The Chief had asked, “Can you tell me what happened?”
She was dead. Penny. His girlfriend. “Girlfriend” was insufficient; he was a wordsmith, he could do better. His lover. No, his beloved. His Juliet, his Beatrice, his Natasha, his Daisy Buchanan. What did it matter what had happened when Penny—the Penelope to his Ulysses—was dead?
Dead. He let out something between a cackle and a scream, and as he watched the features of the Chief’s face soften, then harden, he could see the Chief wishing that he would act like a man, and he wanted to grab the front of the Chief’s sweatshirt and say, “I am seventeen years old, and the girl I’ve loved for fourteen of those seventeen years—since I was old enough to think and feel—is dead. She died right next to me.”
The Chief cleared his throat and started again. “Had Penelope been drinking?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“You were… where tonight? Where did you start out?”
Jake glared at the Chief. “Why are you interrogating me?” This was brutality, wasn’t it, a barrage of questions like this? This was the Chief abusing his power. Jake’s father had talked about the police overstepping their bounds because it was a small island and they could occasionally get away with it. The Chief and Jordan Randolph had had their differences; there was bad blood over some political thing or another.
The Chief said, “Listen to me, young man, I know you’re hurting. And I’ve been there myself. I lost my best friends, three years ago now, lifelong friends, and now I’m raising their children. I know this is difficult. It may be the most difficult thing you ever do, let’s pray that it is, but I have to try and piece together what happened tonight.” He pressed his lips together until they turned white. “It’s my job to figure out what caused this accident.”
Jake lowered his eyes to his jeans. Penny had written on his jeans in ballpoint pen—a heart containing their initials. She had written on every pair of jeans he owned, and she had written on his T-shirts with Sharpies and on the white rubber of his sneakers, and she had written on his palms. I love you, Jake Randolph. You are mine, I am yours. Forever. It was old-fashioned, better than a text message, she said, more visible: he couldn’t just delete it. If he wanted the markings gone, he would have to scrub. But he didn’t want them gone, and especially not now. It was all he had left: the memory of the pen in Penny’s hand, drawing the heart, tickling his thigh.
“We started at Patrick Loom’s house,” Jake said. The Chief wrote that down, which was silly, because the Chief himself had been at Patrick Loom’s house and had seen Jake there. “Then we went to Steps Beach.”
“Who drove?”
“Me.”
“Why did you drive?”
“It was my Jeep.”
“But you’d been drinking.”
“At Patrick’s?” Jake made what Penny referred to as his “face.” Had the Chief seen him drinking, or was he just assuming? “Yes, sir, I had one beer at Patrick’s. But I was okay to drive.”
The Chief paused. Jake knew he could take issue with the beer he had drunk at the Looms’ house, but that wasn’t important now, was it? Or maybe it was. Jake couldn’t tell.
“Who threw the party at Steps?”
“I have no idea.”
“Please, Jake.”
“I have no clue.”
“Did you know anyone there?”
“I knew everyone there. It was a graduation party. The seniors were there. Probably they all kicked in money and found somebody to buy the keg.”
“Someone like who? David Marcy? Luke Browning?”
“You want to blame them, go ahead,” Jake said. David and Luke were trouble; Luke had an older brother named Larry who was doing time at Walpole for selling cocaine. “They were both there, but neither one of them was bragging about buying the keg. I don’t know who bought the keg.”
The Chief said, “Fair enough.”
Jake said, “I forgot. On the way to Steps we stopped to pick up Demeter Castle.”
“Where did you pick her up?” the Chief asked.
“At the end of her street? Not at her house?”
“Correct.” Did Jake need to state the obvious here?
“So she was sneaking out, then. Her parents didn’t know she was going out?”
“I didn’t ask her about that,” Jake said.
“And she had alcohol with her?” the Chief asked.
Jake felt relieved. He wasn’t ratting her out if the Chief already knew. “A bottle of Jim Beam.”
“Why did you pick up Demeter? Was it prearranged?”
