She was determined to be the first to arrive at the Castle and had made Penny promise to have her mom drop her at the cottage with an hour to spare. So they could pick out outfits and do their hair and makeup. Now that Penny had suffered two seizures, there was no way her parents would let her drive—a rule that made sense to Maddie but outraged Penny.
“I mean, if I’m going to die, I should at least be able to use my learner’s permit!”
They primped in the upstairs bathroom, straightening their hair (Penny’s was noticeably thinner), lining their lips and coating them in Dr Pepper–flavored Lip Smacker. Even plumping out their eyelashes with Maybelline Color Shine! mascara in aquamarine. Maddie remembered Bitsy’s lecture on the kind of subtle beauty that made East girls, but tonight she wanted to stand out. For Brooks.
She was so nervous or excited, or a mix of both, that she wiped her face clean with makeup remover pads and started again.
“Shit!” she slapped her hands on the bathroom counter. “I’m all blotchy.”
“What’s your deal tonight?” Penny said, smiling, because she knew.
She’d told Penny about her skateboard ride home with Brooks. How he’d held her hand. Even pulled her up Snake Hill Road. She hadn’t told Penny about the feeling she got watching Brooks snip off the tip of the honeysuckle flower with his front teeth. How could she explain the unexplainable? Brooks had been right—there just weren’t enough words.
She’d also decided to keep quiet the details about her and Spencer’s botched sex. God, how she wished she could pretend it had never happened. When Spencer hadn’t called her house the day after, and then still hadn’t called three days later, she’d been both relieved and worried. She was dreading seeing him tonight, and had considered keeping Brooks’s invitation to herself. But she’d called Bitsy the night before, using the kitchen phone—the longest cord in the cottage and if she pulled it straight, she could sit on the step outside the front door. Guaranteed privacy. There was no telling what her father would do if he knew she was hanging out with the Marshall boy. The black boy.
In some ways, he was cool, her dad. Didn’t care about curfew. Bought her a pack of maxipads without flinching. But he wanted her to be with someone like him. No Jews. No Hispanics. It was weird, him wanting that, she thought. Him being her dad and all and the last person on earth she could be with. Like that. In that way.
When Bitsy had finally got on the phone, after a whole minute of Captain Smith yelling for her, Maddie had said, “Guess where we’ll be partying tomorrow night.”
“Uck, please tell me it’s not in some basement with a bunch of tools watching porn.”
“Guess again.”
“The beach with the caterpillars?”
“At the Castle!”
Bitsy screamed into the phone so Maddie had to pull the receiver away from her ear.
“Oh. My. Fucking. God. I underestimated you, Mads. Big-time.”
Now she and Penny stood in front of the bathroom mirror surrounded by round, bright lights Maddie’s mom claimed were Hollywood-style.
“You’re beautiful,” Penny said, arranging Maddie’s long hair so it hung over her shoulders, tumbling down her white T-shirt.
She wanted to ask how a girl even knows she’s beautiful. Would a time come when she knew, for sure, either way?
“Thanks, Pen.” She touched her friend’s hand, the one bruised purple and yellow by the IV. Feeling like an ass for complaining about her looks when they both knew Penny’s mom had made an appointment for a fitting at the wig shop in Rosedale.
Dom slammed a fist against the bathroom door. “I got to go!”
“Jeez, all right! Don’t have a cow!” Maddie yelled back.
“Hasta la vista, Dom,” Penny sang as she and Maddie hurried through the front door and into the dusky light.
* * *
They stood at the entrance to the path leading through the woods between White Eagle and the Castle. It seemed the pulsing of the caterpillars—ca-caaaah, ca-caaaah—grew louder every day.
“You ready?” Maddie asked. “On the count of three, we run.”
“It’s like the end times,” Penny said. “A pox upon your heads!”
“One, two…”
Before she could finish, Penny took off in the long-legged stride she used to outrun girls on the lacrosse field.
“Woo-hoo!” she screamed.
Maddie joined in, “Cowabunga!”
They booked it, leaping over branches, catching themselves when they slipped on the black goo coating the ground. She remembered Veronica’s posh tone—caterpillar excrement.
