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  To Andrea, Bev, Jill, Linda, Mary Lynn, Pam, and Susan—

  I pledge with all my might.

  “First woman settler on Drummond Island, 1820–1896; courageously she wrought, joyously she lived.”

  —bronze plaque on a granite boulder, South Water Street, Drummond Island, Michigan

  “Girls, US, Applied, often jocularly, to women of any age, especially in the form of address; used mainly by women.”

  —Oxford Dictionary of Slang

  PROLOGUE OCTOBER 2013

  From left, me, with Bev, Jill, Andrea, and Linda, outside Paw Point Lodge, 2013.

  Okay, so check us out. It’s two o’clock in the morning and there we all are, eight bony, dark-rooted, and wide-awake women, sitting around the table at Paw Point Lodge.

  If there exists a more improbable group of girlfriends, I don’t know where you’d find them. Not on Drummond Island; we’ve already claimed that rock as surely as the Pilgrims claimed Plymouth. Not with buckle shoes or lukewarm beer from barrels, but with aerobics sneakers and shots of Absolut; otherwise, it’s a pretty similar setup. A group of energetic misfits pools their resources, leaves their familiar confines in a huff, docks in a strange land, and parties like Vikings. (A historic liberty. I can’t recall anyone saying they partied like Pilgrims. Ever.)

  At the head of this table is Linda, busy counting the cash in our kitty. She started our trip more than twenty years ago with seventy-five dollars and a roll of quarters from her tip jar; when she arrives at the final sum tonight, it will have a comma in it. A pair of Kmart readers slips down her nose and a cigarette is notched between her fingers. An impressively long ash hangs from the end, but fall off? It would not dare.

  Susan is in the kitchen, mouthing the words to a Van Halen song while also texting her husband, downloading a geocache coordinate, and mixing a cocktail. It might be her second Maker’s and Caffeine-Free Diet; it might be her fifth. Two decades in, yet it is impossible for me to tell which.

  Pam is smiling contentedly, simply being her relaxed and happy self. She’s making a snack, scooping up a teaspoon of potato salad, but vowing next year to bring baby spinach with turkey-bacon dressing instead (3.5 carbs). Her cropped hair is a dozen shades of bronze, a style that would look ridiculous on the rest of us, but is the bee’s knees on her.

  Mary Lynn is here, yet not here, and I miss her. She was taken from us more than a decade ago by what her doctor called “a cardiac event.” I am older now than she was when she died, and I silently vow to never get myself invited to one of those. Then top off my cocktail, eye a pot brownie, and go for a sloppy joe and a handful of corn chips. I can diet when I’m dead.

  I take my place at the table then, across from the two women leaning in and whispering. Yes, the ones who look like they’re plotting a revolution. Andrea and Jill, the youngest of the girls at forty-three and forty-seven. Put them in charge and we’ll be kidnapping a cop, fixing a flat tire with nicotine gum, then popping into the Northwoods to sing covers with the bar band. It’s late now, though—or actually really, really early—and most of us have our Cuddl Duds on, so those shenanigans will just have to wait until tomorrow.

  “When did we start going on this trip, anyway?”

  Sitting next to me with her perfect posture and that pretty, heart-shaped face is, finally, Bev, aka “the Polish Princess.” She might insist on the senior discount and have a Medicare Part D card in her purse (if she can find her purse; dammit, it was just right here), but she’s still got the cover-girl look. She could draw back the bow, aim the arrow, and be Bear Archery’s poster girl tonight if she wanted to.

  She doesn’t. She just wants to know when the eight of us started going to Drummond Island together.

  “Was it ninety-four? Or maybe… ninety-six?”

  The room quiets and a few of us share a look. We’ve answered this question for her already, several times in fact. So I think I’m justified when I turn to her with just a hint of irritation and open my mouth to answer it again.

  I lift my hand for emphasis this time, hoping my words will take. But then before I can utter a single one something in the gesture catches my eye.

  Because, for the love of Christ, there’s what looks like a two-dollar night crawler on the back of my hand, stuck under the skin. It’s purple, it’s tender looking, and it’s big enough to catch a lunker bass if someone had the wherewithal to poke a hook through it.

  Then I remember I’m wearing a pair of Lacoste boots—the pink plaid ones I bought just for this year’s trip. Describing my footwear may seem like a random observation until I explain that inside their narrow toes my bunions are screaming the seven words you can’t say on television. One of those words is piss. Not a bad option, as obscenities go.

  In my head, I try it out: Piss, my feet fucking hurt.

  Which feels satisfying for about one second. Because wait—is that my rotator cuff? And has it started throbbing?

  The nerves inside the shallow socket rear up at odd moments since an ill-advised, backwoods horse race. Considering the heft of the dinner plate in my hand, the one holding my “snack,” I probably just reinjured my shoulder by carrying it to the table.

  I swing my arm in a circle to get some circulation going and narrowly miss Bev. She gives me a reproving look. Not for the arm windmill, but for the attitude. Considering my own maladies, is helping her remember the year she first came with us to the island really all that much to ask?

