“Yeah, well, this is all swell,” Amy said, her voice rising pointedly, projecting out to the room. “But I still want some goddam answers.”
“Be careful what you wish for, Amy,” a voice suddenly answered. “You just might get it.” They all turned as one, as the rectory door creaked open.
And Josh Custis entered at last.
Like the rest of them, it was Josh but not Josh, the passing years etched into every fiber of his being, but not as they might have expected. The wild and unruly mane of his youth was cropped close and shot with premature gray, rendering his prominent features all the more piercing. He was tall and lean, dressed entirely in black, and looked clear eyed and fiercely focused. An ethereally beautiful mulatto woman with ice blue eyes accompanied him, her presence both riveting and oddly unsettling. Josh came forward and embraced them one by one, then shook hands with Kevin. When he came to Zoe, he smiled.
“You must be Zoe,” he said. “I’ve heard so much about you.” He held out his hand graciously.
“Hi,” Zoe replied, and hesitated a moment before taking it. Caroline watched protectively, as Josh turned to her.
“She’s beautiful,” he said, then turned and addressed them all.
“My friends,” he said, his genuine warmth punctuated by an undercurrent of intensity. “It’s been a long time. I thank you for coming.” He hesitated a moment, then added, “Justin does too.”
Caroline and Seth glanced at the coffin, but Amy continued to watch Josh suspiciously. “You said, ‘does’”,” she said. “Don’t you mean ‘did’? Or ‘would’? I mean, he’s dead, right?”
Josh looked at her and smiled. “Not exactly,” he replied. The others looked from the coffin to Josh to each other, uncomprehending.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Amy said. “You told us he was dead.”
“No,” Josh countered. “I said he was gone.”
“Motherfucker!” Seth exploded, rising up to tower over him as the street rose in his voice. “We all know you a crazy fuck, Custis, you always was, you and your whole damn family. But since you dragged us all down here and scared the shit out of everybody, you mind explaining what the hell we’re doing here??”
Caroline and Amy visibly winced; they knew from experience that when Seth started cussing and calling people by their last names, it was time to duck.
Around the room the brothers shifted, suddenly wary; Josh waved them off and stood his ground, calmly looking up at his friend.
“It’s okay,” he said. “He’s right. I owe you all an apology, and an explanation. You deserve no less.”
Josh met Seth’s angry gaze; Seth grudgingly backed off. As he did, Josh nodded to Louis, who in turned signaled the men. Then he turned to the shocked and shaken congregation.
“Once upon a time, there were seven good friends,” he began.
While behind them, the doors of the church were quietly shut and locked…
11
Once upon a time, there were seven good friends. They were the baby brothers and sisters of the Big Chill generation, born in the turbulent year that the flames of Watts lit the City of Angels; the year that Martin Luther King trekked twenty-five-thousand strong from the streets of Selma to the capitol in Montgomery to end segregation and Lestor Maddox led two thousand white-hooded hopefuls through the heart of Atlanta to preserve it; the year that Malcolm X fell to assassin’s fire in Harlem and napalm first kissed the war-torn skies of Vietnam. When their elder siblings were slogging through the Mekong Delta or storming the Chicago Democratic convention, they were just coming out of diapers and heading off to kindergarten; when the Beatles broke up and Janis and Jimi took a header into the hereafter in ’70, they were navigating the perils of first grade: just a bunch of little kids growing up in a culture rending itself asunder at the seams. But when the first shots were fired at Kent State, a hefty chunk of the revolution grabbed their Frisbees and hightailed it home; when the peace signs of Woodstock were traded for the pool cues of Altamont, it seemed that the dawning of the Age of Aquarius was perhaps not all it was cracked up to be.
