The sparks worked their magic for approximately two weeks before my mom discovered that Peter Covington was in fact married, that he had a toddler at home—a little boy named Hayden—and that most of the things he’d said to her in private were a pack of lies. She ended things immediately, with a fiery speech that she has a tendency to recount verbatim whenever she’s had a little too much white wine, and then spent a few months debating whether or not to rat the man out to his wife. When she learned that she was pregnant, it was merely the icing on the cake.
I was born into the midst of an ugly war that continues to this day, erupting in periodic skirmishes as Peter Covington tries to ruin my mother’s career and life, and she sues him repeatedly for slander and back child support. Peter’s wife, Isabel, amazingly has stuck by him through the whole lengthy ordeal; supposedly, April was born to save their marriage, but I suspect a prenup is the real reason their matrimonial bonds have never been torn asunder.
Peter wouldn’t have anything to do with me; in sixteen years, I’ve never received so much as a birthday card from him. When I was a kid, he fascinated me—my wealthy and elusive father, who lived in a beautiful home and drove a fancy car—but I only made the mistake of calling him Dad once, when I was five years old and he came by our house to deliver some personal message to my mom; his reaction, which was swift, furious, and terrifying, permanently cured me of my misplaced affection. In an emergency, my mother would have turned to the Cloverfield monster for help before asking for a favor from Peter Covington—and if she’d called him now, it could only mean one thing.
“How broke are we?” I ask flatly, when her silence becomes unbearable. My thoughts fragment inside my skull. Fox’s corpse is practically looming over my shoulder, but the poverty my mom and I struggle against is a black hole with its own inescapable gravity; I can’t avoid it, so I might as well dive in instead and give myself a little more time to think about how I’ll bring up the dead body I’ve just discovered.
She takes a hesitant breath. “It’s not for you to worry about, kiddo.”
“Mom.”
“I’ve got it under control, Rufus.”
The lie is so threadbare, it’s impossible to let it pass unchallenged. “You said you’d rather take a bath with a lawn mower than ask that ass-butt for money again! You’d never have called him unless it was really serious.” More silence follows, and I bite the inside of my cheek as the bottom drops out of my stomach. How much worse is this night going to get? “How bad is it?”
“Ruf—”
“Please, Mom, just … tell me.” I’ve made my way to the rear of the cottage now, and I lean tiredly over another porch rail, crickets underscoring the deceptively tranquil view of dark water spreading toward the far shore. The moon glares brightly down at the Whitneys’ cottage like the spotlight from a police helicopter, and I duck my head. “Whatever it is, my imagination’ll only make it worse.”
“We owe the bank about eight grand,” my mother confesses miserably, “and, okay, it’s kind of … urgent.” It’s only the fourth of the month, and she’s already panicked enough to appeal to my father; that means this is an old debt, a compounded one, and she’s starting to get desperate. “I can scrape together about a quarter of it if I can get your uncle Connor to pay back the money I loaned him last Christmas. But…”
She trails off, my stomach heaves again, and just like that I feel the phantom grip of Fox’s cooling fingers at the base of my neck. I called my mom about a murder and now we’re talking about the chance that we might lose our house? The ground seems to tilt sharply under my feet, pressure grips at my chest, and I struggle for air.
My mom’s all I’ve got; my whole life, it’s just been the two of us, holding hands to ride out the storm; and too often, the storm has been me. Somewhere inside me lurks a volatile Mr. Hyde, an alter ego driven by an engine of combustible anger I’ve only recently found any success in mastering. Swept up in the inner hurricane of my rage, I’ve screamed and ranted, broken dishes and bones, terrorized my teachers—and provided my father with ammunition in his agenda against us. How many phone calls has she gotten from school officials over the years because I lost control and broke the glass on a trophy case or attacked someone in class?