  The other girls are looking at me that same way, too. Over her glasses Linda raises an eyebrow. Susan turns down the classic rock, and she and Pam make eye contact, say nothing, and take ladylike sips of their drinks instead. Even Andrea and Jill have stopped strategizing long enough to look my way.

  I get the message.

  Who am I, with my varicose hand, my horse-wrecked shoulder, and my squee-hawed feet to begrudge Bev a little memory lapse?

  They’re right, of course. They usually are.

  There was a time when we believed we were immune from the passage of time. That we’d be young and sound forever. Today, we know different. And our once sacred pact to keep the details of our trips to the island a secret (“what happens over the Mackinac Bridge stays over the Mackinac Bridge”) doesn’t feel relevant anymore.

  “When are you going to write our story?” the girls asked me.

  There are eight stories, I reminded them, not just one.

  “Fine,” they said, undeterred, “then write yours.”

  That we ever became friends at all is miraculous. Within our group is every combination of married, divorced, remarried, and staunchly single. We’ve got graduate degrees but also high school diplomas barely and miraculously bestowed; world travelers and homebodies; Republicans, Democrats, and several who self-identify as members of the None-of-Your-Damn-Business Party. Besides Drummond Island, Michigan, the one thing we share is a puritan-esque independence. And by that I mean that one Drummond Girl does not ask another Drummond Girl for anything very often. When one does, no matter what it is, you do not say no.

  I’d do anything for these women.

  I’d take a rubber bullet for them. I’d do ninety days at a minimum-security prison camp, p
lan a hostile takeover of a Caribbean beach resort, or even lift one of those little plastic dump trucks off a baby, and they’d do those things and more for me.

  And Beverly, I’m sorry I became irritated with you that night at Paw Point. I remember exactly when you joined the Drummond Girls. It was 1995. I remember the two trips before you came along, and a good deal of what we’ve all shared since then, too.

  So here goes. I’m going to start at the beginning and work my way forward. That’s the only way I know how to tell our story. It’s not just mine; it’s ours. The girls knew I’d come around to that idea eventually.

  I hope it helps you, Bev, and the rest of us, too, remember every single minute of it.

  CHAPTER ONE 1993

  Andrea, Linda, and Jill, with Frank, at Barb’s Landing, 1993.

  Mothers who hand sewed their kids’ clothes, who read used Jane Austen paperbacks and stenciled checkerboards and hearts onto their kitchen cupboards, did not go away on weekend benders. Not according to my husband they didn’t.

  “This one does,” I told him, tossing long underwear, a disposable camera, and a Led Zeppelin cassette tape into a denim duffel bag.

  It was early October; I was a thirty-one-year-old wife and mother of two, a bar waitress with a college degree, and getting into Jill’s red Fiero that morning was the most radical act I’d committed in years. My older son was three, the younger fourteen months, and I’d rarely been apart from them for more than a few hours. And yet when Jill backed down my driveway, that duffel bag and I were in her front seat.

  My husband stood on the rickety front porch, our baby in his arms. Next to him squirmed our older boy, grasping his father’s leg with one hand and solemnly waving good-bye with the other. I blew him kisses and waved back. Then watched out Jill’s windshield as the three of them grew smaller and smaller. Inside my rib cage, guilt battled the anticipation of a girlfriends’ weekend away.

  I was leaving behind flannel sheets, family dinners, baby skin smell, and him.

  I was leaving behind temper tantrums, dirty dishes, diapers, spit-up, and him.

  It’s going to be okay, I thought, it’s only for the weekend. Then almost immediately my mind overrode that with I’ve earned this.

  Jill drove the quick two miles to Peegeo’s, the bar where we worked, and we met up with two other coworkers, Linda and Andrea. The plan had been to leave before sunup; we were racing the light and had fallen a little behind. The sun was crowning over the trees when Jill parked the Fiero at the back of the empty lot, and the four of us scrambled into Linda’s Jeep. I knew the name of the place we were going—Drummond Island—and that we’d need four-wheel drive, but little else about the weekend.

  By the time we’d crossed the Grand Traverse County line, it was daytime, and those girls and the island—not my guilt—won out. From then on, for that one weekend a year, no matter who was waving good-bye, the island would win. The island would always win.

  Linda hit the gas hard and pulled out onto US 31 North, which for the next ninety miles would take us along the coast of the Grand Traverse Bay, then Little Traverse Bay, and finally the shore of Lake Michigan for our approach to the Mackinac Bridge. After we crossed it, another coastal highway, this one running along the northern shore of Lake Huron, would deliver us to the Drummond Island car ferry.

  “Sure you’re ready for this?” Jill asked me, when we were far enough from home to see the iconic bridge ahead in the distance.

  “Clear your head!” Andrea hollered before I could answer. “And prepare yourself!”

  She held her fingers in front of her face and then slowly slid them apart like a security gate, illustrating exactly how I might go about clearing my head.

  As for how to prepare myself, I had absolutely no idea.

  But I was still young then. And boy, would I learn.

  “There’s no cops on the island,” Linda said.

  The tone of her voice made it sound as if that fact were a value-added selling point. I’d heard her use the same tone when she told customers at the bar that the fish was good and the salad dressing was homemade.

