Neverworld Wake(31)

Sophomore year, Mr. Joshua twisted someone’s arm to get her a job at Darrow. Vida started appearing in admissions, yawning as she shuffled unconvincingly between the copy machine and a computer; later she turned up in the Spanish department; then as assistant coach for JV field hockey, though when that didn’t work out (apparently few were comfortable working alongside a big cat), they stuck her in the remote outpost of the art gallery. Most of the time she left the front desk unattended, and could be found outside in the back by the dumpsters, chatting with a random student, always a boy. Rumors swirled that her nickname at Darrow had been Very Flexible Vida, that she’d had sex with the entire wrestling team, that she’d fallen in love with a professor in college and stalked his wife, which had resulted in a restraining order that led to Vida’s mysterious breakdown.

That was all I knew about her before I saw her with Jim. Once I saw them leave campus together, though, Mr. Joshua’s nickname for his daughter, Kitten, seemed so fitting, because what had once been a cute little fluffball had suddenly morphed into a dangerous predator with a diet of horse carcasses and the capacity to kill without warning.

I hadn’t even known she and Jim were friends. He’d never mentioned her. She had surveyed Jim from her spot on the living room couch with only marginally less indifference than she’d regarded me and everyone else. After he was found dead, though, she suddenly vanished from her job at the art gallery. Her ergonomic swivel chair, her mug of pens, the gallery printouts of price sheets and artists’ statements of purpose mixed in with a welcome pack for a gym membership at the Jam, and Thai take-out menus—all sat there like nagging questions in the days following his death.

I found myself calling into question my every private moment with Jim, as if I were a miser locking myself in my room to stare down at the stacks of cash I’d stashed under my mattress, counting the money for the millionth time to make sure it was all there, checking that it wasn’t counterfeit. In the intervening year, I kept tabs on Vida. I stared at her Instagram photos of camping trips in Wisconsin with some friend named Jenni who wore Bermudas; her loud move into a new apartment in Wicker Park (Anyone know a good mover in the Chicago area????), followed by a mute return home not three months later; her registration in a fashion design course; her interest in reflexology and a heavy-metal band called Eisenhower. I pored over these artifacts, looking for clues to her relationship with Jim. Occasionally I found them. She posted lyrics to a song Jim wrote—“Carpe”—to accompany a blurry photo she’d taken of a frog. Once we had days when we ripped up the skies. Swore it was real, no deception, no lies. On the one-year anniversary of his death, she posted a message on his Facebook page, which had become a living memorial. Miss you Mason.

In some of my darker moments, I considered sending her a series of anonymous messages, a sort of I Know What You Did Last Year, to see if I could smoke her out, get her to reveal what she knew, what she’d done.

I never did.

Never would I have believed Jim capable of betraying me by fooling around with Vida. Then again, we’d never had sex. We came close. At the last minute I always said no. Jim would roll onto his back, prop up his head, stare at the ceiling.

“What are you afraid of?” he’d ask with genuine curiosity.

I deferred with various versions of “I’m not ready,” never having the guts to tell him the truth: that I was scared of losing the last piece of dry land I was standing on. I loved Jim, but our relationship could feel like a blackout sometimes. I’d get swept up in him, then days, weeks later suddenly look around, unnerved, wondering where I was, what time it was.

“You want to wait for our wedding night? Fine,” he’d tease.

No wonder he never broke up with me, I thought later. He wasn’t missing out on anything at all.

He had Kitten.



* * *



—

None of us had been back to Darrow, not even inside the Neverworld.

Arriving felt the way it always did, as if we were traveling back in time to a lost past of driving goggles, candlestick telephones, and people wearing tweed sprinkling their sentences with grand and calling good times a gas. Darrow had always been willfully old-fashioned, a quality the school went out of its way to proudly maintain, as if the place were not a school, but a sanctuary for some endangered bird. Classrooms had the same wooden tables as fifty years before, the chapel the same pews. Most of the teachers looked like walking daguerreotypes, with stiff necks and expressions suggesting great depressions.

I peered out the window, trying to ignore the nervousness in the pit of my stomach. Throughout the past year I’d wondered what I’d say to Vida if I ever had the chance to confront her, but now every scenario I had considered sounded pathetic and insecure. What were you doing with Jim that night? Why did you suddenly vanish when he died? Did you love him? Did he love you?

Ahead I could see the old white wood sign swinging in the torrential rain.

DARROW-HARKER SCHOOL. The bronze stag stood beside it. As we tore past I caught a fleeting glimpse of the antlers and eyes, FOUNDED IN 1887 flashing in the bloodred taillights before both sign and stage were swallowed by the dark.

“Don’t worry, Bee,” whispered Whitley, leaning her head on my shoulder. “I’ll take care of everything.”

“Every time you say that, child, someone loses an eye,” said Kipling from the front seat.