“You’re good, boy.” The Colonel squeezed his shoulder again, even harder this time, and he fought against the pain, willed himself not to pull away. He imagined he was a knight being blessed before a mission, his grandfather’s hand a king’s sword. “In times like this, there are few who can be counted on.”
“Watch yourself out there.” The Colonel pointed to the shadowy woods where the caterpillars chewed and shat so it sounded, Dom thought, like rain falling despite the sun overhead. “There’s more to fear than the witches and wolves your mama told you ’bout in those fairy tales.” The Colonel smiled and it reminded Dom of those same fabled villains. “Those are just stories mommies tell to scare little kids. To make them eat their vegetables and say their prayers and stay out of the woods.”
He pointed a squat finger at Dom.
“It’s up to you to figure out what the real danger is, lieutenant. When you find it, you’ll know. And then you’ll destroy it.”
Champ growled. Then bounded off into the woods, barking.
“Leave it, boy!”
The Colonel marched to where Champ dug, dirt spitting out from behind the dog’s crooked back legs.
“I said, cut it out!” He kicked the dog in the ribs. Champ yelped and ran back toward the house, his head hung low, looking back at his master. Dom’s hand rose to cover his mouth, to stuff in the cry that had almost escaped. His fingers smelled like the fireworks he set off every Fourth of July.
The small larvae of the gypsy moth take to the air and are carried by the wind. The larvae spin silken threads and hang from them, waiting for the wind to blow.
—The Gypsy Moth: Research Toward Integrated Pest Management, United States Department of Agriculture, 1981
According to the United States Department of Agriculture, without intervention, this pest spreads about 13 miles per year. Typically, short distances can be traversed by larva, but there is suspicion that long distance flights are possible. It has been hypothesized that storms carried the larva across Lake Michigan to the western shore, a span of dozens of miles.
—KL Frank, Interpretation of gypsy moth frontal advance using meteorology in a conditional algorithm
16.
Maddie
She was determined to be the first to arrive at the Castle and had made Penny promise to have her mom drop her at the cottage with an hour to spare. So they could pick out outfits and do their hair and makeup. Now that Penny had suffered two seizures, there was no way her parents would let her drive—a rule that made sense to Maddie but outraged Penny.
“I mean, if I’m going to die, I should at least be able to use my learner’s permit!”
They primped in the upstairs bathroom, straightening their hair (Penny’s was noticeably thinner), lining their lips and coating them in Dr Pepper–flavored Lip Smacker. Even plumping out their eyelashes with Maybelline Color Shine! mascara in aquamarine. Maddie remembered Bitsy’s lecture on the kind of subtle beauty that made East girls, but tonight she wanted to stand out. For Brooks.
She was so nervous or excited, or a mix of both, that she wiped her face clean with makeup remover pads and started again.
“Shit!” she slapped her hands on the bathroom counter. “I’m all blotchy.”
“What’s your deal tonight?” Penny said, smiling, because she knew.
She’d told Penny about her skateboard ride home with Brooks. How he’d held her hand. Even pulled her up Snake Hill Road. She hadn’t told Penny about the feeling she got watching Brooks snip off the tip of the honeysuckle flower with his front teeth. How could she explain the unexplainable? Brooks had been right—there just weren’t enough words.
She’d also decided to keep quiet the details about her and Spencer’s botched sex. God, how she wished she could pretend it had never happened. When Spencer hadn’t called her house the day after, and then still hadn’t called three days later, she’d been both relieved and worried. She was dreading seeing him tonight, and had considered keeping Brooks’s invitation to herself. But she’d called Bitsy the night before, using the kitchen phone—the longest cord in the cottage and if she pulled it straight, she could sit on the step outside the front door. Guaranteed privacy. There was no telling what her father would do if he knew she was hanging out with the Marshall boy. The black boy.
In some ways, he was cool, her dad. Didn’t care about curfew. Bought her a pack of maxipads without flinching. But he wanted her to be with someone like him. No Jews. No Hispanics. It was weird, him wanting that, she thought. Him being her dad and all and the last person on earth she could be with. Like that. In that way.
When Bitsy had finally got on the phone, after a whole minute of Captain Smith yelling for her, Maddie had said, “Guess where we’ll be partying tomorrow night.”
“Uck, please tell me it’s not in some basement with a bunch of tools watching porn.”
“Guess again.”
“The beach with the caterpillars?”
“At the Castle!”
Bitsy screamed into the phone so Maddie had to pull the receiver away from her ear.
“Oh. My. Fucking. God. I underestimated you, Mads. Big-time.”
Now she and Penny stood in front of the bathroom mirror surrounded by round, bright lights Maddie’s mom claimed were Hollywood-style.
“You’re beautiful,” Penny said, arranging Maddie’s long hair so it hung over her shoulders, tumbling down her white T-shirt.
She wanted to ask how a girl even knows she’s beautiful. Would a time come when she knew, for sure, either way?
“Thanks, Pen.” She touched her friend’s hand, the one bruised purple and yellow by the IV. Feeling like an ass for complaining about her looks when they both knew Penny’s mom had made an appointment for a fitting at the wig shop in Rosedale.
Dom slammed a fist against the bathroom door. “I got to go!”
“Jeez, all right! Don’t have a cow!” Maddie yelled back.
“Hasta la vista, Dom,” Penny sang as she and Maddie hurried through the front door and into the dusky light.
*
They stood at the entrance to the path leading through the woods between White Eagle and the Castle. It seemed the pulsing of the caterpillars—ca-caaaah, ca-caaaah—grew louder every day.
“You ready?” Maddie asked. “On the count of three, we run.”
“It’s like the end times,” Penny said. “A pox upon your heads!”
“One, two…”
Before she could finish, Penny took off in the long-legged stride she used to outrun girls on the lacrosse field.
“Woo-hoo!” she screamed.
Maddie joined in, “Cowabunga!”
They booked it, leaping over branches, catching themselves when they slipped on the black goo coating the ground. She remembered Veronica’s posh tone—caterpillar excrement.
“Caterpillar excrement!” she yelled, and their laughter bounced off the trees and, for a moment, drowned out the zombie drone of the gypsies that had already become the soundtrack of the summer.