“Ophelia,” Viv sighed dreamily. “She’s so tragic, mad. I don’t even care that she’s the ultimate manic pixie dream girl. Mr. Lancaster’s dropping hints that the spring production will be Hamlet. I want him to see that I was born to play Ophelia. Amanda will be all, Ophelia was a blonde and so am I. I won’t let her snake it from me. Hold on.” She yelled away from the phone. Listened for a beat of silence. Then, “Ina wants to know if you’re having a veggie burger?”
“I’m going to give my parents heart attacks and eat here tonight.”
She shouted back to her mom and then to me, “Uh-oh. Is it zombies versus unicorns over there?”
“No. Mom texted about making pesto earlier. She used emojis. I have to reward the effort.”
“Have they been fighting since you got home?” She sounded unimpressed by my stalling.
“They’ve stopped.”
“It’s not like when they throw things and your dad leaves?”
“No,” I whispered.
She waited a few seconds. “I didn’t think we had secrets.”
I flipped on the battery-operated strand of fairy lights inside my chair. They were white and bright in my eyes. “I was embarrassed.”
“You want to tell her, don’t you? You want her to know because then they will get a divorce.” It wasn’t phrased as a question.
I flipped the lights off. “I never said that.”
“You said you’d rather have two houses than one full of screaming.”
“It’s not what I meant.”
“Because you get that you wouldn’t just blow up your family. You’d blow up mine.”
“Hold on. I’m going into the closet.” I pressed between the sweaters. With the door closed behind me I had absolute privacy. “We made a promise. I will never tell my mom what we saw. I’ll never tell my dad that we know.”
I could hear her breathing deeply on the other line. Her face was probably going runny like it did when she tried not to cry. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “If you want to tell, I won’t be a bitchface about it.”
I shook my head into the dark. “Subject change, okay?”
“Okay.”
“I was thinking about Slumber Fest.”
“Why? Wait—oh my god.” Her voice jumped high. “Are you thinking what I am?”
“That it doesn’t need to be canceled?”
“Throwing it would make the Order a legend,” she said. “But they put up a barbed wire fence blocking the road to the slaughterhouse.”
“Forget the slaughterhouse,” I said. “What about the old railway tunnel?”
“The Ghost Tunnel,” she said with delicious exuberance. “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. What’s the plan?”
A few minutes later she hung up for dinner. I sat on my desk and drew my knees to my chest. I stared out at the beach visible over rooftops. I tried to resist it, but what I saw in Viv’s garden six years before demanded to be remembered. Fully.
Viv and I hopping along the stones set into an ocean of clover. My legs kicking out, following their archipelago by memory around the corner of her house. The wink of the sun off the glass walls of the hothouse as it came into view. A figure inside. Her mom in the poppy-red turban she wore during treatment. Another head, taller than Ina. My dad stooped over her and then their mouths fitted together. I froze, one foot off the ground in a doomed jump. Viv’s pinkie finger hooked mine. Tears sprung to her eyes.
How could we tell? Her mom had cancer. And then the cancer was in remission, a miracle for Viv. And maybe the kiss had been a mistake, and what if we told and her mom got sick again? Who would we tell? What if grown-ups kissed in private all the time?
Later we understood. We named it cheating. On TV, families broke apart because of it.
It wasn’t fair to us to decide between the lives we had and whatever would come after our parents splintered. They’d break apart because of what we saw. That’s how we thought about it. It was what we saw, not the wrong they did.
That was wearing off the older I got.
It was easier to imagine telling. But I believed that Mom sensed the space between her and Dad, and because I thought Mom knew Dad was up to something I convinced myself that it wasn’t my job to be honest.
Awful things happened all the time and people didn’t do anything about them. Just the way the world is. Grown-ups had affairs, deaths went uninvestigated, Goldilocks was killed, and mean-spirited kids called you names.
Except the Order of IV had started to right the wrongs in Seven Hills.
Retrieved from the cellular phone of Vivian Marlo
Transcript and notes prepared by Badge #82827
Shared Media Folder Titled: IV, Mon., Sept. 16 9:08 p.m.
Video start.
