Splendor (22 page)

“Ladies,” he said when we met halfway. He inserted himself between Lily and me and took Lily’s hand in his left, mine in his right. “Now the party can begin.”

Debauchery. That about summed it up. Alcohol was a given. So was pot. The thrumming music, the flickering fire, the briny ocean smell…it all combined into a witch’s brew, a concoction designed to stoke the smoldering fire.

After the Halloween party at Andy’s house junior year, I’d resolved never to get drunk again. So as the beers got passed around, lubricating the conversation and the dancing and the kissing, too, I staunchly shook my head.

Not Lily, though. It was like she was a special kind of alive; everything about her seemed a little bit sharper, brighter, and more beautiful than usual. Always there had been something magnetic about her. As long as we’d been friends—all our lives—others had looked to Lily as their measuring stick.

What to wear? After Lily showed up to school last fall in a buttery leather suit from Italy rocking a pair of shoulder pads, other girls started working shoulder pads into
their
wardrobes. In the eighth grade, when Lily had triumphantly appeared on the first day of school with her curls—which she’d always worn long—trimmed into an ear-length bob, it wasn’t long before more than a few of the other girls cut their hair off, too.

And when Lily started dancing at a party—like she was doing now, swinging loose from her hips, her arms up over her head as if she wanted to fill as much space as possible with her wonderful Lily-ness, her eyes closed because she didn’t care whether or not people were looking at her—invariably, that was when others joined in.

And that was how I would remember her. In motion. So beautiful. Alive.

I guess I was shivering, watching Lily dance, because Gunner came over to me and offered his flask.

“Just a little nip,” he said. “To warm you up.”

“Alcohol doesn’t actually make you warmer,” I said. “It only makes you
feel
warmer.”

“Isn’t that just as good?” Gunner smiled and wagged the flask in front of me. It caught the light of the fire and shimmered.

Was it? Is illusion as good as reality, as long as you can’t tell the difference?

I accepted the flask, unscrewed it, and took a sip. I didn’t know what kind of liquor it was; it was cool in my mouth but burned as I swallowed, and it tasted sweet and bitter all at once, like licorice.

“What is this?”

“Absinthe,” Gunner said. “Do you like it?”

I shrugged. Not really, but I took another sip anyway. And then a third. My year-old promise to myself to avoid drunkenness seemed less important with each sip.

Eventually, Lily danced over to us. She looked like she’d maybe been doing more than drinking. Her eyes were shining ebony, like her pupils had taken over, and a high spot of red colored each of her cheeks. “Two of my favorite people,” she said, and held a hand out to each of us.

Gunner tucked his flask back into his jacket—shaking it first, to determine how much I had drunk and then smiling at me with approval—and took one of her hands. I took her other. The absinthe was doing its job admirably; I wasn’t so cold anymore, and the music seemed to have seeped into my muscles, moving my limbs almost without my deciding to do so.

With his free hand, Gunner entrapped mine. We formed a little circle, the three of us by the fire, and though all around us Connell and Kaitlyn and everyone else laughed and flirted and moved along with us, it was like they were just background noise. Even Will seemed not so important as the absinthe moved through my system. There was just the three of us—me, and Lily, and Gunner, a closed circuit—and as the music thrummed, we closed the circle more and more until all the empty space between our bodies was gone and we fit together like three parts of one single creature.

Lily laughed, even though no one had said anything funny, and I laughed too. Gunner smiled and slipped his hands free of ours, winding his arms around our waists.

“My two people,” Lily said, and it seemed to me that maybe her voice was slurred a little. Then she leaned over and kissed me, her lips colder than they should have been considering how hot her cheek felt, pressed against my face. Then she kissed Gunner, this time longer and harder, and I couldn’t look away from it.

“Now the two of you kiss,” Lily demanded. I looked at Gunner. He smiled and shrugged, as if it wasn’t up to him, like he was just following orders. With one arm still around Lily’s waist, he leaned into me, and almost hypnotized by the marble of his eye, the slant of his mouth, the beat of the music, and the blaze of the fire, bewitched by the absinthe and the night, I kissed him back.

His tongue tasted of smoke and spice and the sweetness of the same absinthe I’d drunk. He pushed into me, and I pushed back, and our kiss was like a challenge or a fight, almost bruising in its force.

