Beach Week: A Novel - Softcover

Susan Coll is the author of the novels Acceptance (FSG, 2007), karlmarx.com, and Rockville Pike. A film adaptation of Acceptance, starring Joan Cusack, aired on Lifetime Television in 2009. Coll lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, the writer Steve Coll.

Chapter 1

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When Leah reminded her husband at breakfast that they were hosting a meeting that evening to discuss the logistics of the forthcoming annual high school graduation celebration known as Beach Week, he kept his eyes locked on the sports section of the newspaper and made a plaintive choking noise that sounded like the bleat of a sheep. A few drops of coffee sprayed from his mouth, landing on his pressed white shirt.

Charles had reacted in a similar, if less theatrical, fashion when she initially informed him of this meeting a few days ear­lier. Still, she had hoped for something else, some sudden change of heart that might have made him warm to the idea of welcoming into their home this group of parents whom they barely knew, to discuss a subject that had, admittedly, caused him to bristle even when it first crossed their radar as a mere abstraction on a local NBC News segment entitled “Mayhem at Beach Week” more than a year earlier, before their daughter had begun her senior year. After viewing footage of underage drinking and lewd sexual behavior, Charles had quipped that the idea of packing one’s child off for a week of presumed debauchery was akin to negligent parenting.

It was unlike Leah to act unilaterally in a matter concerning their daughter, and for a brief moment she felt a twinge of guilt disproportionate to having merely volunteered to invite a few people over to their home for a brief discussion involving child rearing. She could only regard this as a sad indication of how constricted her life had become since they moved to the suburbs of Washington, D.C., almost two years earlier. She had given up her job as a teacher back in Omaha and had since failed to find—or to seriously look for—another. Once, an act of daring on her part might have involved challenging a con­tentious school board on a ninth-grade reading curriculum; now she felt like a renegade for simply inviting the parents of her daughter’s friends to their home and preparing to set out plates of cheese cubes and bowls of salted nuts without first consulting her husband.

Of course it was true that Charles might have other cause for annoyance; for one thing, it probably appeared that Leah was disregarding their plan to have a meaningful, considered conversation specific to the potentially loaded question of whether their daughter would even be allowed to attend Beach Week. But Leah wasn’t disregarding it. They would have plenty of time to discuss this later. Tonight’s meeting was purely informational, intended only to find facts, to meet their fellow parents and hear them out.

Leah might have tried to explain this now, but she felt sud­denly afraid of what she’d done to disturb their increasingly delicate marital balance, and her instinct was to retreat. She walked over to the sink and wet a paper towel, which she pressed to the specks of coffee that were starting to merge above Charles’s left breast pocket into an amorphous brown cloud. She regarded with some tenderness his hairline, which was receding incrementally each day. Charles was a gentle, easygoing man who only ever raised his voice to yell at profes­sional athletes on television, but lately he’d become somewhat mercurial. Although there were outside forces that had altered the family dynamic, Leah knew that she was not without blame when it came to the matter of his changeable moods, particu­larly on this occasion.

“This was one of my best shirts,” he said.

“I’m so, so sorry,” she said, and she was. “It’s no big deal. I can definitely bleach it out.”

This was not quite true; she didn’t have the talent to remove this spot. She was the sort of laundress who turned whites pink and inexplicably lost socks. Why now, even in assertions to do with laundry, she wondered, was she behaving with duplicity?

It wasn’t as if Leah had invented the idea of Beach Week. Kids from this community had been flocking to the same stretch of the Delaware shore to commemorate their high school gradu­ations for as long as anyone could remember, and although there were occasional minor incidents involving citations for possession of alcohol or cases of sun poisoning, nothing truly awful had ever happened. She had done a little poking around online to assuage herself with the knowledge that this sort of thing wasn’t unique to the affluent suburb where they now lived. At high schools all over the country, graduation was marked by one sort of celebration or another. Some communi­ties called it Senior Week, and activities ranged from barbe­cues to trips to amusement parks to presumably more raucous expeditions to such notorious party spots as Cancún. Sharing a house with a nice group of girls from good, solid families at a beach only a few hours from home—Leah could easily imagine worse ways for Jordan to cap her high school experience.

