By the time they reached the Castle’s front doors, the cuffs of their jeans were splattered with black slime and their makeup smudged. They stood on the rolling lawn in front of the Castle and picked caterpillars out of each other’s hair. The day had alternated between sunny and gray, a late-afternoon squall had rolled in from the sea, but still the Castle’s marble shone a pearly white.
Maddie found a caterpillar tucked between her sock and sneaker. Penny found one in her sports bra and shrieked. They wheezed with laughter. Maddie was relieved to be dirty. She was sick of trying to look perfect.
“Are you sure we’re allowed to just, like, walk in?” She touched the initials—H. M.—in the center of the wrought-iron doors, which stood open. And looked, she thought, more like the gates of a nineteenth-century asylum than a front entrance.
“I don’t know,” Penny said. “He’s your boyfriend.…”
“Zip it,” Maddie said. She knocked on her head quickly so Penny wouldn’t see, wishing it were true.
She was buzzing with anticipation. Not only would she see Brooks, she was visiting the Castle, the most extravagant home on the island, rumored to have thirty rooms and an indoor saltwater pool. In the winter months when the trees were bare, from the guest room window in White Eagle, she could spot the top of the castle’s stone turrets. Veronica swore that the Marshall Castle had been in the running for Robert Redford’s mansion in The Great Gatsby but that pious Mrs. Marshall refused to have her home turned into a movie set and definitely not for, in Veronica’s words, “a film that celebrated wanton debauchery.” Maddie knew it had been her model for all the towers in the fairy tales her mother had told her and Dom. Her mother had only to speak the word—“castle”—and an image of the Marshall place sprung into Maddie’s mind, as if from one of Jack’s magic seeds. She and Dom had spent many weekend hours walking the woods around the Marshall gate, its marble eagles staring at them hungrily as they listened for the cries of a trapped princess.
Then Brooks was there, framed in the massive doorway, greeting them with a quiet hey. His eyes met hers and she was sure they paused for a beat.
“Welcome to the Castle,” he said and took her hand, pulling her into the airy blue light of the entryway.
They walked through a cavernous hall, the gray stone walls hung with the stuffed heads of huge beasts—deer, moose, and even a bear—whose glass eyes shone under the iron chandelier’s light. A tall glass case held guns of all kinds—silver antiques (was that a bayonet?) and the more recent matte-black steel.
“Holy shit,” Penny whispered as they walked under the arched doorway of the ballroom.
It was like walking into a dream. Maddie felt a shiver of recognition. A zap of déjà vu. Like she’d been there. Or dreamt of it. She stood in the center of the room and looked up, turning in a slow circle.
The sun came out (just for them, she thought) and streamed through the stained-glass windows, painting the enormous domed room with wet brilliant light, making Maddie think again, like she had at the fair, of a kaleidoscope.
She looked up and saw pink-tinged clouds against a blue sky so real it was like the ceiling didn’t exist. Only the edging gave it away. Filigree like icing on a solid-gold cake.
Gray rocks rose up the walls, their craggy tips piercing the rosy sky.
“It’s the sunset at Singing Beach,” she said. “It’s beautiful.”
Brooks was next to her. Her eyes were on the ceiling, tracing the silver lining in each cloud, but she smelled his cinnamon scent. Felt his heat.
“We can’t hang at the beach,” he said. “’Cause of the caterpillars. So I brought the beach to you.”
You, Maddie thought. Me. And it felt as if it were just she and him and he’d conjured the beach from thin air. Like a magician or one of Dom’s gods. All for her. And all hers.
“I hang in here sometimes,” he said. “When the sun is setting. Light a joint and lay on my back.”
Please, she thought, let me do that with you.
“There’s this moment—when the light outside and the light up there is like a perfect match.” He pointed to the stained-glass windows lining the ballroom, alternating with tall white columns draped with spiderwebs. “I guess it’s maybe what heaven looks like.”
“Totally.” Maddie sighed.
She ignored Penny’s eye roll.
“If heaven exists.” He winked.
“Are you an atheist or something?” Penny said. “My mom says your parents are radicals. Got any cool stories about them blowing up colleges or banks and stuff?”
“Pen,” Maddie said. “Quit it with the third degree, ’kay?”
She knew Penny was just being Penny, but what if Brooks had been offended?
“Dude,” Penny said, holding her hands up, “I’m just curious. I’m not going to turn them in to the pigs.”
“I’ve seen the cops on this island,” he said. “Don’t think they’ve ever had to do anything but eat doughnuts and get old ladies’ kitties out of trees.”
“Not,” Penny said. “They’d have a coronary climbing a ladder.”
“That station looks like it was built for some Disney movie,” Brooks added. “Like it’s got gnomes and fairies and shit living in it.”
They were laughing, all three of them, just as Maddie had hoped, and then he gave her fingers a gentle squeeze.
“I’m really happy you’re here.”
“Adorable,” Penny said as she fell into one of the giant black beanbags with a whoosh of air and a cloud of dust.
He was still holding Maddie’s hand and she dared to step forward. She made herself look into his eyes. The lids were heavy, thickly lashed, like a young Sylvester Stallone, and she wondered if this was what people meant by “bedroom eyes” in the old black-and-white movies her mom watched on the weekends. She didn’t want to look away but felt a tickle knocking around in her belly. She couldn’t understand why she felt so nervous when she knew she liked him. A lot a lot.
“Cool!” Penny pointed to the back of the room, where an opera house–style balcony hung like a cozy shelf, draped in thick red and gold velvet tied off with tassels. Penny let out a trilling impersonation of an opera singer, her mouth stretched into a clownish O. Echoes of echoes ricocheted off the tall walls and curved ceiling.
There was a burst of sound from the entryway and Maddie heard Bitsy, “Oh my God! This place is bitchin’!” and the whisper of feet shuffling over the stone grew louder until the whole gang was flooding into the ballroom. Bitsy, Vanessa, and Gabrielle. Gerritt, Ricky, John, Austin, and Rolo. And Spencer, one hand in the pocket of his cargo shorts, the other smacking a tin of tobacco dip against his thigh. Thwack, thwack. He had a baseball cap on—YALE—the brim shaped into a tight arch so Maddie couldn’t see his eyes.
They’d brought treats. Each waited their turn to offer up their goodies to Brooks, along with a fist bump, an up-nod, a hug if you were Bitsy—and the way she pressed her boobs up against Brooks made Maddie squint. Gerritt brought an eighth of kind bud. Ricky a block of tar-black hashish he’d scored at a Grateful Dead concert, wrapped in tinfoil. There was a plastic baggie of shake left over from the shrooms, and John, Austin, and Rolo had gone in on a beer keg.