St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

The Star-Gazer’s Log of Summer-Time Crime

My job is to be the lookout.

Raffy’s job is to give out jobs.

Marta’s job is to get Petey choreographed and in costume.

Petey’s job is to be the moon.

I didn’t come out here tonight expecting to join a Comical Ironical Crime Ring. I’m here because my dad set me up on a date to see Alcyone. Dad made some sly references to her long blue light filaments and her extraordinary nebulosity, and boy was I excited. I polished my pocket planisphere. I read up on all the expert tips for locating her star cluster center in my Starry-Eyed Guide to the Galaxy — For Kids! I logged her spectral type prematurely in anticipation of one luminous night. That’s how Molly and I got suckered into coming out to the touristy side of the island in the first place. Dad promised us that it would be a Junior Astronomer’s beach paradise. But then I crested this dune and saw Petey, and now all my thoughts of Alcyone have been eclipsed.

Petey is dancing on the beach in a puddle of moonlight. He appears to be doing your basic two-step, but he’s spiced it up with a spastic little shimmy from side to side. He twitches; he twirls. He lets out a low, gurgly giggle that goes goose-bumpling up my arm.

Petey’s not particularly nimble, but he sure is quick. I’m not surprised. The formula bubbles up unbidden in my brain: Momentum © mass ® velocity. And Petey is a sandy dervish of a man, soft-bellied, at least twice my height.

He is also twinkling like a star.

When I get closer, I find out why. Somebody has tied a trash-can lid to Petey’s chest with crisscrossed strings of Xmas lights. It’s been buffed to an impressive sheen. The rest of Petey’s upper body is festooned with more of the tiny white bulbs. They loop around his arms and neck, blinking on and off at random intervals that seem timed to coincide with his lurching dance. I hypothesize that they must be battery-operated. The nearest hotel is a fifteen-minute walk away, so you’d need a pretty long extension cord.

We’ve never met before, but I know that this human disco ball must be Petey; after all, what other adult man on the island would look and move and laugh this way? Petey is something of a legend around here. Doreen, the chambermaid at the Bowl-a-Bed Hotel, told Dad that he’s one of the few people who come to the island every summer. Nobody’s sure what’s wrong with him, exactly, and Doreen says he always shows up at midnight so she’s never there to check him in. All Doreen knows for certain is that Petey’s at least thirty years old and has wax-white skin and long, colorless lashes. She says that frightened guests always call to report a ghost haunting the hallways whenever Petey comes to stay.

“Is he a friendly ghost?” my sister Molly wanted to know. “Like Casper?”

“Oh, Petey’s no ghost,” she reassured us. “I told you, I don’t know what he is, exactly, but he’s harmless. You’ll see.”

But the ocean mist has fogged up my glasses, and now I can’t see a thing. After I spit-shine them, I realize that Petey’s arms and hands are covered in tinfoil. He’s holding a pair of huge red flashlights in his aluminum-foiled fingertips; he shakes these like maracas. They cast weird shadows across a roped-off square of sand. I can’t actually see what’s inside the roped-off area; all I can make out is the red plastic tape wrapped around four wooden beams. A triangular sign is attached to a driftwood post behind it. It takes me a couple of Petey’s strobe-light revolutions to read it: SEA TURTLE NEST. DO NOT DISTURB! VIOLATORS SUBJECT TO FINES AND IMPRISONMENT.

A boy and a girl are standing next to Petey, staring down at the mound of sand. I recognize the boy as Raffy. Uh-oh, I think. I stuff my stargazing apparatus in my back pocket and turn to go, but it’s too late. They’ve seen me.

“Hey, Raffy,” I gulp. “What’s up?”

“Hey, cockbag,” he says. His tone is unexpectedly genial. “Who the hell are you?”

Raffy must have forgotten that he already knows me. We’ve had homeroom together since middle school, but Raffy travels in a different social solar system. Raffy hangs out with tattooed graffiti artists who race cars; I hang out with members of the Sci-Fi/Fantasy Club. We discuss the fiery edge of Orion’s sword. We wear helmets and reflective knee pads when we ride our ergonomic bikes to school.

Raffy is the reason that we wear protective gear. He demands “loans” from our meager treasury and mocks the size of our genitalia and brags about fornicating with our mothers. If you inform Raffy that you do not, in fact, have a mother, as I have on several occasions, he tells you to go fornicate with yourself. All the girls in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy Club confide to me that they are secretly in love with Raffy. It’s not fair. Everybody knows that bullies are supposed to have squat bodies and flattish heads like hammerhead sharks. But Raffy is tall and lean and regal-looking, with these leonine dreadlocks and laughing black eyes. He’s bashed me into the gym wall several times and “borrowed” my dollars, but we’ve never had what you’d call a real conversation.

“I’m Ollie,” I remind him. “Oliver White? We have class together. I’m staying over at the Bowl-a-Bed Hotel….”

“You staying on this side of the island too? Small fucking world,” Raffy says. He narrows his eyes and gives me the once-over, and I am painfully aware of my dimpled arms, my effeminate blond curls, my collared shirt on which every button has been dutifully buttoned. I feel my planisphere bulging conspicuously in my pocket. But Raffy just nods at me, visibly relaxing.