Besides, it was Jordan herself who had proposed the idea. Their seventeen-year-old daughter had come into their bed­room late one night the previous week to say that she and her friends had found the perfect rental for this coming summer, but they had to act quickly to secure the lease. Leah and Charles had at least been on the same page in groggily sug­gesting the need for a proper conversation about this at a more reasonable hour. That was the extent of their discussion to date, so it was not as if Charles had expressly said no to Jor­dan’s participation, and it was not as if Leah had put forth her own completely out of character yes-leaning view.

After a difficult transition following a move halfway across the country the summer preceding Jordan’s junior year of high school, compounded by a terrifying, high-impact collision on the soccer field that had left her sidelined with a concussion and its lingering—albeit mercifully dwindling—side effects, Leah wanted, above all, to have her daughter be a happy, healthy teen. That she set this goal intellectually didn’t stop her from trying to protect Jordan at every turn. Since that dis­orienting moment when Leah had glimpsed her daughter unconscious on the 18-yard line, the blood from her nose bril­liant in the afternoon sunlight as it trickled down her white jersey, she had become a bit overzealous in her mothering, and she knew that she needed to let go.

By all indications, they were over the hump: Jordan’s post-concussive migraines had largely subsided, her concentration had returned, the bursts of vertigo were now rare. She did remain a bit moody and aloof, but Leah understood that these hardly qualified as signs that something might be wrong in a teenage girl. Given the scale of disasters that might befall a family, this was clearly minor; nevertheless, Jordan, Charles, and Leah herself had all lost equilibrium, recalibrating emo­tions in private, and not always linear, ways. Leah had started to have bouts of What Might Have Been, with the insidious sidebar crazy mothering issue of What She Might Do to Pre­vent This from Ever Happening Again. If only the dangers in this world could be confined to the soccer field! Leah now had a heightened awareness of the catastrophes that loomed at every turn. There were crooked bolts of summer lightning shooting randomly from the sky and distracted Beltway drivers swerving out of lanes, cell phones pressed to their ears. She had even just seen a newspaper photograph of a bear roaming their pristine subdivision, on one occasion walking right onto someone’s deck and swiping the bag of hot-dog buns that had been left beside the grill. And the environment! There were toxins galore—in food, in plastics, in underarm deodorants, microscopic carcinogens in the water and the air. From what she’d read, it was possible that some of these might even be triggering Jordan’s headaches.

Allowing Jordan to go to Beach Week was of course hugely inconsistent with Leah’s recent neurotic style of parenting, but she thought it a good sign that their daughter wanted to go, that she was seeking to engage with her new Verona friends, about whom she at times seemed ambivalent. Leah wasn’t completely naïve; she had some insight into teenage behavior, having been a high school English teacher for nearly two decades, but she trusted Jordan and had come to the conclu­sion that certain kids were going to misbehave no matter where they were, whether under twenty-four-hour guard or on their own at the beach. She’d seen bed-hopping by members of the wind ensemble she chaperoned at a school-sponsored band trip, had spied a National Merit finalist snorting coke in the bathroom at the local Dunkin’ Donuts late one night, and had once walked in on two male students having sex after debate team practice—and this was in the supposedly more conservative, bucolic Midwest. If kids were going to get into trouble, they would, regardless of whether their parents kept them on a short leash. Leah understood as well that Beach Week was an important rite of passage, a dry run for the more wrenching letting-go that would by necessity take place when Jordan left for college in the fall.

Admittedly, there was something else to this whole Beach Week thing. Leah would say it was subliminal, except that she had easy access to the thought. She wanted to go to Beach Week herself. Not actually, physically go to Beach Week at the age of forty-two, of course, but symbolically, in an if-she-could­only-go-back-in-time kind of way. Having grown up in a small town, Leah had always wished for a richer teenage experience, which in her mind would have involved going to a large, coed, racially diverse public school that was the stuff of television dramas—the kind of school her daughter now attended, minus the diversity part. In addition, Leah had grown up dreaming, quite literally, of the beach itself. She wanted crashing waves, funnel cakes, boardwalks w...