V. Marlo sits with her back to a mirror. In it, the reflection of a window and the Marlos’ apple orchard.
“How do I look? Oh god, forget that. Blah, okay,” She gives her head a shake. “In super-serious mode. I thought we’d get busted for the first rebellion. Laymen don’t think of actors as artists—laymen losers. But I am an artist. I just thought of our rebellion as performance art. And hello, silver lining: If we got caught, my face would have been on at least the local news. Stars have been discovered from less than that. But we didn’t get caught and the rebellion worked. It’s all anyone is talking about. People are losing their shit over who IV is and what they’ll do next. The girls all think IV is a really hot guy, tattooed and bad boyish with a conscience, and the guys all think it’s a girl in a full-body leather suit like a Marvel superhero. Seriously, no one is even mentioning homecoming, which is in less than two weeks. I have stolen homecoming’s thunder.”
She waves her free hand at the lens. “I kind of wish everybody knew IV was us. That would shut Amanda and her hyenas up for good. Forever. It would knock the stuffed animal hat right off her head. No one would ever buy that Amanda Gasbags and Witches Schultz had forgotten my name again.”
She looks past the lens. “She would never get to treat me like I’m not as good as her. Everybody would not just know my name, they’d be saying it.”
She focuses anew on the lens. “G, I, H, don’t freak if you cheat and watch before graduation—and FYI, you’d be cheating baby diarrhea receptacles—I know we can’t tell anyone. Duh, it’s a secret society.” She smiles. “I can’t wait until the Slumber Fest reboot. IV is literally going to rule the school.”
Video stop.
Retrieved from the cellular phone of Harrison Rocha
Transcript and notes prepared by Badge #82827
Shared Media Folder Titled: IV, Mon., Sept. 16, 10:31 p.m.
Video start.
H. Rocha sits on the floor with his back to his bed. Posters of musicians cover the wall. The shadows of a ceiling fan whirl across his face.
“Holy crap.” He uses an excited whisper. “We got Bedford tossed out of school. We were a silent and unseen hand flicking that creep away. Mind blown.” His free hand mimics an explosion. “I’ve read about revolutionary leaders and how they started out. Usually just normal teenagers who don’t clean their rooms and worry about asking who they like out until one day something happens, like boom. Reality gets right in their faces. And then they know it: The world is a dick.”
He tugs at his hair absently. “I used to like history because reading it was like reading fairy tales, but way more jacked up, like video games on ’roids. Even though I was reading about this world, I pictured the places as alien, ruled by trolls with really small gonads, nothing to do with me or Seven Hills.
“I guess that’s only half false if you consider the guys who actually call the shots and push the buttons that end up blowing kids to pieces.”
He frowns. “After my dad’s attack, I stood over him as he was sleeping in his hospital bed and he looked way smaller than the giant who lifted me onto to his shoulders or the one I thought could keep us safe from anything.”
His eyes close. “And that’s when I realized that no one was going to do shi
t about my dad’s attack. Whoever hurt him was going to get away with it.”
His eyes open. “But the Order of IV is an unseen hand.”
Video stop.
9
Do you see anyone?” Viv whispered. “My false lashes are screwing up my vision.”
“Move your head,” I said. “No, the other way.” I peered through the windshield. “Maybe I see a group of—”
“Shhhh,” Graham hissed behind the wheel as a figure streaked by on the far side of the shrub concealing the car. He flicked the visor mirror shut, cutting off its glow.
“If my lash ends up looking like a caterpillar hanging from my eyelid, I’m holding you responsible,” Viv said, a death threat implicit.
Darkness fleeced the hillside outside the car. For the last fifteen minutes we’d listened to the slam of doors. Harry put his lips right at my ear. “I hear something new.”
“Voices?”
“Uh-uh. Music,” he whispered. I shuddered at the warmth of his breath on my neck and then, embarrassed, held my hand to my ear to listen in an exaggerated way.
Viv twisted around. “That makes at least twenty kids and music. Enough waiting. I’m ready to find my future boyfriend.” Our Slumber Fest reboot had rekindled her plans.
“Five more minutes,” Graham insisted.
Viv’s hand was on the door lever. “I am physically incapable of being patient for one more second.”
