“Puh-lease don’t start with your what-ifs, Maddie,” Bitsy said. “Carpe diem, bitches!”
Bitsy, Vanessa, and Penny high-fived. Maddie knew she’d have no chance getting a word in now.
“Dude!” Spencer yelled from the floor, his hands cupped round his mouth. “You ready?”
Austin volunteered to go first. Or, Maddie guessed, had been nominated by Gerritt to go first. He held the rope taut so the chandelier lifted with a creak loud enough to be heard over the music. The crowd of kids under the balcony groaned as Austin climbed onto the lip of the balcony, the tips of his Teva sandals peeking over the edge.
The music stopped. It was the first time, in all the nights at Neverland, that the beat had stopped short, and it left a hollow ache in Maddie’s chest.
“Ready?” Austin shouted.
He swayed back and forth and the kids’ oooohhhh sounded like the roar of a crowd’s wave at a ball game.
Brooks yelled, “Get the fuck down!”
Austin jumped, locked his legs around the rope, and swung out over their heads like a swashbuckling pirate. The kids screamed as Austin lurched above, and then Brooks’s hands were pulling her away from the center of the room, and she heard him curse, “Jesus fucking Christ.” Austin let go in time to fall into the beanbag chairs someone had tossed under the chandelier. His legs buckled but he bounced up to stand, lifting his arms in the air and letting loose a roar like he was one of Dom’s WWF wrestlers.
Brooks ran toward Austin, one arm slack behind him like he was ready to throw a punch, but Enzo caught him just in time. Locked an arm around Brooks’s neck to hold him back. Her cousin whispered into Brooks’s ear and, slowly, that hot rage warping his handsome face vanished. Vinny gripped Austin’s forearm and pulled him toward the ballroom entrance.
“Me and Austin are going to have a smoke outside. Everybody chill.” He winked at Maddie and she mouthed thank you.
“Oh. My. God,” Bitsy said as she slid a cardboard box out from one of the shadowed corners. “Has this been here the whole time? Or did I just find a real live treasure box?”
“Yo,” Enzo said, shoving Bitsy aside and hoisting the box, his forearms flexing. “What the hell is that doing here?”
Her cousin looked at Brooks and the two boys exchanged a look Maddie didn’t understand. But she knew something was wrong.
“What’s in it?” Penny asked.
A few kids shuffled forward to investigate.
Enzo, still holding the box, elbowed the circle away.
“Back the fuck up,” he said.
The room fell silent and Maddie felt her pulse in her ears.
She saw Brooks was focused on the cardboard box. Like it was something he didn’t want them to see.
“Dude,” Brooks said. “I don’t know how that got there.” He stopped when he saw Enzo’s face.
Her cousin was scaring her. He’d looked like that last Christmas when he and Vinny, drunk on bottles of Uncle Carmine’s homemade wine, argued over a poker game and ended up on the floor next to Nonna’s dining-room table, slugging it out. Vinny had lunged for a steak knife before Maddie’s dad had knocked his hand away from the table and dragged him, still swinging, out into the cold, dark night.
“Screw this.” Enzo set the box on the floor.
“Oooh!” Gabrielle pulled something out.
It was a can of spray paint. The kind Maddie had used last fall to help decorate the Homecoming Day float.
“It’s arts-and-crafts time, kiddies!” Bitsy said.
“Can we?” Penny asked Brooks. Like a little kid, Maddie thought, begging for a cookie. “Can we paint the walls?”
“No way,” Maddie began. Not the exquisitely painted walls she’d fallen in love with on her first visit to the Castle. The craggy rocks of Singing Beach rising. The rosy clouds with their silver linings.
“It’s fine,” Brooks said. He sounded tired. “We’ll be painting in here next week. My mom wants to cover up this old stuff.”
“Seriously?” Rolo asked.
Maddie saw Rolo too had a can in his hands. Everyone did. Poised and ready.
“Have at it,” Brooks said, waving at the walls. He didn’t sound like himself. She wondered if she should try to stop them.
Bitsy was the first to skip over to the western wall, where the tangerine sun sank into the painted sea. Maddie wanted to yell No! as the paint sprayed with a hiss. Vanessa grabbed a can and then Gerritt and Ricky, and even Penny. Last, Enzo, with a pissed-off shrug. Maddie and Brooks stood in the middle of the ballroom, listening to the shhhh as the kids covered the walls with their names, and the names of their crushes; with hearts and skulls and rainbows; with peace signs and anarchy signs; and swearwords and smiley faces. Black paint on black paint until it seemed to Maddie that the ballroom grew midnight-dark.
Brooks took Maddie’s hand and she didn’t pull away. She didn’t care if her cousins told her dad—what was a beating compared to this? This feeling. He handed her a can of paint with a sad smile and they joined in. Someone turned the CD player on and Rage Against the Machine blasted from the speakers—Killing in the name of! / Some of those that work forces, are the same that burn crosses—raw and angry, and the black light went on, set to strobe mode so a blinding white light pulsed with the music, and the walls came to life like animals, the shapes of the words throbbing—FUCK YOU. I HATE YOU. LOVE ME. She turned in a slow circle, searching for Brooks, wading through the oily fumes. She couldn’t tell one person from the next. SAVE ME. DIE AVALON. CARPE DIEM.
There were bodies on the dance floor, thrashing, flying at one another like winged monsters in fairy tales. Elbowing, kneeing, shoving, and stomping.
OBLIVION. HOPE. GRUDDER KILLS. GRUDDER IS CANCER.
The vandal. He, she, was there. In their ballroom. Those were the words sprayed across the island. Here, in their Neverland. A hand found hers and pulled her out of the chemical cloud, out the side door. She gulped air, coughed and spat to clear her lungs. But the poison was in her nose, coating her tongue. She dropped to her knees in the damp grass and rubbed her hands through it, used the moisture to wipe at her lips.
“You okay?” Brooks was talking but she was too dizzy to lift her head, sure she would puke.
Her head spun. From the fumes, the strobe, what she saw on the ballroom walls. The vandal was inside.
She took a deep steadying breath.
“Let’s go down here,” she said, standing, pointing to the rows of red roses that looked black in the moonlight. “Where it’s quieter.”
How could she tell him the truth? That she was worried her cousins would see them and tattle to her dad, who’d beat her. Because he was a racist. Because we all are, she thought. She had made a promise to herself, that she would stop hiding her feelings for Brooks, but that was before she saw those words dripping on the wall.
“That was so fucked up in there.” He paced up and down the rows of roses, talking more to himself than to her. “What is happening? I don’t get how this could’ve happened.”
“What?” she said. “I don’t understand.”
“Shit! I pricked my finger on a thorn.”