By the time the seven friends entered the crucible of high school, Reagan was in office and the Moral Majority was laying claim to God, Nixon was an uncomfortable memory, and the baby boomers had mutated to a disco beat as hippies became yuppies, corporate raiders became superheroes, and America ushered in an unparalleled epoch of immolated idealism, profound self-absorption, and greed. The defining moments of a generation — the assassinations of Kennedy and King, Vietnam, Civil Rights and the Summer of Love — were little more than something they had seen on TV. “Give Peace a Chance” gave way to Give Me My Piece of the Action, as John Lennon rolled over in his grave. Even rock and roll had gone bloated and corporate, ingesting everything in its path: the raucous, anarchic anger of punk had morphed into a moussed and manageable New Wave, Michael Jackson was urging everyone to just beat it, and the New Age was effectively toast.
For the forgotten baby brothers and sisters of the boomer wave, the rapid segue from “we” to “me” left them effectively in the lurch, with nothing but cultural hand-me-downs to tide them over. Drugs and music, bad fashion and empty attitude, combined with boundless cynicism and a deep yearning for something that really mattered, were all that remained.
And then they found each other.
They called themselves the Underground. They were seven suburban teens caught in a tidal pool of fractious cliques and social subsets that multiplied like bacteria in the petri dish of public education, freaks and jocks and straights and stoners, geeks and dweebs and punks and preppies, all swirled together in perpetually warring factions. The name was pretentious, but it managed to alienate the Stillson High administration, not to mention the straighter segment of the student body, so it couldn't be all bad. They also had a little radical newspaper, which they used for fun and generally raising hell. That publication, Subterranean Rumblings, began as young Josh Custis's vehicle for shouting back at the world. He specialized in blistering essays of opinion, taking on everything from Nicaraguan death squads to the legalization of drugs to the rules against kissing in the halls between class. It kept him in constant trouble, both at school and at home. Nine generations down from Silas, the original Custis patriarch, Josh was the youngest son of up-and-coming State Representative Eli Custis. Eli didn't much like to see family members making trouble with the authorities and generally crapping on the family name.
“This family is everything,” Eli told him on more than one occasion. “You violate that, and God help you, boy, because I won't.” Josh fought back by digging in even deeper, consolidating his black-sheep reputation, becoming more of a rebel and loner. He despised his family, hated everything they stood for. They punished him for it. He got exceptionally good at withstanding pain.
But by Issue #3 of the little ’zine, in the middle of his junior year, Josh was no longer entirely alone. His little Xeroxed rag had proven a weirdo-magnet, attracting misfits like moths to a klieg lamp. The result was a proudly outcast circle of souls. Josh's best friend — and the person he loved most in all the world — was Mia Cheever. She was beautiful, with green eyes and raven hair and a sly, crooked smile. Her folks were upscale professional types, but being a daughter of privilege didn't turn her into a snotty, self-absorbed little princess. She had a mind like a bullwhip, was idealistic, caring, warm, passionate and outspoken in her egalitarian beliefs. That last quality had gotten her canned as editor of the official school paper when she bucked the system and ran a story on racial harassment in the classroom. From there, it was a short leap to Josh’s camp, where her tough, meticulous viewpoint was the perfect balance for Josh's iconoclastic rants. For while Josh's style was assault and bombast, Mia was at heart a peacemaker; even after the racial incident, she could still sweet-talk the powers-that-be better than anyone he’d ever known.
Josh and Mia grew incredibly tight. She could tell him things that she couldn't tell anyone else. They got each other's jokes, understo
od each other's problems, and were inspired by each other's ideas. Together they conspired, commiserated, and cried on each other's shoulders, tying up the phone lines for hours on end. The bitch of it was that Josh virtually worshipped the ground Mia walked on, a fact that he was constantly trying to hide, most importantly from himself. Not that it would have made a difference.
Because Mia was totally head over heels in love, as well. Only not with Josh. The man of her dreams was a young and rowdy kid named Justin Van Slyke. The moment she confessed it to him Josh knew he didn’t stand a chance.
Justin didn't actually work on the paper, but his influence could not have been more deeply felt. He was a walking adrenaline buzz, a nonstop rush of swashbuckling charm and rebel energy. Reckless and handsome, sensitive and wise beneath his street exterior, he was the kind of dangerous boy that girls spontaneously lubed for and authority figures longed to crush beneath their heels. It wasn't bad enough that Mia loved Justin; he compounded the tragedy by falling for her too. It was one of those everybody-knew-it-couldn't-last-but-God-was-it-intense relationships: doomed from the start, and for that reason all the more determined to survive.
