I’m living with this wonder bitch in Corpus Christi, holed up in my square inch of a white house on the south end. It’s been nine years since my brother left me on a steel bird to places I couldn’t catch up with. The door to my room locks on the inside—keeps me safe from the sticky hands of her drunk boyfriend. I’m on the floor eating my daily ration of beef jerky, wearing a tuxedo bowtie. See, all the bartenders that work for the temp agency have to dress like cold-footed groomsmen and I’ve given up changing out of my uniform every day. When I’m not working I’m locked in my room. Billy would be so goddamn disappointed. That sits in my stomach like leftover meatloaf. No matter. Billy’s never coming back. Selfish prick. Left me no defense against our mother. You even had the luxury of skipping her funeral. 

Corpus is morbidly muggy, hell’s-mouth hot. I’m cutting every shirt I own to deconstruct them into deep, v-neck tank tops. I’m not the type of girl who thinks about the future. Why I ever let a boy influence me to move here in some weird twist of boredom is beyond me. A boy named Nathaniel who’s completely struck me blind. Billy would be—oh fuck it. Billy isn’t here. I had to get away from home. With Billy gone there wasn’t much left for me.
 
Hopeless Beach. Its shores were born on a slip of the tongue.
 
“I’m moving to Corpus Christi,” I said to Nathaniel six months ago. I never actually wanted to move to Corpus, but my options were move to Corpus with a girl I barely knew, or stay in my mother’s old house alone in Oklahoma. I didn’t want to stay there without Billy.
 
“Where?”
 
“Cor-pus Chris-ti.” I had to enunciate. He was lit on Percocet and lust.
 
“Oh, I thought you said ‘Hopeless Beach,’ and it sounded like some place I’d want to go,” he replied after a moment.
 
So I had to go to Corpus. I had to find this place for us because, at the time, it was all I had going. I was a vagrant—everything I owned waited for me in the back of a 1991 Honda Accord. I took his long, failing hands, freezing despite the suffocating temperature. I wanted him to come with me.
 
I was just a girl.
 
“I’ll find Hopeless Beach. In case you ever need somewhere to go, you can be safe there for as long as you need.” It took a moment for his defeated brown eyes to ignite with recognition. 
 
“And where is this again?”
 
“It doesn’t exist. I’m going to find it.”
 
“You’re going to invent it.”
 
“Yeah.”
 
A few months later I found it. I crawled on dunes under clouds that turned like ballerinas clothed in potato sacks. The sea looked like the backs of a thousand tortoise-shell kittens clamoring for their mother. I walked across bruised wood that formed a half-finished bridge abandoning me in the three-toned water.
 
I cursed him.

I don’t even know you.
 
But I needed someone. The little fucker was somewhere hundreds of miles away, just like my brother, and I loved them both anyway.

To read Part IV, see Billy – Part IV