Rainbow Black

by Maggie Thrash

Genres: Coming of Age; Literary Fiction; LGBT & Pride; Historical Fiction

Synopsis

“I've loved Maggie Thrash's work for years, and Rainbow Black is going to set so many new hearts aflame—murder, intrigue, queer love, dark humor AND satanic panic? Welcome to the Maggie Thrash Fan Club, world!”—Emma Straub, New York Times bestselling author of This Time Tomorrow

For readers of Donna Tartt and Ottessa Moshfegh comes a brilliant, deliriously entertaining novel from the acclaimed author of Honor Girl. Rainbow Black is part murder mystery, part gay international fugitive love story—set against the ’90s Satanic Panic and spanning 20 years in the life of a young woman pulled into its undertow.

Lacey Bond is a 13-year-old girl in New Hampshire growing up in the tranquility of her hippie parents’ rural daycare center. 

 Then the Satanic Panic hits. It’s the summer of 1990 when Lacey ’s parents are handcuffed, flung into the county jail, and faced with a torrent of jaw-dropping accusations as part of a mass hysteria sweeping the nation. When a horrific murder brings Lacey to the breaking point, she makes a ruthless choice that will haunt her for decades.

 As an adult, Lacey mimes a normal life as the law clerk of an illustrious judge. She has a beautiful girlfriend, a measure of security, and the world has mostly forgotten about her. But after a tiny misstep spirals into an uncontrolled legal disaster, the hysteria threatens to begin all over again.

 Rainbow Black is an addictive, searing, high-octane triumph, an imaginative tour de force about one woman’s tireless desire to be free.

Release date: March 19, 2024

Publisher: HarperCollins

Print pages: 416

Sample

Part One

I’M STILL HERE, LIKE ONE OF THOSE CHILD STARS who’s been around forever, one who, five nervous breakdowns into her career, people are astonished to learn is only twenty-eight. Baked into every newspaper article and television segment about my blown identity is a sense of surprise that I hadn’t been frozen in time, that my life continued after the Medusa’s eye of the American news machine moved on and forgot me. In a decade I imagine they’ll circle back and rediscover me again, and we’ll revive this whole song and dance for a fresh audience.

God, I hope not. What more could there be to say? And yet, someone always seems to come up with something.

Reporters had been camped out on our street twenty-four hours a day, hoping to catch me or Gwen in a moment of candor, to ask the burning question on viewers’ minds: Which one of us did it? Which of us actually pulled the trigger and killed that kid fourteen years ago?

This distinction is less legally important than you might think. We were both there, we both fled, we would both get charged with conspiracy to murder. But for normal people, people who haven’t been to law school, whichever one of us made that tiny tug of her finger is the truly guilty party.

I was the obvious suspect, with my mirthless face and dark suits, the crease in my trousers so sharp it could draw blood. But wouldn’t it be thrilling if it turned out to be Gwen, the golden girl, the beauty to my beast, the supernova to my black hole? Wouldn’t that be a great twist?

If I’m to give my best assessment of what happened, I would first need the right word. What’s something that has the long odds of a miracle but is so colossally ruinous you’d never call it that? If I go through the whole thing from beginning to end, without mercy, overlooking nothing, will the right word become apparent?

It was “whatever,” to quote the golden girl. And I guess that word is good enough to get started, to convey, right off the top, a sort of bewildered acceptance of forces that are senseless, like how a leaf in flight accepts the wind.

i

NEW HAMPSHIRE

1983

THE FIRST COURTROOM I EVER SAW WAS ON AN EPISODE OF ONE Life to Live. My older sister, Éclair, was a soap opera fanatic. Days of Our Lives was her favorite, but she watched them all. I was six at the time, and she was thirteen. For a long time our family didn’t have a TV, because our parents were hippies and thought television was the harbinger of doom. “If you want to rot your brain, you can pay for it yourself someday,” my mom said.

