I followed Amanda to the restroom during intermission. Surprised her in the corridor by the theater’s coat closet, yanked her in.
“What in the hell?” she cried.
I pinned her against the wall, elbow pressed to her neck, imitating the way the girl with the blade held me in the train car. “I promise that if you don’t shut up during this performance, I will rip your wicked tongue from your mouth so you can’t make S sounds ever again, snake.” The burst of violence, the threat, had me trembling as I held her. She smiled like she’d won something. Adrenaline made me light-headed. Amanda leaned into my elbow and spoke in a raspy whisper, “If you don’t let me go, I’ll stand up in the middle of the second act and tell your bestie her thighs look like an elephant’s.”
I could smell the watermelon hard candy tucked in her cheek. It nauseated me. The closeness. I dropped my arms. “That’s what I thought,” she said as she knocked by me.
But she didn’t make a peep during the second half.
• • •
“They want in,” Graham said in the backseat of the car. “Who do you think Amanda meant?”
“Everyone who was there,” Viv said. “Amanda, Jess, Rachel, Conner, Trent, and Campbell. The six of them.”
“Do you realize what a coup this is?” Graham slapped the driver’s seat back.
“Hey.” I swiped blindly at his hand.
“Sorry,” he muttered aside. “We haven’t even tried to recruit them and they’re begging to join.”
“There’s nothing for them to join,” I said, steering onto our street. I slowed at Mr. Kirkpatrick’s house and glared up at it. “The Order of IV is ours. That’s the point. It would be different if we had more members.”
“Absolutely it would have to change.” Graham’s voice already heavy with thought. “Think, Izzie. Everything we’d be capable of with recruits.”
“Stop calling them recruits.” My protest was halfhearted. Recruits like in an army. I was caught between fear that Amanda would ruin the Order for us and cravings for amping up our next rebellion.
“Imagine,” he whispered, “if we had six foot soldiers to do our bidding.”
Harry palmed his eyes beside me. “Do our bidding?”
“To help with the rebellions,” Graham said.
Thoughts were streaking through my head at speeds that whistled, their colors running, mixing, forming new ideas. “If we want new members, why add kids who treat us like crap?”
“Because they’ll have to grovel at our feet,” Graham said.
“We’ll give them orders,” Viv whispered, like she was watching Amanda grovel already.
Harry stared out the window. “All of them would have to listen to us?” His tone sounded funny; I couldn’t put my finger on how.
“Every single one would have to do what we wanted,” Graham answered.
“Because they want in,” Viv added.
“Doesn’t everyone always want in?” Graham said, like it was the simplest lesson in the world.
Maybe it was.
The Order was always about belonging. Us. Together. Forever. Was it so unforeseeable that its allure would crook its finger and beckon to others? So unimaginable that other kids would be hungry for an idol, a bonfire, the moon, and secrets?
19
I stayed in my room Saturday morning, planted on my desk, watching the Pacific. Each wave rushed in darker, something ominous gathering. I snapped Polaroids, placing their unformed vignettes in single file across my desk. When I finally studied their captured moments, it was clear. The sea knew what we were planning.
Our third rebellion had been aimed at Carver and Denton. Intended to frighten and unnerve them. Pictures circulated. People gossiped. That boy lied about the bloody noose and the girl about the X marking her door. The mayor was forced to respond to the whole town in her statement. My own parents locked our windows, which were usually thrown open to the breeze. All that blood gnawed a little at the myth of the utopian Seven Hills.
The fourth rebellion would have a wider scope. We would aim revenge not just at Carver and Denton, but at those we knew hadn’t helped Goldilocks. Maybe there were more whose indifference cost Goldilocks her life, or at least justice. Our next rebellion wouldn’t target them all directly, but I hoped they’d get the message of our scattershot. You are not safe.
But we were small in number, and though our group was a universe to me, there was a limit to what we could do.
The Order had one invisible hand. With Amanda and the others, we would have many. All invisible. Omnipresent. Vengeful gods capable of endless aftershocks.