“Caterpillar excrement!” she yelled, and their laughter bounced off the trees and, for a moment, drowned out the zombie drone of the gypsies that had already become the soundtrack of the summer.
By the time they reached the Castle’s front doors, the cuffs of their jeans were splattered with black slime and their makeup smudged. They stood on the rolling lawn in front of the Castle and picked caterpillars out of each other’s hair. The day had alternated between sunny and gray, a late-afternoon squall had rolled in from the sea, but still the Castle’s marble shone a pearly white.
Maddie found a caterpillar tucked between her sock and sneaker. Penny found one in her sports bra and shrieked. They wheezed with laughter. Maddie was relieved to be dirty. She was sick of trying to look perfect.
“Are you sure we’re allowed to just, like, walk in?” She touched the initials—H. M.—in the center of the wrought-iron doors, which stood open. And looked, she thought, more like the gates of a nineteenth-century asylum than a front entrance.
“I don’t know,” Penny said. “He’s your boyfriend.…”
“Zip it,” Maddie said. She knocked on her head quickly so Penny wouldn’t see, wishing it were true.
She was buzzing with anticipation. Not only would she see Brooks, she was visiting the Castle, the most extravagant home on the island, rumored to have thirty rooms and an indoor saltwater pool. In the winter months when the trees were bare, from the guest room window in White Eagle, she could spot the top of the castle’s stone turrets. Veronica swore that the Marshall Castle had been in the running for Robert Redford’s mansion in The Great Gatsby but that pious Mrs. Marshall refused to have her home turned into a movie set and definitely not for, in Veronica’s words, “a film that celebrated wanton debauchery.” Maddie knew it had been her model for all the towers in the fairy tales her mother had told her and Dom. Her mother had only to speak the word—“castle”—and an image of the Marshall place sprung into Maddie’s mind, as if from one of Jack’s magic seeds. She and Dom had spent many weekend hours walking the woods around the Marshall gate, its marble eagles staring at them hungrily as they listened for the cries of a trapped princess.
Then Brooks was there, framed in the massive doorway, greeting them with a quiet hey. His eyes met hers and she was sure they paused for a beat.
“Welcome to the Castle,” he said and took her hand, pulling her into the airy blue light of the entryway.
They walked through a cavernous hall, the gray stone walls hung with the stuffed heads of huge beasts—deer, moose, and even a bear—whose glass eyes shone under the iron chandelier’s light. A tall glass case held guns of all kinds—silver antiques (was that a bayonet?) and the more recent matte-black steel.
“Holy shit,” Penny whispered as they walked under the arched doorway of the ballroom.
It was like walking into a dream. Maddie felt a shiver of recognition. A zap of déjà vu. Like she’d been there. Or dreamt of it. She stood in the center of the room and looked up, turning in a slow circle.
The sun came out (just for them, she thought) and streamed through the stained-glass windows, painting the enormous domed room with wet brilliant light, making Maddie think again, like she had at the fair, of a kaleidoscope.
She looked up and saw pink-tinged clouds against a blue sky so real it was like the ceiling didn’t exist. Only the edging gave it away. Filigree like icing on a solid-gold cake.
Gray rocks rose up the walls, their craggy tips piercing the rosy sky.
“It’s the sunset at Singing Beach,” she said. “It’s beautiful.”
Brooks was next to her. Her eyes were on the ceiling, tracing the silver lining in each cloud, but she smelled his cinnamon scent. Felt his heat.
“We can’t hang at the beach,” he said. “’Cause of the caterpillars. So I brought the beach to you.”
You, Maddie thought. Me. And it felt as if it were just she and him and he’d conjured the beach from thin air. Like a magician or one of Dom’s gods. All for her. And all hers.
“I hang in here sometimes,” he said. “When the sun is setting. Light a joint and lay on my back.”
Please, she thought, let me do that with you.
“There’s this moment—when the light outside and the light up there is like a perfect match.” He pointed to the stained-glass windows lining the ballroom, alternating with tall white columns draped with spiderwebs. “I guess it’s maybe what heaven looks like.”
“Totally.” Maddie sighed.