“Well, Ollie…” He turns to the girl, who hands him a big burlap sack. He holds it open for my inspection. “We could use a third. Are you in?”

I peer inside the bag. It’s empty, except for one lone potato peel.

In what? I wonder. They’re all staring at me expectantly, even Petey. In the uncomfortable silence that follows, the only possibility I can come up with is that Raffy wants me to get in the sack. I try to swing my right leg over, and end up kicking the little girl in the shin.

“No, you retard!” Raffy yells. “Not in the bag. I want to know if you’re in on our baby turtle smuggling ring.”

“Shhh,” the girl says, a finger to her lips. “Don’t talk about retards that way in front of Petey.”

We all stare at Petey. He’s resumed his dance, shaking the flashlights with such gusto that the tinfoil’s peeling off, chunks of aluminum big enough to wrap up a ham sandwich. Shimmering bits of foil fall all around him, revealing swatches of Petey’s skin. He looks sort of like the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz, were the Tin Man to contract some leprous skin disease. I don’t mean to, but I can’t help it: I gasp when I first glimpse the skin on Petey’s arm. In the moonlight, he looks like he’s made of liquid silver.

“We think Petey’s an albino,” Marta explains.

“And a retard,” Raffy adds.

“Mentally handicapped.” She frowns, punching him in the arm.

“Special,” I say, and it’s true. I think that Petey might be the most special person I have ever seen.

“Hi, Petey,” I say. “Good to finally meet you.”

Petey waggles his silvery fingers at me.

“What about the rest of you?” I ask. “Who are you?”

I smile at the girl. She’s cute. She has a freckle-dusted face and these big round glasses with pink frames. She looks like she should be eating vanilla wafers, or pasting evening wear on paper dolls. She definitely doesn’t look like she should be hanging around with guys like Raffy. Or even guys like me.

“Who, her?” He pinches her cheek. “This my bitch, Marta.”

“I’m his bitch,” she repeats happily.

“Oh,” I say. “I’m Ollie. Nice to make your acquaintance.”

“So, Ollie,” Raffy asks again. “You down for some turtle smuggling tonight?”

“Um…yeah. I mean, maybe. What is this smuggling ring, exactly?”

Raffy nods at Marta, who hands me a yellow flyer. I recognize it from the lobby of my hotel. They’re posted all over the place on the island, in English and Spanish and Creole:

WARNING: DISTURBING A SEA TURTLE NEST

IS A VIOLATION OF FEDERAL AND STATE LAWS

As you may be aware, the months of June — August are prime time for sea turtle eggs to hatch. Baby turtles possess an inborn tendency to move in the brightest direction. On a natural beach, they will orient themselves by the reflection of moonbeams and starlight on the water. However, in recent years our hatchlings have become disoriented by artificial lights, which beckon them away from the sanctuary of the ocean.

On the coast of Namibia, a nest of disoriented hatchlings walked into a beach barbecue and were burned to a crisp.

On the shores of Greece, the fatally bright lights of the discotheques lured thousands of baby turtles to their deaths.

Let’s not make the same mistake here in Loomis County! Please turn off all outside lights between the hours of dusk and dawn.

REMEMBER: SEA TURTLE HATCHLINGS RELY ON

NATURAL LIGHT TO ORIENT THEMSELVES.

DO NOT INTERFERE WITH THE MOON!

“Did you read that first part?” Raffy asks, dreamy-eyed. “A federal offense!”

“You’re going to use a mentally handicapped man to help you steal baby turtles?” I ask.

“Yup!” the girl says brightly. “We’re going to trick those silly turtles into walking into our burlap sack instead of the ocean. Isn’t that right, Petey?”

“Tuuuurtles,” he says in his creepy monotone drawl.

“But…but why?”

They all stare at me blankly. Raffy shakes the letter in my face, as if it’s an open invitation to lure endangered species away from their natural habitat and into a burlap sack of certain doom.

“I mean, what are you going to do once you have all the turtles?”

Raffy waves my question away. “We’ll figure that part out later. Don’t people keep them as pets? Or eat them in soups, or something?”

“Tortoiseshell accessories are really trendy now,” Marta says helpfully. She beams at Raffy.

“Tuuuurtles,” Petey says.

“Okay,” I say. “But I still don’t get why Petey has to wear the trash can and the tinfoil and the festive lights. Doesn’t that seem…unnecessary?” I want to say unnecessarily cruel. “Why can’t we just scoop them up with our hands, or sweep them into a dustpan or something?”

“Because,” Raffy says, rolling his eyes at Marta as if I am the mentally handicapped one. “It’s funnier this way.”

Wowie zowie, I think. This is the most truly evil scheme that I have ever heard.

“Okay,” I say. “What’s my job?”

Two hours later, Petey is sweating profusely, and the turtles have yet to emerge from their nest. His calves quake with exhaustion in a way that makes the dance a lot less amusing.

“These fucking eggs better get cracking,” Raffy grumbles. “School starts in a few more weeks.” He turns to me. “How long you here for?”

I shrug. My dad is here with a group of his retired astronaut buddies, and my guess is that we’ll stay at the Bowl-a-Bed until Dad exhausts his pension or his lunar nostalgia, whichever comes first.

