I laughed. It seemed like the start of the first true conversation that night.
Kipling and I had always been close. Tall and lanky, with rust-red hair and “an ancient gentleman face”—as he described himself—he was the most fun stuffed into a single person I’d ever met. He was eccentric and strange, like some half-broken talisman you’d find on a dusty shelf at the back of an antiques store, hinting at a harrowing history and good luck. He was gay, though claimed to be more interested in a story well told than in sex, and saw Darrow more as a country club than as any institution in which he was meant to learn something. A study date in the library with Kipling meant constant interruption for his anecdotes and observations about life, friends, and the host of colorful characters populating his tiny hometown of Moss Bluff, Louisiana—like we weren’t holed up in muggy cubicles stressed about SATs, but relaxing on a porch shooing flies. While he was as rich as the others (“defunct department store money”), he had had what he called a “busted childhood,” thanks to his scary mom, Momma Greer.
Little was actually known about Momma Greer, apart from the details Kipling let slip like a handful of confetti he loved to toss into the air without warning. When he was a toddler she locked him alone for days in Room 2 of the Royal Sonata Motel (“ground floor by the vendin’ machines so she could sneak out without payin’?”), nothing to eat but a stash of Moon Pies, no company but Delta Burke selling bangles on QVC. Her negligence had led to a pit bull, chained up in a backyard, attacking Kipling when he was five, biting off three fingers on his left hand, and leaving him with a “mini shark bite” on his chin—disfigurations he paraded like a Purple Heart.
“Just call me Phantom of the Opera,” he’d say, gleefully fanning his severed hand in front of your face. When the court finally removed Kip from his mom’s custody, sending him to live with an infirm aunt, he kept running away to try to get back to Momma Greer.
Last I’d heard she was in a mental institution in Baton Rouge.
I wanted to ask how his year had been, but at that moment, Whitley, in true Whitley fashion, came over and without a word grabbed my wrist, pulling me through the crowd. She’d come to some understanding with the doorman. He let me in without a ticket, stamping my hand, and then we were all at a reserved table in the front watching a girl with stringy hair pretend she was Kurt Cobain.
It was strange. The drummer looked like Jim. I wasn’t sure anyone else noticed, but he looked like Jim’s younger brother, all milk-chocolate eyes and bedhead, the rueful air of a banished prince. It was deafening inside, too loud to talk, so all of us just stared at the band, lost in the swamps of our thoughts.
Maybe I was the only one lost. Maybe they’d all had amazing experiences in college, which had shrunk what had happened to us in high school, turned even Jim’s death into a faded T-shirt washed ten thousand times.
Once upon a time at Darrow, they’d been my family. They were the first real friends I’d ever had, a collection of people so vibrant and loyal that, like some child born into a grand dynasty, I couldn’t help but be awed at my luck. We’d been a club, a secret society all the other students at Darrow eyed with envy—not that we even paid attention. Friendship, when it runs deep, blinds you to the outside world. It’s your exclusive country with sealed borders, unfair distribution of green cards, rich culture no foreigner could understand. To be cut off from them, exiled by my own volition as I had been for the past year, felt cheap and unsettled, a temporary existence of suitcases, rented rooms, and roads I didn’t know.
Jim’s death had been the earthquake that swallowed cities. Although I had spent the past year certain my friends knew much more about it than they’d let on, I also knew with every passing day the truth was drifting farther out of reach. I’d checked Whitley’s Snapchat and every now and then I saw the four of them together. They looked so happy, so nonchalant.
Like nothing had happened.
Yet now, I could see that the dynamic between them had changed.
Kip kept drumming his disfigured hand on the table. Whitley kept checking her phone. Martha seemed to be in an unusually bad mood, throwing back shots the bartender kept sending to our table—something called the Sinking of the General Grant, which tasted like crude oil. I caught her staring at me once, her expression faintly accusatory. I smiled back, but she turned away like one of those jungle plants that shrivel at the faintest touch, refusing to look at me again. Once, as Cannon leaned forward to whisper something to Whitley, he tucked her hair behind her ear, which made me wonder if they were back together. Then it seemed more habit than anything else.
When the opening band finished, I wanted to disappear. I wanted to take a taxi back to Wincroft, climb into my dad’s truck, drive off, and never look back. What had I expected—for the truth to be right there, obvious as a giant weed growing among tulips, waiting for me to yank it out?
But I stayed. I stayed for the next band, the band after that. I drank the Moscow Mules Whitley put in front of me. I let Kipling pull me to my feet, and I danced the Charleston with him, and the fox-trot, letting him spin me into the beach bums, and the prepsters, and the Harley-heads under the shaking paper lanterns and posters of sunken ships.
Just a little while longer, I kept thinking, and I’ll bring up Jim.
When the next band finished, Whitley wanted to go back to Wincroft, only no one could find Cannon. As it turned out, he was in the bar’s back alley, helping a girl who’d had too much to drink and was passed out by the fire exit.
“Here comes Lancelot,” said Whitley.
Perched along the railing, we watched while Cannon tracked down—with the efficiency of a lobbyist working Capitol Hill—the girl’s missing friends, purse, sandals, and iPhone. He even located her hair clip, which he used to gently pin back her hair so she’d stop throwing up on it, which led the girl’s newly located, equally drunk friends to stare up at him in wonder.
“Are you human, dude?”
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
“Who are you?”
Cannon ran a hand through his hair. “I’m Batman.”
“Here we go again,” sighed Whitley.
Cannon was not handsome. He was slight, with dirty blond hair and pale, out-of-focus features. But he had atomic intensity, which never failed to shock and awe when unleashed upon the world. Moving like a highly charged ion, capable as a machine gun, the first week of freshman year Cannon hacked Darrow’s intranet to display its flaws (becoming the school’s de facto tech guru). He revamped the decrepit sculpture garden and the wrestling gym. He was class president, and organized marches, marathons, and fund-raisers for endangered species and girls’ rights. Cannon was the first to admit that his outgoing, sociable nature and activism was compensation for being a tongue-tied computer geek as a child, worshipping Spielberg movies, eighties pop songs by the Cure, and Ray Kurzweil, no friends to speak of but an imaginary fly named Pete who lived inside his computer. He was adopted, raised by a single mother, a judge in the superior court of California. And while at first glance having Whitley Morrow as his girlfriend—besting Darrow’s country club boys who were IIIs and had middle names like Chesterton—seemed like a mistaken case of the princess accidentally ending up with the sidekick, the more you knew Cannon, the more you realized the role of prince was far too trivial for him. He was the king—at least, that was what he was aiming for. He was the most silently ambitious person I’d ever met.
“Any more distressed damsels you need to save?” Whitley asked as Cannon strode back over, having helped the girl and her stumbling friends into an Uber.
He held out his arms in mock triumph. “The bartender looks like he’s coming down with a head cold. But no. My work here is done.”