She ignored Penny’s eye roll.
“If heaven exists.” He winked.
“Are you an atheist or something?” Penny said. “My mom says your parents are radicals. Got any cool stories about them blowing up colleges or banks and stuff?”
“Pen,” Maddie said. “Quit it with the third degree, ’kay?”
She knew Penny was just being Penny, but what if Brooks had been offended?
“Dude,” Penny said, holding her hands up, “I’m just curious. I’m not going to turn them in to the pigs.”
“I’ve seen the cops on this island,” he said. “Don’t think they’ve ever had to do anything but eat doughnuts and get old ladies’ kitties out of trees.”
“Not,” Penny said. “They’d have a coronary climbing a ladder.”
“That station looks like it was built for some Disney movie,” Brooks added. “Like it’s got gnomes and fairies and shit living in it.”
They were laughing, all three of them, just as Maddie had hoped, and then he gave her fingers a gentle squeeze.
“I’m really happy you’re here.”
“Adorable,” Penny said as she fell into one of the giant black beanbags with a whoosh of air and a cloud of dust.
He was still holding Maddie’s hand and she dared to step forward. She made herself look into his eyes. The lids were heavy, thickly lashed, like a young Sylvester Stallone, and she wondered if this was what people meant by “bedroom eyes” in the old black-and-white movies her mom watched on the weekends. She didn’t want to look away but felt a tickle knocking around in her belly. She couldn’t understand why she felt so nervous when she knew she liked him. A lot a lot.
“Cool!” Penny pointed to the back of the room, where an opera house–style balcony hung like a cozy shelf, draped in thick red and gold velvet tied off with tassels. Penny let out a trilling impersonation of an opera singer, her mouth stretched into a clownish O. Echoes of echoes ricocheted off the tall walls and curved ceiling.
There was a burst of sound from the entryway and Maddie heard Bitsy, “Oh my God! This place is bitchin’!” and the whisper of feet shuffling over the stone grew louder until the whole gang was flooding into the ballroom. Bitsy, Vanessa, and Gabrielle. Gerritt, Ricky, John, Austin, and Rolo. And Spencer, one hand in the pocket of his cargo shorts, the other smacking a tin of tobacco dip against his thigh. Thwack, thwack. He had a baseball cap on—YALE—the brim shaped into a tight arch so Maddie couldn’t see his eyes.
They’d brought treats. Each waited their turn to offer up their goodies to Brooks, along with a fist bump, an up-nod, a hug if you were Bitsy—and the way she pressed her boobs up against Brooks made Maddie squint. Gerritt brought an eighth of kind bud. Ricky a block of tar-black hashish he’d scored at a Grateful Dead concert, wrapped in tinfoil. There was a plastic baggie of shake left over from the shrooms, and John, Austin, and Rolo had gone in on a beer keg.
“Dude.” Gerritt flicked his chin at Brooks. “Your parents are, like, cool with us being here? Drinking, smoking, and whatnot?”
“They’re cool,” Brooks said. “Already half asleep in the cottage. And you gotta go through a maze to get from here to there. I’m pretty sure my dad’s stoned. So he ain’t making it through any maze. Having ex-hippies for parents isn’t half bad.”
He delivered this info in one shot, played it straight, didn’t even crack a smile, and there was a pause before the crew burst into laughter, the ceiling catching it so it seemed to Maddie as if the laughter went on too long.
So that’s how it was going to be. There was her Brooks—the honeysuckle-tasting, making-up-words, sweet-and-chivalrous Brooks. And there was the cool and aloof Brooks he showed to others. He was hers though, she was suddenly sure of that, and the thought ignited a spiral, like the shooting-star fireworks Dom set off every Fourth of July, from her belly to her throat.
Brooks had hooked up his stereo next to a set of turntables. There were at least six black binders, the plastic sleeves filled with CDs to satisfy everyone’s craving. Rolo, always jonesing for classic rock, had his Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. John Anderson, Beastie Boys and A Tribe Called Quest. The perfect accompaniment, Maddie thought, for his habit of crushing beer cans under his Timberland boots. There were home-burned CDs she guessed were dance music. But sounded like new drug fads. Mojo. Trance. Acid House. Thick 3D block letters in red and black Sharpie. That’s his handwriting, she thought. He must be an artist.