And she’s stood by me through all of it. I owe her so much. I owe her everything. How much more can she take? My mouth clicks dryly, my free hand tightening on the wooden rail. “I’ve been working all year, Mom. I can help—”
“No. Absolutely not, no way!” She’s so vehement I can practically hear her hand karate-chopping the air. “I will not let you spend your money on this, Rufus Holt. Do you hear me? These are my mistakes, not yours, and if—if—”
She stops altogether, and I can picture her again: glasses in her lap, fingers pressed hard against her lips, mouth trembling as she tries not to cry. The lake smears in front of me, black and gray and blue all running together, and I blink hard. None of this is fair. “It affects me, too, Mom. It’s my house, too.”
“I’ll take care of it. If I have to sell my organs on the black market, I will handle it. Okay?” She puts some steel in her tone. “Your shithead sperm donor owes us so much by now I would own this fucking place outright if he’d pay up.”
“Don’t hold your breath,” I mumble weakly.
“I’m sorry, kiddo. All that … let’s strike it from the record and start over. What did April do this time?”
Reflexively, I turn around and peer back into the cottage through the broad French doors of the family room. The fixtures of the kitchen gleam menacingly at the front of the house, and Sebastian stands near the fireplace, watching me with brightly nervous eyes and radiating an inarticulate terror of being alone inside with a corpse. I know I should tell her what we’ve found … but how can I? She’s already in a lousy place; the first thing she’d do would be call the police—or, worse, Peter—and there would go any chance for me to take control of my involvement in the situation.
I’m not exactly one of the Bad Kids, but my history of anger-related behavioral issues are well documented, and cops don’t really seem to care much about your GPA when they already remember you from the time you lost your shit in the eighth grade and knocked a bully’s tooth out with the back of a chair. Especially when your own father prosecuted the bully’s subsequent lawsuit against the school district and publicly called you a “dangerous animal.” Thanks to a good therapist and the right medication, my moods have stabilized a lot since then, but the president of the school board is just waiting for the proper excuse to expel me—and having been suspended once this year already, my situation is precarious.
I haven’t thought things out, I realize; once my mom learns what’s happened, there will be no taking it back. I need to know more. I just need a little more time.
“It’s nothing,” I mumble at last. “Don’t worry about it.”
As I disconnect, though, it is with the distinct sensation that—somehow, in some way—the Covingtons have just ruined my life yet again.
3
“Who were you talking to?” Sebastian demands the second I let myself back in through the doors of the family room, stepping carefully around the glass fragments that litter the glossy floorboards. The music is off now, and so is the sound of water rushing through the pipes in the bathroom. April is done with her shower. “I thought you said we shouldn’t call the cops!”
“Five minutes ago, you wanted to call the cops,” I point out, startled by his about-face. From my new perspective, in the middle of the family room, the disarranged furniture looks like evidence of a struggle; the chairs have been knocked rather than pushed aside, and the glass inset of the coffee table is feathered with cracks.
“Five minutes ago, I hadn’t had a chance to look around yet,” Sebastian counters with quiet urgency. He comes closer, his soft, dark eyes gazing steadily back into mine, and a painfully happy memory zings through me like an electric shock. “Rufus, who were you talking to?”
“My mo
m, all right?”
“You told your mom?” Aghast, he stares at me, his face turning gray again in an instant.
“No, I didn’t. It was just … forget it, it doesn’t matter. What did you mean about having a chance to look around? What did you find?”
Wordlessly, he leads me away from the scattered furniture and into the dining nook. There are paintings on the wall of sailboats and harbors, a sideboard with bric-a-brac and iron candlesticks, and a blocky wooden table holding up a bounty of all sorts of things kids our age are not supposed to be into. There are jugs of cheap wine, an open case of cheaper beer, and about a half-dozen bottles of liquor that are nearly empty; an ashtray bristles like a porcupine with cigarette butts; and a broad hand mirror shows unmistakable traces of white powder, a tightly-rolled dollar bill resting alongside it.