Finally we broke apart. I looked at Lily, worried what her reaction would be. But she was smiling. “See?” she said. “Isn’t that better?”

Time grew liquid. We danced, and danced, and danced. I drank some, but not a lot, from Gunner’s flask. I was starting to like the taste of absinthe. A couple of times other people tried to interrupt our threesome—Connell, once, and later Jane—but it was as if their voices didn’t come in on the same frequency as Lily’s and Gunner’s and my own. As if they couldn’t penetrate the private circle we’d created, our hearts toward a shared center, our backs turned to everything else.

I didn’t feel drunk like I had at Andy’s party; I didn’t feel spinny or sick at all. Instead I felt brilliantly clear, like a film had been wiped away from things I’d thought I’d seen clearly before, but now realized had been corrupted, blurred. Each grain of sand at my feet seemed to glow; I could feel the splash of the water as it crawled up the shore.

Maybe it was the absinthe that colored my vision of Lily. Maybe it was Gunner’s fault, since he had given it to me. But I had taken it. Either way, it was because of the absinthe that it took me so long to realize that something was wrong.

I couldn’t have told anyone if it had been minutes or hours or days that we’d been at the party. Maybe the others had told us they were leaving; maybe they hadn’t. I couldn’t remember later, when Lily’s parents demanded answers, when the doctors and the police wanted to know what had happened, in what order, when and where and how.

But one way or another the crowd thinned and the firelight dimmed.

I had been cold all night, in spite of our fierce dancing, but Lily’s hand in mine remained warm.

Here is an interesting fact: if you put a frog in cool water and then slowly, very slowly, heat the water until it boils, the frog will not notice that anything has changed. As long as the changes are incremental—as long as there is no sudden increase in temperature—the frog will sit, perfectly content, as the water around him warms, then simmers, then boils his blood inside his veins and he dies, cooked.

I tried to comfort myself with that later. I did not notice that Lily’s hand had grown so hot. I was like the frog.

It was only when Lily collapsed on the sand, her eyes wide open, her body convulsing in jerks, and when her brand-hot hand slipped from my fingers that I noticed how hot it had been.

Someone screamed; it was me. Someone went for help—Gunner. I fell to my knees in the sand and I think I said her name. I touched her cheek and drew my hand away, shocked by how hot it was. How could I not have noticed? How could I have failed her so?

“Lily,” I said again, and turned her face toward me. Vomit streaked her cheek; she convulsed in my arms.

And then she died.

H
ow could it be that another day could break? How could it be that my own breaths still came, one after the other, in and out and in again?

It seemed too much to bear. But still they came—the breaths, the days.

The first thing that happened following Lily’s death—Sunday morning—was that Gunner Montgomery-Valentine left our island. Connell’s parents put him on the ferry and he took a taxi from there to the airport and he went home.

Probably his desire to leave quickly could be explained by the coroner’s report, delivered a few days later. Officially, Lily’s death was caused by Ecstasy-induced hyperthermia and dehydration. Connell, a blubbering mess, told the cops that Gunner had given Lily the Ecstasy, but it wasn’t like he’d slipped it in her drink. She had asked him to get some for her. She’d wanted to try it. Connell showed them the texts on his phone that confirmed his story; he’d been with Gunner in LA, and Lily had communicated with both of them while still in Australia with her family. There had been a guy, Connell said, a guy whom his cousin hooked him up with, who sold Gunner the X. He didn’t remember his name; he didn’t have his number.

Neither Gunner’s departure, nor Connell’s blubbering confession, nor the toxicology report made any real impact on me.

I was already destroyed by having held my best friend’s body in my arms as she died—by Laura’s reaction upon hearing that there would be an autopsy.

Her face was swollen from crying. There were lines that I’d never seen before, and the shape of her face, its whole structure, seemed different in grief.

“They can’t cut into my baby!” she half choked, half screamed, her hands gripping and twisting Jack’s shirtfront. “They can’t cut her apart! My baby girl! Don’t let them, Jack. Don’t let them cut our little girl!”

Jack was sobbing, too, his nose running and his shoulders sloped with grief and shock. He tried to wrap his arms around Laura’s shoulders, wanting to comfort her, but she screamed, rageful like a feral animal, and shook him, clawed at his shirt, at his arms.

“Don’t let them cut our baby!” she wailed, over and over again, until finally the doctor came to the house and gave her a shot of something. Then the lines of her grief softened and her talonlike grip loosened and her eyes closed.

