to an increasing sense of panic that I’m doomed to become one of those awful little people who peaked in high school.”
“Goddamn it, Madeline, we are the balls,” said Astrid, kicking me in the thigh. “Now and forever.”
“Look,” I said, “in this place, you and I own any goddamn room we walk into. We can get up onstage and play the entire school like a fucking violin, conjuring forth any nuance of emotion we want—teachers, classmates, administration—off the cuff, pitch-perfect every time. Either one of us could snap our fingers and start a riot, or stop one dead in its tracks.”
She nodded. “Absolute power.”
It’s why we were friends. I mean, who the hell else could we have admitted this to?
“Absolutely,” I said, then pointed at the window. “Out there, however, it’s a goddamn crap shoot. Entropy… chaos.”
She crossed her arms, impatient. “Don’t be such a pussy.”
“I’m not a pussy, I’m a realist. Our main ingredient is just charisma, Astrid, the very quintessence of ephemerality. ‘One shade the more, one ray the less…’ and hey presto, it’s gone.”
“Bullshit,” she said. “The only thing that can take it away is allowing yourself to doubt it.”
“Well, there you go, then. I’m dead meat.”
Astrid blew a stream of smoke out the window, then turned back to me. “Take off your jacket.”
“Why?”
“So you can give it to me.”
“I don’t want to fucking give you my jacket. The window’s open and it’s goddamn freezing in here. Besides which you’re already wearing a coat.”
“Yeah, but we’re trading.” She stuck the Dunhill in the corner of her mouth and shook off her mother’s sable, holding it out toward me.
“Fuck off. I like mine better.”
“The hell you do,” she said. “It’s an ugly piece of shit with duct tape all over it.”
“I happen to enjoy duct tape.”
“Cocky bitch.”
“Damn right,” I said.
She took another drag and put her coat back on. “You know how many people would’ve traded?”
I shrugged.
“All of them,” she said. “Everyone but you, Madissima. So fuck doubt. The only thing you need to do is arise, go forth, and conquer.”
“Tennyson. ‘The Passing of Arthur.’ ”
“We are the best fucking minds of our generation,” said Astrid. “And I will never let you forget it.”
She leaned out the window, blowing a plume of smoke into the frosty air before extending her sable-draped arms in a gesture of sublime grace, a benediction over those still asleep in the waning darkness.
“Hear this,” she said into the night, “from Astrid and Madeline: We. Are. The. Balls.”
She declaimed Eliot’s second-stanza blessing, then—softly—across all the campus below:
“ Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.”
Then the sun came up, and, four hours later, the pair of us aced Hindley’s bullshit poetry test: ninety-eight apiece.
It was hard, now, to remember the two of us—me and Astrid, as children—but harder still to recall the people she’d believed we would become.
14
I got from Jamaica Station to Prospect faster this time around. Not just because I knew my way, but also because the air felt a little crisper—there was a nice snap to it, heralding fall. Not enough to make me wish I’d brought a sweater, just adequate to walk at a brisker pace, freed from summer’s soggy oppression.
Cate was just unloading her car when I turned into the little dead-end lane.
She looked up and smiled. “You’re the first one here.”
The other volunteers arrived moments later—half a dozen mellow-looking older folk wearing sturdy shoes and floppy hats. They might’ve just returned from an Elderhostel rafting trip down the Colorado: no-nonsense, ready for anything.
Cate jumped right into describing the parameters of today’s
mission.
“All we know so far is that the child was three years old,” she said. “So we’re looking for anything that might help to identify him or her… clothing especially. Let’s work in pairs this week, and go slowly.”
The Quakers nodded.
“If you uncover anything other than plant matter,” she continued, “even if it looks like run-of-the-mill garbage, bring it out to the edges of the cleared trail and leave it next to the little railings, here.” She pointed to the granite corner-marker of a family plot.
“Didn’t Skwarecki say we shouldn’t touch anything we found?” I asked her, once the Quakers had paired off and moved away.
“Her crew’s spent some time here since,” said Cate, “and she thinks if we do turn anything up, the stuff will most likely have been moved by animals. She’s coming by later to look over whatever we do find.”
I tied a newly laundered bandanna around my forehead.
“Nice,” she said, handing