After a ton of negotiation, which involved Ricky threatening to leave (and take his hash with him) if they didn’t play Dark Side of the Moon, Brooks dropped six discs in the CD changer. Music filled the ballroom from rounded ceiling to parquet floor. The vast space seemed to devour the sound and spit it back out twice as loud, reminding Maddie of how, on foggy days, the sound of the barges offshore warped so they seemed next door even though they were really miles away.
They got to work getting their buzz on. She knew now, after a month of partying with the East kids, that they took getting wasted seriously.
Bitsy pulled a blue plastic bong out of her purse and called, “Who wants a taste?” and some of the kids—Maddie, Brooks, and Penny included—sat in a circle on the cool dirt-streaked floor and passed the bong.
Rolo and Austin tapped the keg and Vanessa was the first to do a keg stand—her shirt falling down so her lacy black bra showed. John Anderson started to reach for her breast, ready to give it a squeeze, when Bitsy lifted her face from the bong and said, breath held, “Don’t you even fucking think about it, John,” right before she let out a stream of thick smoke and fell into a fit of coughing.
An hour later, when Tribe’s “Scenario” blasted from the tall speakers, all the girls, even Penny, were in the middle of the ballroom dancing and singing the stuttering lyrics, pointing at the boys with their lips pressed in pouts. Bitsy trotted out of the circle and grabbed Brooks, pulling him into the crowd of girls, and Maddie felt Penny shoot her a look but pretended not to notice, kept singing, Here we go yo / here we go yo / So what so what so what’s the scenario. But when the song reached Gots to get the loot so I can bring home the bacon, and the usually shy Rolo was dancing, his belly jiggling under his threadbare Grateful Dead tee, Maddie saw Bitsy gyrating her lithe body around Brooks. Spencer was watching Maddie watch Brooks and his eyes narrowed in disgust before he turned away.
Maddie searched for Gerritt, knowing he’d be good for busting up Bitsy making moves on Brooks. Then the music went dead. Her ears rang in the sudden silence.
The kids groaned, What the fuck? and there was Bitsy standing by the stereo, clapping her hands. “Chop-chop!” she sang, “That’s enough whirling-dervish shit for now. It’s game time.”
“Chop-chop?” Brooks whispered, his breath tickling Maddie’s ear.
She knew what “game time” meant and prayed it was Spin the Bottle, not Seven Minutes in Heaven. Not much happened in seven minutes locked in a closet with a boy—cold hands slipping under her shirt, over her bra, as she massaged some guy’s hard-on over his khaki shorts while the rest of the kids whispered on the other side of the door. But there was that awful moment when time was up and the door opened, light blinding the couple as they returned to the world, faces flushed, hair mussed, lips raw. Like Adam and Eve after the snake (or was it God, she couldn’t remember which) told them off. Seven minutes with Brooks she’d do times ten, but odds were high she’d pick another boy’s name out of the smelly Mets cap Bitsy would pass around.
What a relief to hear from Brooks that there were no closets in the ballroom, and the players settled in a circle around a few thick candles that smelled like pine trees. It was dark out now and the arched windows above were an underwater blue.
Not everyone participated. She’d spotted John and Vanessa sneaking off to make out in a dark corner after swallowing two pills of E. Rolo and Spencer were also rolling hard and had left for the woods to climb trees. She’d been able to avoid Spencer all night so far, which, she thought, probably meant he was also avoiding her, and that was just fine by her.
That left six. An even split of boys and girls.
“Lucky six!” Bitsy sang. She coordinated the events with a bossiness that reminded Maddie of PTA moms overseeing school bake sales. At first, Maddie had guessed it was the thrill of sex that excited Bitsy, but she’d come to understand that Bitsy was like the vampires in the Stephen King novel she’d read late at night under her bedsheets with a flashlight. Bitsy fed on humiliation.
Like now, as Penny locked lips with twitchy Ricky, Penny grabbing the collar of his Izod shirt with both hands, Bitsy called out, “Too much tongue, girl! I give that kiss a five, tops.” As if, Maddie thought, she were judging an Olympic ice-skating competition.
