Vampires in the Lemon Grove

The story begins:

The gulls landed in Athertown on July 11, 1979. Clouds of them, in numbers unseen since the ornithologists began keeping records of such things. Scientists all over the country hypothesized about erratic weather patterns and redirected migratory routes. At first sullen Nal barely noticed them (53).

It’s summer and Nal, the protagonist, is “fourteen and looking for excuses to have extreme feelings about himself” (54). He’s bummed because his mother was fired from her job and can no longer afford his scholarly pursuits and his brother, Samson, is dating his long-time crush, Vanessa. To make matters worse, Cousin Steve, who is in beauty school, “decided to dye Nal’s head a vivid blue and then razor the front into tentacle-like bangs […] Nal looks like he is going stoically to his death in the grip of a small blue octopus” (55). Further, Steve won’t let Nal cut it. Steve also did Samson’s hair; rather, he shaved it all off. But even without hair, Samson is still extremely attractive to girls, and this makes Nal annoyed. Samson is 17, and has what Nal describes as:

a bovine charm: he was hale and beefy, with a big laugh and the deep serenity of a grazing creature. Nal loved him too, of course—it was impossible not to—but he was baffled by Sam’s ease with women, his ease in the world (54).

Nal often tries to escape himself. He:

feels incapable of spontaneous action: before he could do anything, a tiny homunculus had to generate a flowchart in his brain. […] He pictured the homunculus as a tiny, blankly handsome man in a green sweater, very agreeably going about his task of wringing the life from Nal’s life (55).

He shares this feeling with Samson, and Samson seems to know exactly what he’s talking about. This makes Nal angry, as if Samson’s understanding makes his feelings ordinary. Samson tells Nal that drinking or smoking will help him get out of his own head.

It’s nighttime at the beach, and Nal is trying to write poems to take his mind off his brother and Vanessa, who are having sex within earshot. While he tries to write, the massive swarms of seagulls overhead keep dropping “[w]hite globs of gull shit” onto his paper (58). Although Samson and Vanessa’s love-making is mostly hidden by a dune, Nal can see her legs in the air. Nal is a virgin and mad that Vanessa is with his brother instead of him. He goes down the beach kicking sand until he comes across a large gull who is “vaguely humanoid in shape” (60). When the gull flies away, it creates the “disturbing illusion that the bird had hitched itself to Nal’s shadow and was pulling his darkness from him” (60).

Nal’s mom was fired from her job at the nursing facility because the company used her as a scapegoat for their own negligence: each window of the building was “supposed to be fitted with a stop screw, to prevent what the Paradise manual euphemistically referred to as ‘elopement’” (61). However, one of the windows was missing the screw, and an older resident nearly fell from the window. The facility pinned the near-tragedy on Nal’s mom, saying it was her responsibility to check the windows. Nal’s mom was forced to resign, and now she just sits in front of the TV all day, looking depressed. Nal is upset by his mom’s apathy, and also by the fact that she can’t pay for LMASS, a summer program for gifted students that Nal was accepted into.

Nal housesits for his chemistry teacher to make extra money, and then he gives it to his mom to help her out. Housesitting means that he gets to stay at his teacher’s house on the beach all summer, unsupervised. However:

The move there hadn’t mattered in any of the ways that Nal had hoped it would. Samson had buffaloed him into giving him a spare key, and now Nal would wake up to find his brother standing in the umbilical hallways between the two rooms at odd hours (65).

Samson tells Nal that he and Vanessa are going to stay the night. Nal cleans a room for them, finding twisted pleasure in wooing Vanessa through his brother. Nal goes to close a window, but a huge seagull is sitting on the window’s edge. This creeps him out. When Vanessa comes over, Nal leaves. He dribbles a basketball down the boardwalk when he comes across the same huge gull that had been in the window. It flies away and he follows it into the woods. He notices that the gull has a piece of paper in its beak: “As he watched, the gull lifted off the branch and soared directly into one of the trees. In the moonlight, Nal saw a hollow there about the size of a basketball: gulls kept disappearing into this hole” (67).

Nal wonders how so many gulls can fit into this one little hollow, and if gulls are normally so active at night. He looks into the hollow and finds that it’s littered with things like tickets and “Mary Gloster’s train tickets to France […] dated two years in the future” (68). He also finds his ticket to Whitsundy Island, a summer fieldtrip that he wanted to attend but that his mom couldn’t afford.

Nal goes on the field trip the next day. Vanessa goes too, and they spend the whole day talking. She was also supposed to attend LMASS that summer, but her dad didn’t want her staying in a co-ed dorm. The next day, Nal goes to the library to research “omen birds,” but can’t find anything about seagulls (73). Nal goes back to the seagull nest and finds a litter of random things, but he can’t stop thinking about how “somewhere a man or a woman’s life continued without these tiny vertebrae, curving like a spine knocked out of alignment. Suddenly the ordinary shine of the plastic and aluminum bits began to really frighten him” (74). He imagines all the futures that won’t happen because of these lost objects. He imagines the seagulls as “cosmic scavengers […] stealing scraps of our lives” (75). He takes the items from the nest to the police station and tries to tell a policewoman about what’s going on, but the items are so trivial that the policewoman shrugs him off.

Nal watches the gulls flying above the sea. The largest gull, the one that had presumably been following Nal, drops something into the water. The water turns a “foam-blistered violet” as if something magical is happening (76). Nal goes back to the nest and finds a screw stop, the missing object that got his mom fired. He decides not to tell his mom because the “screw couldn’t shut that window now” (77).

Samson asks Nal if he can borrow money to buy Vanessa a ring. Nal says no and Samson punches him in the stomach. Samson says, “You don’t want to help me out, just say so. Fucking learn to behave like a normal person” (79). Nal goes and buys the same ring that Samson wants to buy Vanessa. He then goes to Vanessa’s house to give her the ring, but on the way, he shuts the seagulls’ hole in the tree with his basketball, thinking that the birds might try to “sabotage his plan” (79). Vanessa loves the ring, and she and Nal have sex:“This was not the time or the place but he kept picturing the gulls, screaming and wheeling in a vortex just beyond him, and he groaned and sped up his motions” (82).