Beach Plum Island by Holly Robinson Read Free Book Online

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Two tests tomorrow, might as well kill myself now, so stressed!
    Today she had ridden her bike out to Beach Plum Island to see where Ava lived. Not that she could even
think
of her as a sister. God, she was older than her own mom! Still, Gigi was curious about her and about Elaine, too, after that freak show at the service.
    She had met them before, of course. Mom used to always invite them for holidays or whatever. “They’re family,” she’d insist when Gigi rolled her eyes and pointed out the obvious, that Ava and Elaine wanted nothing to do with them. “They should know they’re always welcome in their father’s home.”
    Today, after Ava caught her snooping around the studio—she would have liked to have seen more, but she didn’t need any
lectures
—
Gigi biked over to the beach by the Beach Plum Island lighthouse. This beach was across the Merrimack River from Salisbury Beach on the mainland, a place her mom refused to go, saying it was filled with “transients,” and probably even “real Gypsies.” But Gigi and her dad went to Salisbury anyway.
    “Let’s go to the honky-tonk side of town,” Dad would announce on certain steamy summer weekends, and off they’d go to Salisbury Beach, where they’d bodysurf the waves or wander through the chaotic campground with its flocks of sticky kids.
    Then they’d hit the boardwalk and hang out at the arcades. Her dad was amazing at the old pinball machines. For dinner they’d eat slices of limp pizza sold out of a window. They’d finish the night with go-karts and fried dough powdered with sugar and so sweet it made Gigi’s teeth ache. Her dad always made her arm-wrestle him for the last bite.
    Gigi’s eyes filled. She swatted away the tears, wishing she could smash them like flies. She hated God for letting Dad die. More proof that God sucked. As if the hurricanes and earthquakes, terrorist bombings, and school shootings weren’t enough proof that God was totally insane.
    She locked her bike to the chain-link fence by the playground, slipped off her sandals, and carried her sketch pad down to the water, where she sank cross-legged onto the sand and fiddled with her lip ring. She’d gotten her ears pierced when she was twelve. Her mom took her to a doctor and winced when the doctor put gold studs in Gigi’s ears, despite the fact that he’d numbed her ears so completely, Gigi felt like her head was wrapped in duct tape.
    After Dad got sick, she’d bribed Miguel, one of the janitors at her school, to take her to New Hampshire in his rusty truck for more piercings. Miguel knew lots of places where people didn’t care how old you were. You could buy tattoos, fireworks, lip rings, and even guns in New Hampshire if you had the money and knew where to go.
    She’d pierced her eyebrow and then her lip out of solidarity with her father. By the end, Dad had looked half machine, connected to tubes that dripped medicine into his body like a leaking faucet. Only it seemed like maybe the faucet was dripping the wrong way, because her dad’s life was leaking out of him.
    After getting her lip pierced, Gigi had ridden her bike to the hospital. Her lip was swollen and red. At the sight of it, Mom said, “Oh, Gigi, that’s the last straw, honestly, your poor beautiful mouth,” and started to cry. She left the room “to get a little air.”
    But Dad, who was having one of his good days, sitting up and drinking something orange with a straw, asked her to sit on the bed beside him. His face was so thin by then that he’d been joking with Gigi about it lately, saying, “Finally, I look like Mick Jagger instead of a fat banker.”
    “Does it hurt?” he’d asked, reaching out to almost, but not quite, touch her lip.
    “More than my ears or my nose,” she admitted. “That’s okay. I wanted it to hurt.”
    “Why, honey?” Dad dropped his hand, his fingers landing on her wrist like a bird’s scaly cold foot.
    “I wanted to know what you’re