When Harry arrived Saturday evening to take me to homecoming, Mom and Dad had their cell phones out, Dad being sneaky about snapping shots and Mom instructing us to pose. I set my jaw and withstood the happy parent routine. Thus far, there was no evidence that the flowers delivered to Ina had caused the flourish of town gossip I’d expected.
“You look beautiful,” Harry told me in the car.
I smiled at him. “You do too.” I hadn’t seen Harry in a suit since eighth-grade graduation. I remembered him looking like a coat hanger in his jacket. Since then, Harry had done a lot of broadening.
“This used to be my dad’s.” Harry pinched the fabric of his jacket cuff.
“It’s perfect.”
“Green is my favorite color,” he said of my sleeveless dress.
The fabric was thin and delicate, pooling around my strappy sandals. “It’s silk, I think.”
“I like silk.”
He opened the moonroof. It was a balmy night, moisture in the air making my wavy hair wavier. I rested my head back and looked starward. “It’s really clear. The stars are so bright.”
Harry glanced up from the road. “When I was way younger, I was obsessed with astronomy.”
“Did you ever have those glow-in-the-dark constellation stickers when you were little?”
“They covered my bedroom ceiling. You?”
“My closet. I used to tear all the clothes off the hangers to stare at them from the floor. Sometimes I’d make Graham or Viv sit and I’d talk like we were at the planetarium.”
“That sounds—”
“Like I was a huge dork.”
His eyes cut to me. “Like something I would have done. Are they still there?”
“No way. After we discovered the meteorite, we were all really into space. The possibility. And then it occurred to me how scary endless possibility is. Like, isn’t there enough possibility on Earth where a zillion crazy-awful things can happen?”
“Or a zillion wonderful things. To me that’s what’s cool about space,” Harry said. I watched his profile. His hair was combed to the side, and his shirt collar brushed just below the knot of his throat. I swallowed. “Anything could be up there. I used to imagine other planets and I’d make really long lists with the characteristics of their solar systems and how the lifeforms in them evolved. And for my favorite worlds I drew comics. Not good ones. Not like your drawings.”
“What were the comics about?”
“Uh . . .” Out of force of habit, he pawed at phantom hair on his forehead. “One was about a family of aliens and another one was an alien war over resources. A lot of them had revolutions and heroes and battles with lasers. But my all-time favorite was about an alien boy sitting in his room drawing comics and imagining me, on Earth. It was like I had this interstellar friendship and no matter what happened, I had this friend out there, like a reflection, the same and different.”
The tops of palm trees moved across the rectangle in the car roof. Between their fronds the stars burned brighter as Harry spoke.
“Do you still think he exists?”
“Who?”
“The teenager living on another planet, wondering if you exist. Taking a girl to his civilization’s version of homecoming.”
He shook his head. “What? No way. I was younger than Simon. He still thinks a fairy leaves him cash for baby teeth.” He shook his head aga
in. “Kids are crazy-stupid.”
“Liar. You totally believe.” I laughed and pointed to his deepening right dimple. “You’re trying too hard to convince me.”
He raised a hand in surrender. I wanted to pluck it from the air, to kiss his palm. “I’m not a liar. Not exactly. Maybe a boy like me is up there. I just don’t buy that he’s thinking about me. Why would he bother?”
“That’s sad.”
“Or realistic.”
“Do you still have the comics?”
“My mom keeps my baby teeth in her jewelry box.”
“So obviously,” I said.
“Definitely.”
It would have been motion-picture perfect if that year’s homecoming theme had been the cosmos. A night of twirling past Venus and Mars. But our journey into the gymnasium remained a terrestrial one, to France. A fifteen-foot cardboard replica of the Eiffel Tower was midcourt, and teachers manning the macaron and sparkling lemonade tables wore red berets and horizontally striped shirts. Our classmates were in quiet clusters around the room. The night was early and sober.
