White Rabbit(9)
“Five minutes ago, I hadn’t had a chance to look around yet,” Sebastian counters with quiet urgency. He comes closer, his soft, dark eyes gazing steadily back into mine, and a painfully happy memory zings through me like an electric shock. “Rufus, who were you talking to?”
“My mom, all right?”
“You told your mom?” Aghast, he stares at me, his face turning gray again in an instant.
“No, I didn’t. It was just … forget it, it doesn’t matter. What did you mean about having a chance to look around? What did you find?”
Wordlessly, he leads me away from the scattered furniture and into the dining nook. There are paintings on the wall of sailboats and harbors, a sideboard with bric-a-brac and iron candlesticks, and a blocky wooden table holding up a bounty of all sorts of things kids our age are not supposed to be into. There are jugs of cheap wine, an open case of cheaper beer, and about a half-dozen bottles of liquor that are nearly empty; an ashtray bristles like a porcupine with cigarette butts; and a broad hand mirror shows unmistakable traces of white powder, a tightly-rolled dollar bill resting alongside it.
Mr. Hyde is already fighting to surface within me, some hot, dark emotion clawing at my chest like heartburn, when Sebastian directs my attention to the small white pills that lay scattered everywhere across the floor like rice at a wedding; there are so many of them, strewn about so haphazardly that they’re impossible to count. With shaking fingers, I turn one over, revealing the telltale stamp pressed into the top side of the tablet: the outline of a rabbit.
“White rabbits, man,” Sebastian notes the obvious. “A shitload of them.”
Rage sweeps over me so fast that lights actually flash in my eyes. My brain feels like it’s spinning, exploding, and melting all at the same time, and I become dizzy from the heat building in my face and neck. What the fuck has April gotten me into?
Migrating from the New York club scene, “white rabbit” is a designer drug known to cause euphoria, heightened sensory perception, and hallucinations. The pills have also been linked, notoriously, to acts of extreme violence—like, trying-to-exfoliate-your-neighbor-with-a-belt-sander extreme—and parents everywhere are terrified of them. We had two assemblies about drug abuse at Ethan Allen this past spring alone, after white rabbits turned up in a couple of arrests on campus at the university. Get caught smoking a joint or taking some of your best friend’s Adderall and you’ll be in trouble; get caught with white rabbits and you’re fucked. They’ve replaced bath salts as the latest version of History’s Most Dangerous Substance Ever, and local authorities come down like a guillotine on anyone caught buying, selling, or using them.
Rumors make the rounds at Ethan Allen all the time about the various losers and burnouts using hard drugs, blotting out dismal visions of their uncertain futures with a chemical assist; and the bored, rich kids are notorious for spending their unwieldy allowances on recreational substances, counting on their trust funds and connected parents to protect them in the event of “legal complications.” But what Sebastian and I stare at now is an order of a different magnitude.
Lucy and I swore a blood oath to each other, once upon a time, that we would never ever so much as touch white rabbits. For one thing, my brain chemistry is unpredictable enough as it is without adding hallucinogenic nightmares to the mix, and for another, I absolutely cannot afford the trouble that getting caught with white rabbits would bring me. My mom and I have no money and no prestige. My life would be ruined.
And April has invited me to a murder scene decorated with enough of them to fill a fucking beanbag chair.
“Hey—hey, Rufus? I need you to breathe, man, okay? Slow breaths. Like me, right? Do what I’m doing.” Sebastian’s voice penetrates the fog of my rage, his eyes level with mine again, his right hand locked with my own. “Take a step back, right? Say it.”
“Take … a step back,” I repeat, forcing myself to focus—on his face, on his touch. I struggle to control my breathing, and he moves my free hand to his chest, holding it there. He’s done this for me before when my anger has taken over, talking me down from the ledge when I was perilously close to losing it, and the routine is heartbreakingly familiar. It felt so huge, so significant, to share such an awful part of myself with him—to be so unbalanced, and to know that I could trust him to be my counterweight.
He’s looking at me, looking into me, and his eyes are warm, dark pools full of our shared history—windows into a past that’s still too painful to touch.
*
The first time I really met Sebastian “Bash” Williams, it was at a meeting for the Front Line, our school’s sorry excuse for a newspaper. Everybody knew who he was, of course; Bash was too good-looking and his dad too important for him to fly under anyone’s radar for long. But he and I didn’t become personally acquainted until September of our sophomore year.
I’d been working on the paper ever since I’d started at Ethan Allen, writing occasional editorials, but mostly serving as a photographer. Bash joined the staff as a sports columnist—a position for which our supervisor, Mr. Cohen, felt he was eminently qualified, based solely on the fact that 1) he played lacrosse, and 2) the guy’s father was the athletic director at the university. It didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but everyone on the Front Line was so impressed by Bash’s lacrosse stats—and his looks—that they didn’t really care. For some even less explicable reason, Mr. Cohen assigned me to act as Bash’s personal photographer, shooting the pictures that would accompany his articles.