"Doooooug!" the other swim team boys cheered and clapped from the darkness.
"Awww," Lila said, "Doug's with us in spirit."
"Is that really Doug?" I asked. Lost in thoughts of my mom, I'd almost forgotten seeing him an hour and a half ago at the emergency room. Now that anxiety came swirling back. At least if he was stuck on his dad's fishing boat, he wouldn't be showing up here tonight.
"Y ep," Lila said. "He honks every time he misses a party for one of his dad's night charters."
"He was here earlier, though," Keke said, "searching for you, Zoey." She poked me on the breastbone. "Why does Doug hate you so much?"
I took a sharp sniff of ocean air. I'd known Doug wouldn't miss an opportunity for revenge on me.
"Doug doesn't hate her," Lila reprimanded Keke. "Don't freak her out." She turned to me. "Nobody hates you, Zoey. Who could hate you? Y ou're so beautiful."
"And blond," Keke offered.
"And so sweet to all of us." Lila pursed her lips and reached up to pinch my cheek like I was a baby. "Besides, Doug hates everybody." Lila was trying to smooth over what Keke had stirred up.
Keke, as the tipsy one, was also the one who pressed the issue. "No, he stormed in here all dramatic and upset," Keke insisted. "There must be something up between the two of you. What is it?"
"Doug storms everywhere," Lila told Keke, "and he's always dramatic and upset."
I hoped Lila's explanation would satisfy Keke. Maybe I could change the subject to our chances at the swim meet next Saturday.
Then Gabriel splashed past us on his way to the beer stash against the dunes. "Zoooey!" He wrapped me in an alcoholic bear hug. "Doug was here looking for you earlier. What's up between you two?"
"Nothing!" we three girls said simultaneously.
"Ooooookay." Gabriel gave each of us a look that said he did not believe us, but he was so drunk that he would not remember this conversation in the morning. Then he let me go and splashed away.
The way the twins were watching me, I knew I wasn't getting out of this now without a better explanation.
In my mind I was back in my mother's bedroom, trying to fix everything. With two fingers I brushed her blond hair away from her closed eyes so she'd look better to the paramedics when they arrived.
I struggled out of those dark thoughts and back to the reality of the starlit beach, the sound of the ocean, and a shadowy Keke and Lila expecting answers. Of course I had told them my mom was having trouble dealing with the divorce, and I didn't want to leave her alone during the summer nights to come to the Slide with Clyde parties. I couldn't divulge more than this to them. My dad had warned me at the emergency room not to tell "those little twins" what my mother had done, and his instincts had been right. I loved Keke and Lila, but they were not discreet.
Luckily I had secrets to divulge that wouldn't touch on Doug seeing me at the emergency room. Doug had a lot of reasons to hate me. I had not wanted to admit this, even to them, because employee matters at Slide with Clyde were supposed to be private. But they were forcing my hand here, and keeping my mother's secret was more important than keeping Doug's. "He sent in an application for Slide with Clyde along with the rest of the swim team last May, and I told Ashley not to call him in because he's been to juvie. Those records are sealed, so she would have had no way of knowing without me telling her. He probably figured that out when everybody got hired but him."
Doug had spent part of ninth grade in juvie. People in our town did not go to juvie. I'd never heard of anyone else who'd been there. I didn't even know where juvie was. I would have suspected it didn't exist except I remembered when Doug missed two weeks of school to go there. Ever since, he was as likely to be in the principal's office as he was to be in class.
"What did you rat him out to Ashley for?" Lila asked. "He could have saved that three-hundred-pound man drowning in the wave pool instead of me."
Keke nodded. "And we could have stared at him shirtless all summer. God, those abs!"
I did not want to think about staring at Doug all summer. And I did not want to talk about this anymore. I turned toward the horizon, the black sky barely discernible from the black ocean, where Doug's fishing boat had disappeared.
But I could see out the corner of my eye that Keke and Lila both watched me, waiting for my answer as to why I had not wanted to give all of us the opportunity to stare at Doug's taut, tanned swimmer's chest all day every day for three summer months. Finally I stated the obvious, which logically should have overridden even teenage girl-lust: "He went to juvie. He's a criminal. I thought I should warn my family's business against employing a criminal."
"What did you think he was going to do," Keke asked, "embezzle funds? Did he go to juvie for embezzlement?"
"What did he go to juvie for?" Lila asked. "He was only in the ninth grade. What could he possibly have done?"
They were making me feel more and more sheepish. I wished I hadn't told them this after all. I wished I hadn't come to the party. "Look," I defended myself, "it wasn't the only job in town. I didn't go all over town and prevent him from getting a job anywhere."
"Y eah, but the job at Slide with Clyde was his only chance to get away from his dad this summer," Lila said, waving toward the spot we all gazed at now, where Doug was helping gung-ho tourists hold the line on big game fish beyond the horizon.
"I heard that from the guys on the swim team," she said. "Lifeguard jobs were the only jobs a teenager could get that paid more than his dad's fishing biz, and the pools around town were hiring college kids as lifeguards. It was Slide with Clyde or nothing for Doug."
"What was so bad about working with his dad?" I asked.
We all looked at each other, feet sinking in the sand underwater. A wave knocked Keke off balance and she braced herself against Lila, and still we were quiet. Possibly they were thinking what I was thinking: could Doug's situation with his dad be worse than mine?
I broke the silence. "Okay. For years there has been this weird tension between Doug and me because he asked me to homecoming in ninth grade, right before he went to juvie."
"He did ?" Keke gasped.
"And you broke up with him because of that?" Lila asked, outraged.
"Of course not," I said. "He was just gone." I flicked my fingers in the air to show that he'd disappeared. "One day he was in junior varsity swim practice with me, hanging on to the side of the pool and asking if I'd go to homecoming with him. The next Monday he was gone. Around the middle of the week somebody had heard he was in juvie. By the time he came back to school a couple of weeks later, homecoming was over."