Graham gave a defeated sigh. “I guess fifteen minutes is enough to avoid suspicion.” But Viv was already out of the car.
The tunnel burrowed into the mountain a quarter mile up, the spot burned into the darkness by a lit haze. Cars filled the dirt turnoff; every few seconds a new set of headlights swung like light saber beams across our path. Pine needles crunched under our shoes as we began hiking.
We converged on a herd of our classmates at the railroad tracks. Viv was a gymnast balancing on the rail in platform espadrilles. She carried a shopping bag full of whimsical party hats, mostly unicorn horns; glow-in-the-dark wands and bracelets; and temporary tattoos. I doubted the gameness of our classmates, but Viv assured me, in a haughty tone, that it was the kind of paraphernalia she heard was found at raves.
Harry and Graham carried two sleeping bags each. I hugged a big camping thermos full of spiked hot cocoa. Bottles of cider clanked in Graham’s backpack.
Our classmates carried lumpy armfuls of similar supplies. Shouts, squeals, and laughs chipped away at the night, making the dark seem less dense. Kids chanted “Slumber Fest.”
Four days earlier, the Order of IV had unanimously voted to revive Slumber Fest.
Though Graham and Harry hadn’t been enthusiastic about the tradition in the first place, they jumped at the chance to show our school that IV could dethrone a vice principal and follow it up with a party. Slumber Fest was student gov’s domain. But those kids didn’t even try to relocate or reschedule it. It was time we usurped their power, said Graham. So the Order of IV had taken what it wanted.
Invites were low-tech. The message simple:
Slumber Fest
Friday
9 p.m.
The Ghost Tunnel
Spread the word and BYOB
-IV
Invites were slipped into only ten lockers belonging to reliably chatty social butterflies of the senior class. The fewer invites circulating, the less likely one would fall into the wrong hands. They were delivered Friday morning, giving the recipients twelve hours to spread the word and show up. The Ghost Tunnel was ideal: outside of town, up an isolated road, soundproof. Out of sight. A spooky enough reputation to make the invited gape with happy nerves.
Equipped with a crowbar, three hammers, and one ax, we had pried the boards from both ends of the tunnel late Thursday night. We arrived earlier than our classmates to the party and set up the bonfires and candles. We waited in Graham’s car until we could join the party with everyone else. Invited by the mysterious IV.
Thirty or forty kids crowded the opening of the tunnel. They were hanging back, hesitant to move deeper, a ruckus horde around the first bonfire. As our group and others arrived, kids broke off, loping for the next fire, then the next. There was the shadowy outline of an abandoned passenger car, still on its rails. Then a wall of black, the unseen stretch of tunnel running half a mile.
The smell of fire, earth, and wet stone evoked the sense of being in a castle. The stir of cold on my legs was the wind rushing through its never-ending corridors. The murkiness beyond the fires’ reach was a good place for ghosts to haunt. The IVs painted in red on the walls wavered in the firelight; bloody warnings to invading clans. This was IV’s territory.
I pressed deeper. More kids arrived, pushing to get inside, joining the ballad of greetings and calls for drinks.
Voices from yards away jumped over to you, like stones skipping on water because of the tunnel’s acoustics. These tricks were why kids called it the Ghost Tunnel.
The keg was overwhelmed by clamoring cups. I wondered who’d lugged the cumbersome thing up, because we’d left only a few twenty-four packs of beer Harry got from a guy who ran a register at Hilltop Market.
Maisy Horowitz and Anna Spalding stood in the middle of a Twister board, taking neon-colored shots from mini paper cups.
“Hi, Izzie, Graham, Har. Drunken Twister later?” Maisy called.
“Maybe,” I answered.
Maisy and Anna pointedly ignored Viv; they’d learned that Viv wasn’t interested in smiles and casual hangouts with them. In the fifth grade, I found a list of names in the silver jewelry box on Viv’s dresser when I was trying on her earrings. Two days later I figured out what those names had in common: Viv never forgot the kids who teased her in grade school. And though the teasing by everyone other than Amanda’s lot ended years ago, and Maisy and Anna were nice now, their names somewhere near the bottom of that list, Viv’s loopy childhood cursive kept me from getting close to them.