“Well, don’t dip out on us, Ollie. Meet us here tomorrow morning. We’ll do some practice daytime crimes.”

I gulp. “But these crimes…I mean, we only commit comical and ironical crimes, right? We don’t actually hurt anybody?”

“Please,” Raffy laughs. It’s not a pleasant laugh — it makes you feel like he’s giving you mean little pinches all over your body. “I’m on my summer break here. I save the real crime for the school year.” He grins at me. “Hold up, I do remember you. One of the Sci-Fi boys, right? I always had you figured for a fucking dork, kid, but you a’ight.”

“Um, thanks…” And then, a second too late: “You’re a’ight as well…. So, okay, then…” I try to keep my voice casual, as if being invited to join a crime ring with a cute girl and the coolest kid in my grade is a routine occurrence for me. “See you tomorrow?” I turn to go, but Raffy grabs me and whirls me around.

“Hey, you dropped something,” he says. “Fell out of your pocket.” He reaches down and shakes the sand off my Starry-Eyed Guide to the Galaxy — For Kids!

Uh-oh. I hope that it is too dark to read. I hope that Raffy is illiterate. I think: Don’t open it — don’t read the title — please God just give it back to me.

Raffy starts flipping through the pages.

The Starry-Eyed Guide to the Galaxy — For Kids! was a gift from my father on my twelfth birthday. Molly and I aren’t exactly little kids anymore, but Dad hasn’t seemed to notice. Besides, it’s not like anybody’s written a Guide to the Galaxy for Awkward Pubescent Boys yet. Anyhow, I kind of like the glow-in-the-dark graphics.

I’m less fond of the book’s other concession to the seven to ten demographic, a bunch of Wowie Zowie! Fun Facts scattered throughout each chapter. As in:

Wowie Zowie! Fun Fact #47:

Q: A shooting star is not a star, how does it shine so bright?

A: The friction as it falls through air produces heat and light!

As in, wowie zowie, we the authors of the Starry-Eyed Guide to the Galaxy — For Kids! have never actually had contact with anyone under the age of forty-two. Or, wowie zowie, if kids like Raffy catch you reading this book, they will crown you as King Nerd and announce the glad tidings of your coronation over the PA system.

My dad’s version of the book, the staid, declarative Guide to the Galaxy, is nearly identical, except that the graphics are a matte black, and the same information is listed as Fact #47. I guess that’s what growing up means, at least according to the publishing industry: phosphorescence fades to black and white, and facts cease to be fun.

The planisphere was a gift, too. It’s what we Junior Astronomers use to orient us in the night sky. Mine is shiny and compact and has the most accurate star compass on the market. It’s fallen out of my pocket and rolled near Raffy’s foot, and I quickly stoop down to retrieve it before he can see it flashing in the sand.

“Whatcha found there?”

“Nothing,” I squeak. “Just trash.”

I panic. Oh God, I think, they are going to pry my fist open and expose me as a law-abiding astronomy lover. And before I’ve made any sort of conscious decision to do this, I feel myself winding up and chucking my planisphere into the ocean. My weak muscles tense and draw back, and then it’s over. Usually I throw like a girl, but tonight the planisphere goes rocketing from my hand. The waves are so dark that I can’t even see if it makes a splash when it hits the water.

“You know, weirdo, there’s a trash can right over there,” Raffy says, pointing at the lidless can. “Say, what’s this?” He’s turned to the Star-Gazer’s Log of Summer-Time Constellations section in the back. The half-finished Alcyone page stares up at me accusingly.

“Oh.” I blush. “That’s not mine. That’s my twin sister’s.”

Raffy pulls out a pen from behind his ear. He crosses out “Constellations” and writes in “Crimes.”

“Well, now it’s the official log for our crime ring.” He grins down at me. “You can be the secretary.”

“Hey, Big Dipper,” Dad says when I finally get back to our hotel room. He puts down his drink and looks over at me with bleary eyes. “It’s past your curfew. I’ve been waiting up for you for hours.” But he sounds more proud of me than angry. “You must have really gotten lost in the stars tonight. Did you find Alcyone?”

“Yes, sir,” I lie. “Five degrees south of Eta Carinae, right where you said she’d be.”

“Great work, son!” he says, beaming at me. His voice drops to a whisper. “Don’t tell Little Dipper — it’s different for girls — but maybe we can talk about extending that curfew.” He winks at me. “There might be a few foxy new clusters around Cassiopeia tomorrow night, if you know what I mean.”

I picture my planisphere glinting on the bottom of the dark ocean floor. Right now, I think, schools of tiny yellow fish are probably nibbling at the glow-in-the-dark stars.

“Hubble hubble,” I say, raising my eyebrows. “Boy, would I love to get Cassiopeia on the other end of my telescope. Thanks, Dad.” We grin at each other, man to man.

Parents can be so dumb.

As I climb into my hotel bed, I have to hold on to the headboard to steady myself. I have the giddy sense that I’m hurtling towards some uncharted corner of space, a world full of bros and bitches and comical, ironical crime. I pull back the covers, preparing to sink into sleep. Then I scream.