So one summer Éclair called her bluff and worked her ass off laying mulch for half the farmers in the county, quitting as soon as she had her $560. The TV she bought lived in her room like a devoted pet. I was permitted the special privilege of watching her shows with her only if I promised not to ask dumb questions (“Why did Tony give the diamond necklace to the island girl?” “What does ‘blackmail’ mean?”), which meant I had to fill in the blanks myself, creating an even more dizzying web of amnesia plotlines and secret agendas on top of the existing ones.

In the One Life to Live episode that’s seared into my memory, Karen the tormented housewife is forced to testify as a witness, in defense of her best friend, Viki Lord Riley, who’s been accused of murdering an evil tycoon. In the climactic scene, the merciless prosecutor rips Karen to shreds, exposing the truth that she was secretly a prostitute, a word that shocked the characters so much I could not even imagine what it meant.

What really confused me was why Karen was being attacked by the lawyer in the first place. Wasn’t Viki Lord Riley the one on trial? Wasn’t Karen just the witness?

“It doesn’t matter who you are,” Éclair explained. “The point is, if you have a secret, you’re fucked.”

It’s still probably the wisest thing I’ve ever heard anyone say. 

ii

1988

OUR PARENTS OWNED A DAY CARE THEY RAN FROM OUR HOME IN New Hampshire—a converted old barn with a bright rainbow painted on the roof. Rainbow Kids Care, it was called. We had a little goat farm with five goats (Donny, Lonny, Sunny, Spunky, and Trailblazer) and a view overlooking untouched forest, the trees skeletons in winter, ruby red in fall. According to my dad, the trees were home to the fairy people who sat hidden in the branches and sprinkled fairy dust on our heads to keep us all safe and sound.

It was the 1980s, before those studies claiming that your kid would become a mentally ill delinquent if you didn’t pick the right preschool. Before the promises of “Baby Einstein Academy” or “Stepping-Stone to Success Day Care.” No one thought, when they handed over their two- through five-year-olds to my parents, that anything crucial was happening inside those two- through five-year-old brains. Keep the kids alive and reasonably happy until they could be picked up at the end of the day—that was the job. It was babysitting. Apple juice, graham crackers, finger painting, story time. I remember it all feeling pretty simple. Then again, every speck of my memory has been turned over, interrogated, and second-guessed to the point where I hardly know what I remember and what I don’t.

The day after she graduated high school, Éclair put us all in the rearview mirror and moved to Miami, about as far away from New Hampshire as a person could get while still technically being in America. Her dream was to be a backup dancer for Gloria Estefan, get “discovered,” and be propelled to stardom. She soon had a whole life of her own—a wardrobe comprised entirely of leopard print, a boyfriend with a car phone and his own exercise videotape company called Bangin’ Beach Bods—and her trips home were brief and infrequent.

Without her around, Days of Our Lives and One Life to Live lost their magic, and I stopped watching them. I’d gotten sort of nerdy and preferred books anyway. In the woods, there was an old shed kids called the “witch hut,” and I practically lived there, reading and listening to my Walkman and doing nothing.

But what were you doing in the woods?

I was asked this a hundred times, years later, in the sterile white office of a police station.

Nothing. I was doing nothing.

Adults seem to forget that between the grind of childhood (art time, nap time, snack time) and the grind of teenagedom (soccer practice, homework, party), there is a brief, sweet set of years where no one cares what you do, and you roam free. How could I explain the idle magic of these afternoons without sounding insane? That I collected rocks and gave them names, that I imagined clouds had personalities, that I believed animals would talk to you if they trusted you. Walking, walking, walking, practically losing my identity as I followed a red fox for miles into the forest.

I took after my mother, who was always more interested in animals than in people. The two of us would discuss our animal neighbors endlessly, like a pair of ladies gossiping at the hairdresser, except instead of so-and-so got drunk and wrecked his truck or so-and-so is sleeping with the mailman, it was the black bear found a new patch of berries or the skunk’s babies all had pure white tails. Occasionally my dad would interrupt us with some news from the real world:

“I’m bringing Dylan Fairbanks to stay for the week. His mom’s been arrested again, and she’s trying to make bail.”

