The Vacationers: A Novel (15 page)

“Get me something,” she said, hurrying behind him.

Bobby nodded and raised two fingers at the bartender.
“Dos!”

The DJ booth was at the far end of the bar, on a raised platform. Sylvia could see only Psychic Bomb’s head bobbing in time to the music—he’d just faded from something into a Katy Perry song she recognized, and the girls on the dance floor all squealed.

“Here,” Bobby said, pushing an enormous glass into her hands.

“What is it?” Sylvia sniffed at the rim—it smelled like cough syrup.

“Red Bull and vodka.”

Bobby had one, too—they stood there for a minute, Sylvia sucking the sweet drink through a long straw, and Bobby gulping his back with large swallows. Bobby’s glass was empty almost immediately, and he returned to the bar to get another.

“Thirsty?” Sylvia said, when he came back.

“I was just really needing to get out of the house, you know?” Bobby spoke without looking at her. He scanned the room, his head moving in time with the music. “Carmen was driving me fucking crazy.”

“And Mom?”

“And Mom.” Bobby looked at her, finally. “I can’t believe you still live with them.”

“Only for another month.” Sylvia tried to sound chipper.

“Honestly?” Bobby said. “I have no idea who they are. When I was a kid, they fought all the time, and when you were a kid, it was like sunshine and rainbows. I have no idea. At least now they’re looking more like people I recognize.”

“I’m pretty sure they’re fighting all the time,” Sylvia said. Had they really not told him anything? Bobby had always seemed so grown-up, so adult, that she’d assumed he would have known everything long before she did. “It’s pretty bad.”

“Yeah?” Bobby said, but he wasn’t really listening to her.
Sylvia felt sorry for him, sorry enough to keep her parents’ secret. He lived so far away, what was the difference? When he visited for Christmas, they would all go out to dinner and be civil and her parents would still be her parents and her house would still be her house, if only in Bobby’s imagination. “I’m going to dance,” he said, and left her sitting there. Psychic Bomb faded into a song with a faster beat, which sounded like something that would have poured out the open window of a packed car with Jersey plates.

Sylvia stayed put, stunned, and watched as Bobby quickly finished his drink, set the empty glass down on the bar, and then made his way onto the dance floor, swiveling his hips like a gyroscope. Sylvia opened her mouth and let it hang there, voluntarily slack-jawed. Bobby moved quickly into the orbit of two distinct groups of dancing girls, and both circles opened up to let him in. The girls on the left were taller and blonder, and seemed to be speaking German. The girls on the right were smaller, mousier—Brits, maybe. (Sylvia was not surprised that the native Spaniards did not yet seem to be in attendance—it was still their dinnertime, after all.) Bobby shimmied into the center of the circle on the right, eliciting even more squeals. One squat girl, with a dark brown bob that swung from side to side as she danced, seemed particularly excited about Bobby’s arrival, and reacted as if she’d been expecting him. She positioned her body in front of Bobby’s, her knees straddling his left leg, so that it looked like they were in a two-person limbo contest. Sylvia turned toward the bar, unable to watch any more.

There were some stools at the high glass tables, and Sylvia sat down. It wasn’t that Sylvia didn’t like to dance, it was more that she’d never really learned how, and even if she had, she didn’t see the point in grinding against total strangers. It reminded her of the photos, and how they would never go away; even though she’d untagged herself and flagged them for inappropriate content, there would always be someone new who’d seen them, or who had been at the party, waving another camera in her face. Dancing was something for luckier, less stupid people. Sylvia wished, for the millionth time, that she’d been born in a more civilized century, when dancing was about learning steps and executing them en masse, like a drill team, everyone waltzing together. The twentieth century had been bad (the flappers, the hippies), but the twenty-first was even worse. Sylvia thought of Tolstoy, and Austen’s grand balls, with protracted wistfulness. What was unfolding in front of her was a pathetic travesty. A cocktail waitress swanned by, and Sylvia flagged her down, pointing to her now empty glass and nodding. Another.

An hour later, Blu Nite had started to fill up. There was as much Spanish being spoken as German or English, which made Sylvia feel less like a colonizing imperialist. She’d lost Bobby in the crowd—he’d surfaced once at her table, sweating and panting and smiling, and once at the bar, when she was going for a
glass of water, but other than that, he was just another body making the place into a massive, thumping
Romper Room
for adults. Two hours later, Sylvia was getting tired. She’d had two glasses of sangría after the disgusting vodka and Red Bull, which wasn’t a lot, but given the lack of moisture in the room and the uncharacteristic lack of snacks (the Spanish were
excellent
at snacks), Sylvia was feeling a little bit drunk and more than a little ready to go home. She slid off her stool and made her way across the room to the bathroom. She’d pee first, then find Bobby and convince him that the place sucked and that they should leave.

There was a line for the women’s restroom, which was not surprising. Sylvia shuffled against the wall and took her place. All the other girls were glued to their phones, texting and e-mailing and on their Facebook pages. Sylvia had a small pang of grief at not being able to do the same thing. She missed her phone, despite the fact that she hated most of the people she knew and didn’t care what they were doing all summer. She would have checked her e-mail to see if Joan had written back. She would have looked at the clock to see what time it was in New York, what time in was in Rhode Island (which was the same as in New York, of course, but it felt good to think of it as so separate and far that it be acknowledged as such). Sylvia shifted from foot to foot. She was getting sweaty, not from actually moving around but just from being next to so many bodies, and she stuck her nose toward her armpit to check on her smelliness. The girl behind her gave her a look, and Sylvia
rolled her eyes. Across the very narrow hall, a short line had started to form for the men’s room, too, which Sylvia found satisfying in a vaguely feminist way. She was all for equality. The men weren’t sure what to do, though, not having trained for moments like this throughout their entire lives, and the guy in front banged on the door.