“Molly!” She is mummy-wrapped in the hotel sheets and staring right at me, her arms crossed over her flat chest. Anger seems to have inhibited her ability to blink. As usual, I’m dismayed to note that my sister has more arm hair than I do.

Molly and I are twins, but we’re not identical, and thank God for that. People often describe me as “cherubic” because I’m blond and fat, but at least I’m well complected. Poor Molly. My sister’s like a kiwi fruit — sweet on the inside, but small and hairy and round on the outside. Not to mention her face has more craters than friggin’ Callisto.

“Well, well, well,” she says icily. “Howdy, Ollie. How was your hot date with Alcyone?”

“Oh,” I mumble, “It was okay….”

“Liar!” she howls, throwing back the hotel covers. “Don’t patronize me. I know it was a lot better than just okay. We’re talking Alcyone here.” She does a swoony pantomime and collapses against the pillow. “So, are you going to take me with you next time, or what?”

I don’t answer. Instead, I pick Molly up and plop her down on her own twin bed. “G’night, Little Dipper.”

“I hate you.”

I sigh and turn off the lights. Molly’s the other fifty percent of the Junior Astronomer Society. At first I didn’t want her to join, but I had to capitulate after the Activities Committee told me that I couldn’t form a society with only one member. Molly thinks that just because we share the same genome, we have to have matching bedsheets and hobbies and moral systems. I don’t want to take her with me tomorrow. The crime ring is my new friendship constellation. Besides, Molly’s such a goody-goody that she’d probably feel betrayed by my baby turtle smuggling or something. Some people just aren’t cut out for a life of crime.

We meet every morning, still bearded with toast crumbs from our continental breakfasts. Everybody assembles in the green shade of the palm trees next to Barnacle Bob’s Shrimp Stand. Everybody except for Petey. We don’t know where Petey goes during the day. Sometimes we plan crimes and sometimes we perpetrate them. Sometimes we just sit around tic-talking down the hours until we can resume the Great Turtle Stakeout. I keep detailed notes of all our activities in my Star Log.

I guess I’d always assumed that Raffy was a bomb-in-your-mailbox, flaming-bag-of-fecal-matter-on-your-stoop kind of outlaw. But Raffy has a real flair for comical ironical crime. I don’t know what he does during the school year, but Raffy’s summer-time crime feels good, and clean, and funny. In fact, that’s the catchphrase that sparks every crime we commit:

“Wouldn’t it be funny if…?”

And Raffy has this magical, abracadabrical ability to transform all his “ifs” into “whens.”

On Monday, we stow away on a glass-bottom boat and then tap out forbidden messages to the dreamy-eyed manatees in full view of the DO NOT TOUCH THE GLASS sign. On Tuesday, we warm up by shoplifting a six-pack of Coke and then throwing the cans away in the PLASTIC ONLY bin. Afterwards we take the bus to the other side of the island — we do not hold on while it is departing — and steal all the pennies from the Children’s Hospital Wishing Well. Raffy uses them to buy a Mr. Goodbar candy bar. He seems unperturbed when I point out that 1 Mr. Goodbar © 187 sick children’s wishes.

“Think of it this way,” Raffy says, his mouth ringed with chocolate. “We’re making our wishes come true.”

On Wednesday, Raffy makes me use my mechanical expertise to rig up a plastic conch shell so that it makes crude potty noises whenever little old ladies in big floppy hats hold it up to their ears to hear the ocean.

On Thursday, Raffy wants to see if taking candy from a baby is really as easy as the old adage suggests. We walk up and down the splintery boardwalk peering into strollers, but I guess that today’s health-conscious parents don’t let babies have candy anymore, because all the ones we see are gumming jars of stewed prunes. We take some Ricola cough drops from an elderly sunbather’s straw bag instead. It is easy, and you can tell that Raffy’s disappointed.

“There’s just no stopping us,” he says glumly.

“Stop her!” Raffy yells, a little over an hour into Night Four of our Turtle Vigil. He points down the beach, to where a shadowy figure is bumbling along towards our nest. “Stop that intruder!”

I peer down the beach at the intruder and stifle a groan. It’s Molly. She is engrossed in her star maps, using her birthday planisphere to chart her course. I feel a sudden twinge of remorse. My own star compass is probably all sea-weeded and shattered by now.

“She’s just some kid,” I say.

“Anybody we know?”

“I told you, it’s nobody. Just some girl out past her bedtime.”

“Are you sure you don’t know her?” Raffy asks, turning Petey in her direction and illuminating Molly’s startled face. “Because it looks like she’s mouthing your name.”

“Oh. So she is. That’s my little dip…sister. I guess I didn’t recognize her from here. Hang on, I’ll get rid of her.” I hurry off to intercept her.

“Ollie?” she says when I run over to her. She pronounces my name uncertainly, as if it’s a foreign word. “Is that you? What are you guys doing?” Her eyes are wide and disbelieving. “You’re not hanging out with Rafael Saumat over there, are you?”

I shrug. “Yeah, and? He’s not such a bad guy. He’s my bro now.”

“Your bro?” she snorts. “He’s an asshole, Ollie!”