Mom would seem momentarily confused, as if trying to remember which animal of the forest Dylan Fairbanks was and why we would ever bring him in the house.

“. . . Oh, of course, put him in Éclair’s room. How about I take them to the movies tonight? I need a little change of pace. Does Dylan like movies, Lacey?”

I shrugged. All I really knew about Dylan was that he loved NASCAR, or at least I assumed he did, because he wore the same threadbare NASCAR

T-shirt every day. Only much later would it occur to me that, quite possibly, it was the only shirt Dylan owned. I was too sheltered to understand all the things I took for granted, like clothes and a stable home life. And I was dying to know what bad thing Dylan’s mom had done to wind up behind bars. Was she a bank robber? A Soviet spy? But I was too shy to ask Dylan, and my mom wouldn’t tell.

We got to the Stardust drive-in movie theater as the sun was setting, and Mom spread a quilt on the grassy knoll up front, in the family-friendly area. I didn’t see many kids as young as me and Dylan there. Alien was playing, and as soon as the movie started, it was clear that it wasn’t meant for children—no talking animals or goofy sidekicks or precocious kid characters. The dark, industrial spaceship was ominous and unsettling, and when the alien finally appeared, it was so terrifying I stopped breathing. Part of me loved it; I had never been so thrilled in my life. But another part of me was already blaming my mother: Why are you letting me watch this?

At some point in the middle of the movie my mom leaned over and asked Dylan and me if we’d like popcorn and hot dogs. I thought she was joking. Hot dogs? Mom always said the body was a temple and the meat industry was the axis of evil.

“Ketchup and mustard? Ketchup and mustard? What do you like on your hot dogs?” She looked from Dylan to me, weirdly agitated. I shrugged, baffled. Then she trotted off into the darkness without waiting for an answer.

The movie was scaring me to death, and I kept glancing at Dylan to see if he was as terrified as I was. But he had the same dim look on his face as always. And when it was over, all he said was “If I met an alien, I would do a karate chop and its head would fall off.”

Mom never came back with the popcorn and hot dogs. I looked around and felt a creepy disconnect from reality—was this still the movie? If I opened the car door, would I find her body torn apart and a slimy alien waiting to leap out at me?

The family-friendly area was emptying out. A caravan of minivans streamed through the front gate, leaving behind popcorn-littered turf and derelicts and people with nowhere else to be: a teenage gang kicking abandoned cups across the gravel lot, cherry Slurpee spills arcing like blood splatters; a trailer park couple drinking from a jar while a baby howled in their junky back seat; a too-thin man leaning against the chain-link fence, flashing a switchblade open and shut: click, click, click. I felt lost, though I hadn’t moved an inch from the quilt where my mother had left us—it was everything around me that had changed. Even the group of hippies in their peace-sign T-shirts seemed suddenly homeless and addled. They weren’t holding hands or strumming guitars like in Alice’s Restaurant; they were arguing viciously, pointing fingers at each other: “Your fault!” “No, your fault!” You heard a lot in those days about how the region was falling apart; this was the first time I’d ever seen it with my

own eyes.

“Where’s my mom?” I asked. Without waiting for Dylan to answer, I said, “Maybe we should wait in the car.”

But the car was locked. I didn’t know what to do. Should we stay put, or sneak into a dark corner and hide? I decided we should look for her. Sitting on the knoll was like asking to be kidnapped. It was the age of “stranger danger”; every kid at school knew someone who knew someone who’d gotten AIDS from a candy bar or been abducted and sold to the Amish.

“Look at those kiddies,” I heard someone say. “They’re on a hot date. Hey, kids! Kiddies! C’mere! Where your daddies at?”