A minute later, the lock turned, and Sylvia watched as her brother and one of the mousy Brits tumbled out, their faces still attached like two warring vacuum cleaners. Her lipstick was smeared on his cheeks and neck. They squeezed past the guy who had banged on the door, who sneered at them less aggressively than Sylvia would have done, had she been in his position.

“Um, hello?” she said, tapping her brother on the shoulder.

“Oh, hey, Syl,” he said, sounding remarkably casual. He pulled back, leaving the Brit gaping like a caught fish. His shirt was open at the neck, unbuttoned almost to his navel, and the Brit dug her fingers into his sparse chest hair. Bobby’s eyes were having trouble focusing on Sylvia, and she had to force herself not to look away.

“What the fuck are you doing?” All the other women waiting for the bathroom had let their phones fall to their sides, happy to have a live show instead.

“This is my new friend. She’s on vacation, too. Right?” The girl looked up from Bobby’s chest and nodded.

“This is fucking gross, is what it is. Do you know that he has a girlfriend? Who is here with us? Who no one likes, but he brought her anyway? Do you even know her name?”

“I’m Isabel Parkey!” Little Isabel cocked her head to the side, confused about who to be annoyed with. “We were just having some fun,” she said in a British accent, as posh as someone in a BBC miniseries.

Bobby kissed her on the cheek and then physically turned her around and pushed her back toward the dance floor. “I’ll meet you out there—let me talk to my sister for a minute.” Isabel shrugged. A new song came on—a golden oldie, maybe Kylie Minogue—and she jumped up and down, her troubles forgotten. “Let’s go,” Bobby said to Sylvia, his voice now so low that she could barely hear him over the thumping and the singing along. She could tell that the other women waiting for the bathroom were straining to hear him, too.

“Not yet, I still have to pee,” she said. “But that does not mean that we’re not going to talk about this. You are gross, you know that? Who does that?”

Bobby wiped off his cheeks and mouth with his shirttail. His belt was unbuckled, and he refastened it. “Whatever, Sylvia. I’m not married to her. It’s not that big of a deal.”

“But you
live
together. She is your girlfriend. You force us to hang out with her. And then you treat her like this? That is so fucked up. Like, the worst kind of fucked up.”

If he were a nice brother, the kind who asked her questions about her life, he might know about Gabe Thrush and her stupid friends and how she was never, ever going to have sex with anyone in her entire life because of boys like him, but he didn’t know anything at all. If he were a nice brother, and less
pathetic, she would have told him all about their parents and how the whole world was ending and no one seemed to care. A lightbulb went on over Sylvia’s head. “You do this all the time, don’t you?”

Bobby couldn’t resist smirking with pride.

Sylvia could no longer contain her rage, and began to pummel her brother in the stomach. The other girls on line for the bathroom shrank back against the wall, getting themselves as far out of arm-swinging range as possible. Those who were merely keeping their friends company but didn’t really have to go fled back onto the dance floor. No one stepped in to rescue Bobby, possibly because Sylvia’s punches were cartoonishly amateur and didn’t seem to be wounding him in the slightest. After a little while, she stopped. “My knuckles hurt, you asshole.”

“Let’s go,” Bobby said, and this time Sylvia slumped after him, furious and still having to pee so badly, but ready to not have so many people staring at her. They wound their way through the club—even more packed now—careful to avoid Isabel and her friends, who had yet to relinquish their corner of the dance floor. They’d made it all the way to the front door before someone stepped in front of them, purposefully halting their progress. Sylvia closed her eyes, sure that it was going to be the Spanish police, arresting her for assaulting her brother in a public place.

“
Ciao
, you found it!” Joan kissed her on both cheeks and clapped Bobby on the shoulder. “It’s a good place, yes?”

Sylvia smoothed out her shirt, which she had only recently
realized was in fact so small and tight that you could see the indent of her belly button, which was almost as bad as being able to see her nipples. Could he see her nipples? Sylvia’s cheeks burned. He had kissed her. His face, his mouth, had been right next to hers. Her stomach lurched as it had when driving down from Pigpen, the small car flying around wet corners, dangerous and fast.

“Yeah, it’s pretty cool,” Sylvia managed.

“Hey, we were just on our way out, man, but we’ll see you,” Bobby said. “Ready, Syl?”

Joan stood there expectantly. She couldn’t figure out a way to ask him for a ride home, or tell him how badly she had to pee, or to say that her brother was an asshole, and she’d only just realized it, so Sylvia leaned in close and whispered to him in Spanish,
I wish I could stay.
She tried to look wistful, the kind of face that a French actress would make before stepping onto a train, never to be seen again, and then walked out of the club as quickly, scissoring her legs together so hard that she was sure the denim would wear out.

Sylvia held it until they got to the car, a few blocks away, and then unzipped her pants and dropped into a squat in between cars. Her pee was warm and splashed against the cobblestones, running in a ragged stream down the sloped street. Sylvia would have cared, but it felt too good. She thought about Joan
coming after her, like someone in a romantic comedy, and finding her with her jeans pulled taut against her thighs and her bare butt wedged between two bumpers. Bobby was already in the driver’s seat, waiting. He could wait.