“Look, you don’t know him like I do. He can be really sweet.” I try to think of some examples. “Like the other day, these bovine girls with back acne floated by us in the pool — I mean, the kind of girls you wouldn’t want to feel up with oven mitts on, Molly — but Raffy gave them these charity cat-calls and politely invited each one to have his baby, even though you could tell that his heart wasn’t in it. Why, he’d probably hit on you!”

This rhetorical strategy doesn’t go over so well. In fact, Molly looks like she’s about to burst into tears.

“I bet he doesn’t even know your favorite constellation. You probably haven’t even told him you’re a Junior Astronomer, have you?”

“Well…”

“You faker, you phony!”

“Look, I’m not a phony!” I try to huff my voice up to an appropriately righteous volume. “It’s just that I choose to accentuate other aspects of myself around Raffy — sort of like how you glob on mascara so as to indicate, Look! I have eyelashes! So maybe I don’t mention the Junior Astronomer Society. Well, you don’t use mascara on your chin hairs.”

“Fine.” She sniffs. “Have fun with your new friends, Mr. Faker. I’ve got a date with Vulpecula.”

“Does Dad know you’re out here? If he finds out, he’ll be furious.”

“Ha! Dad’s been down at the bar with his buddy astronauts for so long now that I doubt he even knows there is an ‘out here.’”

I look over my shoulder. Raffy is waving at me impatiently.

“Go back to the hotel, Little Dipper,” I beg, whirling her around and giving her a little shove. “You can see Vulpecula just fine from the window of the Bowl-a-Bed.”

“I’m ashamed to share your DNA.” Molly whacks me with her own dog-eared copy of the Starry-Eyed Guide to the Galaxy—hard. Then she stomps off to the Bowl-a-Bed to constellate and sulk.

Molly’s pretending to be asleep when I get back that night. She’s left me an angry message written on one of the Bowl-a-Bed bar napkins.

Q: What is the constellation that never varies from its position at right ascension seven hours and declination eighteen degrees? Or have you forgotten? (Hint: it used to be your favorite.)

A: Gemini aka The Twins!!!

By the fifth night, the Christmas lights have run out of batteries. Now Petey has a compromised glow. His outfit looks less like the moon and more like a giant prewar nickel. Then Marta decides that we have to put the lid back on the trash can. These huge raccoons have taken up residence inside it, and she’s worried about rabies.

“Well, bitches,” says Raffy, Boy Scout — resourceful, “I guess we can always get more foil.”

So we shoplift some Reynolds Wrap from the Night Owl Mini Mart and triple-wrap all of Petey’s extremities. Including his head. It looks like a giant baked potato. Sweet little Marta remembers to make silver slits for his eyes and nose and mouth.

I think I might be developing a species of crush on Marta. It’s not sexual or anything, I don’t think. It’s sort of like what I feel for Molly, and sort of not. I just want Marta to let me lace up her sneakers. I want to rock her and knee-sock her and push her on swings. And, you know…I guess I wouldn’t mind doing a few other things.

But later, Marta and I have a conversation that effectively forecloses that possibility. Raffy decides that we need a getaway vehicle, and he goes off to try to hot-wire a miniature golf cart. I like it when Raffy leaves Marta and me to babysit Petey; it’s like we’re playing house. Tonight we break open some coconuts and give him the sugary-sweet milk, and then we use the scooped-out shells to dig a shallow little bed for him. We tuck Petey in by shoveling a white blanket over his hulking body. He yawns and smiles up at us, just his downy head sticking out of the sand.

“This should be creepy,” I tell Marta, patting down the sand around Petey’s neck. “But it’s not.”

She nods. “Do you ever get that cobwebby feeling when grown-up men look at you?” Marta asks me. “Like you’ve just walked into something sticky and invisible?”

“Oh, sure.” I nod. “Right.” I have no idea what Marta is talking about. For all I know, I am giving her this sticky look right now.

“Me too. But it never feels like that when Petey looks at you, you know?” Marta brushes sand off Petey’s nose. “Hey, Ollie,” she asks me, “can you keep a secret?”

“Sure.” I try to sound big brotherly and nonchalant, but my breathing gets all fast and wonky. Tell-me-that-you-like-me-too! I think with every exhalation.

“Tonight’s my birthday,” she says.

“Heeeey!” I give her a noogie. “Happy Birthday! Here…” I cup her chin in my hand and tilt her face up at the sky. “Blow out the stars and make a wish.”

Dad told me and Molly that our mother used to do this with us when we were very little. We both pretended like we remembered.

Marta shuts her eyes. She smiles. And I am seriously considering leaning in and kissing her.

“Can I tell you what I wished for?” she asks, her eyes still closed.

Kiss her now! I think. But I can’t do it; I mean, how do you do it? I just keep picturing my big nose crashing into her smooth cheek like some clumsy meteor.

She opens her eyes. “I wished that Raffy—”

“Don’t tell me,” I say, and something bee-stung and bitter creeps into my voice. “It won’t come true.”

Raffy.

I should’ve known. When Raffy’s around, she gets all dumb and honey-eyed. She half parts her pink lips. With me, she turns furry-browed and philosophical, just like the girls in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy Club.

I bet I know exactly what she’s wishing for, too. I’ve already had every girl in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy Club confess the same stupid wish to me. I’ve been working on a formula to explain this phenomenon. Apparently: 13 cruel comments / 2 not-unkind words © 1 weak-kneed girl

Raffy returns fifteen minutes later. On foot.

