“It became an addiction,” Kipling went on. “The rush of it. I never stopped. Every few months, whenever things got out of hand or hopeless, I’d find a way to do my Black-Footed Sioux Carpet. I’d sneak off campus. Immediately felt better. I did a big one junior year, right before Christmas break, when Rector Trask told me I couldn’t return next semester. I was kicked out. I was the sort of student—how did he put it?—who needed an environment with ‘less vigorous expectations.’ Like, he thought I’d do better in Sing-Sing. My Black-Footed Sioux Carpet after that nearly got me made into an egg-scramble sandwich by a Folger’s truck.” He glanced up, sniffing. “It certainly would have given new meanin’ to their slogan ‘The Best Part of Wakin’ Up.’?”
I gazed at him, speechless. Kipling had always been a rotten student. While I knew there had been cliffhangers at the end of every school year as to whether he was passing, I’d never known he was actually kicked out. His poor academic record had changed senior year, when he managed to focus on his studies. By the time we graduated, he had done well.
“It was Cannon who saved me,” Kip said with a faint smile. “He saw what I was tryin’ so hard to hide.”
“You weren’t that good at hiding it,” said Cannon, grinning. “You were walking with a limp and winced when you sat down.”
Kipling looked at me. “Remember how I missed two months of school due to a ‘family emergency’?”
I nodded. Vaguely I remembered him telling me a vibrant and long-winded story about his aunt’s heart condition.
“It was all lies. I was at a treatment center in Providence, doin’ tai chi, watercolorin’ fruit bowls, and developin’ a middle path to manage my unrestrained patterns of thought. It was Cannon who checked me in. Cannon who came during visitin’ hours. Coordinated with the shrinks on my progress. Lobbied Darrow to give me one last chance. He helped turn my grades around. Got my college applications ready. Sat up with me all night helpin’ write my essay about Momma Greer. ‘Mommy Bipolar.’ Otherwise known as ‘How to Survive in the Custody of a Complete Lunatic.’ That got me into Louisiana State. I’d be encrusted right now in the front tire treads of a UPS truck if it weren’t for Cannon.”
My mind was spinning. I thought back to senior year, and though I recalled Cannon as always quite busy, coming and going abruptly with his backpack and an armful of textbooks, never had I suspected what he was up to. But it made sense. He was the silent problem solver. “The steady trickle of water that always finds a passage,” Whitley used to say. Still, I felt hurt that they hadn’t wanted to confide in me, that there had been an entire history happening right before my eyes about which I’d had no clue.
“Why did you never say anything?” I asked Kipling.
He glanced at Cannon, and I saw pass wordlessly between them some fleeting shadow of understanding that was gone almost as soon as I recognized it.
Kipling shrugged. “There comes a point where your personal pile of crazy gets to be a bit much. Even for your best friends.”
“That’s not quite the whole truth,” prompted Whitley expectantly, tilting her head.
Kipling looked sheepish. “Yeah, well.” He cleared his throat. “My eleventh-hour streak of Cs and Bs, revealin’ me to be a decent student who’d only been pretendin’ all that time to be abysmal? That wasn’t real.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
He seemed unwilling to go on.
“Cannon hacked Darrow’s network for him,” blurted Whitley. “All senior year. Kipling had every test from every teacher ahead of time. Including midterms and finals.”
“Not every teacher,” said Cannon.
She glared at him. “It was still cheating.”
“It was assisting a beloved friend,” he said stonily.
Whitley huffed. “You could say the same thing about what I was doing as the White Rabbit. Everyone thinks I’m the bad person? Look at what you guys were doing.”
Cannon said nothing. For years he had assisted Darrow’s notoriously backward IT department. It wasn’t unusual for him to be summoned from class to help with some bug or networking error. And though he was glaring at Whitley now in obvious annoyance, he didn’t appear to feel in the least bit guilty about this disclosure.
“How did you do it?” I asked him.
Cannon shrugged. “Social engineering. The weakest component in any given network is always the human. I sent a faculty-wide email, a required update for Darrow’s intranet. For Kipling’s teachers I included a RAT. They downloaded the trojan and I became root. It was as easy as untying a shoelace.”
He frowned at the look of disbelief on my face.
“Come on, Sister Bee. You of all people should understand. Darrow-Harker was an obstacle in the way of Kipling’s bright future. Kicked out junior year? He’d have to start over at some second-rate institution. Away from us. It’d look like shit on his record. And anyway, Kipling can’t be measured by such blunt objects as As, Bs, and Cs. No. Kipling is an experience. I had to help him in the best way I could.” He shrugged. “There are the rules of this world, and there is what you do when life comes crashing down around you.”
Cannon stared at me with such a penetrating look, I felt chills inching down my arms. I’d forgotten how intense a presence he could be, how when he focused, he seemed more energy than flesh and bone.
“So that’s it,” said Kipling. “That’s the two-headed monster in my closet who can’t stop drooling.”
“The question is,” Martha whispered, looking him, “will your secret help us change the wake?”
She fell silent, frowning, lost in thought. For a minute no one said a word.
That was what Martha did sometimes—let a question dangle for minutes, sometimes even an hour, before suddenly blurting the answer when everyone else had forgotten the problem.
“I have an idea,” she said.
That was how we came to be parked in the wild beach rose along the empty coastal road at 4:47 in the morning, four minutes before the end of the wake.
Directly across the street was where we’d had the accident—where, according to the Keeper, one Mr. Howard Heyward, age fifty-eight, of 281 Admiral Road, South Kingstown, had smashed his tow truck into our car, condemning us to the Neverworld, where somewhere, in some other dimension of time more real than this one, we were lying inside a totaled car inside a single second waiting to unlock.
Martha knew the exact spot, a hairpin curve twisting one hundred and sixty degrees through dense pine trees. She admitted she’d come back here to inspect it in the Neverworld.
How had it happened? I could hardly remember. Aggressive flashes of headlights blinding me. Hedges of beach rose trembling in the torrential rain. Windshield wipers waving as if in warning. Liquid night. Our drunken laughter spilling everywhere. Honking. Spinning. The car bouncing off the road, leaping into the dark. A loss of gravity.
“He’s a drunk,” Martha said. “He sits in the Raccoon and Hound Saloon in Warwick and drinks twelve Coors Lights. Twelve. Then he climbs behind the wheel. He can hardly stay awake. Nearly crashes into a telephone pole. In the Neverworld, he drives straight past the spot where he hits us. But that marks the end of the eleven point two hours of our wake.”
Rain hammered the roof. The windshield and windows were fogged. I felt as if we were sealed inside a submarine at the bottom of the sea. The radio stuttered classical music.
Only one car had passed us, a blue pickup. Spotting us nestled in the bushes on the side of the road, it braked and backed up. Martha unrolled the window.
“You guys got a flat?” asked a middle-aged man in a hunting vest. “Need a hand?”
“No, thanks,” said Martha. “We’re fine. We’re looking for our lost dog.”
He frowned, baffled by the sight of five teenagers dressed in green hooded ponchos smiling stiffly. With a perplexed grimace and nothing left to say, he drove off.
“Three minutes,” said Martha, checking her watch.