Free September Girls by Bennett Madison Page B

“Like a Virgin” by two recently divorced moms from Philadelphia, “the lovely Miss Kristle’s going to sing us one of my favorite tunes.” Every single person in the room was drunk now, and even I found myself cheering wildly along with them as Kristle emerged from the crush. Jimmy fastened the microphone onto the stand.
    I was surprised at how tiny she looked; she seemed to shrink as she stepped onto the stage, like Alice in Wonderland walking through a doll-sized door. The stand was too high for her, the microphone pointing to her forehead, and as she struggled to adjust it, her eyes darted around the room. She had a shy, barely-there smile on her face. “Hi, everyone,” she said, looking down at her feet. The strings came in.
    “Sea of Love” is a song I’ve always hated, but now, with Kristle singing it, it was something entirely different from the song I knew. Her voice was thin and wispy but had a deeper timbre than I’d anticipated, hollow and insubstantial but with a vulnerability that was haunting. It wasn’t at all what I had expected. The audience had been wasted and raucous when she’d stepped up, but within seconds they were utterly silent, mesmerized by the spell she was casting.
    Without looking over to his spot next to me, I felt something in Jeff change. I felt whatever last bit of himself he’d been holding on to leave him. He was hers now.
    The sound that was coming out of her mouth was unearthly and far away. We were all hers, sort of.
    And then I found my mind drifting over the ocean, suspended over the waves as Kristle’s song echoed out into the distance, into infinity. It was empty and black, so big that it was a little scary.
    Then, in my mind, I saw DeeDee. She was walking down the shore alone, coming slowly toward me and into view, her flip-flops dangling from her fingers as she dragged her toes in the sand.
    I wondered where she was going. I wondered where she had been. I wondered whether she was thinking about me, and why, in this moment, my mind had turned to her. She was barely there at first, shimmery and foggy—just a cloud of blond hair—but as she got closer she became more and more herself. I’d always thought of all the Girls as looking pretty much the same, but as I watched her approaching, Kristle’s song still slow and mellow in my head, DeeDee looked nothing like the rest of them. I just couldn’t put my finger on the exact differences.
    It was just about then that I heard another voice, and I was back in my stool at the bar, watching Kristle sing. Kristle was no longer alone: somehow DeeDee was up on the stage too, hunched over, leaning in close to the single microphone with her sister like she had hummed out of a gap in the guitars and just materialized, already singing. Their voices wove in and out of each other’s, the same but different, and for a while it was impossible to know whose was whose.
    The audience was silent, everyone in the bar staring at them, but DeeDee was concentrating only on the song, adding layers and layers onto Kristle’s melody until Kristle receded into the background and DeeDee was the only one I could hear. It had lost all resemblance to the original tune, and then I didn’t know what the song was anymore at all. All I knew was that it was beautiful, that DeeDee was beautiful.
    And even though she wasn’t looking in my direction—even though I’d thought of her only in passing since the night of Kristle’s party—I had a certain feeling that she was singing only for me.
    When the song ended I’d expected the crowd to disperse, as shocked and dazed by what they’d just seen as I was. But Jimmy just introduced another song and things rolled right on.
    I found her outside the bar a few minutes later. DeeDee was smoking on the wooden patio that looked out over a muddy patch of grass. She was leaning out over the railing, swaying her hips in time to the song coming from inside, and when she heard me behind her, she looked up and