The Romeo Catchers

by Arden, Alys

  Annabelle slowed to a stop. “Shit.”

  Half a block ahead was the now-infamous cruise ship that had ended up on the wrong side of the levee thanks to the storm surge and was now blocking the road. The cruise line, the insurance agency, and the government were all fighting over who was responsible for removing it. My money was on it staying there forever.

  “Just take a left here,” I said, and then directed her the rest of the way through the Storm-devastated neighborhood. Holy Cross was about as deep in the Lower Ninth Ward and as near the riverfront as you could get. By the time we parked, the mood was so somber, it was hard to remember we were going to a party.

  I blotted my eyes dry on my sleeve and then waited as she reapplied her makeup.

  The campus was pitch black, and even with her brights it was hard to see much more than the wrought-iron fence surrounding the once-magnificent property that now looked like something from a gothic novel. A few giant oaks still stood strong, their branches creating sprawling canopies over the walkway through campus, but most lay lifeless on their sides, uprooted by the high winds and soggy grounds.

  I opened the car door—faint music came from somewhere farther into campus. The wrought-iron gate swung open in the riverfront breeze, someone already having cut the chain that had held it closed. I wonder how many laws we’re breaking tonight?

  The engine cut, and Annabelle stepped out with her case of booze. Cell-phone flashlights activated, we walked through the gate and down the path of dead trees, bottles clanking, our offering to le fais do-do.

  Leaves crunched underneath our feet as we approached the mammoth three-story redbrick building, which even in its destroyed state still managed to be beautiful. It was at least a hundred years old. White scrolling ironwork, now covered in rust, framed the second and third story balconies in a fairy-tale-like way, winding and scrolling over the building like wisteria. Its rows of windows were blown out and boarded up, and now covered in graffiti, making me wonder if that had been part of tonight’s requiem.

  Feet scurried across the second-floor balcony, and a guy yelled, “Who’s there?”

  “The girls with the good stuff!” Annabelle yelled back, and smiled at me.

  We held up our phones as he swung over the rail and half shimmied, half jumped down the pole to the ground. I recognized him from the fund-raiser.

  “Need some help with that, Miss Drake?” he asked, taking the box from Annabelle.

  A freckle-faced guy was right behind him. “Madame?” he asked me with an exaggerated bow.

  I handed off the bottles. “Merci beaucoup. I’m Adele.”

  “Oh, we know who you are.” They both smiled and ran ahead with the booze, yelling a chant that I assumed was the Holy Cross fight song.

  “Did you make them do that?” I asked Annabelle, trying not to giggle.

  “Nope. The credit is Bobby and Sampson Bradford’s. Southern boys being southern boys.”

  We hurried to catch up with them.

  Close to the building, a chain-link fence had been erected and topped with barbed wire to keep trespassers out post-Storm, but the boys had cut out a passageway.

  The freckly one, who I think was Sampson, held it open as we ducked through. “You’re going to want to run through to the other side of the building.” Then they took off through the doorless entranceway.

  As soon as we stepped inside, we both immediately started to gag—and then we ran—the stench of mold wrapping around us like an inescapable plague.

  When we burst through the other side of the building to the back of the campus, I was gripping my side, trying not to throw up. I felt like we’d just made it through some rite of passage.

  Dozens of kids were spread out on the dark, expansive lawn, chatting and laughing. I spotted most of the upperclassmen from Holy Cross, Sacred Heart, and Ursuline, their faces lit by the glow of phones, flashlights, and camping lanterns. One group had surrounded themselves with candles. Puffs of marijuana smoke hung in the damp air around them.

  We walked through the crowd. Music played from shitty phone speakers, and nervous laughter and giddy shrieks came from girls who weren’t quite drunk enough to flirt with the guys trying to inch closer to them.

  Three students sprinted out of the building behind us, all with chairs held over their heads; then two more came out with crates of moldy textbooks.

  “I found some dry ones, Preston!” one of the guys yelled as they ran past us.

