He went to put an arm around Brooks’s shoulder, to show him he wasn’t mad. God forbid he ran from Jules, from his protection—they’d figure it out together, like a family—but the boy pivoted out of reach so fast Jules stumbled. Almost fell. Brooks was walking away. Like Jules was a stranger.
“Get back here!” he shouted, and checked himself. The tent was full of people. He didn’t want to make a scene or call attention to the very reason he was shouting. His boy was the vandal. The villain everyone—from the cross-eyed postmaster to the mad Colonel and even his one ally, Veronica—was looking to string up.
The girl’s pale face looked back as she and Brooks walked away from Jules, vanishing into the inky darkness. Behind him, at the clubhouse, “God Bless America” blared from stereo speakers. The first firework launched into the sky with a hiss of air, and Jules counted one, two, three, before it burst red, white, and blue.
The crowd went ahhh.
When black-and-white egg-laden females emerge, they emit a pheromone that attracts the males. The female has a small gland near the tip of the abdomen which releases the pheromone, with a pumping motion, termed “calling.” It can attract males from long distances, tracking the scent through its erratic flight pattern.
—The Gypsy Moth: Research Toward Integrated Pest Management, United States Department of Agriculture, 1981
33.
Maddie
His lips tasted like the peppermint ice cream they’d shared in the clubhouse dining room.
It had been Maddie’s favorite since she was a girl, when Sunday lunches at the club with her grandparents had meant Shirley Temples with extra maraschino cherries, a club sandwich speared with frilly toothpicks, and peppermint ice cream for dessert. With a stick of chocolate-covered mint. Always served by the club’s restaurant manager Mr. Hickey himself. Something special for the Colonel’s granddaughter.
Lunches at the club had been safer than family meals at home. The Colonel had to play nice. He couldn’t go off on her mom, calling her fat, in front of the islanders. They felt like a real family for a few hours, even if she’d known it was make believe, playing her part, sitting upright and smiling in the satin-sashed dresses her mother insisted she wear because it pleased Veronica. Her grandfather’s friends, most Grudder higher-ups, stopped at their table to crouch down and shake the Colonel’s hand (he never stood the way she’d seen other men do when her grandfather visited a nearby table—men jumping out of their seats to stand like toy soldiers), telling Veronica how lovely she looked, nodding curtly at Maddie’s father who’d always be an outsider, and smiling at her mother, complimenting her pretty new dress. The same men pressed squares of paper into Maddie’s and Dom’s small hands. Crisp twenty-dollar bills folded so many times they were creased like miniature accordions.
She kissed Brooks again. To taste the peppermint, but also to make him stand still—he’d been antsy all day.
Her family was dead. In her mind, at least. They’d been that way since she first stepped into Neverland and heard Brooks’s music. Sure, her dad was in the clubhouse faking fun with people he despised. Her mom was there too—all swollen from her pills and junk food and sadness, stuffed into a flowery dress that belonged on Little House on the Prairie. Pretenders. She and Brooks would never pretend, she promised. They’d be real.
The first firework whistled into the air. The crowd at the clubhouse said ahhh. Maddie remembered the look on Brooks’s dad’s face, his long arms hanging at his sides. Defeated. Sad.
“Maybe we should go back?” It came out like a question. “Your dad seemed super worried.”
“I don’t want to talk to him,” Brooks said, and the hollowness she heard made her worry too.
The slow sizzle of a roman candle then the rapid pop-pop-pop. Brooks flinched and pulled away from her. He bumped against the wall of the tin shack, making it rumble like thunder.
She wrapped her arms around his warm middle and squeezed.
“I didn’t know you were scared of firecrackers.” She laughed. “Brace yourself. It’s going to get real loud.”
His body tensed. Almost, she thought, like he was pulling away. Something was wrong tonight. She’d felt it as soon as she’d walked into the club. As soon as he’d pulled his hand away when she’d reached for him in the main dining room.
“I got to go,” he said. “I told Vinny and Enzo I’d meet them.”
“For what?” she asked, although she didn’t want to know. She remembered the dripping black letters on the ballroom walls. GRUDDER IS CANCER. GRUDDER KILLS.
A rocket launched with a thwump and a sizzle before lighting up the sky with a shower of gold glitter.
The crowd at the club went ahhh and Maddie felt a pinch of disappointment that she and Brooks were all the way over here, alone.
“Oh, those are my favorite!”
It didn’t sound like her voice and she knew she was trying too hard, wanting to change the mood—his mood—make everything better. Why did it feel like something bad really was happening, just like the list of worries she’d written down in her diary? What if writing them down, somehow, like the dangerous magic in one of Dom’s myths, had made them come true?
“I got to find my dad,” he said.
She felt betrayed. “But he said those mean things. About us.” She paused. “About me.”
“What are you talking about?” He laughed and tucked a piece of her hair behind her ear, and for a moment, she believed everything would be okay.
And he was right. His dad had only stared at her like he was thinking bad things. Like, if his eyes were a meat cleaver, he’d slice Maddie and Brooks apart.
“He just worries about me,” he said.
“I worry about you too.”
“I know you do, baby.”
He kissed her and she closed her eyes. A triple thwumpthwump-thwump made him pull away and then a loud boom sounded and three starbursts—red, white, and blue—cracked open the black sky. The crowd whooped back at the club and someone yelled, “US of A!”
“Let’s go,” he said, and she couldn’t tell if he was mad at her or scared. Or both. But it pissed her off because this was not what she wanted this night to be. She wanted it to be perfect. Their coming-out party. And although she knew she sounded like a child, she said, “What is wrong with you tonight?” She twisted out of his reach. “You’re being a real bummer.”
His face was lit red and then purple and then gold by the fireworks that were launching one after another. Thwump. Thwump. Thwumpthwumpthwump. He walked back toward the club. That wasn’t what she wanted either.
“Stop!” she shouted, and couldn’t tell if he was ignoring her or couldn’t hear. “Remember the second-balcony jump? Scream. Oh, whatever.” She wished the fireworks would end and then everyone would hear them arguing, know they were together-together, and there would be no turning back. No more hiding. “Let’s jump and scream together. So every-fucking-one hears us.”
She gripped his arm with both hands and he wheeled around. He laughed. But it was the kind of laugh she didn’t want.