Afloat by Jennifer McCartney Page B

fucking know how to party,’ the groundskeeper says with approval.
    Trainer takes in the vases of flowers, the gold candlesticks,the heavy portraits on the walls, and says, ‘This place needs a lot of fucking to liven it up.’
    The groundskeeper nods and says, ‘hell yeah’, and then takes a mirror from his pocket.
    â€˜You guys need a bump?’
    Rummy shakes his head, no, and wanders out the front door wiping his chin, where we hear him continue his dry heaving on the front stoop. Bryce pretends he doesn’t indulge, so Trainer sits down to do a line and the two of them discover they have the same dealer. After more drinking someone brings out a deck of cards, and at four in the morning all of us, minus Rummy, play Crazy Eights, a game the groundskeeper punctuates with accusations.
    â€˜Cheating motherfuckers,’ he says after every hand.
    We ignore him.
    â€˜You all think this island is some backwater shithole,’ he continues, as if defending it from some unspoken insult.
    â€˜But, seriously. You know who’s stayed here? In that bedroom?’ He points to a window. ‘George fucking Bush.’
    â€˜I told you!’ Bryce says to me.
    Bryce has already told me the long list of historical figures that have visited the island over the years. Mark Twain is said to have rocked in a chair on the porch of the Grand Hotel, Gerald Ford came here as an Eagle Scout, and George Bush Senior, as the groundskeeper now swears on his life, was here in secret one summer. Bryce’s friend Dickweed has corroborated this fact, although I didn’t believe him at the time. Dickweed claimed that while he was wandering the streets late one night a few years ago he fell over in front of a carriage. It was forced to stop and two men wearing black searched him. After the men realized Dickweed was merely drunk, they led him by the arm to the roadside and were on their way.
    â€˜So I’m by the side of the road and this old guy leans out of the carriage as it speeds up and says, “Have a good night,” and it was the
fucking
president.’
    So the story may or may not be true.
    The groundskeeper gets up abruptly, and he disappears saying something about turning on the sprinklers. I look out the front door to check on Rummy, but he’s disappeared. His bike is gone, so maybe he made it home.
    We choose the third-floor guest bedroom for the night, listening to the gentle sound of the chugging waterworks and the occasional swearing from our new friend still somewhere outside.
    â€˜Rummy says Anna Jameson visited the island back in the day,’ I say.
    My face is buried in Bryce’s armpit, and there is a pause while I wonder if he’s asleep.
    â€˜I refuse to give you the satisfaction of asking who that is,’ he says.
    The stately bedroom has thousands of flowers everywhere: the bedspread, the curtains, the wallpaper. We do not notice this until the next morning when the governor’s butler asks us to please get the hell out of the house before he calls the police. The house is on a hill, however, and we know that the trek upwards on bicycles will not be one the police make eagerly. We also cannot believe that the governor has a butler.
    When we leave the governor’s mansion it is cool and raining, and we notice the gardens around the front of the home have been dug up during the night. Strange mounds of dirt and uprooted plants lie in the darkening soil.
    Rain is impossible to ignore when you travel by bike, and water saturates my eyebrows and eyelashes. My face is wet and dripping, my fingers cold on the handlebars. The rainsoaks my knees as they bob up and down, and wets two patches over my breasts, until gradually I’m wet through. The neglected piles of horseshit become muddy lumps, steaming and disintegrating before they can be shoveled away. We swerve expertly around each of these, spraying gravel as we skid too fast into the lane leading to the Pine