I was squeezing Harry’s shoulder and staring at the silver run disappearing under my shoes when he stopped abruptly. We’d reached the abandoned passenger car. Trent and Campbell were sitting, lackadaisically swinging their legs between its guardrails, passing a joint back and forth. I dropped off the rail and away from Harry.
“ ’Sup,” Trent said.
I gave an unenthusiastic tip of my hand. Trent wasn’t as horrible as Conner; that wasn’t saying much. Campbell held the joint out to us.
“No thanks,” I said.
Trent squinted. “You guys puss out on a suicide pact?” he asked, indicating the big rectangular bandage on my inner wrist. Despite five scrubbings and one application of nail polish remover, the IV Viv drew was still a shadow. Harry had a lime-green bandage in the identical spot.
I forgot to be intimated by a loudmouth like Trent.
“How’d you know? We got one wrist in and realized that if we were dead, we’d never get to see you again. Guess we owe you our lives.” I could hardly breathe at my nerve. The tunnel, the passenger car, Slumber Fest, the fires burning at our backs, the night—it all belonged to us.
Trent held his fist up and pretended to pull a crank with his other hand as he slowly raised his middle finger.
“Don’t be a dick, man,” Campbell said, knocking Trent’s shoulder. To us, “Chill party, huh? How crazy is the graffiti? All the IVs.” His beanie cut off his eyebrows.
“The chillest,” Harry responded, rocking back on his heels.
Campbell smiled amiably, undeterred. “Bonkers about Principal Harper’s car. IV knows how to party.”
“What about Harper’s car?” I asked sharply.
“Oh man, you didn’t hear? IV tagged his wagon. A black IV across his driver’s-side door. People are saying it must have happened at lunch, but they don’t really know.”
“Harper’s such a bitch,” Trent muttered.
“You start Ms. Ives’s research essay?” Campbell had moved on to asking me, but my eyes were intent on Harry’s profile. I focused on his expression of stone, willing mine to be as withholding. A IV painted on the principal’s car. Not painted by us. I didn’t even need to ask. Graham, Viv, and Harry wouldn’t be so reckless as to tag a car in the middle of the day.
“I’m writing it on medicine in Africa. You?” I heard myself say to Campbell as he smiled patiently.
“Law and justice.” And then he said something else I didn’t hear because Harry swallowed, the knot of his throat bobbing, and I felt a wild yip rising up from my belly. A nervous yip; a triumphant one; both. We’d inspired a copycat.
Trent exhaled, coughing out smoke in bursts. “C’mon, dude,” he said to Campbell. “They’re obviously here for the privacy.” He jerked a thumb at the passenger car. “To bone.”
Trent swung under the rail to the ground. “And here I thought you guys were into goats and shit.” He scattered rocks as he stalked in the direction we’d come from. Ina had invited our entire fifth-grade class to a birthday party for Viv. Since then, Amanda had spread rumors about the barn and what the four of us might be getting up to inside of it.
Campbell went after Trent, pausing for a moment by us. “See you in class, Izzie. Bye, dude.”
I wanted to crack a joke at Trent’s expense, but Harry was uneasily reordering his hands—front pockets to back pockets to hanging at his sides. The boning comment hadn’t bothered me, but Harry’s obvious discomfort made feel wrong for it. Like I’d crossed a line.
“Want to head back?” I offered. “Go tell Graham and Viv about Harper’s car?”
“Someone probably already told them.” He scratched the back of his head. “Unless you want to head back.”
“Not really.” I started up the metal risers to the car. “I hiked here once, right after Goldilocks but before the tunnel was closed up.”
“Goldilocks?” he asked.
I tripped on a metal stair. I’d never called the dead girl Goldilocks aloud. “That’s what I named the girl from the rock because that cop asked us if we’d noticed stolen food or—”
“Or signs she was camping or sleeping in the barn. Goldilocks,” he said. “Makes sense.”
I hesitated where the compartment door should have been, its old brass hinges dangling purposelessly. I spun to face Harry and gave a stiff bow. “Good afternoon, sir. Ticket, please.”