Watching nearly broke Josh's heart. Not just because of his unrequited, unrequitable love, and not just because he knew that he was the one who could truly make her happy, if only she'd let him. It was also because he liked Justin too. They were rivals for her affections, yes; but in time, they also came to be like brothers, in a way that Josh and his big brother, Duke, had certainly never been. Josh found unexpected reservoirs of support in Justin, was astonished to learn that Justin genuinely admired Josh's way of looking at things. It was weirdly flattering, and good for his confidence, to be looked up to by someone so much cooler than himself.
So when both Mia and Justin starting coming to him for advice, Josh finally had to swallow three bitter pills: one, that he would never be Mia's guy; two, that her friendship was the best he could hope for; and three, that he could still help bring her happiness just by really being a friend. To them both.
In the course of all that, Josh got himself tangled up with blond-haired, blue-eyed Caroline Tabb. It was a stormy romance, at best, though not without its high points. Caroline was at her party-hearty wildass peak, kicking up against her eccentric but ultimately middle-class upbringing. She loosened him up sexually and managed the business end of the paper with a steady, practical hand. That two-pronged earthiness grounded him, kept his project solvent and his fantasy life in perspective. Only problem was that, though he liked Caroline, he was still in love with Mia, and all the great sex and common sense in the world couldn't change the way he felt. It tortured her. It haunted him. It tainted their relationship, turned it into a turbulent on-again, off-again proposition.
Obviously, this was a problem Josh couldn't take to Mia. He turned instead to Amy Kaplan, the paper’s resident spooky dark-eyed poet chick. When it came to discussing those feelings too humiliating or painful to bear, Amy was the one to call. Her uncanny grasp of the underside of feeling made her everyone's confidante.
But it also kept her at an odd emotional distance, which Josh quickly learned when he tried to make a move on her. She shielded her inner workings well, as well as the knowledge that when it came to the sexual clinches, Amy preferred girls.
The only one Amy seemed to open up to was her best friend, Seth Bryant. Seth was a brilliant, black, athletic, disenfranchised Art Jock from Hell. He'd been a State All-Star fullback, but the combination of his genius IQ and his undeniable talent for pissing people off alienated jocks and brains alike. Like the others, the only place he really fit in was among the freaks.
The last of them was a skinny, volatile bundle of screaming nerves named Simon Baxter. He was Justin’s best friend — another working-class powder keg, with a much shorter fuse — and his racy, psychotic shock-tactic cartoons were the paper’s most popular feature. They also drew the most administrative flak. Because, even more than Josh and Seth, Simon was heavily into confrontation. His enemy was complacency; Simon was always first out of the trenches in any battle. And if there wasn't a fight, he would happily invent one; Simon couldn't get in enough trouble to satisfy his need for controversy.
Because of this, Josh and Simon got along great: they lived to push the limits. It also helped cement Josh's friendship with Justin, bringing the whole thing full circle. Together, these seven friends negotiated the madness that was public high school: struggling to make sense of a time and place where the old values had been thoroughly thrashed but no new ones had arisen to take their place.
When graduation rolled around, the last days of their group were at hand. Soon they would be separated, pursuing their divergent destinies; in a couple of years, they wouldn't even recognize each other in line at the 7-Eleven. So it was that, in the last fateful days of summer, they found themselves greedily squeezing every second of time together that they could. By Labor Day weekend, there was just enough time to throw one last party for themselves. The only question was, where?
Then Simon found out that Josh's Grampa Vance had recently keeled over dead, leaving spooky old Custis Manor temporarily uninhabited. Simon had just happened into a dozen hits of high-quality purple windowpane. And when he suggested to Josh that they might want to party at the mansion, Josh had readily agreed. What was not to like about that? It would be fun. It would piss his father off royally. It was the ultimate familial fuck-you, and soon enough Josh would be free of his oppressive upbringing forever.
12
Friday, August 26th. Twenty years ago. Stillson Beach, VA.