But I wasn’t fooled. I knew her grief raged on inside her. I knew she was burning up from the inside, that she was
ruined
inside. It was just that we couldn’t see it, or hear it, anymore.

Jasper and Henry were shipped off to stay with their grandparents in Santa Barbara for a few days. I didn’t say goodbye to them before they left the island, though I did see the helicopter that took them away, cutting across the sky.

Someone, maybe my dad, must have contacted Martin, because Will called me. His name lit up the display on my phone, but I just watched the phone glow and listened to its ring. He called three times without leaving a message, and then finally sent a text.

I’m coming,
it read.

Even this could not make me feel.

School was canceled Monday and Tuesday. In a community as small as Avalon, Lily’s death touched us all. Grief counselors were available at the school all week, including the days that school was closed, and maybe some of the other kids visited the counselors.

I didn’t. I knew they would not comfort me. I knew this pain. It was my old companion, come home again.

But Wednesday the school bells rang once more, and though Dad encouraged me not to go (“Take as much time as you need, honey”), I found myself in the hallways of Avalon High.

There was Lily’s locker, next to mine. There were the doors she’d burst through so many times, her broad grin lighting up the hallway. There was her empty desk in each of the classes we’d shared. So much Lily all around me, but no Lily.

I guess people said things to me—teachers and students, the vice principal, Mr. Steiner. I nodded and walked on, not hearing their words, not feeling the touch of their hands on my arm, their embraces.

At lunchtime, I found myself wandering into Mr. McCormack’s classroom. I don’t know why. Maybe because I wasn’t hungry.

“Scarlett,” Mr. McCormack said, surprised. “What can I do for you?”

“Hi,” I said. “Nothing. I just wanted to see my pig.”

His brow furrowed. “I don’t think that’s really a great idea, Scar,” he said. “I thought we’d skip the last few days of the lab and just move on to the next unit a little early.”

I looked over to the rack where the piglets were kept. It was empty.

“Where is she?”

“Who?”

“My piglet,” I said. “What did you do with her?”

“I packed all of them up. I thought it would be…easier that way.”

I shook my head hard. “You can’t do that,” I said. “I want to see her again.”

Mr. McCormack looked at me like I was crazy. He stood up from behind his desk and came around to the front of it. I realized my arms were folded across my chest and I was shaking.

He put his hand on my arm. “Scarlett,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

Tears flooded my eyes.
Not yet,
I seethed to myself. “Where’s the piglet?”

I guess he figured I was already as unstable as I could get, because he pointed to a large cardboard box near the back door. “They’re all in there,” he said.

I pulled open the flaps of the box and the strong fumes of formaldehyde hit me hard. There they were—all ten of the piglets. Mine was right on top, the plastic shroud labeled in black Sharpie.
Wenderoth/Montgomery-Valentine
.

Carefully, I lifted it out of the box. I didn’t unwrap it. “Thanks, Mr. McCormack.”

As I pushed open the back door, he called after me, “That’s medical waste, Scarlett! I’m supposed to dispose of it properly!”

But he didn’t come after me, and I didn’t turn around.

Dad was in the kitchen with a cup of coffee and the paper when I came home. “You’re home early,” was all he said.

I didn’t answer and headed into my room. I didn’t mean to slam the door.

Of course I knew Lily wasn’t the piglet. The piglet wasn’t Lily. I wasn’t
insane.
But even so…

Even so, sending the piglet to a mass grave, or even more likely, an incinerator, didn’t work for me.

I found a shoe box in my closet and dumped the sandals inside onto the floor. Then I looked at the plastic wrapping that shrouded the piglet.

Wenderoth/Montgomery-Valentine
. It read like an accusation, a guilty verdict. What percentage of Lily’s death was my fault? What percentage was Gunner’s?

It would be easy to blame Gunner. He had bought the drug in LA; he had brought it to Lily on the beach.

And worse than that…it seemed that Gunner was to blame in less palpable ways, as well. There was something about him, something that both attracted and repelled, some quality he radiated that was like poisoned honey to a girl like Lily.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, I remembered Amanda. Now twenty-four, she had left Avalon High while Lily and I were still in grade school. But we all knew the story—how the football coach had gotten fired for having sex with three cheerleaders. Amanda was one of them.