Mr. Hyde is already fighting to surface within me, some hot, dark emotion clawing at my chest like heartburn, when Sebastian directs my attention to the small white pills that lay scattered everywhere across the floor like rice at a wedding; there are so many of them, strewn about so haphazardly that they’re impossible to count. With shaking fingers, I turn one over, revealing the telltale stamp pressed into the top side of the tablet: the outline of a rabbit.
“White rabbits, man,” Sebastian notes the obvious. “A shitload of them.”
Rage sweeps over me so fast that lights actually flash in my eyes. My brain feels like it’s spinning, exploding, and melting all at the same time, and I become dizzy from the heat building in my face and neck. What the fuck has April gotten me into?
Migrating from the New York club scene, “white rabbit” is a designer drug known to cause euphoria, heightened sensory perception, and hallucinations. The pills have also been linked, notoriously, to acts of extreme violence—like, trying-to-exfoliate-your-neighbor-with-a-belt-sander extreme—and parents everywhere are terrified of them. We had two assemblies about drug abuse at Ethan Allen this past spring alone, after white rabbits turned up in a couple of arrests on campus at the university. Get caught smoking a joint or taking some of your best friend’s Adderall and you’ll be in trouble; get caught with white rabbits and you’re fucked. They’ve replaced bath salts as the latest version of History’s Most Dangerous Substance Ever, and local authorities come down like a guillotine on anyone caught buying, selling, or using them.
Rumors make the rounds at Ethan Allen all the time about the various losers and burnouts using hard drugs, blotting out dismal visions of their uncertain futures with a chemical assist; and the bored, rich kids are notorious for spending their unwieldy allowances on recreational substances, counting on their trust funds and connected parents to protect them in the event of “legal complications.” But what Sebastian and I stare at now is an order of a different magnitude.
Lucy and I swore a blood oath to each other, once upon a time, that we would never ever so much as touch white rabbits. For one thing, my brain chemistry is unpredictable enough as it is without adding hallucinogenic nightmares to the mix, and for another, I absolutely cannot afford the trouble that getting caught with white rabbits would bring me. My mom and I have no money and no prestige. My life would be ruined.
And April has invited me to a murder scene decorated with enough of them to fill a fucking beanbag chair.
“Hey—hey, Rufus? I need you to breathe, man, okay? Slow breaths. Like me, right? Do what I’m doing.” Sebastian’s voice penetrates the fog of my rage, his eyes level with mine again, his right hand locked with my own. “Take a step back, right? Say it.”
“Take … a step back,” I repeat, forcing myself to focus—on his face, on his touch. I struggle to control my breathing, and he moves my free hand to his chest, holding it there. He’s done this for me before when my anger has taken over, talking me down from the ledge when I was perilously close to losing it, and the routine is heartbreakingly familiar. It felt so huge, so significant, to share such an awful part of myself with him—to be so unbalanced, and to know that I could trust him to be my counterweight.
He’s looking at me, looking into me, and his eyes are warm, dark pools full of our shared history—windows into a past that’s still too painful to touch.
* * *
The first time I really met Sebastian “Bash” Williams, it was at a meeting for the Front Line, our school’s sorry excuse for a newspaper. Everybody knew who he was, of course; Bash was too good-looking and his dad too important for him to fly under anyone’s radar for long. But he and I didn’t become personally acquainted until September of our sophomore year.
I’d been working on the paper ever since I’d started at Ethan Allen, writing occasional editorials, but mostly serving as a photographer. Bash joined the staff as a sports columnist—a position for which our supervisor, Mr. Cohen, felt he was eminently qualified, based solely on the fact that 1) he played lacrosse, and 2) the guy’s father was the athletic director at the university. It didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but everyone on the Front Line was so impressed by Bash’s lacrosse stats—and his looks—that they didn’t really care. For some even less explicable reason, Mr. Cohen assigned me to act as Bash’s personal photographer, shooting the pictures that would accompany his articles.