  Out in the darker part of the lawn, a curly haired blond guy whooped before carefully adding more broken furniture to a rickety tower made of smashed-up desks and broken chairs, floorboards, and shelves—anything that could be excavated by the football team and a crowbar.

  The city was never going to rebuild Holy Cross, so it was destined to become nothing more than a time capsule of teenage memories, which made it both sad and cathartic watching students rip the school apart. We stopped at the furniture tower. A slight tinge of smoke lingered in the air.

  “Is that supposed to be a bonfire?” Annabelle asked Preston. He was a friend of Thurston’s who drove a car that cost more than my entire future college tuition. “You realize you’re missing one key ingredient, right?”

  “Everything’s too damp to catch fire,” he said. “But we will persevere, worry not!”

  She winked at me, slipped her hand into his pocket, and tossed me a cigarette lighter. “Maybe Adele has the magic touch.” She hooked her arm in Preston’s and walked him away while I circled around the stack to the other side, out of their sight line. If I can make this work, how am I supposed to explain it?

  I held my hands in front of two smashed chairs, keeping the lighter in my palm, until I could feel heat coming from the bottom of the stack. Tendrils of smoke curled out from the jutting floorboards. I bounced my hands, and flames crackled in the center.

  “Not too much,” I whispered as the flames grew.

  Smoke billowed as the books caught fire and the tinder crackled. Heads turned, and then the cheers started. Flames ripped up the middle of the stack, bringing the crowd running to the bonfire, shouting.

  “Finally!”

  “It’s a miracle!”

  “Something like that,” Annabelle said, bopping back to my side with a bottle of champagne.

  Preston’s arms circled around my neck. “You are a lifesaver.” His breath was hot and alcoholic against my ear.

  I tried not to visibly cringe.

  “Let’s get this party started!” Thurston yelled, running up behind Annabelle, swinging his arm around her shoulders.

  She nearly dropped the champagne she’d been trying to uncork. She extended the bottle out to me, turning around into an instant lip-lock with Thurston. I grabbed it, happy for an excuse to scoot away from Preston.

  Veuve Clicquot? Why am I still surprised?

  I’d brought four unmarked bottles of moonshine—that pretty much summed up our two existences. The foil at the top of the champagne bottle was mutilated—clearly she’d never even had to open a bottle before. I ripped it off in one quick tear, twisted off the metal cage, and gave the cork one little push in just the right spot.

  Pop.

  It sailed into the fire, followed by an arc of bubbly.

  “Oops!” I yelled, wondering how many dollars of champagne it was as the people around cheered. Preston’s arm circled my shoulders again, this time squeezing me. He cheersed me with another bottle, and I took a sip straight from mine, the bubbles backing up in my throat and fizzing out of my mouth.

  He leaned in, dangerously close to licking the champagne from my face, but I squirmed away before I was tempted to set him on fire.

  He began loudly singing the Holy Cross alma mater. Thurston and Georgie joined, matching his volume, and the singing became more and more dramatic until the rest of the Holy Cross boys collected together around the fire, arms slung around shoulders.

  Private school is so weird.

  But no matter what school colors we wore, the s
ense of loss was something we all shared. Annabelle and I huddled together on two wooden crates in the ring of people around the fire, me with a careful eye on the flames.

  People fanned out on the lawn, sitting on blankets and makeshift benches and flattened cardboard boxes, swigging every kind of booze they could swipe from their parents’ liquor cabinets. Or, in the case of a lot of kids here, from their parents’ wine collections. I’d never even drunk wine before I went to Paris.

  The Holy Cross boys took turns running up to the schoolhouse and returning with the contents of their lockers to dump into the bonfire. They told stories about football games and senior pranks and homecoming dances. They sang their alma mater so many times I soon knew all the words. People laughed and people cried, and mostly people drank. A lot.

  “You look intense!” a girl called out.

  I turned to see Veronica and Johnnie approaching, both carrying plastic shopping bags full of stuff.

  I stood, giving them both hugs.

