Peri laughed, wind through bare-limbed trees at night. “Can I bum one?” She stood, now, right by Odilie. She smelled like hyacinths, and Odilie fumbled through the box, almost dropping the cigarette before handing it to Peri. “I liked you better than the girl I had in there with me today. You’re more efficient. This one, she was so gentle, so worried that every little prick would send me into a spasm.” Odilie chuckled back quietly.

“When it’s painful, you know it counts,” Peri said. “I want my gums to bleed.” They stood in silence, gazing at the short row of cars, listening to the sounds of the highway on the other side of the hedgerow planted around the dentist’s building. “What are you doing right now?” Peri asked, ashing the cigarette.

Odilie’s chest thrummed. “Just going to go home and watch TV with my roommate, I guess.” She kept her voice steady, even as her hands shook. She didn’t quite know then why she was so nervous, what about Peri made her want to grovel, want to impress her, want to be her. She just knew that this person excited her in a way nothing else in her life really had before. Not in an erotic, passionate way, really. It was like Peri was a chasm with an unknown bottom and if Odilie jumped, she’d know something about the world that others didn’t. The feeling was intoxicating.

“Want to get a drink?” But it wasn’t a question. They both knew it wasn’t. So Odilie found herself, not a moment later, following Peri’s car as it wound out of the parking lot and into the evening. As her eyes lingered on the vehicle, she had the sudden worry that it would vanish, taking Peri along with it.

Wyneck was a summer destination, a coastal town that attracted Northeastern tourists all season long. Like many other seasonal villages, there was a divide between the local and tourist haunts, the neighborhoods, the types of food they ate. Odilie had grown up watching people come and go all her life, watched houses open on Memorial Day then shutter in September, after Labor Day. Every May she watched her sleepy little town transform overnight, shop windows smudged with debris suddenly gleaming when the first tourist family walked down Main Street. It was oddly discordant to grow up alongside the wealth that the summer dwellers brought, the Jaguars, the yachts, the specialty stores that kept popping up all throughout her childhood with fifty-dollar candles and sweater sets with a used car’s price tag.