It was not an easy partnership in the beginning. Bash’s popularity elevated him well above my own meager social standing, putting him into the orbit of Ethan Allen’s student royalty. He hung out with guys like Fox Whitney and Race Atwood—and, thusly, my brother, Hayden, as well. Natural enemies, Sebastian and I were antagonistic from the moment we were introduced, boring holes into each other with iron glares.
Over the course of the next two months, however, things slowly changed. Our mutual hostility proved too difficult to maintain when we were forced to sit together in the same car for hours a couple times a week, driving back and forth to different away games. I started to realize that he actually was a pretty good sports writer after all, and the atmosphere between us gradually shifted from open animosity to resentful cooperation to a grudging but necessary pact of silent non-aggression. Finally, at a football game in Brattleboro the week before Thanksgiving, Bash Williams actually spoke to me in a genuinely friendly way for the first time ever.
I was rummaging through my bag, digging for a camera lens that had gotten lost in the other useless crap that I kept in there, and I had hauled a bunch of items out in order to make the search easier. Right on top of the disordered pile I was creating beside me sat a battered and dog-eared copy of Love—the fourth volume from the most badass manga series of all time.
“Dude,” Bash blurted unexpectedly, a spark of something unfamiliar glimmering in his eyes. “Are you seriously reading Death Note?”
“Uh … yeah?” Aware that this might be a trap, I kept my answer guarded. But Bash surprised me.
“That story is the shit!” He couldn’t keep his excitement under control. “I don’t want to give anything away or whatever, but by the time you finish that? You’re gonna have lost your mind. What part are you up to?”
“Actually? I’m kind of rereading it. For the third time,” I admitted, eyeing him with a curious level of newfound respect. I didn’t think popular kids were into anything except the Top 40, other popular kids, and ganging up on nerds. “You like manga?”
“I mean, sorta.” He shrugged sheepishly. “My girlfriend’s little brother, Javier? He’s, like, nuts about anime and stuff. All last summer he was bugging me to read Death Note.” Bash was in a very high-profile on-again-off-again relationship with Lia Santos—the kind of obnoxiously torrid love affair that involved tons of handsy PDA in school hallways, followed by tons of screaming arguments also in school hallways, a breakup, a make-up, lather, rinse, repeat. Paying attention to them was exhausting. “I finally agreed, just to get him to lay off, and … man, once I started it, I stayed up for thirty-six hours straight and finished the whole series. I mean, I think I literally know what it feels like to come down off a meth binge now.”
“I know what you
mean,” I said with a short laugh. “The first time I read it was back in the seventh grade, and I didn’t sleep for about a week, because I was convinced that maybe it was really possible to kill somebody just by writing it in a notebook.”
He grinned. “You did?”
“It’s really embarrassing.” I felt my face turning red, but I smiled anyway, because he didn’t seem to be mocking me.
“I get it. I, uh … I actually maybe kinda slept with the light on for a few days after I finished?” he confessed, rubbing the back of his head. “And that was last August.”
“It’s freaky as hell,” I agreed.
“It’s awesome,” he returned, seriously. “Have you read Blue Exorcist? It’s wild—it’s all about the son of Satan learning to fight demons so he can bring down his dad. The action sequences are rad as hell.”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“You should check it out,” Bash said, his eyes not quite meeting mine. “I’m, like, obsessed, and … and I’m sick of not having anybody to talk to about it.”
For a second, I wasn’t sure how to react. This sudden and unexpected olive branch was difficult to process and harder to trust, given our history; but at last, I said, “I will. It sounds really cool.”
He looked at me then, and smiled; and there was a quality to it that was shy and sincere and searching, and I felt something warm flip over in my chest.
And, just like that, I realized the horrible truth: I had a crush on Bash Williams.
* * *
As soon as the spinning in my brain begins to slow, the throbbing fire in my chest to subside, I break my contact with Sebastian and step away. No matter how much I trusted him in the past, I can’t anymore—and maybe never should have.
White Rabbit Page 3