“No, it was last-minute. She sent Penny a text message.”
“A text message.”
“Saying she had a bottle and she wanted to go out.”
“And for that reason, you went to pick her up. Because she had a bottle.”
“Well,” Jake said, “yeah, sort of.”
“So if she hadn’t texted saying she had a bottle, you wouldn’t have picked her up?”
“She texted saying, ‘Come pick me up,’ and we picked her up.”
“So you’re friends with her?”
“Sort of,” Jake said. “I mean, yes. I’ve known her my entire life. Our parents are friends. You know they’re friends. Why are you making me explain something you already know?”
“Who drank from the bottle?”
“Well, when we picked her up, it was already half gone. So it’s probably safe to say that Demeter had been drinking from the bottle. And then Hobby and I had some.”
“How much?”
“I don’t know,” Jake said. “A couple of swigs?”
“Did Penelope drink from the bottle?”
“No,” Jake said. “Penny didn’t drink. She didn’t like it. It made her sick.” Did he have to tell the Chief about the game of strip poker in tenth grade at Anders Peashway’s house, where they were drinking vodka and grape Kool-Aid and Penny puked into the Peashways’ clawfoot tub? “She had an incident a couple years ago and never drank again.”
“So what happened at Steps Beach?” the Chief asked.
Jake put his head in his hands. What had happened at Steps Beach? He wasn’t sure. He remembered swigging from Demeter’s bottle before they got out of the Jeep, he remembered taking off his shoes, he remembered trudging up over the dunes and seeing the orange blaze of the fire and hearing a Neon Trees song playing on somebody’s iPod, he remembered Penny in the sand next to him, she was drinking Evian water, always Evian water, it was soothing to her vocal cords, she said. She had to stay out of the path of the smoke from the fire, the smoke could harm her vocal cords, one cigarette or toke of marijuana could alter them forever.
At the party Penny had been in a fragile mood. She had been feeling fragile a lot lately, crying over things like graduation and how sad it was that the seniors were graduating and how scary it was that they themselves were now seniors and that this time next year it would be them graduating and leaving everyone behind. Penny was especially worried about leaving her mother. She and Zoe were best friends. After Penny lost her virginity to Jake, she had gone right home and climbed into bed with Zoe and told her everything.
Except lately, there had been things that Penny was telling only Ava.
“Like what?” Jake had asked her.
Penny had ignored this question, which infuriated Jake, though he realized that if there were things that she was telling only to his mother, then she wouldn’t be inclined to turn around and tell him what they were.
Penny had said, “I’ll be sad to leave Ava.”
And then—then!—Jake remembered another thing Penny had said:
“I just want to stay in this moment forever. Like in a bubble, you know? You and me and the fire, staring at the edge of adulthood but never quite reaching it.”
Jake repeated these words to the Chief, and the Chief wrote them down carefully, then cleared his throat. He opened his mouth to speak, and Jake thought, Don’t say it.
“What else do you remember about the party?” the Chief asked.
What else? Kids drinking, smoking cigarettes, smoking weed, pairing off and heading down the beach to make out, kids talking to Jake and Penny, asking them what they were going to do over the summer—Jake was working at the newspaper, Penny had a job hostessing at the Brotherhood, and the last three weeks before school started, she was going to music camp in Interlochen, Michigan. Jake and Penny had repeated these plans to half a dozen people. What Jake didn’t say was that he was planning on taking Penny away to Boston, where they were going to spend the night at the Hotel Marlowe, which would cost a fortune, but Jake had been saving his money for something spectacularly romantic, something that Penny would never forget, and that was what he’d come up with.
“We hung out,” Jake said. “And then we left.”
“Okay,” the Chief said, scooting his chair forward. This was what he’d been waiting for, of course, the details of their leaving. “So whose idea was it to leave?”