  “We made a pit stop on the way,” Veronica said, lifting one of the plastic bags to me. “Johnnie said you were locker number 306?”

  “You didn’t!”

  “We did.”

  “Merci mille fois!” I didn’t tell her the reason Johnnie knew my locker number was because he used to wait in front of it during our freshman year, causing me to constantly be late for class because I was so shy I avoided my locker until after the first bell.

  I opened the bag and sucked in a deep breath. Tears stung my eyes when I saw the French-English dictionary Mémé had given me when I was little. I filed through the waterlogged notebooks; a photo of me and Brooke from the last Krewe du Vieux, now covered in black specks; a sketch pad; and a huge roll of pattern pieces I’d drawn during my mentorship last semester.

  “A fire!” Veronica yelled as she threw a black dress high up into the air toward the fire. “A fire is burning!” It ballooned open, and I recognized it from last year’s production of The Crucible.

  “Hey! I made that!”

  Veronica had played Abigail. She spun around, tossing the rest of her notebooks into the fire and yelling more of the lines from the play: “God damns our kind especially, and we will burn, we will burn together!”

  I sat back down next to Annabelle. “No one will ever burn us,” she said, resting her head on my shoulder.

  “No, they won’t.”

  I giggled, and she giggled, and we passed another bottle of warm champagne back and forth, watching more students ceremoniously dump their possessions into the fire. All while Tyrelle slid sad notes up and down his trombone.

  “None of it matters!” Thurston yelled, coming up behind us. “Only each other!”

  He leaned over Annabelle’s back, and her arms circled around his neck.

  “Kiss me,” she said. And he did, until he was crashing over us and I was pushing them away. They toppled onto the ground, getting laughs from the girls and hoots from the guys.

  More kids went up to the fire, and more stuff was burned. Trig books, chemistry tests, sports jerseys, yearbooks—it all went into the fire between tears and sniffles. Most of the kids here were seniors. Six months ago they’d all had a pretty firm idea of what they’d be doing after graduation. For some of them it would all still work out; for others, their college funds were now paying for their family homes.

  Everyone got their turn, and we moved on to a fresh bottle of bubbly. I needed to pee like never before, but Thurston was gone and I didn’t want to leave Annabelle by herself—she’d been taking sips from the bottle at twice the rate I had.

  I pulled Veronica away from her lip-lock with Johnnie and sat her in my place.

  “Bathroom,” I said, and wandered off.

  We were miles from an actual functioning bathroom, so that left two options: popping a squat behind a tree or going inside the dilapidated building and testing my gag reflex.

  I crammed Nicco’s jacket sleeve over my mouth and dashed inside, phone in hand, lighting the way through the dank decay.

  “Adele, wait up! I need to pee too!”

  For some reason, hearing Annabelle say the word “pee” made me giggle, which was bad when your bladder was about to erupt. I neared the end of the hall and saw a door with a dress.

  “Thank God,” I said, half bent over as I barged through.

  In the dark, a figure sprang away from the sink, where another guy was sitting.

  “Shit!” I yelled as pants were jerked up and zippers zipped.

  “Adele!”

  I was out the door even quicker than I’d come in, running smack into Annabelle.

  “I need to peeeeee,” she said.

  “Let’s go upstairs. It’s bad in there—dead-animal smell.”

  But then Thurston opened the door, yelling my name. His eyes opened wide, her flashlight in his face. “Annabelle!” He stepped out, pulling the door shut behind him.

  “I have to pee,” she said.

  “There’s another bathroom on the second floor.”

  She tried to push past him. “Come on, Annabelle,” he begged. “Don’t go in there.”

  Her eyes slanted, hearing the desperation in his voice. “Move, Thurston.”

  “No.”

  She looked straight at him, her eyes glistening. “Let go of the door, and move.”

  “Annabelle, I never wanted to hurt you.”

  “Move!”

  He stepped away begrudgingly, a valiant but futile attempt to fight through her magic. I followed behind.

  Georgie was standing there by himself. His voice trembled. “I’m—I’m sorry, Annabelle.”