“That was some Deep Throat shit,” Ricky said with a shaky sigh before making a big show of using his shirt to wipe his mouth.
While everyone laughed (but Maddie), Penny stared at the shadows flickering across the floor. Poor thing had a major crush on dickhead Ricky.
They spun the bottle as Alice in Chains hummed from the speakers, telling a story about a man in a box buried in his own shit. Maddie got Gerritt and gave Bitsy a quick shrug (asking if it was cool) before leaning over and giving him a quick peck on the lips.
“Thanks, babycakes,” Gerritt said.
The circle laughed and Maddie found Brooks’s eyes. He winked and she was relieved.
It was Gabrielle’s turn and she spun the bottle the way she did everything—slow and lazy. She got Bitsy, pouted, and said, slyly, “Well, it ain’t the first time.”
Maddie had heard boys talk shamelessly about their johnsons and jerking off and how their hand was their best girlfriend. Ha-ha-ha. But she hadn’t heard girls talk that way, not until she starting hanging with Bitsy, Vanessa, and Gabrielle, who talked openly, loudly, in front of the boys, about “stirring the soup” and “getting off.” Making Maddie blush. Driving the boys wild. So when Bitsy mediated Spin the Bottle, she enforced one rule: Girls had to kiss who the bottle told them to kiss. An excuse for her and Gabrielle and Vanessa to tangle their tongues in front of the boys. Of course, if a boy landed on a boy, they spun again. The rules weren’t the same for girls and guys.
Bitsy’s and Gabrielle’s glossed lips met. Their tongues flickered around O-shaped mouths. Gabrielle nipped at Bitsy’s lower lip and Bitsy pinched one of Gabrielle’s plump breasts. Gabrielle flinched, smacking Bitsy’s hand and saying, without meaning it, “Bitch.”
“Fuuuuck,” Ricky drawled.
Bitsy looked straight at Brooks and said, “Future jerk-off material. You’re welcome.”
“Screw this,” Gerritt said, and stomped out of the ballroom, his heavy steps echoing.
Bitsy ran after him.
“Sore loser?” Gabrielle said.
It was Brooks’s turn.
Please, Maddie thought, if there is a God, he will make the bottle land on me. She knew it was a ridiculous thing to pray for. Nonna LaRosa would call it sacrilege.
He spun the bottle fast and it seemed to make a thousand rotations before stopping.
The bottle’s brown snout pointed at her.
Her.
Time slowed as he made his way around the outside of the circle. A breeze blew through one of the open windows and two candles snuffed out.
“How poetic,” Penny said. Gabrielle snickered.
He dropped to his knees in front of her. The candlelight made the silhouette of his hair glow like he was on fire. He tucked his hands under her jawbone and she felt his pulse twitch in the wrist on her cheek. Quick gentle kisses settled into slow and deep sucking. Until then, sex, even just kissing, had felt like something being taken away, a draining, but now she filled. Her hands were on his chest, reaching around his neck, when she heard Penny’s voice, joking, “Cool your jets, kids. Get a room already.”
“Shit,” Gabrielle said. “That was so hot, I creamed my shorts.”
For once, Maddie was grateful for the distraction the girl’s crassness provided.
But Brooks was staring at the back of the ballroom. Looking worried. Most of the boys were there in one big clump.
Brooks jogged past Maddie, mumbling, “I told my mom this was crazy. That it would never work.”
Before she could ask him what it was, he was hurrying over to the entrance, shouting, “It’s cool! It’s cool. I invited them.”
The pack of East boys—Spencer, Austin, Rolo, and Gerritt—parted. Enzo and Vinny strutted into the ballroom, two of their buddies behind them, and, finally, Carla, her beaded braids swinging click-clack, click-clack.
“Holy shit,” Penny whispered.
Maddie wiped her mouth. Licked her lips. Had they seen her and Brooks kissing? That’s all she needed. Her cousins telling her dad.
“That bitch!” Bitsy was yelling even as she ran across the ballroom floor.