Jake couldn’t remember, even though it had been less than two hours earlier. The party was breaking up, and Demeter materialized, her hair hanging in her face and her mouth slack, the way it got when she was smashed. Demeter was a nice girl deep down; she’d been a part of Jake’s life forever and ever, but something had changed in her, she had developed a sharp, shining edge that seemed dangerous. Jake knew enough about girls to know that it had to do with her weight and the fact that she didn’t have close friends and didn’t do as well as she ought to in school. The edge was her defense. She could be mean, sarcastic, snide—even with Penny, and Penny was the only person who was always nice to her. When Demeter had texted earlier that night, above Jake and Hobby’s unspoken protests, Penny had said, “Let’s go pick her up. She’s just sitting home drinking, poor thing.” Demeter had taken up drinking with a vengeance, which Jake found ironic since her parents were teetotalers and pillars of the community.
On the beach Demeter had said, “I have to pee. Come with me, Penny.”
Penny had stood up, wiped the sand off her butt, and dutifully followed Demeter into the dunes. Now Jake wondered if Penny had had to pee as well or if she’d just gone along because Demeter asked her to. What he remembered now was that once the girls had vanished, he had gone looking for Hobby and found him drinking a beer, talking to Patrick Loom. Hobby had a way with people that Jake envied. Hobby was such a phenomenal athlete that people expected him to be as dumb as a bag of hammers, annoyingly self-congratulatory, or at the very least overly interested in the topic of sports. But Hobby socialized like an adult at a cocktail party. He held his drink a certain way, he tilted his head so that you knew he was listening, he asked perceptive questions. He shone so brightly that he made other people shine too. Jake had a lot going for him, everyone told him so, but he was envious of Hobby.
He’d nudged Hobby’s elbow. “Hey, man, we’re going.”
Hobby grinned. “Cool.” He scanned the dispersing crowd. “Have you seen Claire?”
“Not in a while,” Jake said. “Did you text her?”
“I did, but I got nothing back. She must have left.” Hobby looked wistful. He could have had any girl at Nantucket High School, he could have plucked them out one by one and used them like Kleenexes, but that had never been his style. He liked girls, respected them, treated them like human beings. Claire Buckley was his current favorite, but she and Hobby were casual. Nothing like Jake and Penny: Jake would never have let Penny out of his sight at a party like this, even for a second. Except for right now—he realized that she and Demeter were taking a long time. Jake eyed the dunes; he could see people moving up there, but it was too dark to tell exactly who they were.
He said to Hobby, “I’ll meet you at the car.”
Hobby dumped his beer. “I’m coming.”
The next thing Jake had a distinct memory of was leaning up against the driver’s side of the Jeep, inhaling big gulps of night air. He was drunk enough that Penny would have to drive. He couldn’t afford to get pulled over. His father was the publisher of the paper, and if Jake got caught, his name would appear in the police blotter, a blanket of shame would shroud the Randolph name, and Jake’s prospects for Princeton or Dartmouth would be dashed, just like that.
Penny would drive. They would drop Demeter off first.
Then he realized something was wrong. Penny grabbed the keys out of his hand. She was crying. When Jake said, “Jesus Christ, Pen, what’s wrong?” Penny screamed. When he tried to pry the keys out of her hand, she swung at him. He had never seen her act like that before; it was as if she were possessed. He got a sick feeling that she had heard about what had happened between him and Winnie Potts in Winnie’s basement after the cast party for Grease. But what had she heard, and who had told her? Jake remembered looking at Demeter to see if she could shed any light on the situation, but Demeter’s face was closed up tight. Her eyes were blank, her motions robotic; she was shitfaced drunk. Maybe that was the problem, maybe Demeter had said something mean to Penny while they were in the dunes. Oh God, Jake hoped that was the case.
Demeter climbed into the back and fastened her seat belt, and Jake tried not to notice how the belt cut into her belly. She had that shining edge, she kept it hidden most of the time, but then she unsheathed it. That must be it, then, and it had nothing to do with Winnie Potts, oh please.
Penny flung open the door. She was having a hard time catching her breath. The sobs kept coming, one more strangled than the next.