Harry made a show of retrieving his imaginary ticket from his pocket, smoothing its wrinkles on his thigh, and handing it over. I held it up to catch the firelight. Pretended to examine it. “You forgot yours,” he said, waving his pinched fingers, grinning. I laughed, falling out of character. He offered me his arm. My hand slid into the crook of his elbow.
The passenger car was dark, only a few candles balanced on the window frames and in the eaves of the luggage compartment. The red of the seats and the purple of the glasslittered carpet richened as my eyes adjusted. The candle flames beat at the air we’d carried in, making the whole car seem alive, like the passengers had just disembarked, their shadows still with us.
“I think Viv decorated in here to have somewhere to bring a guy,” I said.
“Operation Boyfriend Hunt,” he said with a comical twist. “It was nice of you to think of doing Slumber Fest for her.”
I thumped the head of a seat to my right and imagined a plume of dust rising. “I didn’t. I wanted Slumber Fest for myself.”
His brows tugged together.
“The Order went from being a game to making us powerful,” I explained. “You are powerful.” A doubtful flare of his nostrils. “I’m powerful. We even inspired a copycat. Before, I thought of myself as weird Icky, one of those four loners, the plain one who actually laughs at teachers’ jokes, too young to do anything about her parents’ fighting. I wasn’t powerful because power was tied to stuff you can see.”
“Like money,” Harry whispered.
“Yeah, or age, gender, race, looks. But now it’s like power can be invisible too. A breeze you capture and aim to send people in any direction. The direction I wanted was Slumber Fest. Here.” I waved a hand, noted that it was shaking. There was too much eye contact and spilling of guts. “I felt like a joke before the Bedford flyers.”
“You’ve never been a joke,” he said.
“Thanks, but you’re not exactly impartial, friend.” I half turned to show him a grateful smile anyway. “So how come you went along with the Slumber Fest reboot?”
He shrugged. “I don’t have a big, complex reason. You wanted to. Viv wanted to. Graham was going on about usurping student gov’s domain. It wasn’t going to hurt anyone.”
With a twist of my stomach, I was glad to be alone with Harry. Harry, who wanted to make his friends happy. There was the delicate tinkle of breaking glass crunching under my sneakers. I brushed the litter from two of the seats and took the one by the window.
“Tell me about coming here after Goldilocks,” he said.
I breathed in and out. It was about time I confessed. That it would be to Harry made the words neatly queue up in my head. “You remember the cop who came out to the meteorite?”
“Denton. He’s the police chief now.”
I nodded. “He wanted to know if I’d seen Goldilocks before, and I was so upset I didn’t know. We went up on the rock again, to look. I said that the girl was like me because . . . because she was. Her purple bra looked like it matched one I’d been begging my mom for. She had a heart tattoo on her ankle—I loved doodling hearts. And Denton goes, She’s nothing like you, just a runaway asking for it.”
A parenthesis formed between Harry’s eyebrows.
“He was a police officer. Don’t they always tell the truth? If he said it was the girl’s fault, wasn’t it?”
“Hell no,” Harry said.
“He thought Goldilocks was a runaway. You remember how there’d be girls on the beach? Girls who weren’t from here. And they looked like they’d been camping, partying outside. Viv said she heard that teenagers who came to surf
or party on the beach camped up here. I thought maybe Goldilocks did. I had to wait a couple of days, but the first chance I got, I hiked here.”
“It could have been dangerous,” Harry said.
“Could have been. But she was on our rock, Har. Before Goldilocks, Viv and I used to take turns laying on the rock. Pretending to be Sleeping Beauty. Just a dumb game. Whoever wasn’t Sleeping Beauty was the prince and the prince had to kiss his princess to wake her up. But sometimes we’d play dead, refuse to open our eyes.” My cheeks burned hot. “Finding Goldilocks didn’t feel random. After the scientists left and we understood that our rock was a meteorite from space, we were obsessed. Its mystery became a part of us. It was there in our choice of books. It shaped our adventures. We played on the rock a lot before, but it became our epicenter. Camping and stargazing. Leaving messages in chalk so that if aliens were looking down on us, they’d see we wanted to talk to them.” I laughed self-consciously. “Goldilocks on our rock—it felt like a message. It was like the meteorite drew her in. Like we did. Like we tempted the universe into sending us an actual mystery. And none of the people who were supposed to help were doing anything.”