“Cool it, pretty lady,” Enzo said, smooth as ever, gripping Bitsy’s arms when she tried to push past him, get to Carla.
Vinny and the two West boys chimed in, “Oooh,” and John called, “Cat fight!”
Bitsy glared at Enzo, and Maddie saw there was more there, and it looked like sex.
“Whatever,” Bitsy said, “Rico Suave.”
Penny snorted behind Maddie.
“Carla,” Enzo called.
The petite girl dressed in black head to toe, from Metallica tee to scuffed, steel-toe Doc Martens, stepped forward, arms crossed.
“I’m sorry.”
“What? I can’t hear you,” Bitsy sang, rolling her head with extra sass.
There was fire in Carla’s thickly lined eyes.
“I AM SORRY,” she said, loud and silly, so everyone had to know she was really saying fuck you.
Enzo applauded. A slow clap that doubled with the echo.
“Okay then,” he said. “Let’s party.”
He pulled a plastic baggie from his pocket and tossed it to Bitsy, who almost dropped it. It must’ve been a quarter of weed. Even from where Maddie stood, hiding behind Penny’s wide body, she could see the fat buds furred with red hair. Bitsy opened the bag, stuck her perfect nose inside, and inhaled.
“Fuck yeah. They can stay.”
Everyone laughed. Brooks jogged back to the stereo. The tunes restarted. Red Hot Chili Peppers urging them to “give it away, give it away, give it away now,” repeating the lyric until it sounded to Maddie like half manifesto, half tongue twister.
She grabbed Penny’s hand and pulled her friend toward her cousins.
“What? Wait,” Penny whispered. “They’re kind of scary.”
“Cugina!” Vinny cried with open arms when he saw her, giving her a tight hug so she knew she’d smell like his musky Drakkar Noir cologne all night.
“Cuz,” Enzo said, and kissed her once on each cheek. “You old enough to be out partying?” His face was dead serious before it cracked open in a smile.
“The question is,” she teased, “how’d you guys get here? You know Brooks?”
“Oh, yeah,” Vinny said, lighting a cigarette, taking a long pull, and exhaling with the cigarette still between his lips. “We know Brooks. Been doing some work for his mom. Like cleaning up some of the rooms in this joint.” He held his arms out at his sides as if, Maddie thought, he were saying Check this place out. “She invited us. Leslie did. You think your buddies will have a problem with that?”
He peered over her head at the crowd of East kids gathered by the stereo. Lots of looks being passed back and forth.
“You stay cool, they’ll stay cool,” she said. Surprised at how well she was faking calm.
“What we should be asking,” Enzo said, like he was interrogating her, “is how come ol’ Brooks knows so much about you? He told us about your walk home the other night.”
“Yeah,” Vinny said. “Sounded like it was a long walk.”
Her stomach flip-flopped. She thought of her father. His belt.
“Just kidding, cuz,” Enzo said.
Vinny laughed so hard the cigarette fell out of his mouth. “You should’ve seen your face. So serious. What was it old Nonno said about you that one time?”
She sighed. “That I was too serious and had the face of a nun.”
Her cousins laughed. “Yeah, that’s it,” Vinny said. “I miss the old guy.”
Maddie didn’t. Both her grandfathers had told her she wasn’t good enough. Too somber. Too opinionated.
“Seriously,” she said, making sure she whispered, “You guys know how my dad would flip if you told him anything, like, weird. Yeah? Even if you were kidding.”
“We know you don’t have nothing going with this guy,” Enzo said, his arm, heavy with muscle, slung around her shoulders.
“And what if I did?” She was testing them. And trying to convince herself she wouldn’t care if her dad beat her black and blue.
“He’s all right,” Vinny said.
“For a moolie,” Enzo added.
They laughed. Slapped each other’s backs. High-fived. Like it was a bit they’d rehearsed on their way over.
“What’s a moolie?” Penny asked innocently.
