Neverworld Wake

lt;b>Marisha Pessl is the author of Night Film and Special Topics in Calamity Physics, which won the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize (now the Center for Fiction s Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize) and was selected as one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review. Pessl grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, and currently resides in New York City.

I hadn t spoken to Whitley Lansing--or any of them--in over a year.

When her text arrived after my last final, it felt inevitable, like a comet tearing through the night sky, hinting of fate.

Too long. WTF. #notcool. Sorry. My Tourette s again. How was your freshman year? Amazing? Awful?

Seriously. We miss you.

Breaking the silence bc the gang is heading to Wincroft for my bday. The Linda will be in Mallorca & ESS Burt is getting married in St. Bart s for the 3rd time. (Vegan yogi.) So it s ours for the weekend. Like yesteryear.

Can you come? What do you say Bumblebee?

Carpe noctem.

Seize the night.

She was the only girl I knew who surveyed everybody like a leather-clad Dior model and rattled off Latin like it was her native language.

How was your exam? my mom asked when she picked me up.

I confused Socrates with Plato and ran out of time during the essay, I said, pulling on my seat belt.

I m sure you did great. She smiled, a careful look. Anything else we need to do?

I shook my head.

My dad and I had already cleared out my dorm room. I d returned my textbooks to the student union to get the 30 percent off for next year. My roommate had been a girl from New Haven named Casey who d gone home to see her boyfriend every weekend. I d barely seen her since orientation.

The end of my freshman year at Emerson College had just come and gone with the indifferent silence usually reserved for a going-out-of-business sale at a mini-mall.

Something dark s a-brewin , Jim would have told me.

I had no plans all summer, except to work alongside my parents at the Captain s Crow.

The Captain s Crow--the Crow, it s called by locals--is the seaside cafe and ice cream parlor my family owns in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, the tiny coastal village where I grew up.

Watch Hill, Rhode Island. Population: You Know Everyone.

My great-grandfather Burn Hartley opened the parlor in 1885, when Watch Hill was little more than a craggy hamlet where whaling captains came to shake off their sea legs and hold their children for the first time before taking off again for the Atlantic s Great Unknowns. Burn s framed pencil portrait hangs over the entrance, revealing him to have the mad glare of some dead genius writer, or a world explorer who never came home from the Arctic. The truth is, though, he could barely read, preferred familiar faces to strange ones and dry land to the sea. All he ever did was run our little dockside restaurant his whole life, and perfect the recipe for the best clam chowder in the world.

All summer I scooped ice cream for tan teenagers in flip-flops and pastel sweaters. They came and went in big skittish groups like schools of fish. I made cheeseburgers and tuna melts, coleslaw and milk shakes. I swept away sand dusting the black-and-white-checkered floor. I threw out napkins, ketchup packets, salt packets, over 21 wristbands, Del s Frozen Lemonade cups, deep-sea fishing party boat brochures. I put lost cell phones beside the register so they could be easily found when the panic-stricken owners came barging inside: I lost my . . . Oh . . . thank you, you re the best! I cleaned up the torn blue tickets from the 1893 saltwater carousel, located just a few doors down by the beach, which featured faded faceless mermaids to ride, not horses. Watch Hill s greatest clai