  I was sitting in the backseat with Jill, Andrea had turned to the front, and the Mackinac Bridge loomed huge in front of us when Linda imparted that detail. The fish was good at Peegeo’s, the salad dressing was homemade, so what she’d just said about the police was probably true, too.

  “Drink and drive, baby!” Jill whooped.

  The three of them had been to the island together once before, and even though I was so excited to be along I could barely keep a rational thought in my head, I was aware enough to be in awe of their friendship. When I was around new people, only a tiny percentage of what I was thinking ever came out of my mouth. And what I was thinking was that my presence in that car felt provisional. If I fit in, I’d be included. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t. On Drummond Island but back home, too.

  I’d still have my waitress job, the four of us would still work together, they’d probably even still be friendly to me, but every woman knows friendly is not the same thing as friends.

  No one came right out and said those were the stakes, but it was kind of a given. The three of them were the established group; I was the untested one they’d decided, for some unknown reason, to try out.

  Back then, friends were the one thing I’d wanted more than anything else. Not just any friends. I wanted them. Those three women were everything I’d wished I could be: tough, undaunted, independent. I hoped being a wife and a mother didn’t preclude me from becoming those things, too. They had cool to spare. Once we were on Drummond Island, some of it just might rub off on me.

  “Hey,” Jill said, unbuckling her seat belt and reaching to the back of the Jeep. “Who wants a beer?”

  I looked at the clock on Linda’s dashboard. Eight thirty.

  “Not till we’re over the bridge,” Linda said.

  “Oh yeah,” Jill said. “Right.”

  Her voice carried an unmistakable sigh of disappointment. But she turned back around, buckled her seat belt again, and busied herself with the air flowing by out her window. It was a familiar way to pass the time on a road trip, but when most people put their hand out a car window, they just cupped their fingers and rode the air currents, letting their hand swim easily along. Jill was full-on rock and roll when she did it, even that early in the morning. She punched the wind with her fist, then pumped her whole arm up and down to the beat thumping from the radio.

  I’d been so absorbed in whether or not I was going to fit in that Linda’s comment about the police hadn’t fully registered. Jill’s enthusiasm for drinking and driving did, and although I didn’t say so out loud, I wasn’t exactly sure what to think.

  Linda had told me there were two bars on the island, plus we all worked in a bar, so I knew there was going to be drinking. Not a problem. I enjoyed a beer as much as the next college-educated waitress with two little kids and a grouchy husband at home.

  The girls had also told me about the miles of dirt roads that crisscrossed the island—two-tracks, they called them—where we’d unroll the windows, drive for hours, not see another vehicle, and just enjoy the wilderness. That was why we needed the four-wheel drive, so I knew there was going to be plenty of driving around that weekend, too. I would have preferred hiking, but I was so happy to be along at all, I wasn’t going to quibble about it.

  I just hadn’t realized we’d be doing the drinking and the driving at the same time.

  When Linda said there were no police where we were going, she’d said it not with caution or warning, but with what today I can only call glee. That’s what should have registered with me. Because Linda didn’t do glee. She was too self-controlled and deliberate for a such girlish emotion. I didn’t know her very well then, but I knew that. Everyone knew that.

  Linda could be wickedly funny and was sometimes even animated, but she never gushed. Ever. She was a woman’s woman, not a girly girl. And yet, she’d just said “no cops” with all the excitem
ent of a cheerleader on her way to the big homecoming game.

  What had I gotten myself into?

  I was raised in an active family of outdoor enthusiasts. We’d camped, fished, hiked, sailed, canoed, swum, ridden horses, and backpacked all over Michigan, and I was absolutely certain the presence of law enforcement (or not) had never been a factor for me, my parents, or my grandparents when planning any of those excursions.

  Yet despite having traversed much of my beloved state, I’d never been to Drummond Island. Not once. In my mind the island seemed mysterious and special, a land separate and secret from all those other places I’d seen and all those other things I’d done. Apparently, it was also the kind of place where no one in uniform, trained and obligated to help in case of an emergency, dared tread.

  My husband was often irritated with what he called my “completely useless tendency to overthink everything to death.” I did do that, but it wasn’t something I could control; it was just me, and I silently put the signature trait to use right there in that car.

  No cops meant no parking tickets, no speeding tickets, no sobriety tests, no arrest warrants, no nights in a jail cell that smelled like urine and dirty feet. (I’d never been in jail but my brother had.)

  Then again, it also meant no help with directions if we got lost; no free lockouts or jump-starts if Linda locked her keys in her car or her battery died; and no armed protection from thieves, gropers, flashers, rapists, wild animals, or serial killers. Drummond Island was not a population center, that much I did know. The demographics didn’t seem very promising for a serial killer. Just perfect, though, for wild animals.

  I’m levelheaded, I thought to myself, and reasonably capable. In stressful situations I wasn’t prone to panic, freeze, or scream. When I was in college, a man in an actual tan raincoat had flashed me. I burst out laughing and he ran away. These women would have given chase and then beaten the crap out of that guy, I was sure of it.