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.”