As she watched him through the flickering flames, she thought she could like him. Enough to let him do the things boys did to the girl they were “going with.” His hair had a cute cowlick that made it stick up in front in a moody I-don’t-give-a-shit way, like River Phoenix, her movie-star crush and the only teen heartthrob poster she’d hung on her bedroom closet door. And Spencer could be funny, and sort of sweet, especially when Gerritt wasn’t around to be impressed.
He wasn’t as handsome as the boy at the fair, she thought. Almost a week had gone by and all the kids talked about was they and them, meaning Leslie Day Marshall and family. While they stood on line for chicken-cutlet sandwiches at the deli and passed a joint down by the dirt parking lot near the docks, as they burned bonfires and tapped kegs, drank cases of beer on their fathers’ boats in the harbor and rollerbladed to town to get more beer, and definitely, she imagined, as they whispered to one another over the phone after curfew. They/Them was a topic even hotter than the almost fight with the West kids, which Gerritt and Spencer and the boys had reenacted again and again until, Maddie thought, it was pure fantasy.
It wasn’t just the kids. She knew the gossip mill had ground its way across the island via summer-camp carpools and chitchat in the supermarket produce aisle. Through the housewives’ call trees, their manicured fingers fiddling with plastic phone cords as that night’s roast marinated. Did you hear they…? Did you see them? So-and-so said they …
They and them were all anyone on the island talked about and Maddie had heard Sandra Weller at the bakery, Donna Rich at the Stop & Shop, and even her own parents claim that it was Leslie Day Marshall and family who had caused Penny’s seizure; that it was they who had carried the gypsy moths to Avalon Island in unimaginable numbers. Them, them, them. Whispers slipping in and out of screen doors, joining until they formed a hue and cry thick enough to strangle the island. As loud as the drone of the caterpillars feeding on the forest. Until it seemed even the caterpillars chanted: Them, them, them.
Of course, Maddie knew the caterpillars (Lymantria dispar dispar, repeat after me) had been lying in wait all winter, cozy in their furred egg sacs tucked in the crooks of trees all over the island. Waiting patiently for their turn. But, as Dom had told her once while they played Gods versus Mortals in the woods, coincidence was kind of boring. And she too wanted to believe in a sense of order, divine providence or whatever—a sign—linking the arrival of Leslie Day Marshall’s family and the metamorphosis of the island, overnight, into a nest of ravenous pests.
It wasn’t like she’d never seen black people. There was the annual school trip to the city to see a musical—plenty of black people walking the crowded streets. She’d watched countless hours of hip-hop videos on MTV, and episodes of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and reruns of The Jeffersons and Fat Albert, and she’d seen Do the Right Thing twice when the movie came to town. Just last week, she’d climbed into Gerritt’s Jeep, so crammed with kids she’d had to sit on Spencer’s lap and feel his boner digging into her thigh. They had driven to the railroad station on the mainland, where double-decker trains shuttled people, mostly men in suits, to the city and back. There were liquor stores there that didn’t card for cases of beer and the cashiers were always black or Hispanic.
But they were here in East Avalon. They would go to their schools; play on their teams; dance at their prom; and suck on the ends of joints passed at their parties. Leslie Marshall and family would share the domed dining room at the Oyster Cove Country Club, where the only blacks were valets and cleaning women and busboys. It was, after all, Maddie had heard, Admiral and Mrs. Marshall who had founded the club.
Bitsy wouldn’t quit talking about what she kept calling the fight.
“Like,” Bitsy said, “I’m going to let some lowlife from Loserville…”
“Screw those skanks!” Penny shouted over the popping and spitting bonfire. Maddie saw she was already drunk—her words slurring, strands of lank hair stuck to her sweaty forehead.
“Don’t shoot your load yet, Penelope dear. You almost got us beat back there,” Bitsy said.
Maddie was relieved to see Penny back in her place. The awkward duckling.
Then Bitsy laughed, shook her head, and said, “Damn, girl. You got some serious balls.”
“Serious balls.” Vanessa snorted. When had Maddie ever heard Vanessa give someone a compliment?
It made her feel like a monster, envying her sick friend. Her best friend. Penny was the girl she had slept head-to-toe with on sleepover nights when they filled black-and-white composition books—slam books—with their first names followed by the last names of their crushes. Curlicued script and every i dotted with a bubble. Even better, a heart. She had watched Penny carve the initials of her first kiss into the fleshy part of her own thigh (RB, Ricky Bell, behind the maintenance shed at school), rubbing Penny’s back when the X-Acto knife broke through skin and blood and tears rose. She and Penny had shared plenty of firsts that year—first cigarette, first joint, and their first leg shave, passing the can of strawberry-scented foam back and forth on the deck of Penny’s parents’ kidney-shaped pool.
She trusted Penny, who’d been in the backseat of Maddie’s father’s station wagon that rainy afternoon a few months back when he’d slapped Maddie across the face. He’d caught them at the Shore Multiplex on the mainland with two Jewish boys Penny had met at a bar mitzvah in Rosedale. Penny had sworn cross my heart, hope to die she wouldn’t tell, especially not her parents, who might get that pervy school social worker Mr. Frederick involved. Maddie’s mother had warned her, and Dom, of what might happen if either told someone, anyone, about their father. That they—the school, the police … who exactly they were, Maddie didn’t know—would take them away. Penny had kept her promise and Maddie owed her for that.
Pink Floyd blasted from the Bronco’s subwoofers and even then the new sound, the ca-cacking of the caterpillars’ pincers sinking into the new leaves in the forest behind the dunes, threatened to overpower the music.
“Get them off!” Bitsy screamed. “Get them off me!”
Gerritt peeled the bristled bugs from Bitsy’s Wildcats sweatshirt and tossed them into the bonfire, where each one burst with a spark and a sizzle. Maddie couldn’t tell if Bitsy wanted an excuse for Gerritt to lay his hands on her as his boys looked on hungrily, or if their fearless leader was truly scared of a few caterpillars. Maddie tried not to flinch each time she found one squirming on her but the rest of the girls, even Penny, seemed to relish the role of damsel in distress. The tiny monsters gave the girls a chance to play screeching victim. The boys, hero.
After a dozen bonfire-fried caterpillars, Gerritt announced it was time to bounce. Spencer volunteered his house—his parents, like most of the east islanders, were at the dinner party. “Getting shitfaced and eating too many pigs in a blanket,” Spencer said. There was that sense of humor, Maddie thought. He walked past her, slipped a long finger into a belt loop on her jean shorts, and tugged so she twirled, her bare feet swiveling in the cool sand.