They had chased shots of Absolut stolen from Penny’s older sisters’ stash with pink cans of Mrs. Whittemore’s Tab, and Penny, who pretended not to give one shit about her looks, let Maddie rub blush into her ruddy cheeks and dab shadow on her lids, so she looked more like a girl who belonged in Bitsy Smith’s crew and less like the ugly duckling of the five Whittemore girls—all blond, blue-eyed, and Ivy League–bound beauties, a living ad for Avalon Island.
As she had combed through Penny’s thinning hair, her Twin Turbo blow-dryer filling the room with the scent of singed scalp, strands came loose until the oriental carpet was coated in fine gold threads. She knew it was only a matter of time before Penny would have to wear a wig.
Penny had been far beyond the margins of Bitsy’s clique when a seizure in sixth-period chemistry led doctors to the tumor in her brain. A status that had scored Penny overnight popularity, and an invitation to join Bitsy’s crew—penned in Bitsy’s own bubbly script on her personalized stationery. Good for one official membership in the FRESHEST DOPEST gang of bitches at East High! When Maddie had opened her own locker, the same rainbow-print envelope had fallen to the floor. She’d been sure it was a prank. Like in that TV after-school special where the fat girl is invited into the sorority only to be humiliated half-naked in front of their brother fraternity. She knew she had Penny and her cancer to thank for her place in Bitsy’s clique, and reminded herself of this when Penny’s klutzy jokes fell flat and Maddie felt the urge to shush her, or, worse, tell her to shut it for once.
Penny insisted her doctors were optimistic she’d be plowing across the lacrosse field in no time, carrying the East High Wildcats to another county championship. And how serious could it be, Maddie thought, when there were other sick kids, especially on the west side, where her father’s side of the family—the LaRosas—lived, near the factory and commercial streets crowded with gas stations and car washes and shops like her uncle Carmine’s garage, Panther Autobody?
The fairway was packed. No surprise, she thought, the east islanders turning out big only days after graffiti—black, dripping, three-foot-tall letters—scarred the steps of City Hall, and, more shocking, the tall stone obelisk (Bitsy had a bunch of nicknames for it—“The Shaft,” “Dick Tower,” “Needle Dick”) in the center of Town Square, a memorial to pilots killed in battle flying Grudder planes.
GRUDDER IS CANCER
GRUDDER KILLS
Maddie had seen the words herself, only a few hours before the factory sent men to blast the memorial with a power washer, drape Needle Dick with wreaths of red, white, and blue carnations, and plant like a hundred flags around the monument. A little much, she thought. Like they were asking to get tagged a second time. She guessed she wasn’t alone in hoping the graffiti bandit (that’s what the kids were calling him) would strike again. On Avalon, rules were rarely broken, and the thrill of such a blatant up yours to Grudder felt like a jump-start to the summer. Like anything was possible.
Even the old men who ran Grudder, some of them navy men like her grandfather, made an appearance that night. Sure enough, she saw they were trying extra hard—navy blues knife-edge creased, clusters of medals polished so high they flashed under the carnival lights. An FU back at the graffiti bandit shitting on Old Ironsides in her own backyard.
Bitsy led them past a group of moms Maddie recognized from the PTA, their blond helmets varnished with Aqua Net. Maddie tasted the metallic tang. A wall of humidity had rolled in from the Sound that morning and the ladies of East Avalon, Maddie included, had blown out their hair, and, in some cases, like mouthy Vanessa, who had natural corkscrew curls, used a hot iron.
Bitsy had lectured new recruits Maddie and Penny on the kind of beauty that made East girls. Curls are too ethnic. Leave the kinks to the Hispanic girls in Avalon Point near the ferry landing and the Jews in Rosedale on the mainland where Maddie’s family ordered Chinese takeout.
Do not go ape shit with the makeup, Bitsy had preached. God forbid they look like the big-haired, gum-snapping West Avalon girls, who lined their lips with brown pencil, caked on the foundation, and hung out at the Walt Whitman shopping center on the mainland because they had nothing better to do. Mall maggots, Bitsy called them. Now an official East girl, Maddie learned she had a duty to mock the West High kids. Even if her cousins, the twins Vinny and Enzo, went to West High. Even if her uncle Carmine owned the busiest auto body shop on the west side.
She knew some might say she’d always been an East girl, having lived on the east side her whole life, and behind the gates of one of its grandest estates, but she felt her otherness, knew she wasn’t east or west but caught between. Every month, she watched her mother sit at the kitchen table and write out a check for a single dollar in her shaky cursive—to Colonel and Mrs. Robert Pencott—and stuff it in an envelope addressed to her grandparents’ condo in Florida. A reminder that, although, like her mother, Maddie had never known another home, they were temporary tenants in the cramped groundskeeper’s cottage squatting like a forest mushroom in the shadow of her grandparents’ nine-bedroom limestone Tudor, White Eagle.
She watched Penny take T. rex–size steps in her high-heeled sandals, reassurance that at least she wasn’t most out of place in Bitsy’s crew. While Penny’s horsey teeth and woman-wide hips threw their herd symmetry off-kilter—she didn’t even pop her zits!—it guaranteed Maddie was the good recruit, Bitsy’s star pupil. But as they passed the panicked squeals of the pig race, she felt the jagged half-heart charm under her shirt and felt a prick of guilt. For her sixteenth birthday, Penny had given her one of those Best Friends Forever necklaces from Piercing Pagoda at the mall, and together they’d cracked the charm in two.
They found their brother pack at the Hoop Shoot game. The cluster of East boys Bitsy and her girls took turns dating and dumping gathered around Gerritt Driscoll, the boys’ version of Bitsy, as he shot basket after basket. Yellow paper coupons spilled onto the torn grass. Enough, Maddie guessed, for a dozen sad-eyed pandas. Gerritt scored and the boys let out a roar, snapping their fingers against the canisters of mint-flavored Kodiak tobacco dip they packed between their lower lips and gums.