All the West boys were laughing now, Carla too. Maddie was about to tell them to fuck off when the music changed. Brooks slipped in a few discs for the West kids. Metallica’s “One” came on and her cousins and their two friends roared, charging into the center of the ballroom, whipping their heads around, knocking shoulders. Rolo, who was blitzed on ecstasy, catapulted into the whole lot. John joined in, and Ricky and Gerritt, and even Brooks, until all the boys were headbanging, sweat spraying, jerking their heads back and forth so hard that by the time the lyrics cut out and the guitar started pounding in time with the drums, like the rat-a-tat-tat of a machine gun, Maddie was scared they’d hurt themselves.
When the song ended, the floor under the pack of sweat-drenched boys was slick. First Rolo went down, then Vinny, and then one after another, the boys started falling on purpose. Like little kids on a Slip’n Slide in the sprinklers. Except, Maddie thought, this one was made of sweat and spilled beer and cigarette ash.
It was after midnight when Brooks took his place behind the turntables and the electronic beat pumped out of the speakers, filled the ballroom with a rhythm that felt more reliable than anything she’d ever known. The ballroom became a temple. Brooks’s tables an altar. The steady throb—pa-da-boom, pa-da-boom—filled Maddie, and she danced. There was so much room. She stretched out her arms and whirled in a circle. She let her head loll side to side, her long hair whipping at her face. She arched her back so her shoulder blades touched and her chest opened. She imagined she was wearing a glittering diamond necklace, just as her old ballet teacher Ms. Posey had instructed.
This was when summer started. She was free. From the caterpillars and her mother’s snoring, her father’s slaps, even Dom’s sad face. She stopped dancing only to take a hit off a joint passing around. She wished she could stay, never go home. What was the point? No one cared where she was. Her mom was in another universe, high on her pills. Her dad, who knew where he was—either working at her uncle’s garage or, if her hunch was right-on, screwing Rosemary Dutton, who waited tables at Sonny’s Diner on the west side.
She felt Enzo’s dark eyes watching. Who did he think he was? Her brother? Her father? She already had one of each, and they were plenty useless. Penny was making out with her cousins’ silent friend on one of the beanbags in a dark corner of the ballroom. Gabrielle was in full rave mode after downing the rest of the mushrooms, even licking the inside of the plastic baggie. Maddie had watched her dance in front of the speakers, her breasts bouncing under a tight tee, and then she’d stomped over to a sulking Spencer and led him to the antique sofa where they were now sucking face. Maddie wanted to cheer, thank Gabrielle, forget everything that had happened with Spencer.
She wished she could crawl inside Brooks’s head as he spun records. His eyes were trained on the spinning discs, his head bobbing as he mixed hip-hop and house, a little riff here and there of something surprising, all of it seamless so the beats matched like the two records were dancing arm in arm. A velvet voice broke apart a manic techno beat, slowing and smoothing out time as it pleaded Cupid, draw back your bow, and Brooks found her eyes and she knew she was the most sober person in that room and also the happiest.
Then Brooks’s expression changed. Grew serious, maybe even annoyed, and she followed his eyes to the ballroom door. It was his mother standing under the archway, and the sight of the golden-headed woman, whom her grandmother had made her promise to watch, made Maddie take a step toward the door. But Vinny and Enzo were talking to her, their heads bowed so they could hear over the music. Her delicate arms were crossed over a baggy sweatshirt. Even in sweats, Maddie thought she looked elegant. When her lips stopped moving, the boys nodded and she shook each of their hands. Like they’d made a deal.
Maddie had to pull Penny away from the mute West boy—Paulie—when it was time to go.
“But he’s my lover,” Penny slurred.
“Okay,” Maddie said trying to be patient. “You can hang with your lover another time.”
Brooks helped her get Penny through the woods, although it was hard work. Maddie’s ankles were torn up by prickers and mosquitos and they arrived on the lawn of White Eagle covered in caterpillars and spattered with black goo, but none of that mattered. Because she was with Brooks. She put Penny on the couch in the cottage and left a trash can nearby in case she had to barf. She hurried back to the front door. Finally, they would be alone.
He was gone.
A small square of paper rested on the welcome mat.
She unfolded it. It was his list of words. For her. He had nice handwriting. For a boy. Her boy.
Wildinger—a feeling so strong it makes you want to tear your hair out
Grateship—the symbiotic friendship between two people grateful for each other