In the cold blue light, she saw how thin Penny had grown, her cheekbones like steep hills. Her teeth a ghostly blue. She thought of asking how she felt but knew that would just piss Penny off. She’d made it clear she wanted to be treated like everyone else, like she wasn’t sick.
Brooks was behind the turntables, weaving a slippery electronic pulse into a thumping house beat that tickled deep in Maddie’s chest, urged her to rush to the dance floor. She made her way to Brooks, who saw her and nodded, a hand pressing his headphones close, the other sliding the cross-fader as he looped one record into the next. She passed a trashed Bitsy lying on the floor, rocking back and forth in one of her mom’s strapless ivory gowns. She was rolling on E, Maddie could tell from her clenched jaw. A choker of diamonds winked on Bitsy’s neck and Maddie guessed she’d hacked into Captain and Mrs. Smith’s house safe to borrow it.
The East boys had wussed out and worn their usual—khaki shorts and rugby tees, except for Rolo who had stuffed his thick waist into a pleated cummerbund that looked decades old. A tall felt purple-and-white striped Cat in the Hat topper he’d bought at a Dead show covered his long greasy hair.
Enzo had called Maddie the night before, adorably nervous about what he should or shouldn’t wear. “Think Mad Max meets the Lost Boys,” she suggested, and now she saw that he, Vinny, and their two buddies, Paulie and Tim, had gone all out in tight jeans and muscle tanks, topped by leather jackets and vests, their hair gelled in spikes or slicked back. Black on black.
“Damn, that’s hot,” Gabrielle said as she strutted past, then pulled Vinny away by his leather bolo tie toward some dark corner where they were sure to get hot and heavy.
Maddie had seen plenty of fooling around that month—kids partnering off in the dimly lit ballroom or slipping into a car for a clambake, smoking a joint with the windows shut so the car filled with thick, weed-sweet smoke. Making out on E, she’d learned, from watching Bitsy and Gerritt, Gabrielle and Tim, Vanessa and Enzo (the combos changed every night it seemed), was more than making out. She understood why they called it ecstasy, the lovers’ faces twisting in anguish one minute; euphoria the next. They sniffed and licked each other, ran fingertips up and down each other’s arms, backs, necks, thighs. Like that game they’d all played as kids. Round and Round the Garden, fingers stroking circles into a kid’s palm, walking up to the elbow, the shoulder, the armpit. But no game she’d played as a child looked as delicious as the ones played in the ballroom. She wanted to feel that. With Brooks. But she was too nervous to do anything more than smoke pot, despite the way both Penny and Bitsy were always pushing her, calling her a prude.
Enzo was in the middle of the dance floor, the diamond of blondwood in the center of the ballroom. Every night, her cousin danced until his dark hair was sleek with sweat. Enzo danced like he was the music, shifting moves as seamlessly as Brooks shifted records. He spun on his back and then hopped up to stand, the motion graceful and liquid so he reminded her of a ballet dancer. He was an acrobat too, and most nights, the kids cheered as he threw back handsprings stretching from one corner of the ballroom to the next. Gerritt called him Ninja and it stuck.
She caught Enzo’s eye now and gave him a thumbs-up before he did some footwork so fast it seemed to blur. Rolo was impressed enough to take a break from his Deadhead jig to howl at the gold-trimmed ceiling. Vinny and Enzo were at the Castle day and night—days working for Leslie Marshall doing odd jobs, like cleaning out the dusty rooms so Brooks’s family could move in. Her cousins had a lot to hide from that summer—a sick Uncle Carmine meant an angry Uncle Carmine, and she knew he was home most days instead of at the garage, too weak from the chemo to work on cars. And Aunt Mariana had a hot temper she expressed with a wooden spoon.
She watched Brooks’s long fingers glide the cross-fader left to right on the turntables. She had found a pack of glow-in-the-dark star decals in the back of her closet and used Krazy Glue to stick them to the edge of the table. With the Stop sign Spencer and Austin had liberated from the entrance of East High nailed to the wall behind Brooks’s head—stars and sign lit a spectral blue—it was like looking up at an altar, Brooks their priest. Celestial. That was how the music he spun made her feel, and she knew she wasn’t alone. All the kids, even shy Austin, spent half the night dancing, until the stained-glass windows fogged with the heat of their sweat.
She hadn’t known music like that existed. It wasn’t like the pop music she listened to on the radio—songs with a tune and lyrics so you had to listen and think hard to decode the message. Brooks’s music was about the beat and nothing else. Like the sounds Maddie tapped her foot to without thinking—the steady clunk-clunk of the clothes dryer, the even pachum-pachump of a car’s tire skimming the grooves in the highway on a road trip, and the unmistakable sound of the caterpillars feeding, ca-cack, ca-cack. The beat was as necessary as her heartbeat—boom badam bap, boom badam bap—and the rhythm melted into the air she breathed in and out, the damp heat her arms and legs sliced through, and she learned a vital skill. How to turn her brain off and let her body lead. She danced and danced. Sweat sprayed from the ends of her hair. The thin silk stuck to her back and chest and belly and when she felt Brooks’s eyes on her, she felt a rush more potent and altering than any drug she’d tasted or smoked or snorted. In Neverland, entranced by Brooks’s beats, she was transformed. Like a lucky (or cursed) mortal in Dom’s myths.
Her pulse matching the kicking groove of a new record, she slipped the piece of paper from her pack of Parliaments. She’d folded it into a small square, worried if Enzo spotted her passing it to Brooks, he’d tell her dad. She dropped it on the table next to the turntables and Brooks slipped it into his palm, without looking up from the records, without skipping a beat.
She had scribbled “meet me in the garden in 10” (signing it with a heart) on the folded paper, and was making her way to the ballroom entrance when she saw Bitsy and Penny staring up at the balcony.
Bitsy said, “Yo, someone’s going to die forever young tonight.”
“Boys are stupid,” Penny slurred.
The guys had found a coil of thick boat rope washed up on the beach, and had spent three nights trying to lasso the wrought-iron chandelier. Three nights filled with the boys’ tantrums each time they missed hooking the chandelier. Maddie and the girls—Carla too—laughing until their cheeks ached. She saw now the boys had finally hit gold. Austin, junior captain in the yachting club, had tied a knot he swore was secure.
“I am not,” Vanessa said, “driving those morons to the ER when they fall.”
Maddie looked back at the dance floor, where Brooks was busy spinning.
“You know you want to try it,” Bitsy teased.
“You’re damn right I do,” Vanessa said.
“What if…” Maddie began.