His hand cupped my knee. “So you did something. What’d you find?”
“A few girls. Teenagers or a little older. At first they let me sit by the fire. Even offered me a puff on one of their cigarettes. Laughed because of how much I coughed. I brought up the dead girl—God, I tried to do it casually. But their expressions just slammed shut. The one with the cigarette came in here. I followed. Her eyes were red. High or crying.” I looked across the aisle. There she was again, balled up in a seat, blond hair uncombed, dirty bare feet. “I asked if she knew Goldilocks. Described her.”
“Did she?”
“Sort of. They were all camping here, surfing, but they didn’t know her know her, other than sleeping in the tunnel for a couple weeks. Goldilocks left for the gas station by the freeway one night. If she wanted a snack it would have been the only place open late. Blondie never saw her come back. I got excited and said we should tell the police. I’d call them and they’d talk to her. She lunged and pinned me.” I pointed to the wall. “It was a pocketknife or glass.” I raised my sleeve to reveal a fine white line, three inches long, on my shoulder. “She said she knew where I lived. Bullshit, but I was gullible. She said I needed to shut up or she’d make it worse than a scratch on the shoulder.”
The girl, she’d pounced like a wild animal, desperation curling her lips away from her yellowed teeth. The rattle of a growl in her throat as her blade seared my skin.
Once the afternoon in the tunnel tumbled free, it dug its elbow into my chest, stung the scar on my shoulder. My only cigarette burned my lungs.
“You were twelve. You were scared. It’s okay that you didn’t tell anyone,” Harry said.
I’d run through the tunnel, grasping my shoulder. The girls had returned to the fire. I sprinted by like a kid escaping a monster’s den.
“She was more scared than me,” I said. “They all were. Of the cops. Of everyone, maybe. Just a bunch of girls with nowhere to go that was their own. Not like us. Nice parents and the barn and one another. I was too stupid to even ask Blondie if she knew the girl’s real name.” We sat without talking for a time. I listened to Harry’s steady breath; with each one, I leaned a hair closer to him. “Harry? How do you handle not knowing who hurt your dad?”
“I don’t. Handle it, that is.” He ran his hands over his head, hooked them on the back of his neck, and sighed heavily. “The police failed—didn’t even try, like with Goldilocks. My dad walks with a cane and everyone acts like it was a practical joke gone wrong. Bunch of kids on campus screwing around. Unintentional. It wasn’t.” Harry’s dad spent over a year in physical therapy, but the limp would be permanent. I knew Harry thought about the attack often, though he didn’t let on.
I felt a dark mood crushing us both. I sprang out of the seat. “C’mon, let’s go find fun. Let’s have our Slumber Fest.”
“Sure.” He stood and followed me out of the passenger car, but the weight of what we both knew didn’t lift. I was suddenly wary of us sleeping in the tunnel. What did we know about the people who could be drawn in by the smoke and light of bonfires? Really, what did anyone know about anyone? Because even though I was twelve when I learned that Goldilocks had been camping in the tunnel, I wasn’t too young to understand its significance. The true weight of that afternoon laid in the realization that she’d been walking around my hometown when she met her end. It was the same sort of knowledge Harry had to live with, accepting that someone had hurt his father, a someone who Harry likely bagged groceries for.
The police and the mayor were adamant that one of two scenarios had played out. I knew them both to be impossible. Goldilocks wasn’t killed in another town. Over the hills. Some depressing place. Inland. She wasn’t dumped on the rock because her killer was trying to leave her far from his home—his because, come on, I was a realist. And I sat with those girls. Took a puff off their cigarette. I didn’t believe it was fear of getting caught for hurting Goldilocks that had Blondie trembling as she cut me. She wasn’t a killer; just a cornered girl. Goldilocks wasn’t the victim of some band of lost girls and their twisted games.
