Neverworld Wake(27)

He called me Amish, and Cahoots, and Hedy Lamarr. He said I had some quality of the past that he could never put his finger on, that I was meant for some long-forgotten, more innocent time.

“You’re a Dusky Flying Fox,” he told me.

“A what?”

“An extinct species of mammal known only by a single specimen. You were spotted once in 1874 on Percy Island off the coast of Queensland, Australia. No other examples of you were ever found. Yet here you are again, tucked away in an antiquated, not especially impressive boarding school in the wilds of Rhode Island. And no one knows about you but me.”

He was analytical, agonizing, easily wounded, unable to let much go. The summer before senior year, he and a childhood friend were drinking and driving a speedboat off Long Island when they collided with a sandbar, hitting a fisherman’s skiff. The fisherman and Jim’s friend were fine, thank goodness, but Jim suffered a skull fracture and ended up unconscious for two days. As a result of his injury, he wrote six songs, four poems, and a rap song called “Bang-Up” about the incident. He vowed to give up alcohol. Once a month after the accident, he wrote letters to the fisherman, as if confessing to a priest.

That was just how Jim was. He saturated. He overflowed. He drowned.

“You have to design your life like it’s a fresh America,” he used to say, pulling his guitar onto his lap, his calloused fingertips dancing along the strings. “An unseen brave new world sits before you. Every. Single. Day. What are you going to do about it?”

Now Whitley, Cannon, Kipling, and Martha were watching me, uneasy. We’d never done this before. We’d never talked together about Jim’s death. This had had to do with timing as much as the devastation of it. When every fact had been released by police and the administration had made their statement, finals week was finished. In a state of shock, unable to leave my bed, barely able to speak, I allowed my stricken parents to whisk me away from the treacherous kingdom of Darrow, back to the calming shelter of Watch Hill. It was days before I could stop sobbing, months before I felt anything remotely resembling fine.

“The body shuts down when it’s too sad,” said my dad.



* * *



—

“Where do we begin?” I asked now.

“Excellent question,” said Martha. She looked at me, her dark eyes glinting behind her glasses. “What do you think happened to Jim? I always wanted to ask you.”

There it was, the question I asked myself every day. So much so, it had turned me into a secret freak of nature, like a man who wanders around for years with a bullet lodged in his brain, normal on the outside, a gruesome marvel on the inside.

I was dying to spill my theories, what I knew but they didn’t know I knew. It had been my whole reason for coming to Wincroft. But in this dizzying life-and-death dynamic in which we found ourselves, sharing them wouldn’t necessarily be a wise idea. Not if I wanted to live. Martha asking this so pointedly sent a fresh wave of chills up my spine.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“It was an accident,” interjected Kipling. “Had to have been, right? Say Jim was out at the quarry. Maybe he decided to get wasted. Sure, he’d sworn off booze after that boat crash, but maybe he was depressed. He was stressed about his musical. Didn’t think he could pull it off. Maybe he slipped. The swim team kept those Pabst Blue Ribbons stashed all over. So maybe he was wanderin’ the tall grass, which on a windy night could be like gettin’ caught in a car wash’s Deluxe Wax Special, and, I don’t know, he stepped too close to the edge and tripped?”

“When did Jim Mason ever trip?” asked Cannon.

Kipling shrugged, tipping back his head to squint at the ceiling.

“Freak possible,” he said in a low voice. “That’s what Momma Greer calls it when worst-case scenarios on steroids actually happen. She says all the big mysteries of history, like Marilyn’s death, JFK, the Black Dahlia, the Lost Colony? They all came down to the freak possible.” He nodded as if trying to convince himself, giving a lazy wave of his hand. “It’s wild flukes. One-in-a-billion chances. Wrong places at the wrong time with a serious helping of bad luck. It’s some crazy, gnarled tangle of destiny that can never be undone by any outside detective ’cause it’d sound too damn absurd.” He looked at me, his face solemn. “The freak possible’s what happened to Jim. I’d bet my life on it.”

“Yeah,” said Whitley, shrugging. “I mean, none of us knew he was heading to the quarry that night.”

Everyone nodded, glancing tentatively at the others.

I suspected at least one of them was lying. I certainly was.

After all, on the night of Jim’s death, none of them had been where they’d claimed.

I knew this because I’d gone looking for each of them, one by one.

I’d found nothing and no one.



* * *



—

Vulcan Quarry—or Vulcanation, as Darrow’s students called it—was the abandoned quarry a mile from the center of campus.

If Darrow had one enduring legend, it was that quarry. Given its tantalizing proximity to school—the seventeen-acre property bordered Darrow’s southeast woods—it was the off-limits no-man’s-land kids whispered about and obsessed over, a far-off world to visit for pranks, hazing, hookups, and all other adolescent rites of passage, you name it.