Her cugini had been Maddie’s holiday pals all her life. Every New Year’s Eve at midnight, they beat pots and pans in front of Nonna’s house, and every Christmas Eve, the twins’ parents, Maddie’s uncle Carmine and aunt Mariana, hosted the Feast of the Seven Fishes. Four courses of sardines, squid, and octopus; and long pieces of dried baccala soaking in salty water—cod caught by her father and uncle far out in frigid sea. But her cousins were boys then. Stick-thin, squeaky-voiced, and terrified of their father’s backhanded slaps. Now they’d earned muscles working at the garage—their forearms roped with green and blue veins as thick as the wires under the hoods of the cars they repaired. They smelled like cigarettes and engine grease and sex, and dared to step up to their father, who she’d seen back away.
Vinny was still onstage, glaring at the throng of boys, making a big show of tucking his cigarette pack into his shirtsleeve, rolled up to reveal the panther, eyes like emeralds, tattooed on his shoulder.
Like he was badass Dallas from The Outsiders, Maddie thought, and almost smiled.
“What’s happening?” Penny asked.
“Nothing. They’re just being meatheads.”
“I don’t feel so good.”
Penny’s pupils were even bigger than Spencer’s. Black globes swimming against icy blue.
“Did you take something?”
“A little something-something,” Penny slurred. “Ricky had these pills.”
Penny leaned into her and Maddie felt the cold clamminess of her friend’s skin.
She tried to convince herself there was no point in thinking about what came next. A fight? Penny puking all over the wedged espadrilles Maddie had begged her mother to buy? And next week, after her father heard she’d been at the fair with Bitsy Smith’s crew. Or later that summer in the soupy August heat of the West Avalon fair, where her cousins expected Maddie at their side as they cruised that other fairway in the parking lot of the fire station, surrounded by families who worked down on the Grudder assembly line, not in the upper-floor offices. She knew that, by August, her white jeans would be grass-stained, her tan turned to freckle, the seat of her bikini bottoms pilled after too many swims in the salty ocean. The promise she felt tonight spent, swept away with the tide.
Enzo bumped Gerritt’s chest with his own and a gasp rose from Bitsy and the girls.
“There’s a smack-down coming.” Vanessa jumped up and down, her breasts heaving.
Maddie felt it too. Shit was going off. Like a boxful of fireworks. She wished she had stayed at home, played her younger brother Dominic’s make-believe games in the cool dark woods. She was still young enough, wasn’t she?
Bitsy, Vanessa, and Gabrielle, maybe even Penny, wanted the boys to fight. Didn’t they know it wasn’t like in the movies where an orchestra played in the background as the camera slow-moed the punches so it looked like a ballet? Maddie had felt her dad’s clumsy swings land on her back, her boobs, her butt. She’d fought back. A spastic flailing. Her chin doubling ugly. Fighting was snot and tears and breathless grunts, and once, when her dad had come after her with the broom, she’d peed herself.
Then all heads turned. The boys froze. As if a spell had been cast, Maddie thought. They looked beyond the stage to the main fairway strung with round glass bulbs.
“Cool.” Penny giggled. “Black people.”
“Shut up,” Gabrielle hissed. “Haven’t you seen The Cosby Show?”
As if Gabrielle had ever talked to a black person, Maddie thought. As if any of them had. The only nonwhite residents of the island were the Korean American Park family who owned Cougar Cleaners.
“Who the fuck are they?” Bitsy said.
All of East Avalon stared at the pretty blond woman, fair and freckled, strolling arm in arm with a light-skinned teenage boy so handsome he could’ve been in one of the Benetton ads Maddie had seen on the sides of buses in the city. Beautiful and happy (she’d never seen smiles so big) white-, black-, brown-, and yellow-skinned children posing in bright sweaters, arms slung around one another’s shoulders.
He looked her age. Sixteen. Maybe seventeen. The apple in his throat bobbed as he spoke to the woman, who, Maddie guessed, must be his mother. But the way they strolled down the fairway, elbows linked, foreheads touching as they shared a private joke—she’d never seen a teenage boy enchanted by his own mom.
His skin was all those sugary words she’d heard East Avalon ladies, her grandmother Veronica included, call the Hispanic girls who cleaned their houses. Cocoa. Cinnamon. Café au lait. Like they were Easter bunnies sold in the windows of Bon Bon Chocolatier downtown. And here she was, she thought, a hypocrite, imagining the warmth of his skin as a spiraling heat sparked in her belly.
A black man walked behind the white woman and brown boy, carrying a pigtailed little girl the same shade as the handsome boy-man. Maddie saw Principal Haskell staring at the man, and his wife, Gloria, who sang in the St. John’s choir; and Suzie Schumacher and Joy Linden and the rest of the PTA mothers who speed-walked in a pack around the East High track each morning, rain or shine. Even the ancient uniformed navy vets and their corsage-pinned wives paused to look.
The man was as dark as the Africans she’d seen in the stack of National Geographic magazines at the school library. His skin was almost a purplish black. She understood, with a queasy jolt, why her father, uncle, even Vinny and Enzo, called Troy and Mike—the two blacks who worked at the garage and lived on the mainland—“moolies.” Behind their backs. It was Neapolitan dialect for “eggplant.” That’s racist, she thought numbly. Then: Am I?
The man was striking, tall and lean like one of her mom’s favorite actors—Sidney Poitier. He smiled politely at the people his wife greeted, shifting the little girl in his arms so he could shake hands with a line of Grudder men. Then Maddie saw the pits of his shirt were stained with sweat; the smile he gave the old uniformed men forced; and, suddenly, she felt like a tool having yearned for this night all winter. She saw it clearly now—the pig races and fried dough and clueless shivering Tina Meyer and her giant nipples.
“Oh fuck,” Gabrielle said from behind.
Bitsy and the girls had formed a circle, their glossy heads tilted toward the ground. There lay Penny, back impossibly arched, lips pulled back, pink gums bared, trembling as if the earth beneath her was quaking.
Maddie knelt over her, tried to catch her head pitching side to side.
“Shhh,” she cooed, pressing her hands into Penny’s thinning hair. “You’re okay. You’re okay!”
She looked up for help and saw them. One, two, three—too many to count. An army of caterpillars floated overhead on gossamer thread. She couldn’t tell if they were rising or falling.
2.
Jules