It was just past eight as the Underground motored out to Custis Manor in Justin’s cruisemobile. The car was a ’72 Chevy Monte Carlo, a hulking coupe with a small block V-8, Rochester 4-barrel carb, turbo 350 transmission, and power everything, a growling behemoth, once black but now mostly done in rust and primer gray with a peeling vinyl top. Seven bodies were packed sardine tight inside: Justin driving, Mia by his side, and Josh riding shotgun, Caroline, Amy, Seth, and Simon smushed into the back. The trunk was stuffed with two cases of Bud, bottles of Boone’s Farm and Bali Hai wine, and assorted munchies, all courtesy of Simon’s five-fingered discount from the local Be-Lo and Giant markets, plus Amy’s cassette player and plenty of tapes. Carlos Santana’s soaring and soulful guitar was playing on the car stereo, mixing with the sweet scent of primo Columbian bud that laced the interior as they passed a fat joint. There was a sense of palpable expectation in the air — once out of the environs of the beach, the road hooked inland, flat and winding and lined with thick, sandy pine woods that swallowed the lights of the car.
Amy pointed out the side window, where thousands of lightning bugs hovered and twinkled between the dark trees; she made a sarcastic reference to their officially entering boonieville. Josh assured them it wasn’t much farther, but there was a hesitance in his voice; he confessed that Grampa Vance had been a hermit of sorts in his latter years, and Josh hadn’t been there since he was a little kid. The others groaned.
Justin and Mia remained quiet; for them, the night
was particularly poignant. Mia had dutifully applied to college in the spring, partly at the urging of her parents but also with the deeper knowledge that she needed and wanted to do something with her life. Three weeks ago she had gotten the notice: she had been accepted at UCLA. She was simultaneously excited and horrified; the liberation of escaping her family matching the heartbreak of what that would mean about her and Justin. For the better part of the month, the news had hung over her like an emotional death sentence; the Cheevers, being practical and loving parents, had accepted Justin's presence, and Mia’s feelings for him, with a nervous reservation that had spanned their daughter’s senior year. But as the summer progressed, they made it clear that they weren't about to go for the notion of their baby girl hitched to a dead-end teen romance fresh out of high school. Finally they told her in no uncertain terms: she had her whole life ahead of her. They would not let her squander her future. Sh
e was going. Period.
She had broken the news to Justin only yesterday; they had told the others as they headed out for the night’s festivities. She was leaving Monday morning. The others were surprised but appropriately congratulatory, with the possible exception of Simon, who didn’t say much. As for Justin…
To put it mildly, Justin was still in shock. Mia snuggled deeper into him as he drove, as if they could somehow absorb more of each other and store it up.
Simon, meanwhile, popped another beer and stewed in the back seat. He was getting trashed, well ahead of schedule. And though he tried to keep it to himself, it was clear that he resented Mia.
They rounded the next bend, and Josh pointed to a small and narrow side road marked by a NO TRESPASSING sign. They had arrived.
It was dark as they pulled down the winding drive: the estate was empty, the outbuildings crumbling and decrepit. As they drove, Amy noticed more weird lights in the distance: furtive greenish glowing dots interspersed amongst the thousands of twinkling fireflies like lanterns bobbing in the woods. But neither Caroline nor Seth saw them, and Amy shrugged it off to her overactive imagination as they continued down the half-mile stretch of private road that led to the mansion itself.
The big house was a faded antebellum monument to the Old South, and even in its sorry state was testimony to the fact that Josh's family was a lot better off than any of them had ever realized. As they ascended the wide wooden stairs everyone turned to Josh, waiting for him to produce keys to let them in. Josh shrugged; he had none. Seth spoke for the group, voicing the obvious: How are we supposed to get in?
Josh picked up a rock, smashing it into one of the big front windows lining the porch. The glass shattered, leaving a gaping rectangular maw. Simon immediately whooped and took the lead, kicking out the stray shards in the sill and disappearing into the darkened interior. As the others looked around warily, the front door unlatched from the inside and Simon appeared like a demented butler.
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