Just like during the movie, I checked Dylan’s face to see if he was scared, but he seemed totally unfazed. Maybe in his world it was normal for moms to randomly vanish. At the Snack Shack, a boy with yellow teeth was sweeping up. I wanted to ask if he’d seen my mom, but I was smart enough not to advertise that Dylan and I were alone.

“I think we should call 911,” I said.

Dylan shook his head. “No, no. Call my neighbor.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“When I can’t find my mom I’m supposed to call my neighbor.”

I couldn’t believe it. Call 911 was drilled into the head of every kid I knew. My friend Sandy had once called 911 when she couldn’t find her cat for ten minutes. I’d never met anyone who’d been told to call their neighbor.

“Well, who’s your neighbor?” I asked.

“Hank.”

“Who’s Hank?”

“My neighbor.”

I decided to call my dad and ask him if I should call 911. I don’t remember how I found a dime for the pay phone. Maybe Dylan had one, or maybe I begged one from the yellow-toothed guy in the Snack Shack. In any case, I dropped the coin in the slot, pushed the grimy buttons, and waited for my dad to pick up.

“4431.” To the bewilderment of most people, my dad always answered the phone with the last four digits of our number. He was a British expat, and that’s how he’d grown up doing it in England.

“Daddy? I can’t find Mom. She went to get us hot dogs and she never came back.” There was a pause. I wondered if he hadn’t heard me. “Daddy? Hello?”

“Lacey, listen to me. Don’t move. Stay with Dylan and don’t move an inch. I’ll be there in ten minutes.” He spoke urgently, with a no-nonsense tone I’d hardly ever heard in his voice before. It scared me.

“Should I call 911?”

“No.”

I looked at Dylan. What did he and my dad know that I didn’t? What was the point of all those videos we’d watched in school about Mikey and

Janie and Susie and their various emergencies if we weren’t supposed to call 911? I hung up the phone.

“Hey, kiddies. You on a hot date? You gonna go all the way?”

It was one of the teenagers wearing sunglasses. I looked away, which was what we had learned in the Just Say No after-school program. Never make eye contact with someone on dope, because they might “wig out” and attack you.

I hid myself behind the phone booth. Nearby, Dylan had found a half-finished hot dog on a table and was eating it.

“Well, I’m glad you got your hot dog,” I said.

“Me, too,” Dylan agreed, his mouth full.

I was being sarcastic, I growled at him in my mind.

A monotone voice sounded over the drive-in speakers: “The Stardust will be closing soon, please make your way to the exit.”

I felt a lump forming in my throat. Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry.

Finally I heard a crunch of gravel as my dad tore into the lot. He was driving the old VW bus that we hardly ever used because it always broke down. I ran up to him, Dylan padding after me.

Dad leapt out of the van. “Get in now,” he barked at us, and we obeyed. Everything felt confused, and I didn’t know what scared me most: aliens, hoodlums, missing moms, dope fiends, the man with the switchblade—they all mixed together in the darkness.

The windows of the bus were dirty, and we couldn’t see what was happening outside in the gravel lot. I heard my dad yelling, “That’s my wife! Move aside!”

I was shaking. My mother was lying there dead, I was sure. Strangely, all I could think about was how much I didn’t want Dylan to see me cry.

A man shouted, “You dirty hippies, get outta here, you filthy pieces of shit, get a job, wear some shoes, this is America, you commie Jew trash, get the fuck outta my place of business!”

Then a gunshot. Dylan and I both heard it and shrieked.

The passenger door groaned open. Dad had Mom in his arms. She was alive—I could tell by the delicate way he placed her in the van, like a knight who’d rescued a princess from a dragon. Relief flooded me. Before I could open my mouth to ask what was happening, he said in a strangely calm voice, “Don’t be scared. Your mom fainted. It’s just the bloody arse of a manager, shooting his gun in the air. Just trying to scare us. Everything’s hunky-dory. Just a little silly drama.”

