Neverworld Wake

by Marisha Pessl

  I kept driving.

  The twisting road seemed to urge me onward, yellowed beech trees streaking past; a bridge; the sudden, startling view of a harbor where tall white sailboats crowded like a herd of feasting unicorns before vanishing. I couldn’t believe how easily I remembered the way: left at the Exxon, right on Elm, right at the stop sign where you diced with Death, run-down trailers with strung-up laundry and flat tires in the yard. Then the trees fell away in deference to the most beautiful kiss of sky and sea, always streaked orange and pink at dusk.

  And there it was. The wrought-iron gate emblazoned with the W.

  It was open. The lamps were lit.

  I made the turn and floored it, oak branches flying past like ribbons come loose from a ponytail, wind howling through the open windows. Another curve and I saw the mansion, the windows golden and alive, all hulking red brick and slate, crow gargoyles perched forever on the roof.

  As I pulled up I almost laughed aloud at the four cars parked there, side by side. I didn’t recognize any of them—except for Martha’s Honda Accord with the bumper sticker HONK FOR GENERAL RELATIVITY. If pressed I could, with little trouble, match the other cars with their respective owners.

  I had changed so much. From the look of these cars, they had not.

  I checked my appearance in the rearview mirror, feeling immediate horror: messy ponytail, chapped lips, shiny forehead. I looked like I’d just run a marathon and come in last. I blotted my face on the roll of paper towels my dad kept in the door, pinched my cheeks, tucked the loose strands of dark brown hair behind my ears. Then I was sprinting up the stone steps and rapping the brass lion knocker.

  Nothing happened.

  I rang the doorbell, once, twice, three times, all in one crazy, deranged movement, because I knew if I hesitated at all I’d lose my nerve. I’d sink, like some lost boot caught inside a lobster trap, straight back to the bottom of the sea.

  The door opened.

  Kipling stood there. He was wearing a chin-length pink wig, blue polo shirt, Bermuda shorts, flip-flops. He was extremely tan and chewing a red drink stirrer, though it fell out of his mouth when he saw me.

  “Good Lord, strike me down dead,” he said in his cotton-plantation drawl.

  Grand entrances don’t happen in real life. Not the way you want.

  What you want is something between a Colombian telenovela (screaming, faces agog, running mascara) and a Meryl Streep Oscar™ Moment (crackling dialogue, hugs, the whole world coming together to sing in harmony).

  Instead, they’re awkward.

  My sudden appearance at Wincroft was a poorly aimed torpedo. I had misfired, and now I was drifting aimlessly, explosive, but without a target. Standing in the foyer under the chandelier in my jean cutoffs, sneakers, Wreck Rummage–stained T-shirt, faced with their freshly showered, glam selves, I felt ridiculous. I shouldn’t have come.

  They were heading to a sold-out punk rock concert at the Able Seaman in Newport, the beachfront dive bar where we’d spent many a weekend senior year with fake IDs and weekend passes, so they were greeting me, but also getting ready to go. So there was an awful feeling of distraction and poorly dubbed conversation.

  First Kip hugged me. Then he surveyed me politely, as if he were on an art museum tour and I were the tiny, underwhelming painting some guide was blathering on and on about.

  Whitley came running over.

  “Oh, my God, Beatrice.” She air-kissed me. “You actually came. Wow.”

  She was even more jarringly beautiful than I remembered: thigh-high stiletto jean boots, oversized sweatshirt with a sequin mouth on the front, black fringe cutoffs, perfume of gardenia and leather. I was at once hit with the magazine ad that was her presence and also finding it impossible to believe she used to be my best friend. Countless nights at Darrow-Harker School in Warwick, Rhode Island—home of the Crusaders—we sat up illegally after curfew, cheeks polka-dotted with zit cream, wool socks on our feet. I had told her things I hadn’t told anyone. Now that seemed like an out-of-place scene cut from some other movie.

  “How are you, Bee?” she asked, squeezing my hands.

  “Good.”

  “This is the best surprise. I mean, I could—I’m— Oh, shoot. The patio cushions need to be brought in. It’s supposed to rain, right?”

  And then she was racing away, long blond hair carouseling her back. “Kip was right,” she called out as she vanished into the kitchen. “He said you’d show up out of the blue like some presumed-dead character in a movie starring, like, Jake Gyllenhaal, but we told him he was nuts. I thought you’d rather die than see any of us again. Now I owe him, like, fifty dollars—”

  “One hundred dollars,” interrupted Kip, holding up a finger. “Do not try to renege. Ghosting on debts is one of your worst qualities, Lansing.”

  “What? Oh, wait. We have to give Gandalf his Prozac or he’ll pee everywhere.”

  “Gandalf is depressed,” Kip explained to me with a prim nod. “He also suffers from multiple personalities. He’s a Great Dane who thinks he’s a lapdog.”

  “I know Gandalf,” I reminded him weakly.

  “Beatrice.”

  Cannon was jogging barefoot down the staircase, Puma sneakers in hand. At the bottom he stopped, surveying me with a warm smile.

  “I can’t believe it. Sister Bee in the flesh. How’s God?”

  “Funny.”

  He looked different too. He was still sporting his signature gray hacker’s hoodie, but it was no longer misshapen and dusted with orange Cheez-Its powder after wearing it two weeks straight in the arctic subterranean computer room at Darrow. It was cashmere. Cannon had become semifamous when, sophomore year, he discovered a bug in Apple’s OS X operating system: when you accidentally tapped certain keys, your screen froze, and your desktop turned into the surreal winter scene of Apple’s Blue Pond wallpaper. He christened the bug Cannon’s Birdcage, and it landed him on the front page of a million Silicon Valley blogs. Last I’d heard, he was attending Stanford for computer science.

  He jumped off the stairs and hugged me. He smelled like expensive wood flooring.

  “How’s college? How’s your mom and dad? They still run that little ice cream parlor?”

  “Yes.”

  He stared at me, his expression intense and unreadable. “I love that place.”

  “Hello, Bee,” called a solemn voice.

  Turning, I saw Martha. She was blinking at me from behind her thick, mad-scientist glasses, which gave her the all-seeing, telephoto-lens stare for which she was famous. She’d given up her khakis and boxy Oxford shirts for ripped black jeans and an oversized T-shirt proclaiming something in German: TORSCHLUSSPANIK. She’d also dyed her thin brown hair neon blue.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “It’s absurd how you haven’t changed,” drawled Kip, his smile like a tiny button on formal living room upholstery. “You freeze-dry yourself in some cryogenic experiment? ’Cause it isn’t fair, child. I got crow’s-feet and gout.”

  Whitley was back, avoiding eye contact, grabbing her flesh-colored Chanel purse.

  “You’re coming with us, right?”

  She seemed less than thrilled by the idea, now shoving her manicured feet into Lanvin flats.

  “Actually, I—”

  “Of course you are,” said Cannon, throwing his arm around my shoulder. “I’ll scalp you a ticket. Or I’ll scalp someone for a ticket. Either way, we’ll figure it out.”

  “Laissez les bon temps roulez,” said Kip, raising his glass.

  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.

  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 aga
in,” 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.