Viv and I usually went stag to dances. Graham couldn’t be persuaded and Harry got a subsequent pass. I felt short an appendage without her; her smile hopeful at the night, the way her eyes reflected the lights and decorations like she was trying to soak it all up, and the contact high of her enthusiasm would send me twirling onto the dance floor.
I fidgeted with my dress without much purpose other than looking the part of girl-with-date-at-a-formal. Easily said and awkwardly done. I had a blister forming on my heel, my forehead was starched with hairspray, I was sweating through my deodorant, and I had just noticed that only the nails on my right hand were painted. Harry tugged at his tie like it was constricting. Suddenly I wished he’d lose the suit jacket.
“Look,” I said, fluttering my fingers.
“Nail polish on one hand. Cool,” he said.
I patted my stiff updo and fluttered my lashes. “I’m very fashionable, you know.” I dropped my hands. “You want to take your tie off, huh?”
“Uh, no. I mean”—his expression seized up—“I want to look how I’m supposed to, for you.” He stuck his chest out, wincing slightly when his collar bit into his neck.
I reached over and worked at the tie’s knot. “I want you to look like you.” He smiled and shoved the tie into his pocket. “Good-bye torture devices for my feet,” I said, kicking my shoes under a skirted table.
We were Harry and Izzie again.
Halfway across the dance floor a familiar laugh came from under the glittery planetary mass of a disco ball. Viv was a 1950s screen vixen; a glimmering figure in a silver gown.
Graham came striding up—classic black tux, cuff links winking at us, a shadow in the cleft of his chin, and enough bob-and-weave to his torso that I knew he’d been drinking. “You two have to liberate me from this nightmare of the American dream,” he said loudly.
I waved at the cardboard Eiffel Tower and smiled cheekily. “You mean Parisian.”
“You know what I mean,” he grumbled.
Harry knocked his shoulder companionably into Graham’s. “That bad?”
“The corsages are making my allergies flare up.” Graham pointed to his watering eyes. “The limo is a white stretch Hummer, it was stocked with bottles of cinnamon whiskey and buckets of fried chicken, Viv’s laugh has reached DEFCON cackle, and I’m considering slitting my wrists in the bathroom so I don’t have to go to her afterparty.”
My throat tightened. “Whose party?” But I already suspected, didn’t I? Inviting the others to our territory was the next logical step in recruiting them. A step that Viv wanted to take. The barn, the orchard, the rock—they were our fortresses. Where better to entertain the enemy? See if we could manipulate them into being our foot soldiers?
Graham pinched the bridge of his nose. No spectacles. “I buried the lede,” he said. “Viv invited them to the barn, after the dance. They’re going to drink our cider and invade our headquarters.”
“They’re going to ask us more about the Order,” I whispered.
“Absolutely,” Graham said. “Amanda has a one-track mind. She’s already brought up you guys at the butcher four times. It’s like she’s trying to see inside my brain.” A feigned shudder. “They’re afraid they’re missing out. Viv wants to let them in.”
“So do you,” Harry said.
Graham held his stare, unblinking. “Indeed, for slightly different reasons, I presume. It needs to be unanimous—on account of democracy.”
“Izzie,” Viv yipped. She plowed into me, arms pitched around my neck, her wet, breezy breath in my ear. “I’m in love with your dress. Where are your shoes?”
She swung away, one hand fastened onto my arm, trying to twirl me. “Whoa,” I said, resisting her momentum. “Do you need water?”
“The limo was so fun, Izzie. We sang to music and snapped pictures and they’re all following and tagging me.” Like a tick, she was checking over her shoulder, making certain Amanda’s group hadn’t dropped out of orbit.
“Come stand with us. Jess was all, When are your friends showing? and I said you were coming, and now you’re here.” She squealed at the predictable order of events.
Concern was a slash to my chest. Was this bleary-eyed girl just a mask Viv the war queen was wearing as she plotted revenge? The invitation to the barn was strategic, wasn’t it?
I was a husk on the sidelines of Amanda’s court. Maybe Amanda’s many air-kisses had dulled Viv’s loathing? Or the way she repeated whatever pearls made her laugh, her reenactments so drab she was basically a vampire sucking the funny out of jokes?