If not for Viv, our small group of friends would have been larger. But without Viv, it also would have been boring, joyless. Mostly we were outcasts of our own making.
The crowd parted for a multiheaded beer bong jouncing through like a desert queen carried on her man-servants’ shoulders.
A few boys, underclassmen infiltrators, had Super Soakers, crowing each time their bolt of water hit an unsuspecting mark, until that mark was the back of the soccer team captain’s head. He darted after their retreating figures.
On the other side of what had spontaneously become the dance floor, the four male members of the Brass Bandits greeted Graham with salutes. Near them was a group I always thought of as the poetry girls. They sat with notebooks open on their crossed legs and were seemingly unaware of the gyrations to their immediate right.
It was just as I’d hoped. All the groups at school were here—kids who didn’t always get invited to parties, like me.
Viv drew me backward with a “Psst. I can’t stomach their slamming. Not tonight.”
It took me a moment to understand. “They’re not doing slam poetry—are they?” I peeked back at the girls with journals.
“They look so . . . angry,” Viv said. “They’re repelling guys.”
“They look like witches reading spells,” I said. The girls with their middle parts; black, gauzy clothes; careless hair; and lace-up boots were taking turns reading from their journals. Their tongues beat their mouths to get the words out.
“Witchy does not equal hot,” Viv said.
“It might,” I said.
“Maybe to someone like . . . like Henry.” Her glare darted to the Brass Bandit’s trumpet player. He was nice, funny, tall, his T-shirt wasn’t tucked in, and his acne flare-up of middle school was old news. I didn’t see what would be so awful about a date with Henry. Graham was in the middle of talking to him and he didn’t waste time on anyone who wasn’t interesting.
“Where do we start Mission: Boyfriend?” I rubbed my hands in comic anticipation.
She narrowed her ey
es at me. “You don’t sound up for being wing woman.”
“I’m ready,” I said. I tossed my hair and gave Viv my most alluring smile, even as a strand caught me in the eye. I blinked to dislodge it. “Who are we checking out? Soccer players? Lacrosse? Younger men—I saw a couple sophomores.”
A muscle by her mouth twitched. “No offense, but I’ll probably be better alone. Just like being onstage.” She leaned in conspiratorially to whisper, “Keep Graham and Harry away so they don’t vagina block me.” She extended her pinkie. I took it with mine.
I was relieved to be off the hook. Viv made a beeline for the soccer player manning the keg. Whatever being Viv’s wing woman required, I did not have it. I’d been dragged along on double dates and to college parties. I had a talent for finding the one guy in the room more eager to talk NPR than make out.
Our last double date hadn’t panned out. Viv liked hers, a college freshman, the son of one of Ina’s friends. But mine, his roommate, told me I swung my mini golf club like a girl, snickered, and patted my head. Viv had told them both, on the middle of the course, that she’d started her period and we needed to leave.
“Look at her on the hunt,” Harry said. He grinned beside me. “You up for an adventure?”
“We’re supposed to keep Graham away from Viv so she looks single.”
Harry nodded toward Graham. “He’s debating video game consoles with Henry.”
“Graham doesn’t play video games.”
“That’s never stopped him before,” he said with a comic crinkle of his lips.
I laughed. “So you’re saying he’ll be distracted for an hour.”
“At least.”
I swept an arm in front of us. “Lead the way.”
Harry took off for the tracks. “You balance on that rail and I’ll take this one,” he said.
His clunky Vans padded one after the other on the left rail; Harry was unexpectedly lithe. My ankles wobbled. After a shambling ten feet, I couldn’t stay up anymore. “You win,” I said.
“Here.” Harry hopped down and placed my hand on his shoulder. This time, leaning on Harry, I stayed up. “You win,” he said softly. The air cooled as we walked deeper. Out of the corner of my eye I watched Harry nod and smile hello to people. I would lose sight of his eyes in between the bonfires, and when they appeared again, on me, I’d look away. My fingertips noted the rises and dips of the shape of him. They couldn’t help it. His shoulder was unexplored territory under my increasingly warm hand. The music faded and the sigh of the wind became a never-ending song, like the ocean.
First We Were IV Page 7