Darrow’s football team used the quarry for Streak Night, the annual tradition of new recruits racing naked to the quarry and back. The crew team went swimming in the lake before state championships for good luck. Couples went there to lose their virginity, daredevils to brood. It was whispered that Vulcan Sandberg was actually a government cover-up, that the quarry had actually been the landing spot for an alien spaceship.
For Darrow’s administration, Vulcan Quarry was a lawsuit waiting to happen, the enchanted wood they wanted to clear-cut to put an end to the dark fairy tales wafting off it like some toxic mist. There was always some board member protesting, collecting signatures to declare it a safety hazard, lobbying state representatives for it to be turned into a cultural center, a YMCA, a housing complex. In the meantime, it required new fencing and a twenty-four-hour police patrol. The town of Warwick—partly out of resentment over being told what to do by uppity out-of-towners, partly out of ineptitude—dragged their feet doing anything about it, though, and as long as I attended Darrow, the fencing around the quarry—rusted, riddled with holes, its faded signs halfheartedly declaring KEEP OUT—remained little more than a suggestion at best.
After Jim was found dead, however, he became the poster boy for the board’s cause. Last I’d heard, the quarry was going to be turned into a reservoir and there was brand-new, state-of-the-art fencing around it.
Not that that would keep Darrow’s students out.
If the administration knew the lengths to which the student body went to sneak out at night, to the quarry and everywhere else—dorm rooms, basement gymnasiums, boiler rooms—they wouldn’t have believed it. There was a secret forum—AlbanzHax.biz—where students past and present anonymously revealed how to get in and out of every dorm without being caught.
All dark clothing. Porch ledge. Sneak past the window where Mr. Robertson is zonked out with an issue of Poets & Writers over his chest. Get past him ur golden.
The six of us snuck out to Vulcan Quarry all the time. We were already in the habit of stealing away to each other’s rooms after curfew, clambering across ledges and landings to hash over boys, teachers, sharing a cigarette in the dark before hightailing it home, stealing back into bed. Sophomore year, Cannon found the crude map and pointers for the quarry etched into the tiles of the forsaken gym in the old athletic center. At midnight we escaped our dorms, meeting at the entry to the Philosopher’s Walk. Barely able to suppress our laughter, we took off running down the tangle of dirt paths to get there.
Those were the best nights of my life.
I couldn’t say why, exactly, this was so—only that I knew that as an old woman, when I thought back to my youth, I’d remember these nights, sitting with these five people along the harrowing window ledge of the Foreman’s Lookout, gazing into that clear blue lake hundreds of feet below.
Our friendship was born there. There we were bound together. Something about seeing each other against that spare, alien backdrop of rock, water, and sky—not to mention the prohibited, dangerous thing we were doing—it X-rayed us, revealed the unspoken questions we each were asking. You could feel life burning us, our scars as real as the wind whipping our faces. We knew that nothing would ever be the same, that youth was here and nearly gone already, that love was fragile and death was real.
“What about the White Rabbit?” asked Martha now. “It never sat right with me. It was just too easy. The White Rabbit suddenly revealed to be Jim the exact moment he turns up dead?” She shook her head. “It went against everything I knew about him.”
“You think it was a cover-up?” asked Whitley. “Some grand conspiracy concocted by the administration and Jim was the fall guy?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re right,” I said to Martha. “There’s no way he was the White Rabbit.”
“How do you know?” Cannon asked me.
I just know.
The White Rabbit.
It was what everyone called the drug dealer at Darrow, someone who circulated the student body, invisible and invasive as a virus.
For most of my time at the school he was a bogeyman. No one had actually ever seen him—no one who would admit to it, at least. He did his deals in creative scavenger-hunt dead drops all around Darrow, like behind the frame of Landscape #14 in the art gallery, or inside the ripped seat cushion of seat 104, row E, Orchestra Hall.
By the time I was a senior, the name had garnered such cult status, whenever anything weird happened, it was said to be the work of the White Rabbit. Even teachers knew the name. They’d doubtlessly held emergency meetings about him, trying to determine whether he was real or it was just kids dreaming up some Keyser S?ze.
The biggest scandal concerned a freshman named Veronica Beers. She took some pills and went out of her mind during Winter Dance, fell down a flight of stairs, and got taken to the ER. She admitted the White Rabbit had sold her the pills. Tracing the phone number led to only a defunct prepaid phone.
Was he a lone wolf or a gang of hoodlums? A student or someone from the outside?
When the police found Jim, he’d been dead for two days. The cause of death was asphyxiation due to drowning, but he also had signs of a concussion and leg and spinal fractures, which the coroner believed were sustained when he hit the water.
Police searched Jim’s room at Packer Hall, and they found hidden inside his Gibson guitar stashes of pot, Adderall, Ritalin, and cocaine. They concluded that Jim had been the infamous supplier, his death most likely suicide, though foul play in conjunction with some local criminal couldn’t be ruled out.
The revelation spread like wildfire.
First Jim Mason’s disappearance and death, then the shocking reveal of his secret life. It was the perfect one-two punch to leave us all breathless at the end of a teen slasher flick.
Of course the White Rabbit was Jim, everyone whispered. Totally.
It’s always the one we worship the most we know the least.
He was, after all, Darrow’s rock star, its heartthrob-musical-genius-Shakespeare, the boy who made spontaneous rapping, poetry, and wearing tweed caps cool (all small miracles unto themselves)—the kid everyone loved, longed for, yet simultaneously wished dead.
He had it. An energy force field.
He was the giant lit-up window with no curtains at night. You couldn’t help stopping to look closer on your silent walk past him.
I never believed it.
There was no way Jim was the White Rabbit. Someone had set him up, I was sure. He never touched drugs or alcohol after his speedboat accident. And he wouldn’t have sold it. He was a rescuer of broken-winged birds and lunchtime social outcasts. Nor did he need the money. His dad, Edgar Mason, was the inventor of the Van Gogh sneaker and the Poe hoodie, the man behind Starving Artist, a global leisurewear company he’d started in the back of his Jeep at nineteen. Jim’s family was worth five billion, according to Forbes.
I’d spent the past year doubting my belief in Jim’s innocence. I road-tested my theory obsessively, kicking the tires, trying to make the doors fall off. I wondered about all the occasions when Jim said he couldn’t meet me in the canteen during Evening Spells, how he was on a tear and had to stay sequestered in his dorm room writing. I wondered if he’d been lying to me every time he said he was at work on Nowhere Man, his musical about John Lennon.
My heart insisted no. He couldn’t have been. He’d lied to me about other things.
Not about that.
“I know where to start,” I announced.
The others had lapsed into thoughtful silence. Now they looked up at me, apprehensive.
“Vida Joshua.”
“Kitten?” yelped Kipling in surprise.
“She knows something about Jim’s death. I’m positive.”
“How do you know?” asked Whitley sharply.
“Remember how Jim was acting that final week?”
Kipling arched an eyebrow. “Like I remember a hot summer with a water shortage, backed-up sewage, and zero air-conditionin’.”
“He wasn’t himself,” I went on. “He was moody. A short fuse.”
“All because of his musical,” said Whitley.