Rachel returned from the restroom, and by the self-congratulatory smile in between sips of her flask, I could tell she had gossip she was dying to share.
She waited until Amanda drifted back from a group of lesser friends. Rachel announced, “I know something I bet none of you do.” There were blotches darkening on her pale chest. She yanked up her strapless gown to cover up a sliver of bra showing.
Amanda’s face flickered with impatience. “What, Rachel?”
“Patton Garvey was in the bathroom a second ago, and she was talking about how her boyfriend and some of his friends tore down all the curfew signs from the beach trails last night.”
Our crescent beach was at the heart of Seven Hills, a few blocks west of the knoll. Five or six trails leading into the dunes began in the beach parking lot. Each was marked by a metal sign on wooden stilts with the sunset curfew posted.
“Why bother?” Campbell asked. “The cops hardly ever enforce the curfew.”
“And even without the signs, the curfew would still stand,” Graham added.
Rachel grinned. “It was like, a symbol.”
Jess was nodding. “A symbolic gesture of giving the finger to authority.”
“Exactly,” Rachel said. “They even signed the asphalt where the signs had been.”
“Dumbasses,” Amanda said.
Rachel shook her head. “Not with their names, A. With IV.”
Jess’s head snapped to Graham, who stood beside her. I felt eyes studying my reaction. First a IV had been spray painted on Principal Harper’s car by a copycat. Second I’d found the symbols on bathroom mirrors and lockers at school. Third there was a tale about a few of our classmates pulling down curfew signs and leaving IVs in their place.
My hand curled into a fist at my side. Patton’s boyfriend—I couldn’t remember his name, only that he had red hair and freckles—had no right invoking IV for his pathetic excuse of a stunt. As Graham said, the curfew was still in effect, so the kids hadn’t accomplished anything.
Rachel said to Viv’s neutral expression, “You should be flattered. It’s like fan art.”
It was more than fan art. IV had inspired some kids to rebel against the authority they chafed under. My fist gradually loosened. This was power. We’d moved kids to action.
Across from me, with no inflection in her voice, Jess said, �
��I’d die for your dress.”
“To wear at your funeral?” Graham said.
“Touché,” Jess replied with a slight bow of her head.
Graham was all dressed up and standing next to the girl of his dreams. He yawned.
“I love this song.” Viv’s hands were moving to the music. “Teddy Graham—dance with me.” Graham adjusted his bow tie and pretended not to have heard.
“Will you dance with me, Vivy?” Harry asked. My heart swelled watching Harry take Viv under the disco ball.
Graham closed the gap between us with an off-kilter stride. “Your date and mine are dancing.” His bushy brows quirked up like it was the most preposterous thing. “I guess we better dance so people don’t assume we’re scorned.” Amanda looked about a second away from marching over to us.
“Don’t step on my toes,” I said, walking onto the court. When we were out of their earshot, I said, “Those kids left IV on the asphalt where the signs had been.”
“I didn’t foresee us inspiring a revolution.”
I flicked his pocket square at my eye level and held on to his shoulders. He was like Viv, comfortable with the pomp of dressing up. “Revolution?”
“Give it time,” he said with a haughty cock of his head. “I’ve been thinking about what increased recruitment for the Order would mean for its structure. Concentric circles. One inner core made up of us and—”
“And an outer circle made up of everybody else,” I finished. “We’d get to keep the Order the way we want by adding an outside layer with different rules.”
“Minions for your majesty,” Graham said. “Or rather than concentric circles, the Order could have autonomous cells. They’re harder to break up. That’s how a lot of insurgencies and terrorists operate.” I frowned. “It’s a simple, ruthless fact,” he continued, gravely serious. “We give the cells their marching orders and they’re clueless about what the other cells are doing, so they don’t get the big picture until after the rebellion.” My attention had drifted to Harry and Viv. “Are you worried she’s going to tell him she’s never been kissed so he’ll kiss her?”
First We Were IV Page 17