Neverworld Wake(6)

Jim’s death had been the earthquake that swallowed cities. Although I had spent the past year certain my friends knew much more about it than they’d let on, I also knew with every passing day the truth was drifting farther out of reach. I’d checked Whitley’s Snapchat and every now and then I saw the four of them together. They looked so happy, so nonchalant.

Like nothing had happened.

Yet now, I could see that the dynamic between them had changed.

Kip kept drumming his disfigured hand on the table. Whitley kept checking her phone. Martha seemed to be in an unusually bad mood, throwing back shots the bartender kept sending to our table—something called the Sinking of the General Grant, which tasted like crude oil. I caught her staring at me once, her expression faintly accusatory. I smiled back, but she turned away like one of those jungle plants that shrivel at the faintest touch, refusing to look at me again. Once, as Cannon leaned forward to whisper something to Whitley, he tucked her hair behind her ear, which made me wonder if they were back together. Then it seemed more habit than anything else.

When the opening band finished, I wanted to disappear. I wanted to take a taxi back to Wincroft, climb into my dad’s truck, drive off, and never look back. What had I expected—for the truth to be right there, obvious as a giant weed growing among tulips, waiting for me to yank it out?

But I stayed. I stayed for the next band, the band after that. I drank the Moscow Mules Whitley put in front of me. I let Kipling pull me to my feet, and I danced the Charleston with him, and the fox-trot, letting him spin me into the beach bums, and the prepsters, and the Harley-heads under the shaking paper lanterns and posters of sunken ships.

Just a little while longer, I kept thinking, and I’ll bring up Jim.

When the next band finished, Whitley wanted to go back to Wincroft, only no one could find Cannon. As it turned out, he was in the bar’s back alley, helping a girl who’d had too much to drink and was passed out by the fire exit.

“Here comes Lancelot,” said Whitley.

Perched along the railing, we watched while Cannon tracked down—with the efficiency of a lobbyist working Capitol Hill—the girl’s missing friends, purse, sandals, and iPhone. He even located her hair clip, which he used to gently pin back her hair so she’d stop throwing up on it, which led the girl’s newly located, equally drunk friends to stare up at him in wonder.

“Are you human, dude?”

“Do you have a girlfriend?”

“Who are you?”

Cannon ran a hand through his hair. “I’m Batman.”

“Here we go again,” sighed Whitley.

Cannon was not handsome. He was slight, with dirty blond hair and pale, out-of-focus features. But he had atomic intensity, which never failed to shock and awe when unleashed upon the world. Moving like a highly charged ion, capable as a machine gun, the first week of freshman year Cannon hacked Darrow’s intranet to display its flaws (becoming the school’s de facto tech guru). He revamped the decrepit sculpture garden and the wrestling gym. He was class president, and organized marches, marathons, and fund-raisers for endangered species and girls’ rights. Cannon was the first to admit that his outgoing, sociable nature and activism was compensation for being a tongue-tied computer geek as a child, worshipping Spielberg movies, eighties pop songs by the Cure, and Ray Kurzweil, no friends to speak of but an imaginary fly named Pete who lived inside his computer. He was adopted, raised by a single mother, a judge in the superior court of California. And while at first glance having Whitley Morrow as his girlfriend—besting Darrow’s country club boys who were IIIs and had middle names like Chesterton—seemed like a mistaken case of the princess accidentally ending up with the sidekick, the more you knew Cannon, the more you realized the role of prince was far too trivial for him. He was the king—at least, that was what he was aiming for. He was the most silently ambitious person I’d ever met.

“Any more distressed damsels you need to save?” Whitley asked as Cannon strode back over, having helped the girl and her stumbling friends into an Uber.

He held out his arms in mock triumph. “The bartender looks like he’s coming down with a head cold. But no. My work here is done.”

“Thank the Lord, ’cause I need my beauty sleep,” said Kip with a yawn.

We piled into the Jaguar.

The problem was, no matter how many times Whitley pressed the buttons on the console screen, the convertible top wouldn’t go up. It wouldn’t go up manually either.

Cannon volunteered to drive, but Whitley insisted. It began to pour, so hard there was more rain in the air than air. The thirty-five-minute ride home was this terrible ordeal, all of us in the backseat hunched together, drunk and freezing. At one point Martha threw up all over her feet, all of us shivering under E.S.S. Burt’s creepy London Fog trench coat, which Whitley had found in the trunk. Whitley began to cry that she couldn’t see the road. Tearing around a curve, we nearly collided with a tow truck.

The driver blared his horn. Whitley jerked the wheel, tires screeching. Everyone screamed as we barreled off the road, bouncing to a halt in a ditch, Kip hitting his head on the seat. Killing the engine, Whitley started to sob, screaming at Cannon that it was all his fault, that as always he’d needed to impress a bunch of girls just to massage his screaming insecurity for five minutes and now we’d almost died. She snatched his baseball cap off his head and threw it into the dark. Then she scrambled out, shouting that she was finding her own ride home, running into the woods. I sensed her tantrum had to do with the rain and almost ending up in a car accident—but also with me, how I’d shown up out of the blue.