He saw how life on the island would play out. What a show it would be. With Leslie Marshall center stage.
She turned away and cried, “Oh my God!” her outstretched arms reaching for two women—a wispy blonde and a horsey brunette, both in white sundresses. Pamela something-or-other and Evelyn something-else. The three women double air-kissed, their spray-stiffened hair unmoving. A man in plaid shorts stepped forward and squeezed Jules’s hand so his knuckles cracked, introducing himself as Captain so-and-so. Jules’s slick palm slipped out of the man’s grasp and he was trying to think of something to say to this man with the buzzed hair and puffed-out chest, when a cry from Eva saved him.
A bristled caterpillar crawled up her white sundress. She screeched, “Buggie! Go away, buggie!”
Then Death Metal Kid bumped Preppy Kid’s chest and Jules spotted the holster around Death Metal Kid’s waist, the silver steel winking—it was there, he saw it with his own eyes—and he gripped Brooks by the shoulders, the ice-cream cone falling to the grass, and dragged him down the fairway toward the parking lot. He heard his father’s voice telling him to run, reminding him, as he had when Jules was a kid, that only a fool froze when his gut told him to hightail it.
It was better to stay scared, Jules thought.
Maybe if Caesar had stayed scared, he would’ve seen those knives coming.
PART TWO
The Feeding
Early June 1992
The gypsy moth was introduced into North America in 1869 from Europe. étienne Léopold Trouvelot imported the moths, with the intent of interbreeding gypsy moths with silk worms to develop a silkworm industry. The moths were accidentally released from his residence in Medford, Massachusetts.
As noted in The Gypsy Moth (1896) by Forbush and Fernald, the gypsy moth was considered a nuisance just ten years after their release. The first major outbreak occurred in 1889, and Forbush and Fernald recount the extent of devastation: all the trees being defoliated and caterpillars covering houses and sidewalks and raining down upon residents.
—The Gypsy Moth: Research Toward Integrated Pest Management, United States Department of Agriculture, 1981
3.
Dom
Dom held the Dixie cup of cold water over his mom who lay on her bed snoring—her pale fleshy arms flung out to her sides like she’d washed ashore after a shipwreck.
“Go ahead,” his sister, Maddie, said with an extralong sigh. “She’s so not going to wake up on her own.”
They had pulled the thick bedroom curtains open. The morning sun ignited the dusty bedroom furniture so it glittered. Still, his mom refused to wake up.
Dom had that ache in his gut. Like he needed a gulp from one of the bottles he’d stolen from the bar in his grandparents’ house or he’d shit his pants.
“Just give me the cup already,” Maddie huffed.
He knew, behind her pissy attitude, she was just as scared by the crap news he’d delivered that morning.
Their grandparents were coming. The Colonel and Veronica could arrive any minute.
Maddie sounded just like those girls she’d gone with to the fair. She’d stolen a bottle of gin for them, from the same bar in their grandparents’ house next door. Dom had heard it sloshing around in her backpack last night and had known she’d get sick. She was a freaking lightweight, his sister. Not him. He’d been sneaking sips, then shots, and now thermoses full for a year now, since he started seventh grade at the East Avalon Junior/Senior High, an underweight kid with girlishly wide hips in a land of giant jocks searching for freaks to humiliate.
“Whatever,” he said. “I heard you puking your guts up this morning. So I let you sleep. Instead of banging on your door and telling you I told you you’d get sick from drinking.”
“Um, you just did, genius.”
“Did what?”
“Told me told you so.”
They laughed. He loved his sister’s laugh. Not that fake giggle when other people were around. The real thing. He wished they could leave Mom, leave the cottage. Before their grandparents arrived. But where could they go? He’d spent a few nights in the woods after his dad chased him out the front door, belt in hand. But Maddie wouldn’t want to sleep in the woods like Dom did some summer nights. Not now with the caterpillars hatching. Where did kids go when they couldn’t live one more day at home waiting for shit to blow up?
A string of spit hung from his mom’s parted lips. Her blond lashes were crusty with dried sleep goo. He tried not to see the dark shape of her nipples under the sheer nightgown. What would their grandmother Veronica say if she saw her only child in such a sorry-ass state? She was always reminding him and Maddie that their mother had been runner-up to Miss Avalon 1967. As if, he thought, their grandmother was reminding herself.
“Ready?” Maddie asked.
“I guess.”
He let his too-long bangs curtain his eyes. His mom made him get bowl cuts at The Hair Cuttery—even though, duh, it made the teasing at school worse. He wanted his hair short on the sides, long on top, sculpted into waves like Brandon on Beverly Hills, 90210. Despite the extra ragging it was sure to get him at school, from MJ Bundy and Victor Hackett and all the senior douchebags who waited at Dom’s locker and followed him to homeroom, calling him “faggot” and “homo,” hands flopping limp-wristed as they lisped, Do you take it up the butt, LaRosa?
“Look.” Maddie’s voice was sweeter. “You know I don’t want to do this. Right?”
“No shit, Sherlock,” he said.
“But the Colonel’s going to be here soon. Real soon. Maybe even today.”
“Veronica too.”
It was their grandmother he dreaded. Her relentless correction. No slouching. No slurping. Her use of we to scold him, as if she and he were pals: We ask to be excused from the table. We don’t lick ice cream off our spoon.
The night before, when his grandmother’s raspy smoker’s voice followed the answering machine beep, her proper tone filling the small cottage, he hadn’t picked up the phone.
“Surprise! It’s Mommy and Daddy. Expect us sometime tomorrow, Ginny dear. We’ve stopped in North Carolina for the night. At a dreadful Howard Johnson.”
She let out a phlegmy cough and he heard a voice in the background—his grandfather. The Colonel.
“Smells like mildew. And the dust! Howard was a good friend of Daddy’s, as you know. It’s a good thing he isn’t alive to see this place. Make sure you tidy up, dear. We know how Daddy can get.”