WELL DONE! The Boardwalk by Dawn Major

The Boardwalk by Dawn Major

Spring Break, Daytona Beach, 1989

Us three girls, milk kittens, not weaned off the mall yet. We returned our back-to-school clothes our moms bought earlier in the year for skimpy skirts and cropped tanks hidden deep in our suitcases in the back of the minivan.

Stephana’s dad, who sucked his teeth and kept the window down to smoke, drove straight through providing travel tips.

“Follow the rabbit. You got to follow the rabbit, girls.”

His words of advice to us girls, who had recently earned learner’s licenses and one day might make this trip on our own. The rabbit was the car he coasted behind, the car speeding down I-75 S that he claimed would get pulled over before him. When he saw one of our rabbits parked on the shoulder off I-10 heading towards Jacksonville, Florida with the red and blue lights flashing like fireworks, he pounded the steering wheel and said, “Ahhhaa! See girls. That’s our rabbit. Told you so.”

We indulged him with schoolgirl giggles, irrevocable laughter, knowing buried beneath flowery summer dresses and one-pieced bathing suits our push-up bras waited.

We slept ‘til noon and then spent the rest of the day on the beach cooking our young flesh and scheming how we would sneak out to the boardwalk at night. It would require cunning.

The boardwalk conjured images of MTV spring breakers guzzling beer from beer bongs, Downtown Julie Brown—Wubba, Wubba, Wubba—Pauly Shore, a/k/a The Weasel, suggesting in his stoner voice that college boys lick whip cream off the feet of dancing girls in DayGlo bikinis, and us parentless girls watching it all from behind our Ray-bans, cool, cool, cool.

Maybe it was the day drinking followed by Happy Hour Rum Runners and all-you-can-eat crab legs that loosened Stephana’s parents up. We didn’t ask. We told.

“We’re going to the boardwalk after dinner, but we won’t be late.”

“Nope.” Stephana’s mom ruled.

And her dad, flushed from beer and rum, covered his wife’s hand with his own and said, “Back by 10:30. Latest.”

“Are you cold?” Stephana’s mom eyed us skeptically, eyes that said, “I was once young, leaving the house in one outfit…”

“It’s windy on the beach.”

“I mean it. 10:30.”

We abandoned our oversized sweatshirts in the sand near the hotel, shedding skin like brides lifting veils for the first kiss and us girls all fresh. Freshly cleaned and ripe fruit still wet in the colander.

Would they let us into clubs?W

e didn’t make it home by 10:30, 11:00, midnight, or 2:00. We got in at 3:00 AM after waiting in the ER, listening to Renee howl behind a white privacy curtain, drawn around her as if on a stage—the main act over.

“No one helped me! No one helped me!” She eulogized the nurses, the doctors, the air—a mantra that would follow her into adult life. A hymn sang from then on while she fed her body drugs, moving her hips mechanically on the floors of Tattletales, accepting every bad man that lined up with her eyes closed, because no one helped her. She was just a cornfed girl from Champagne, Illinois once upon a time. A bunny rabbit in the big woods.

Within a minute of hitting the boardwalk, the locals found us, targeting Renee, who was the friendlier of us girls, less guarded, only recently moved to the South and became our friend. We’d been to Atlanta, were city cagy. She told them she was from Illinois. Wrong, wrong, we thought. She told them too much in her skimpy skirt. She asked where the party was. They invited her. We could all go, but their eyes had narrowed to razors, a pack focused on us prey, and their voices suggested something less fun. They mocked Renee. “I’m from Illinois. I’m from Illinois,” they spit out between clenched teeth.

If we had looked closer when our flipflops hit the dried splintered boardwalk we would have seen the truth. We were at the wrong beach, the wrong town for that matter. No clubs for MTV Spring Breakers, no Wubba, Wubba, Wubba, only closed shacks and dive bars and bored gangs of teenaged runaways willing to kick a girl in the head, beat her down to the boardwalk, boys and girls pumping fists into her eye sockets to cure the dull drone days that fueled the night. Not wolves sinking teeth into rabbits for sustenance, but kids not much older than us gorging on violence for sport. Follow the rabbit.

Renee screaming, “Someone help me! Someone help me!”

And those runaways who once came to the same beach, to the same boardwalk, and like us fantasized about dancing on MTV. Or lazily passed joints to one another, under the pier, watching the waves hit the algae-covered posts. Believing they were the new generation, living life by their rules, until they got hungry and cold, and they remembered they were just refugees from broken families, as unwanted as the trash that washed up from the ocean. Their joints turned into glass pipes. The sweet smell of reefer replaced with burnt plastic, dried lips, and zits. And these rabbits, these Goddam rabbits invading their territory, in new clothes with nice teeth, who reminded them of their mortality. These Goddam rabbits needed to pay.

Then the two of us escaping to the other side of the street contemplating our own hides until there was a break in the beatdown, and I ran and plucked Renee off the boardwalk, and we ran, ran, ran, ran, ran and everything was not cool at all.

We left the following day. No talk of rabbits, no teeth sucking, just Renee staring at us with one eye clear, the other, red. Her once brown eye filled with pooled blood glared like the angry sun at us girls who dared to fly too close to it.

Dawn Major is an associate editor at Southern Literary Review and graduate of the Etowah Valley Creative Writing MFA Program. In 2019, she was awarded the Dr. Robert Driscoll Excellence in Writing Award, as well as Reinhardt University’s Faculty Choice Award. She was a recipient of the James Dickey Review Literary Editor Fellowship in 2018.Her writing may be found at: Well Read Magazine, Heavy Feather Review, Southern Literary Review, Georgia Gothic Anthology, Springer Mountain Press, Elder Mountain: A Journal of Ozark Studies, Five Points, James Dickey Review, Sanctuary, Sediments Literary-Arts Journal, and Family Life Publications. She is an active member in the southern writing and is part of multiple writing organizations.Major is a member of the William Gay Archive and has helped edit and publish the late author’s works. She also advocates for southern authors on her blog SouthernRead. She lives in Atlanta, GA with her family. The Bystanders is Major’s debut novel. Visit www.dawnmajor.com for more about Major.