She was right here, on our side of the hills, surfing by day, soaking up the sun on our beach, camping by night in an abandoned tunnel, crowding around a bonfire. A girl out for adventure. She was exactly like me.
10
Not all secrets liberate the teller.
By sharing with Harry that afternoon in the Ghost Tunnel, I had excavated memories that had been buried. Freed, they hovered over me, just like Goldilocks’s death had for weeks after finding her. They were storm clouds reminding me that life wasn’t a grand game. Death was present. Possible.
The rock had taught us many things. Its first lesson was to ask questions; wonder about mysteries; look to the sky. Its second lesson, taught by Goldilocks, was that mysteries are not always magical, they’re terrifying.
Graham, Viv, and I had planned to submit college applications early in the autumn, right after they became available. We even convinced Harry that he might as well apply to his dream schools, in case any of them offered the financial aid he needed. This gutless enthusiasm to be good little girls and boys getting into college early had since worn away for me. I wanted to go, still; I just couldn’t focus on the task long enough to start my applications.
When, on the Sunday after Slumber Fest, the four of us sat on the floor of my bedroom, all supposedly busy on our personal statements, I searched for Goldilocks.
This habit of mine was old. Its roots grew around that secret afternoon spent in the Ghost Tunnel. It was also not the only habit to sprout from that day.
When I’d arrived home that afternoon from the tunnel, T-shirt stuck in my congealing blood, I sketched Goldilocks from memory. I gagged on the metallic stink in my mouth from running too hard, too far. My nose ran and dripped. The pressure built in my throat as I tried to catch my breath. Her face took form at the tip of my pencil.
At the time it was a compulsion. Draw her. Look at her face. She was real. For the few days between my visit to the tunnel and when the photo of the crime scene was finally published in the newspaper, those drawings had purpose. I compared her face with the others. They made my search possible.
My laptop became a window into the world of lost girls.
For months, almost a year, I clicked through the photos of missing girls in the privacy of my bedroom. The authorities in most places made it easy. Photos were uploaded into searchable databases immediately. Those cops wanted their cases solved.
It was a simple task: appraise one, tap for the next. Seventh grade sped by. Luke McHale never invited Viv to join his lunch circle of eighth graders. I thought a lot about Denton saying the girl was asking for it. The only person I’d identified with a connection to the girl had given me an ugly scar on my shoulder. Maybe Goldilocks was the same kind of girl? On
e who’d lose it and cut you?
I knew even as a stupid little kid that no girl, not even one who cuts you, deserves to be hurt, dead, given wings.
Nothing much happened to make me stop checking the missing person websites. A year passed. If anyone was looking for her, wouldn’t they have posted a picture by then? I gave up.
But there, more than five years later, in my bedroom, I started sorting through gone girls again. I reverted to my old habit as Graham, Viv, and Harry typed their personal statements. Presumably. It’s easier to imagine them having their own secret crusades more and more.
All that clicking filled me with the conviction that I needed to do something for Goldilocks. The Order of IV needed to. But what? It was too late to save her life.
• • •
In third period on the Wednesday after Slumber Fest, Mr. Novak was writing out the discussion topics on the whiteboard, disregarding the laptop and projection screen to eat up class time. I was restless and craned around to see what Viv was up to. She was midwave and gave an exasperated eye roll. She pointed at a note being passed from Jess to Campbell, who sat directly behind me.
Campbell continued chatting and facing Jess as he tossed the note in my direction. I caught it before it hit the floor. A text would have been too ordinary for Viv.
I started to open the note. I stopped, flipped it around, and saw the black, bold IV drawn on the outer flap. My hand clapped over it. Pointless. Anyone who passed it along might have noticed the symbol. Behind Jess was Conner, then Gabby in front of Viv. Any one of them might have noticed the IV.
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