“Watch out for Petey’s head!” we call. Petey’s still snoring in his sand bed.

“Why is Petey sleeping on the job?” Raffy grumbles. He’s grumpy because it turns out there are no golf carts on the island, probably because, as I respectfully pointed out to him several times, there are no golf courses on the island.

I’m about to go help Marta excavate Petey when I get a second chance to prove my worth as the lookout. Two men are power-walking down the beach in our direction, pumping their arms with the frustrated vigor of flightless birds.

“Look out!” I yell. Everybody but Petey turns and obliges.

“It’s the environmentalists,” Raffy wails. “Shit, man, do something!”

Marta warned us yesterday that a group of environmentalists were holding a conference at the Hostile Hostel, but I told her not to worry about it. I figured that the environmentalists would probably just stay in the lobby the entire time so as not to put any undue strain on the fragile beach ecosystem.

“What should we do, Raffy?” I ask. “If these environmentalists find out about this nest, they’ll be here every night with their environmentalist friends, waiting to take digital photographs of one another as they shepherd our baby turtles into the sea!”

Raffy pushes me towards them. “You’re a good talker, Ollie. Make with the orating.” He can tell he’s surprised us with his diction. “I do go to class sometimes, you bitches.” He shrugs. “Now go!”

So I orate. I extemporize. I run like hell.

“Hey!” I yell to the environmentalists, leading them far away from the nest. “Over here! I think I hear some beached marine creature.”

Then I try to approximate the sound of air wheezing plaintively out of a blowhole. But I can’t figure out how to do this without interrupting my own speech like some ventriloquy school dropout:

“I [bubble bubble] think [bubble bubble] it’s a whale!”

A hand clamps down on my shoulder. And it’s not the hand of an ovo-lacto vegan. It’s a big, red-meaty kind of hand.

“That’s no whale,” the man growls, whirling me around. “That’s a human boy making those noises!”

“Well, you got me, sir,” I admit. Then I wriggle out of his grasp and do wind sprints down the beach. I just keep on running, even though neither of the men bother to give chase, until I finally collapse on the sand outside my hotel.

All I’m saying is, Raffy better remember this come school time.

“Sorry, Dad,” I say when I get in, disheveled and breathless and over two hours late for my newly extended curfew. “I got a little Milky Way — laid and lost track of time.”

“Ahhh, Ollie,” he chuckles. “Like father, like son.” He shakes his head fondly. “I know it’s hard for you kids to imagine, but your old man spent some wild nights up in the Milky Way himself when he was your age.” He lifts his glass in my direction.

“Here’s to youth! Here’s to you, Big Dipper!”

“So what did you see up there tonight?” I ask, and my voice comes out choked and strange. “You, uh, you notice any new nebulas? Any anomalies in the orbit?”

But my father has gone somewhere pensive and inward and doesn’t answer. So I get away with it, for the fifth night in a row. I should feel good, I guess, but instead I feel this awful loneliness, an outlaw’s loneliness, lying to the person I love best in the world. It’s too easy to use his love to fool him. I almost want to be found out and grounded. I don’t know why my father believes me. I don’t know what the other kids tell their parents they do at night.

We think there must be something wrong with Petey’s parents. What kind of parents would allow their adult child to play on the beach at night with kids like us? What kind of parents would bring their mentally handicapped albino son on a beach vacation in the first place?

Nobody knows if Raffy has parents. Raffy’s not very forthcoming about these kinds of details. I’m still not sure where he’s staying on the island, and we’ve been hanging out every day for nearly a week.

We know that Marta has a mom, because we keep having these awkward run-ins with her outside the Crustaceous Cocktail Lounge. Marta’s mother is always draped across some jowly older individual, and it’s never the same one twice. Two nights ago it was a much older man whom she introduced to Marta and me as “my gentleman caller.” He had a face like an uncooked steak, pink and unsavory. When Marta’s mother got up to use the restroom, I saw him offer Marta a sip of his Coco-Loco cocktail. Marta’s mother and her decrepit beaus all look like they came to the island for spring break several decades ago and never left.

“Are you playing nice, honey?” Marta’s mother always asks. “Did you make some little friends?”

“Yes, Momma.”

“Oh, good,” she says, and her smile is as vast and empty as the Gamma Quadrant of space.

You know, it might be my imagination, but it seems like lately our crimes have been getting a lot less comical, and a lot more criminal.

“Wouldn’t it be funny,” Raffy says idly, “if we got Petey drunk?” He pauses, biting his lower lip, and you can tell he’s trying to think of some comical ironical twist. Then he gives up. “You know, it would be even funnier if we got drunk, too.”

So we take a ten-dollar bill out of Petey’s pocket and close his fist around it and send him into the Night Owl Mini Mart with this note pinned to his lapel:

I WOULD LIKE TO PURCHASE

YOUR LEAST EXPENSIVE BEER.

Five minutes later, Petey gets sent back to us with a new note written beneath the first in prim red letters: NICE TRY, YOU HOOLIGANS!