In the weeks to come, he’d refuse to tell me a version of the story that I found satisfactory. So I had to make one up myself. Maybe the hippies had attacked my mother for buying a meat product, or maybe the man with the switchblade had tried to murder her because she

 resembled an ex-wife who had stolen his money and faked her own death.

My dad’s explanation, repeated many times to me, was completely insufficient: “Your mother fainted. And the manager wasn’t nice about it.”

“But why was everyone yelling?”

“Because when people are confused, they yell.”

“Why were they confused?”

“Because it was dark and no one could see what was happening.”

“Which was what?”

“Which was exactly what I said. Your mother fainted, and the manager is a mean man who doesn’t like freethinking people.”

“But doesn’t he know this is New Hampshire?” I asked. From a young age I’d taken our state motto, “Live Free or Die,” very seriously.

My dad gave an exhausted smile. “I’m sure he does. And that, my sweet, is called irony.”

The next morning my mother stayed in bed all day, listening to the Moody Blues on her record player and reading The Feminine Mystique. Dad said she needed to rest and I shouldn’t bother her. I was tiptoeing around the house, hoping I’d overhear something that might explain what had really happened.

“Lacey? Is that you? Will you pick me some violets from the yard? I need a little extra color today.”

I picked the violets, put them in a jar, and brought them back to her. She patted the bed next to her. Finally, I thought, ready to hear the full story.

But I was quickly disappointed, as she proceeded to give a scattered speech about how brave I was to call my dad and look after Dylan until he got there, and how the path to womanhood was a song with a thousand beautiful verses.

“But what happened?” I whined.

Her tranquil smile went flat. “Lacey, life is an art, not a science. Facts don’t exist. Just live in the moment.”

While these pseudo-philosophical question-avoiding tactics worked on a ten-year-old, they would later do her incredible damage. You can’t tell law enforcement officers, a judge, and a jury that facts don’t exist.

I couldn’t wait to tell Éclair what had happened. The story contained so many motifs from her beloved Days of Our Lives: a damsel, a hero, gunshots, fainting, an array of mysterious strangers. Once a month I was allowed a very expensive long-distance call with her in Miami.

But when I told her the story, her reaction was not at all what I’d hoped.

“Éclair, did you hear what I said? There was a gunshot. And Dad was carrying Mom and she was unconscious. And the manager was screaming every bad word I’ve ever heard.”

There was a long pause. Finally Éclair said, “Lacey, I want you to promise me never to go to the Stardust again.”

“Well, Daddy says the manager is a bigot and we won’t be patronizing his establishment anyway.”

“I’m sure that’s what

he says. . . .”

I’d been waiting for days to talk to Éclair, and the tepidness of her response made my heart deflate like a day-old balloon. She was barely interested in any of my wild theories and kept repeating, “Just promise not to go there, okay?”

When I tried to discuss the incident with Dylan, still loafing at our house while his mom sat in jail, he didn’t seem to grasp that anything unusual had happened. He told me, delightedly, “One time, at the mall, the police chased me and my mom, and I got to hide in a suitcase in the luggage department for five whole hours!”

With no other options, I begged my dad constantly, “Please, please, please tell me what happened.”

One day it seemed like he was about to crack. We were in the study, an austere room full of books and framed prints of moths and butterflies from the nineteenth century. “Lacey, come here,” he said, gesturing to his knee. I hadn’t sat in anyone’s lap in ages, fancying myself basically an adult, and I hesitated.

“Come here,” he repeated, and I obeyed. I was stiff and awkward at first; I’d grown tall for my age and didn’t fit snugly in his arm the way I used to. But once I stopped resisting, I felt the heavy cloak of father and daughter settle around our shoulders, musty with age but warm as ever. It was a love story largely unwritten; I’d consumed enough Greek mythology to notice that when daughters appeared in the stories at all, it was usually to be married off, locked up, or killed by their dads.

My father struck a match and lit his old briarwood pipe. He smoked English Cavendish tobacco. I loved the smell of it and breathed in as much as I could.

