Neverworld Wake(5)

There was a Texas-sized stretch of silence as we filed outside, the only sounds our footsteps on the pavement and the wind ransacking the trees. My heart was pounding, my face red. I wanted nothing more than to sprint to my pickup and take off down the drive at a hundred miles an hour, pretend none of this had happened.

“We taking two cars?” asked Martha.

“We’re five,” said Whitley. “We’ll squeeze into mine.”

“Promise you’ll glance in that rearview mirror at least once, child?” asked Kip.

“You’re hilarious.”

We piled into her hunter-green convertible Jaguar. Whitley, with a severe look—which I remembered meant she felt nervous—pressed a series of buttons on the console screen. The engine did an elegant throat clear, and the top half of the car began to peel away like a hatching egg. Then we were speeding down the drive, Whitley accelerating like a veteran NASCAR driver, swerving into the grass, mowing through rhododendrons. I was in the backseat between Kip and Martha, trying not to lean too hard on either of them.

Kip tossed his pink wig into the air.

“Ahhhhh!” he screamed, head back, as the wig landed in the driveway behind us. “After a long absence, the band is back together! Let’s never break up again! Let’s go on a world tour!”

What about the lead singer? I couldn’t help wondering as I looked up at him.

Aren’t you forgetting Jim?



* * *



—

The opening band had already started when we arrived. There wasn’t time to talk. There was only this anxious pushing through the packed crowd outside while Whitley approached the bouncer. Martha went in to secure the table, and Cannon went around asking guys with buzz cuts and Budweiser breath if they had an extra ticket, all of which left me crammed pointlessly against the side railing.

“You guys go in without me!” I shouted at Kip, who’d materialized beside me.

“Hush.” He linked his arm through mine. “Now that we found you again, we’re never going to let you go. I’m your barnacle, child. Deal with it.”

I laughed. It seemed like the start of the first true conversation that night.

Kipling and I had always been close. Tall and lanky, with rust-red hair and “an ancient gentleman face”—as he described himself—he was the most fun stuffed into a single person I’d ever met. He was eccentric and strange, like some half-broken talisman you’d find on a dusty shelf at the back of an antiques store, hinting at a harrowing history and good luck. He was gay, though claimed to be more interested in a story well told than in sex, and saw Darrow more as a country club than as any institution in which he was meant to learn something. A study date in the library with Kipling meant constant interruption for his anecdotes and observations about life, friends, and the host of colorful characters populating his tiny hometown of Moss Bluff, Louisiana—like we weren’t holed up in muggy cubicles stressed about SATs, but relaxing on a porch shooing flies. While he was as rich as the others (“defunct department store money”), he had had what he called a “busted childhood,” thanks to his scary mom, Momma Greer.

Little was actually known about Momma Greer, apart from the details Kipling let slip like a handful of confetti he loved to toss into the air without warning. When he was a toddler she locked him alone for days in Room 2 of the Royal Sonata Motel (“ground floor by the vendin’ machines so she could sneak out without payin’?”), nothing to eat but a stash of Moon Pies, no company but Delta Burke selling bangles on QVC. Her negligence had led to a pit bull, chained up in a backyard, attacking Kipling when he was five, biting off three fingers on his left hand, and leaving him with a “mini shark bite” on his chin—disfigurations he paraded like a Purple Heart.

“Just call me Phantom of the Opera,” he’d say, gleefully fanning his severed hand in front of your face. When the court finally removed Kip from his mom’s custody, sending him to live with an infirm aunt, he kept running away to try to get back to Momma Greer.

Last I’d heard she was in a mental institution in Baton Rouge.

I wanted to ask how his year had been, but at that moment, Whitley, in true Whitley fashion, came over and without a word grabbed my wrist, pulling me through the crowd. She’d come to some understanding with the doorman. He let me in without a ticket, stamping my hand, and then we were all at a reserved table in the front watching a girl with stringy hair pretend she was Kurt Cobain.

It was strange. The drummer looked like Jim. I wasn’t sure anyone else noticed, but he looked like Jim’s younger brother, all milk-chocolate eyes and bedhead, the rueful air of a banished prince. It was deafening inside, too loud to talk, so all of us just stared at the band, lost in the swamps of our thoughts.

Maybe I was the only one lost. Maybe they’d all had amazing experiences in college, which had shrunk what had happened to us in high school, turned even Jim’s death into a faded T-shirt washed ten thousand times.

Once upon a time at Darrow, they’d been my family. They were the first real friends I’d ever had, a collection of people so vibrant and loyal that, like some child born into a grand dynasty, I couldn’t help but be awed at my luck. We’d been a club, a secret society all the other students at Darrow eyed with envy—not that we even paid attention. Friendship, when it runs deep, blinds you to the outside world. It’s your exclusive country with sealed borders, unfair distribution of green cards, rich culture no foreigner could understand. To be cut off from them, exiled by my own volition as I had been for the past year, felt cheap and unsettled, a temporary existence of suitcases, rented rooms, and roads I didn’t know.