We peer in the window and see another kid’s mother scowling back out at us, holding some eggs and a carton of milk. Her very hair seems to frizz with maternal disapproval. She whispers something to the gas station attendant, and they both shake their heads in our direction. Raffy thinks we could try sending Petey into the Crustaceous Cocktail Lounge, but we can all hear the other mother berating us through the glass—“And if I catch you hooligans out here again, I won’t stop at your parents, I’m calling the authorities!!”—and her abrasive voice stops us in our tracks.

“Stupid bitch,” Raffy mutters, but he doesn’t sound terribly upset. In fact, I think we all look a little relieved. And I am reminded of Wowie Zowie! Fun Fact #52—

INERTIA: Unless an object is acted on by friction from an outside force, it will spiral through space, in the same direction at the same speed — indefinitely!

That night, Molly breaks down and talks to me. She is standing by the bathroom sink and running cold water over her planisphere. She doesn’t see me at first. I watch her from the door frame, crossing and uncrossing my toes inside my socks. The harsh bathroom light picks out all the cracks in the mildewed tile between us.

“Ollie! Aren’t you going to clean your star compass with me?” She sounds hurt and suspicious. “It’s Saturday night.”

“Sorry,” I lie. “Already did.”

“Oh,” she says in a tiny voice.

And suddenly my eyes get all hot, and I worry I might actually start to cry. I can’t tell Molly this, but I really miss that planisphere. Lately, I feel so lost when I look up at the sky. I’ve been combing the dunes in the early mornings, checking to see if it’s washed up. Maybe some deep-sea diver will find it one day and give it back to me. Dad had it engraved with my initials.

“Sure you don’t want some of these scrubbing bubbles? You know what Dad always says…” We roll our eyes and repeat it in unison:

“You can’t make sense of the universe if you’re looking at it through a fogged-up lens!”

And it feels so good to giggle with Molly again.

When I meet up with Raffy on Sunday morning, he’s just sent Marta running down the beach to get him a soda. Her little red bathing suit rides up in the back, her white bottom flashing in the sunlight.

“Damn!” Raffy whistles after her. “Forget the eggs, yo, wouldn’t you love to crack that open tonight?”

(Yes.)

“No! I mean…”

We watch her run. The soles of Marta’s tiny white feet are always dirty. Even from here, you can see the tar-skunked stripes when she kicks up her heels.

“I mean, it’s too bad she’s so young….”

“Hey.” Raffy winks. “We commit all kinds of crimes together….”

We both laugh a little, and then there’s this long pause when neither of us can really look at the other. We stare at Marta’s sun-browned legs, the curve of her shoulder blades. I can hear my heart pounding in my chest.

“But, you know…” I’m still not looking at him, but I’m not looking at Marta, either. “That wouldn’t really be comical, Raffy. Or ironical.”

He kicks a sand ball at me. “Where’s your sense of humor?”

He’s only joking, I think, my pulse quickening. We’re only joking here.

Marta leans forward to pay the man for Raffy’s soda, and we both lean forward with her. Her wet hair is curling down her back like a question mark.

Unless we’re not.

Tonight, the other kid’s mother is nowhere to be found, and Raffy manages to shoplift a whole case of beer. “Wouldn’t it be funny,” he burps halfway into it, “if we got Petey to go skinny-dipping?”

Nobody thinks this would be funny, not even Raffy. Petey is terrified of the water, and I know we all love Petey.

“Hilarious,” I hear myself say.

“If the skin on Petey’s face is that white, just imagine…”

We all look over at Petey.

Marta gives us an uncertain smile, like she wants very badly to laugh but doesn’t understand what the joke is.

Please don’t do this, I think. We don’t have to do this. Even as I am helping Raffy pull down Petey’s pleated blue shorts.

He grunts and looks up at me unhappily as I pull his shirt over his head. Raffy and I stop laughing and stare. The skin beneath Petey’s clothing is whiter than the lunar snow on Io. Whiter than the instep of a baby’s foot, before it’s learned to walk.

“Atta boy, Petey,” I say. “Time to go swimming!”

I know we all love Petey. But we sure have a funny way of showing it.

Petey gets all clumsy and sea-cowed when we lead him to the water. You can tell he doesn’t trust the waves to buoy him up. He screams when the sea foam first washes over his long toes. It’s a bloodcurdling sound, as if Petey thinks the ocean’s actually erasing his foot. Raffy keeps trying to force him in, wedging his fists into the base of Petey’s spine, but Petey finally breaks away from him and runs back to sit shivering and naked by the turtle nest. Raffy laughs and laughs — and so do we. The sound of it rings hollowly down the empty beach.

The worst part is, I know that no matter what crimes we do to Petey, he’ll always come back the following night. Being with Petey is like being with a dog, or a mother. There is nothing you can do to make him stop loving you.

“He’ll go in if you go in, Marta,” Raffy says. “Go tell him that you want to go swimming with him.” He elbows me. “Marta and Petey — that’ll be doubly hilarious!”

“Ha.”

Raffy raises his eyebrows at me. “Maybe later Ollie and I will come in, too.”