“I know you think you’re all grown up,” he said, “but there are things you don’t understand about the world.”

“What things?”

“You don’t need to know. All you need to know is that I’m here, and I’ll protect you. I promise I will never let anything bad happen to you or your mother or Éclair. Do you believe me?”

I was unsure. Dad was a male preschool teacher, hardly anyone’s idea of Superman. And yet, the way he’d shown up at the Stardust and saved us all had been nothing short of heroic. I weighed these things, making my decision, and if that seems precocious, I assure you it ended up being the same decision any ten-year-old would make: to choose to believe her parents would deliver on their promises.

“Yes,” I said finally.

My dad rubbed the top of my head. “Good. Then stop this silly behavior. Go back to living your life.”

And I knew then that the conversation was over, that I’d gotten all the information I was going to get. Life resumed, and it became clear that nothing like that night at the Stardust was going to happen again. My curiosity faded. But at odd times, trying to fall asleep during a full moon or walking home from the bus stop with a book in my hand, my mind would wander back, and long-sunk questions would bob to the surface: Where was my mom for the entire second half of the movie? Why had the manager shot the gun in the first place? It seemed like a fairly extreme way to inform people that the drive-in was closed. Was there something I’d forgotten, a piece of the puzzle lost at sea and disintegrating into the black water? I could almost feel it, floating just out of reach. Something. Something. I remember. I remember.

iii

1990

BY AGE THIRTEEN I WAS AS STEREOTYPICALLY NEW HAMPSHIRE as could be, like a cardboard cutout created by the tourist bureau (COME SEE OUR RUGGED WOMEN AND GIRLS!). I wore hiking boots to school, I had a sweatshirt sewn into my denim jacket, I knew how to tap for maple syrup, and I hated the government for vague reasons related to “freedom.” Meanwhile Éclair increasingly resembled Debbie Gibson. She’d figured out from a young age that she had “it,” that God-given quality that distinguishes cool girls from posers. At this point we were like a TV movie about a pop star and a farm girl playing long-lost sisters separated at birth.

The only thing we really had in common was that we both hated the day care. Every afternoon the house was full of little kids’ annoying, high-pitched voices. My parents, far from control freaks, believed children should have ample space for “independent play.” Which meant the kids were everywhere, like an infestation of gnomes: in the goat pen, in the garden, in the bathroom, in the kitchen, barging into my room demanding my attention (“Lacey, look at this!” “Lacey, look at me!”). Every couple years there was a whole new crop of them.

Éclair hardly ever left Miami anymore, as if her family (and the entire state of “New Crapshire”) were a black hole to be avoided at all costs. Which was why I was astonished one night, in the summer of 1990, when she appeared in the doorway of the barn, dumped a five-piece set of jewel-pink Diane von Furstenberg luggage on the floor, and said, “Bonjour, peasants. Your queen is here.”

No one had told me she was coming. I’d gotten the sense, lately, that something was going on behind my back, something between my mom and dad that they didn’t want to tell me. Now I wondered if they’d been planning Éclair’s visit as a fun surprise. Except it didn’t feel that way.

“God, Lacey,” she said, appraising me. “You look like Lumberjack Skipper.”

Mom was staring at Éclair’s suitcases like they were the tesseract, objects whose very natures were beyond her comprehension.

“How much was this luggage? You didn’t charge it, did you?”

“Calm down, it was a gift from Chaz.”

“Chaz has lovely taste,” my dad said, planting a kiss on Éclair’s cheek. I was starting to notice little things about my parents’ relationship, like how my dad always got to be the good guy, the one who appreciated fine luggage, while my mom was the one to point out that we knew nothing about this “Chaz” character, who had apparently spent thousands of dollars on Éclair. Everything was a gift from Chaz: her diamond earrings, her cartons of Yves Saint Laurent–brand cigarettes, her sparkling white sneakers, her neon zigzag mohair sweaters.