And though the coach was long gone, Amanda wasn’t going anywhere. Since leaving school at the end of her junior year, she’d given birth to two kids, each fathered by a different guy. She lived on and off with her parents, and whenever I saw her around town she had this hollowed-out look, like life had failed to live up to her expectations.

Some people might argue that it wasn’t the
coach’s
fault things were the way they were for Amanda;
he
hadn’t knocked her up.

But he had knocked her
down.

There are people like that. They use people; they suck them dry. The coach was one of those people. Maybe Gunner was, too.

Mazzikim.
That was the word Sabine had used. Demons.

I left the piglet and went over to my desk, searching for a book I’d taken from Martin’s house,
Kabbalah Magic.
Flipping to the index, I ran my finger down the list of words until I found
mazzikim
.

I read what the author had written:

Mazzikim, meaning “demons of destruction,” are misplaced, rootless forces. They carry with them a sense of exile and displacement and may look for homes to occupy or colonize, to make their own. Like parasites, the mazzikim may infiltrate a host and sap it of its strength before moving on. Mazzikim, like all demons, can occlude the mind; they can bring sickness and even death. Nighttime is their realm. Beware especially the nights of Wednesday and Saturday, during which demons may have additional strength. The Talmud teaches us never to open our mouths to the demon.

Sabine had warned me.… “Be careful which doors you open, Scarlett. And be careful of what you invite inside.”

I had been the first to let him in; it had been Lily’s door I’d opened. And both of us had opened our mouths to Gunner Montgomery-Valentine.

A chill pricked my flesh. The hair at the nape of my neck tingled. I thought of how trouble had brewed between us after Gunner appeared on the island. At school, too, Gunner had upset the social order, displacing Andy.

For one long, satisfying moment, I allowed myself the luxury of pinning Lily’s death entirely on Gunner Montgomery-Valentine, of casting him in the role of demon. It certainly fit him as well as any of his finely tailored clothes.

The book told me that demons ate fire for sustenance and liked the smell of spices; it had certainly seemed to me that Gunner’s clove cigarettes had fueled him, had given him pleasure, maybe even strength. The more I read, the better it fit—the left is the side of evil, and Gunner was left-handed. Demons dwell in the shade; the first time I had seen Gunner, he was stepping from the shadow of Lily’s palm tree, the night of her Halloween party. And he had not come in costume; perhaps he hadn’t needed to. Maybe he truly was a Creature of the Night, a
mazzik.

Oh! It felt so good, so satisfying, such a relief, to lay the burden at his feet, to imagine that Gunner was solely to blame, that he alone had killed my friend.

And it felt good, too, to let rage percolate in my chest, to imagine myself chasing him across the ocean to his home, finding him and screaming in his face, slicing his skin with my nails, punishing him, pummeling him, smiting him.

I tasted those sensations, and I knew for a moment how it must feel to Will—to see a person, a bad person, a horrible, twisted, demented, harmful person, and to know he had the power, and perhaps the reason, to end him.

Maybe if Gunner had appeared in front of me I would have exacted my revenge, in Lily’s name.

But time passed, and with it my first sharp hate. For I knew I couldn’t pin all the blame on Gunner.

I was culpable as well. Lily was
my
best friend;
I
should have acted as her first line of defense, as she had acted for me all last year, each morning bringing me a gift of food when I hadn’t wanted to eat, watching over me as I chewed and swallowed, waiting for me as I healed and returned to her—sometimes patiently, sometimes not so patiently, but waiting, just the same.

I should have been a better friend. I should have been more present, instead of getting so wrapped up in Will and Kabbalah and Sabine. I had failed her. And I would never be able to repair that failure.

Because she was dead.

As was the piglet on my bedroom floor. Slowly I peeled back the plastic and looked at its body. I didn’t want to, but I forced myself to really
look
—at the lines of incision, at the little organs, which Gunner and I had disembodied and then replaced, at the loosely jointed hips that Gunner had snapped as I calmly stood by and took notes.

And I thought of Lily, whose body had been zipped inside of plastic, whose eyes had been closed by gloved fingers, who had been placed on a hard cold table and sliced open.

Someone had opened her stomach to see what she had last eaten. Would the remnants of the brownie we’d shared still have been inside? Someone had used an electric saw to open her skull, then peered into her brain. Someone had turned Lily’s sacred body into a science project.