Hobby said, “Jeez, Pen, pull yourself together.”
Jake said, “Penny, what is it? What is it?”
Penny slammed the door and started the engine, and even though Jake had been drinking, he was coherent enough to realize that she was in no condition to drive. He tried to pull the keys from the ignition, but Penny batted at him with open palms and Hobby snickered in the back and Penny screamed again, and the scream reminded Jake of another time, another place: his mother when she found Ernie dead in his crib. Jake got goosebumps, his head started to spin, he feared for a second that he was going to puke. Penny shifted into drive, and they screeched around Lincoln Circle, and the motion made Jake feel even sicker and he thought, Please stop, Penny, please stop the car. But he was too nauseated to speak. He breathed in and out through his nose, he tasted the Jim Beam in the back of his throat.
To the Chief, Jake said, “I had been drinking, so Penny drove my car. Demeter was drunk, and Hobby doesn’t have his license. Penny was sober, but she was upset about something.”
“About what?” the Chief asked.
“I honestly don’t know,” Jake said. He had been hoping it was something Demeter had said in the dunes, or maybe it was something Penny and Demeter had seen—maybe Claire Buckley had been up there having sex with Luke Browning, and Penny was upset on her brother’s behalf. Maybe someone they knew had been shooting heroin or doing something even more heinous that Jake couldn’t conceive of. He had a ghastly feeling, though, that this was about him and Winnie Potts and that night in her basement. Jake had been monitoring the situation for weeks, and he’d heard nothing. Winnie had been reserved but cool, but who knew what she’d said to her close friends, and who knew what those friends had said to others? If it was going to come out, it would be on a night like graduation night, when everyone was drinking. When secrets washed up like dead bodies on the beach. Jake needed to get Penny alone, they had to drop off Demeter and then Hobby. Maybe they could go for a walk on the beach so he could figure out what the problem was. He couldn’t do it with other people in the car, he couldn’t do it while she was driving. His more immediate problem was getting Penny to slow down, or they were going to get pulled over for sure. She was going fifty on New Lane and then nearly sixty on Quaker. She took the turn onto Hummock Pond Road so fast that Jake was sure the Jeep was going to flip. It wasn’t built to go that fast. His stomach lurched, he could feel the beer sloshing around inside him, and he imagined the Jim Beam lying on top of the beer, like an oil slick on water. He felt all hot and queasy. Penny rocketed up the hill by the Maria Mitchell Observatory, and Jake said, “Penny, slow down!” It was June, and the observatory sometimes had open nights when there would be all kinds of people crossing the street. Plus, the police liked to hide in a spot just below the crest of the hill to catch speeders.
But Penny didn’t slow down. She sped up and put all four windows down so that air whipped through the car in a way that was almost violent. Jake managed to glance at the backseat, where he saw Hobby pitched forward, his widening eyes on the speedometer, and Demeter with her hair blowing, a dreamy look on her face.
The wind made Jake’s eyes dry. His stomach had stopped churning and was now clenched in cold fear. He could see Penny’s leg tensed with the strain of pushing the pedal to the floor. He imagined the doors flying off the Jeep and the roof and the tires popping off and the whole thing lifting up into the night sky like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Penny was biting her lower lip; her eyes were bright and brimming with tears.
She’s not right, Jake thought. He knew when a woman wasn’t right from watching his mother, and Penny wasn’t right. He thought of all the time Penny spent lounging across the bottom of his mother’s bed, worshipping at the throne of the manic-depressive queen. His mother had become some kind of role model for Penny—but why? Why?
“Penny!” he shouted. “You have to slow down! Please!”
She screamed. Jake saw something glittering in front of them. It was the ocean. This was the end of the road.
“Penny!” he said.
“Pull the brake!” Hobby shouted.
Jake thought briefly of the ruined transmission, thousands of dollars of repair work, but then he realized Hobby was right and so he yanked on the emergency brake, but he was too late, they were launching off the lip of the embankment.
They were flying.