“Did he really give you all this stuff?” I asked Éclair later. She was unpacking in her room, her tatty posters of Bananarama and The Phantom of the Opera still tacked to the walls, her broken-down television in the corner, an abandoned pet that had died waiting for its owner to return.

Éclair paused, assessing me. I don’t think it was ever clear to Éclair where my loyalties lay—with her or with Mom. It was never 100 percent clear to me, either. Whenever I was with Éclair, our mother’s flaws loomed large: she was weird and distant; she used nature metaphors to explain everything even when they made no sense. But the reverse happened when I was with my mother. Suddenly Éclair seemed to be the root of the problem. She was selfish and shallow, egotistical and wild. But even that was partly my mom’s fault; she’d run away from home at age fourteen to go to Woodstock, where she met my dad and immediately got

pregnant. Was it really that surprising that a Woodstock baby turned out to be wild?

“I promise I won’t tell Mom,” I pleaded.

At last she leaned in, unable to resist a captive audience. She lowered her voice confidentially. “Once a week I go to Versace at the Omni International Mall, and I pick up a package. I bring it to the Fontainebleau hotel, which is outrageous, Lacey, absolute dyno. I go up to the penthouse, and I meet a guy named Joachim and a couple of his friends.”

“. . . And?”

“And nothing. I give Joachim the package, and we watch Dallas, and he gives me a foot massage.”

“What’s in the package?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t want to know.”

“You never took a single look?”

“Nope.”

I imagined wreaths of sparkling diamonds stolen from exiled Russian royalty. An array of delicate spotted eggs from an illegal rare bird trade, pink and orange and gleaming turquoise. A stack of brute gold bars from a Nazi bank, or letters from a Mob boss in hiding.

It disturbed me to think of this Joachim person touching Éclair; Dad had always rubbed her feet, sometimes even painting her toenails. It seemed like a sacred father-daughter thing that she was now allowing to be polluted.

“Is Joachim, like, your boyfriend?”

“No. Chaz is my boyfriend. Joachim is just a guy.”

“How did you meet him?”

“At a party. Parties are where everybody meets everybody. Speaking of, didn’t you just finish exams? You should be partying right now!”

I had, in fact, been invited to a party at Melissa Shears’s house to celebrate graduating middle school, an accomplishment so unremarkable that even Bobby Hayes, renowned glue-sniffer, had managed to achieve it. I felt ambivalent about going, but now Éclair was adamant that I had to. I had a feeling she was trying to get me out of the house.

She drove me to Melissa’s in Dad’s pickup truck. Melissa lived in a brand-spanking-new development, Whispering Pines, that had polarized the town: either you were jealous of the people who got to live there or you thought it was the death knell of our special New England character. The houses were identical, with large front windows and two-car garages, flat green lawns relieved of any naturally occurring tree or bush or squirrel.

“This is so middle class,” Éclair said in disgust, lowering her shield-style rainbow sunglasses, which were maybe normal in Miami but up here made her look like an alien.

“Middle class?” I said, surprised. I knew the development wasn’t universally liked, but I thought it at least agreed upon that the homes were fancy. Plush carpeting, shiny brass doorknobs, “barbecue-ready” decks, and tile countertops. Brand-new side-by-side refrigerators with ice makers.

“When you visit me in Miami, I’ll show you real class,” Éclair said. “There’s a

club called Reflections where you can have a cocktail in a Jacuzzi. Right there in the middle of the club!”

When you visit me. It was the first time Éclair had floated the possibility of me being part of her new life, rather than locked in the past with the barn and the goats and our clog-wearing parents. I wanted her to come to Melissa’s door with me so that everyone could see what a wild and cool person I was related to. But I couldn’t think of a way to ask her without seeming like a baby. So I said goodbye, and she tore away in the truck as if middle-classness were contagious.

