and played a few rounds of Marco Polo with hands much less innocently targeted than when they’d been children, it was Augusta who demanded and received the majority of Gordon’s attention. She repeatedly climbed onto his broad shoulders and dove into the water, her body glistening in the moonlight. She girlishly splashed water at him to rouse his mock anger and a retaliatory bear hug, followed by a tandem toss of their bodies beneath the surface. All the while, Shelly stood off to the side, smiling awkwardly with her goosefleshed arms crossed over her breasts. Eventually, blue-lipped and shivering in the night air, she climbed out and ran toward her house with her arms holding and pressing her clothes against her nakedness.
“Hey, Shell! Where ya going?” Gordon called when he
realized her absence and spotted her running, bare-assed, toward her house.
For a moment, Gordon remained still, staring into the darkness into which she’d disappeared, but in the next instant, he was once again frolicking in the water with his more-than-sister.
Although she damn near staked out the Byron home 24/7, Shelly didn’t see or hear from Augusta or Gordon for the remainder of that final week of summer. Her calls went immediately to his voice mail and her texts were not returned. She rationalized it away as the siblings maximizing the short time that they had to catch up and be together after so many years apart and before Augusta left for college. It would have been petty, she reasoned, to expect anything else. Besides, he had told her that he loved her.
The mere possibility of being Gordon’s girlfriend immediately preempted Shelly’s nascent relationship with Neolin. Its roots, unlike the layered and intertwined roots of her relationship with Gordon, were still shallow and easily ripped from the soil. Less than two full weeks removed from Neolin’s kiss, North Bass may as well have been the north pole, for all the thought Shelly had given it once Gordon had declared his love.
After Shelly’s exile from North Bass, events went badly for Neolin—at least, according to an article that appeared in the
Ogontz Reporter,
which was delivered every day at the
Beacon
through a Newspapers in the Classroom program. When I tried to show her the article on that second day of
school, Shelly, after a quick glance at the headline, walked out of the room. The article stated that Ohio’s prolonged economic recession had caused voter sentiment to poll strongly in favor of passing casino gambling legislation on the upcoming November ballot. Developers were waiting, shovels ready, to break ground on North Bass casinos, restaurants, condominiums, and resorts. All of which had made the pesky presence of the Ottawa intolerable.
Questioned by the reporter, the Ottawa chief revealed that an agreement had been struck with the legislators in Columbus. Legislators had assured him that if his people vacated peaceably (thereby avoiding a public relations disaster that might shift public sentiment away from passage of the gambling bill), the state of Ohio would pay the Ottawa people of Oklahoma a goodwill offering of a percentage of all slot machine profit generated on the island in perpetuity. Not perfect, the chief told the reporter, but better than nothing. He called it “a rare victory for native peoples” and “a long overdue reparation.”
In an accompanying photograph, Neolin stood, wearing a disconsolate expression, next to the chief, whose arm appeared, not so much to be affectionately wrapped around him but to be propping him up. All of the Ottawa, except Neolin, were wearing kitschy traditional tribal garb for the photograph. A couple of county commissioners, the local state representative, and an actual congressman also appeared in the photo.
Within a few days, the Ottawa pilgrims vacated the island, except for Neolin. The article stated that the Ottawa renegade remained on North Bass despite repeated notifications
of eviction, hand delivered by sheriff’s deputies—enacting a sort of
Last of the Mohicans
. (Don’t blame me. I didn’t write the article or the novel.)
As gloomy as she had been the previous year, as her senior year began, Shelly was bordering on ebullient and pouring most of her excess Gordon-inspired energy into the
Beacon.
Having returned to college, Augusta no longer monopolized Gordon’s time and attention.
“You guys are actually dating?” I asked Gordon as I nodded to Shelly, who flitted about the media center like an ADHD butterfly.
I took Gordon’s half-shrugged shoulders and half-nod as a tepid yes.
“Like, exclusive?”
“Yeah,” he managed to mutter.
“I know
this
,” I said. “I’ve never seen Shelly so happy.”
Gordon ignored my observation. “Did I tell you about that chick Zoe, who I met in Greece this summer? She had a boyfriend, a good dude, named Rony. They had this—I don’t know—this thing, this relationship, that was really cool. They were more than dating; they were, like, friends, partners.” Gordon paused in his reflection. “Man, I wanted to bang her more than anything, and I know she liked me, but they had something stronger. Some kind of bond I couldn’t penetrate.”
“That’s cool,” I said, not really sure of the relevance of his sudden recounting or where he was headed with it.
“Then I came home, and Shelly was all geeked up about
this dude, Neolin, and it sounds exactly like what Zoe and Rony had. It kind of shook me up, you know?” He turned his head to see if I was following. “I started thinking, ‘Why not me? Why can’t I have this kind of relationship?’ And, who better than with Shelly? We’ve been best friends our entire lives.”
“That’s great,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t sense the masking of my skepticism regarding this snowball’s chance.
“That’s just it, you see. It’s not so great. I’ve
tried
to think of Shelly in ‘that way,’ but I can’t. It’s just not right. And have you noticed this year’s freshman chicks? Dude, they’re smoking!”
“Smoking? Who’s smoking what?” Shelly had snuck up, and temporarily lighted behind us. “If you guys are talking about Gordon, you’ve got to help me break him of that nasty habit, John. It’s disgusting.”
I could feel Gordon’s entire form tense and not relax until Shelly fluttered away. He flashed me a do-you-see-what-I-mean glance. “I’ve got to go,” he said.
I watched Gordon capture Shelly near the door. They exchanged a few words. As he pulled away, Shelly rose on her toes, wrapped her arms around his neck, and targeted a kiss for his lips, but at the last second, Gordon turned away, and the kiss landed on his cheek.
With her feet planted back on the floor, I read Shelly’s lips as she mouthed “Love you,” but Gordon’s remained pressed together in a half-smile. After another hug, he slipped out of the room.
Wings collapsed, Shelly stood looking out of the doorway long after he was gone—before she once again took flight.
I’m no psychologist, but I think it’s fair to describe Shelly’s obsession with Gordon as pathological. She was a “Gordon-o-holic” in desperate need of a twelve-step program. There were plenty of other addicts to help form a charter chapter, and, I’m sure, Gordon will provide a continuing stream of future members.