Deaths Excellent Vacation

went out for breakfast at this deli where they made extremely greasy fried-egg and bacon with cheese sandwiches. Hangover food.
    “So, dude—you totally freaked that Brenda chick out last night.”
    “Yeah.”
    “What’d you do? Pull out your wanker?”
    I shook my head. “I saw . . . something.”
    “What? Her humongous titties?”
    I looked up from my sandwich.
    “Hey,” Kevin said defensively, holding up his hands, “everybody saw her running up the beach, man. She let it all hang out.”
    I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t tell Kevin about the demon I thought I had seen in the dunes. We weren’t little kids anymore. We weren’t allowed to see prowling phantoms in the shadows or bogeymen hiding underneath our beds.
    “I guess I acted like a dork,” I finally said.
    “Don’t worry, bro. Plenty of fish on the beach. We’ll meet some fresh chicks. Probably today.” He held out his Kent pack. Two bent cigarettes were all that were left inside the wrinkled pouch. “Smoke ’em if you got ’em.”
    “No, thanks.”
    “I thought you smoked now.”
    “I’m quitting. My lungs still hurt from last night. Feel like charcoal briquettes.”
    “You’ll get used to it, bro. You just cough up the phlegm and junk in the shower every morning. That clears ’em right out.”
    I waved him off.
    Kevin sighed. Put his Kents back in his pocket. “Bummer.”
    “Yeah.”
     
     
    ONE week later, however, Brenda Narramore forgave me.
    On the second Saturday of my family’s two-week vacation, she strolled boldly up the beach, wearing nothing but a bikini and big sunglasses, her hair as wild as a brown sea of coiled serpents. She headed straight for the rolled-out towels where Kevin, Jerry, and I had set up shop for the day.
    She had her beach bag slung over her shoulder and carried a portable radio like a lunch bucket, swinging it alongside her hip, letting it brush against the stretched fabric of her bikini bottom. I think “My Eyes Adored You” was droning out of the solid-state Sanyo’s tinny speaker.
    “I remember my first drunk,” she said softly as my eyes did as the song suggested.
    “What was it like?” I asked, my mouth drier than burnt toast.
    “I saw giant lizards.” She shot out her tongue. Flicked at imaginary flies. Rolled it back to moisten her lips. “Where are your two little buddies?”
    I gestured to the left, where Jerry and Kevin were flirting with two bubbly blondes on a nearby beach blanket. High school girls. They had decided to “aim a little lower” after six straight days of crashing and burning with college chicks.
    “You want to blow this pop stand?” Brenda asked.
    “Sure.”
    “You ever do the Haunted House on the Boardwalk?”
    “Once. When I was little.”
    “You ever do it with a girl?”
    I could only shake my head.
    “It’s dark in there, David. Real dark. Nobody can see you doing whatever it is you want to do.”
     
     
    WE headed down to the Seaside Heights boardwalk.
    “My snobbier friends at school call this Sleaze Side Heights,” Brenda remarked as we strolled past buzzing pinball emporiums and the blinking lights of popcorn wagons.
    “I take it they’ve been here before?”
    She laughed. Tucked her arm under mine.
    “You got any smokes, Dave?”
    “Nah.”
    “You quit already?”
    “Sort of. Maybe.”
    “Too bad.”
    I pulled a soggy dollar bill out of my swimming trunks. “They sell ’em over there,” I said, gesturing to a smoke shop wedged between a French fry stand and a skeeball arcade. “You still doing Dorals?”
    She nodded.
    “Menthol, right?”
    “Right.”
    “Don’t disappear.”
    “I won’t.”
    And she didn’t. Not then, anyway.
     
     
    IT was easy to buy cigarettes when you were sixteen back in 1975. Everybody smoked. Brenda said at her college, you could even smoke in the classrooms. There were disposable ashtrays on every desk.
    I handed her two packs of Doral Menthols.
    “They were only forty cents each.”
    “Thanks, Dave.” She uncurled the plastic wrapper off a pack, lit up a cigarette fast. I remember her hands were trembling slightly until she huffed down that long first drag. After she finished her smoke, Brenda grabbed my arms and pulled me close. Let me feel her bikinied breasts press against my chest. “Did buying me my ciggy-boos wipe you out?” She exhaled the remnants of stale smoke that had been swirling around inside her gorgeous chest up into my eyes.
    “Yeah. I only grabbed like a