All of eighth grade had been invited. Melissa’s parents greeted me and then led me down to the cellar. There was the usual racket of boys at the foosball table, an MC Hammer tape in the cassette player, tinny gunshots from Duck Hunt on the Nintendo, and the tinkling giggle of Twister-playing girls as they fell in a heap on top of Ricky Morris, the only boy in our grade brave enough to cross the gender divide at social events.

I found my friends Ann, Marjorie, and Sandy, who were often embarrassing at parties, doing things like dressing in green, red, and blue like the three fairies from Sleeping Beauty. Our friendship was based on the fact that on Wednesdays we took a bus to Boost, the gifted program at the high school in Concord.

Sandy was being weird, avoiding eye contact with me and pointedly directing her conversation to only Ann and Marjorie. I didn’t read too much into it—maybe she was in a bad mood or something.

Ann and Marjorie were engaged in a hushed conversation about whether there would be “kissing games” at the party. The prospect of kissing a boy did not fill me with the same cocktail of anticipation, exhilaration, and terror as it did my friends; it had been apparent for a while now that I was a lesbian. Éclair had been calling me a dyke since I was nine, and I’d endured many conversations with my mom and dad about the mystical nature of sexuality.

“Some people are special,” Dad would try to explain before Mom cut him off.

“Everyone is special. But some people want different things in life, things that aren’t shown on TV as much.”

“What things?” I asked.

“To marry a woman instead of a man,” my dad said.

“She’s in middle school, Hugh. Don’t co-opt her into the marriage-industrial complex.”

I remember Mom saying unhelpful things like “Love is fluid and can take the shape of any vessel,” and Dad’s pipe bobbing as he nodded in agreement. He was ten years older than her, and the pipe might have made him seem older still. But with his Beatles hair and holey tweeds, he managed to seem more like a schoolboy puffing on his grandfather’s pipe. Mom, too, was stuck in her youth, still dressing like it was 1969. Little treasures could always be found braided into her long blond hair: lilac buds, a tiny sparrow’s skull, a brilliant red maple leaf. During her portion of the sex talk, she listed all the mammalian species known

to engage in homosexual behavior: lions, giraffes, elephants, hyenas, bonobos, polecats, wild marmots. I came away from the conversation understanding that while I was just as normal as a wild marmot, I shouldn’t talk about it at school because other people wouldn’t see it that way.

A small hubbub was brewing at the refreshments table, which held the snacks, the bowl of pink punch, and a stack of untouched party hats Melissa’s parents didn’t seem to realize we were too old for.

“Who ruined the cake? Who ruined the cake?” Melissa was demanding. Everyone, including me, crowded around the table excitedly. But the cake wasn’t ruined at all, I saw with disappointment. A single piece had been neatly cut from one corner.

“Who cares?” I said. “It’s just one piece.”

“We were supposed to light the candles and blow them out together,” Melissa whined. Her friends, out of loyalty, folded their arms and contributed a half-baked chorus of “Yeah, together,” and the catchphrase from Full House: “How rude!”

“Who was it? Who did it?” Melissa said. “Everyone show your tongues right now!”

The cake’s frosting was electric blue with CONGRATULATIONS 8TH GRADERS scrawled across it in green letters. The tongue of whoever had eaten the cake would certainly tell the tale. Rolling my eyes, I stuck my tongue out along with everyone else. Though it was embarrassing to be treated like a five-year-old at a party supposedly thrown to celebrate our maturity, it would have been more embarrassing to refuse and wear the badge of cake-eater for all of high school.

Melissa stomped across the room in her pink Keds to badger the boys playing Nintendo. “Stick out your tongue. Stick out your tongue.” I wasn’t expecting any of this to result in finding a culprit. But at the exact wrong moment, as the MC Hammer song faded out and the tape wound to its end with a foreboding click, Melissa’s eyes landed on Dylan Fairbanks, who I hadn’t even realized was there.

As soon as I saw him, I knew with 100 percent certainty that he was the cake-eater. He’d been caught stealing sixth graders’ lunches during their recess period, ...