“You’ll come in, Raffy?” Marta hesitates for a moment, then starts to unbutton her sweater. She won’t look at either of us. Raffy rolls his skullcap up over his empty eyes to watch her, and I watch her, too, a hot cowardly watching. It should be a very easy thing to look away. But this heat feeling that’s keeping me watching, it’s nothing I can lower like a telescope. And I don’t know the mechanics of shutting it off. I resolve to scream, to say something. We don’t have to do this. Then Raffy grins at me, and I feel myself grinning back.

Now Marta has undone her very last button. Now she’s rolling up the bottom of her shirt. The moon gets squeezed to bits by a black fist of clouds. Under the palm trees, our sockets fill with shadows. Marta’s skin is just visible in the new dark. I feel itchy with excitement. Please don’t do this, I wish again. But I wish it in a much weaker register.

“Time to go swimming, Petey!” we say. I can hear his teeth chattering from here.

Now Marta’s undoing the drawstring of her butter-colored pants. I can’t see her face in the shadows, and I’m glad.

But just as she’s started to tug at her elastic waistband, Petey comes bounding towards us, his silvery hair streaming behind him like a comet’s tail. Momentum = mass x velocity. Droplets of water go rolling down his broad, beautiful back as he flings himself down the beach. He looms huge and naked in front of Marta, one celestial body blocking the light from another, and I think, Petey’s job is to be the moon. And the word that bursts from his lips like a lunar eclipse is:

“Tuuuurtles.” Petey points at the nest. And sure enough, there’s something small and black stirring there.

“Shit!” Raffy cries. “I don’t believe it! The motherfuckers are actually hatching!”

Petey, slick and nude as the new turtles, is in no position to be the moon. Raffy scrambles off to get the flashlights.

The baby turtles are such funny-looking creatures. They seem so old and so young all at once, with their wrinkly old-man eyes blinking out of these viscous, fragile little shells. As we watch the turtles emerge from their speckled eggs and take their first false steps away from the water, I start to feel disoriented, too. Raffy is grinning and swinging the flashlights maniacally, and Marta is struggling with the burlap sack, and Petey is still wet and naked and shivering beside me. I keep patting my pockets for the reassuring weight of my planisphere, forgetting for a second that it’s not there. So then I try this technique my dad taught me for getting your bearings when you get nightmares or nosebleeds or dizzy on car trips. The trick is to mentally pinpoint all the coordinates of your own constellation, and then picture yourself in the swirling center:

Raffy is holding the flashlights, and Marta is holding the burlap sack.

I am holding Petey’s hand. I don’t think anybody can see this in the dark. Don’t let go, Petey.

Petey’s still shivering and rubbing at his bare arms. I help him get his shirt back on over his head and whisper part of a lullaby that my mother used to sing. Nobody remembers how the melody goes, not even Dad. But if he’s had a few, he’ll warble the chorus: “For I have loved the stars too dearly to be fearful of the night…”

The baby turtles are turning away from the ocean. It’s easy to see why. The black waves lap up the moonbeams, and the starlight on the inky surface of the water gives off such a pale glow when you compare it to the megawatt flashlights that Raffy is swirling in hypnotic circles.

“Are you watching this?” Raffy laughs. “This is fucking hilarious!”

The baby turtles are waddling towards the burlap sack in a silvery S-shaped line. They push their puny flippers into the sand with comic perseverance. Their black shells gleam wetly in the light. I edge closer to Raffy to get a better look.

“Wowie zowie,” I breathe, as the first of the turtles files into the bag. Everything is going according to plan. Nothing can stop us now.

“Look…” Marta says. She has rebuttoned all her buttons, and there is wonder in her voice.

One of the turtles near the end of the line has paused. Some dim instinct must have turned its tiny head back toward the ocean, and now it’s turning confused half circles in the sand.

“Get in the burlap sack, motherfucker!” Raffy growls. But I notice that he lowers the flashlight a little.

The turtle blinks up at the too-bright beam of Raffy’s flashlight; then it looks back at the starlight on the open sea. It holds up the line, and we all hold our breath.

My job is to be the lookout, so I look past the turtle nest, beyond the flickering confines of Raffy’s electric light. Petey has wandered away from us. He stumbles down a long alley of sand, picking up pieces of his tinfoil armor and trying to rewrap himself. Behind him, I can see the distant neon of the Bowl-a-Bed Hotel. I tell myself that I could at any moment start walking towards Room 422 with Dad and Molly, clean linens, buckets of ice; but my inert body doesn’t believe this. A mile out from shore, the sea and the sky blend into an infinite blackness. I rub my naked eyes and try to stargaze. The blue Pleiades wink out messages that are illegible to humans. The moon shines down its eerie calligraphy from deep space. Last Sunday, when I was out here alone with my planisphere, this was all still a navigable darkness. That feels like it was a long time ago.

We watch as the single turtle’s instincts wither beneath the hot lights. It flips itself back and forth in a miniature of real agony. We laugh harder; we strain our bellies with laughter. We stare at each other pop-eyed over the burlap sack and laugh as if we’re afraid to stop. Somebody needs to say the magical, abracadabrical words that will turn tonight’s crime into a joke. Marta has buttoned her wet sweater up to her neck. Petey’s vanished. Now Raffy swirls the flashlights with true panic. Our joke keeps hatching and waddling forward in a snaky black procession, growing longer and less funny by the second, and this time nobody, not even Raffy, knows the punch line.