She had dubbed the ballroom “Neverland.” When the kids left the Castle every morning near dawn, knowing it was just a matter of hours until they were back, they said, “See you back in Neverland.” The name—her name—stuck. It was, for Maddie, a land between lands. Between childhood and whatever came next. A land between consciousness and coma, or, as Vinny liked to say, fucked up into oblivion! which sounded right to Maddie, because it was like they climbed through a secret door into another world—far from the caterpillars, their parents, the shitty things that had happened to them, and, maybe, she hoped, the even shittier things that would happen.
It was the twenty-first of June and Bitsy announced a Summer Solstice party. The girls were to be nymphs, sprites, and fairies, so Maddie wore her middle-school graduation dress—long white silk meant to look wrinkled. She bobby-pinned two tiger lily blooms into her hair and dug through her mom’s makeup bag for lipstick. Revlon’s Toast of New York—a perfect brown-red she knew Bitsy would approve of.
She waited until her dad left the cottage for her uncle’s garage (or so he said) before painting her lips in the bathroom.
She puckered. Pouted. Parted her lips and leaned forward so her little bit of cleavage was visible, squeezing her elbows to double it. She looked like a woman in a painting. Like a woman going to a Summer Solstice ball at a castle. Dating the guy who lived in that castle. Well, really, he lived in the cottage next door to the castle, and she wasn’t sure if they were officially going together, but she knew she liked him.
As Penny had said, and she was the only one who knew, “You like him a lot, Mads. A lot a lot.”
She left her sneakers outside the ballroom, and the hem of her dress kissed her naked toes. She stood in the archway. The ballroom was flooded with chemical light. She saw herself in one of the gold-framed mirrors. Her white dress lit an alien blue by the black light. A demigoddess meant to haunt the woods. She wanted Brooks to see her.
Neverland was a home away from home for her and the kids. Who could blame them when the island was crawling with caterpillars, when their parents and grandparents, and every islander over the age of eighteen, it seemed, were obsessed with the graffiti that turned up every few days or so, in black paint and now a new vibrant blood-red. GRUDDER KILLS. GRUDDER IS CANCER. Across the automatic doors at the Stop & Shop. Down the walkways of the post office and the public library, and, in a bold move that rattled even the oldest war-hardened vets, sprayed across the front door of the VFW on Main Street.
At least once a week, the memorial got tagged in Town Square—Bitsy’s “Needle Dick.” The Grudder janitorial team showed up and powerwashed the tall gray stone spotless. The East Avalon police station had all ten officers on back-to-back duty and the vandals were, Maddie had heard the Colonel say, “making them look like goddamned fools!” It was impossible to avoid listening in on the islanders’ worried talk. Why is this happening? In line for cones at Baskin-Robbins and at the box office to see Batman Returns. As if, she thought, they were asking Why us? Why me?
How could they be so clueless, when she, all the kids, knew people from east to west were filling the oncology wards at St. Isaac’s Hospital on the mainland? Rows of them, Penny and Maddie’s uncle Carmine included, sitting side by side with chemo tubes stuck in their arms. The supermarket sold out of bottled water daily. There was something on the island making people sick. Even back in grade school, she and Dom had flicked lit matches at the oil slicks floating on Lake Makamah. The water lit with a swoosh, the flame blue-hot and unwavering even in the sea breeze.
So they escaped to Neverland each night. They played kids’ games. Tag; Red Light, Green Light; Mother May I?; and Chicken—the girls on the strongest boys’ shoulders, swatting at one another until someone screamed Uncle! Every night—from dusk to near dawn—they danced, drank, smoked, swallowed E, and laid paper tabs of acid in the shape of suns on their tongues; they made out and smoked and danced even more as Brooks spun record after record, matching beats so perfectly Maddie couldn’t tell where one record ended and the next began.
They made the ballroom their home. East and West kids. Gerritt and his boys were now pals with her cousins, and Bitsy quit threatening to claw Carla’s eyes out. Enzo and Vinny turned into valuable members of their community, scoring enough ecstasy to keep the kids rolling all summer. With Ricky’s supply of kind bud, the acid Gabrielle got from an ex off at college upstate, John Anderson’s fake ID bringing in cases of beer, and Brooks DJing, the ballroom turned into their own private rave.
Everyone had donated something for what Bitsy named the renovation. Which made it sound, Maddie thought, just how it felt—a revolution. Vanessa, two neon inflatable chairs snatched from her parents’ pool deck. Penny dragged in a dusty shag carpet she’d found in the shed behind her dad’s golf clubs. Rolo’s Grateful Dead tapestries hung behind the turntables and when the black light switched on (the treasured glass tube had come from Ricky’s pool cabana, a.k.a., “the drug den”), the smiling kerchief-wearing Deadhead bears danced amid psychedelic swirls. There was a tent Bitsy dubbed the “make-out room,” lit by two tall halogen lamps saved from the garbage dump, and Maddie contributed velvet sofa pillows she’d found in White Eagle’s garage, and a soft chenille bedspread with a pom-pom hem they stretched out on the floor, so a stoned Maddie felt like Hera on Mount Olympus lounging on a tiger pelt in front of an ever-burning hearth. Plus three lava lamps, two round rattan chairs, a pile of faded quilts, and enough pipes, bowls, and bongs for a hundred ravers, including a water bong Ricky had made from a plastic office cooler. Even Vinny and Enzo pitched in—sacks of stolen coconuts slung over their shoulders like Santa Claus (Vinny worked part-time as a bag boy at Stop & Shop). They used somebody’s dad’s machete to crack open the furred fruit, pieces scattering across the ballroom floor, and drank straight from the shell so milk dribbled down their chins. After all the meat was eaten, Vinny scooped the shells clean with his bowie knife and they became ashtrays.
“Mads!” Penny crushed her in a hug. She had a joint clamped between her teeth and it fit with her gypsy costume. Puffy parachute pants and big gold hoops on loan from Carla. The costume had been Maddie’s idea. A silk paisley scarf (borrowed from Mrs. Whittemore) kept Penny’s new blond wig in place. Carla had taught Penny how to draw a cat eye with eyeliner and two pieces of Scotch tape, and Maddie thought she looked pretty in an I Dream of Jeannie kind of way.