Dead Girl Beach by Mike Sullivan

expression. No longer hostile, but strangely calm and reflective.
    â€œMost of the time, I don’t mind.” Greta chuckled. “You just have to know Parry. He and I go back a long way. I married him on a ranch in East Texas. We never had kids. I got cysts on my ovaries and had to have them removed. I ended up sterile.” She looked at Suma’s tummy. “I bet you ain’t sterile, are you?”
    She touched Suma’s leg an inch below the hem of her red glitter mini.
This girl…she’s plain…but I’ll take ‘em plain just as well as beautiful
, she said to herself as Suma moved away. Greta chuckled and removed her hand. Her foul mood gone now, like a vanished smile.
    â€œI bet you can make a lot of babies,” she said. “Up there, inside your womb. It’s a special gift a woman has. I call it a baby-maker. Once it’s gone, it’s gone forever. She tapped a finger to her heart. “I feel it sometimes—right here—every time I think about not being a real woman.” She stared off, and her eyes looked dark and distant. “Maybe, that’s why I’m as mean and ornery as a man.”
    Greta turned back and went on. She felt trapped under a spell of pent-up emotion, and this seemed the time—
yes, why not?
—to release it. “I thought I’d have a lot of kids,” she said. “Shucks, a whole, big Texas family. Tall, blonde-haired athletes like me. I won the hundred meters in high school and was captain of the track team. Parry was a part-time track coach, then. We married right after I graduated from high school, back in Kilgore, Texas. Home of the mighty Bulldogs.
Ruff! Ruff! Growl!”
She made a bulldog face. “We were pretty good, too…won championships while I was there.”
    She paused before continuing. “People started to gossip right away, wondering if Parry and I were doing it while I was still one of his students. Well, let me tell you. We made love like jackrabbits every time we got the chance. My foster mother went out of her mind trying to control me. She never stood a chance. That was over twenty years ago.” Her eyes wandered off dreamily into space. “The time…it just seems to fly by.”
    She turned back and looked at Suma. The thought that Suma was barely listening changed her mood. Greta leaned in close. She looked at Suma. A grim smile compressed her lips into a thin, straight line. “I can see it all over your face,” she said. “Up there, locked inside that silly head of yours. Thinking, ‘I need to get away…but how, how?’ Well, let me tell you. It wouldn’t be wise.”
    Suma swallowed hard, terrified by this harsh, overbearing woman. Her own temper and penchant for anger now held in check. “I don’t understand why you won’t let me go. I’m not Lawan—or whoever this person is.” A little, white lie to protect her sister. Suma hesitated and went on, “I don’t know why I’m here…honestly, I don’t.”
    â€œNice little act.”
    â€œIt’s not an act.”
    â€œWatch that mouth. In case you haven’t noticed, there’s no one around to help you.” Greta pointed at Suma’s injured arm. “You want a repeat performance…huh?” Suma shrank back from the harsh edge in Greta’s voice. “I’d say you’re up a creek without a paddle,” Greta said. “Back home in Texas, we use that expression a lot. Here’s a solid fact. The nearest inhabitants on the island are Full Moon party animals partying down the coast. They’re far enough away, so there’s nobody here to stop me if I start in on you, again—which could happen any time. Just remember that.”
    In a sudden change of mood, Greta had escaped the plains of East Texas and switched topics as easily as she took her next breath. “Do you know what that place