  “Get out,” she said to him.

  Thurston reached for her arm. “Annabelle.”

  Georgie ran past us. A part of me wanted to chase after him to see if he was okay, but then Annabelle pushed past us and headed for the staircase, so I went after her instead.

  “Annabelle!” I yelled as I reached the second floor, which was just as dark as the first.

  When I opened the door to the bathroom, I could hear her crying in the stall.

  I debated what to say as I squatted in the stall next to her, but then she spoke first.

  “Here,” she said, handing me tissues under the divider. Thank God. The toilet paper looked like it contained five hundred kinds of diseases. Not an option.

  “Shouldn’t I be the one handing you tissues?” I asked, finishing up.

  “Ha.” She sucked in a giant sniffle.

  We both came out of the stalls and stared at the sink. The toilets hadn’t flushed, because the water was cut. “We need Désirée’s magical hand sanitizer,” she said.

  “Come with me.” I led her down the hall and out onto the long balcony that overlooked the back of the property. “Hold your hands over the rail.” I pulled the last bottle of moonshine out of my bag, unscrewed the cap, and poured it over her hands. “Multifunctional. Gets you rip-roaring drunk and kills germs better than soap!”

  She didn’t laugh.

  After I’d poured some over mine, I handed the bottle to her. “And I promise it will also kill whatever’s going on in your brain.”

  Her smile still didn’t crack, but she took a swig from the bottle—and choked it back up over the railing.

  “Told you.”

  She sank to the floor, and I sat next to her, legs sliding under the railing, feet hanging over the edge. A government-issued blue tarp, now shredded and ragged, hung from the roof above us, blowing in the breeze. Out on the lawn below, the bonfire blazed.

  She handed the bottle back to me and burst into tears. “Why did he stop loving me?”

  Oh God.

  “I don’t think he stopped loving you.” My hand went to her back. “I think . . . he’s just . . . in love with Georgie.”

  She cried even harder. I didn’t know if I was putting words into Thurston’s mouth, but I’d seen the way he looked at her and the way he looked at Georgie, and I knew if it were the other way around, Georgie would be the one cr
ying on my shoulder.

  “He’s been my best friend since we were five. We’ve been to every dance together. We were supposed to go to Vanderbilt together. We were supposed to get married at the cathedral, after he proposed at the Eiffel Tower senior year.” She cried even harder. “He’s the only person who gets me . . . who doesn’t think I’m a total bitch.”

  My arm slipped around her shoulders, and I felt like I was in an alternate universe.

  “We don’t think you’re a bitch—the coven. And, seriously, you can do better than the Eiffel Tower. That’s way too cliché for Annabelle Lee Drake.”

  She smirked. “Merci beaucoup.” She took the bottle back and swigged, face contorting. This time she managed to hold it down. “I did kind of hate having to hide the magic thing from him.”

  “I know you don’t want to hear it, but you’ll find someone better for you.”

  “You’re right: I don’t want to hear it.”

  “You’re the most beautiful girl in the whole school—in all the schools—and you have badass magic. Maybe you’ll meet a witch, and you won’t have to keep any secrets from him.”

  “Like you and Isaac?”

  “Like me and Isaac . . .” I turned away as I said it and then drowned my accelerating heart with a swig of the moonshine. I’d been obsessing over Nicco ever since we left the fund-raiser.

  “Who, in case you’ve forgotten, is insanely hot,” she said, sensing something was up. “And he’s from New York. And he can fly. He can fly, Adele.”

  “And he’s a really amazing artist,” I said, “and he wants to help everyone he comes into contact with. And he doesn’t want to kill me, like Nicco does.”

  “Whoa.”

  When I didn’t offer up anything else, she asked, “Is that whose jacket you’re wearing, then? It doesn’t seem like Isaac’s style.”

  I almost told her it was my dad’s. And if I hadn’t been drinking, I probably would have, but instead I said “Oui” and took another sip.

  She took the bottle and swigged again. “So my guy is gay, and yours wants to kill you?”