First We Were IV

by Alexandra Sirowy

  “What did the letter say?” I asked. It was the obvious next question if the kids nearby could overhear us.

  Graham held up his cell. He typed out a message. It traveled around the circle.

  The cops are keeping the wraps on the letters for the same reason they denied the significance of the bloody animal prints. As long as they can avoid acknowledging a connection to past events, they don’t have to talk about one specific past event that if brought up could make them look bad. Potentially. If people in Seven Hills give two more shits now than they did five years ago.

  “The letter’s pretty messed up,” Harry said without skipping a beat. “I’m printing the whole thing on the blog tomorrow, but the gist is ‘For your crime of indifference. You heard someone crying for help. You went back to sleep. You found her shoe on your lawn the next day. You threw it away.’ ” Harry had recited the note verbatim. All the other notes took the same form, but each explicitly stated what the recipient was guilty of.

  “When are you interviewing Lorin?” I asked.

  “Tonight. After her lacrosse practice.”

  I was deep in thought and almost didn’t notice the accessories a few upperclassmen were wearing. My eyes stuck to a junior boy with a bandana around his bicep. His T-shirt revealed a strip of tan midriff, the armband torn from its hem. IV written in black marker stared back at me, like a joke my eyes were playing. I scanned the throngs and circles of students. Five more armbands among them, one headband, and another few where IV was simply written on the fronts or sleeves of T-shirts. I socked Graham’s shoulder.

  “Use your words and say excuse me,” he chided, nosing up from his book.

  “Look,” I said, and pointed.

  After a lot of sighing and fussiness over marking his spot, he said, “And what am I looking at, darling?”

  I jabbed my finger at the air with subdued violence.

  “What’s up?” Harry asked, removing an earphone.

  “You guys aren’t letting me nap,” Viv complained, propping up on her elbow from where she reclined, one eye squinting into the light.

  Word of the city’s official response to the vandalism on Driftwood Street soon came as breathless babble from Amanda. Our city had outlawed the display of the symbol IV.

  Some of our peers had already adopted our moniker to sign their own mischief over the last weeks. These kids and others saw the symbol as a finger to authority. When they heard it was outlawed, some of them started penning it on T-shirts and backpacks. The protest got official when student gov became involved with their armbands. They considered banning the symbol a civil liberties violation. And then there were those classmates who just wanted to be a part of it because it seemed major. Not so different from kids who wanted in or were afraid of missing out.

  Whatever you want to call them, they turned us into spectators that day.

  Amanda and the others joined us on the top risers. One by one they sat alongside us. Companionable even, with Amanda passing out cupcakes from a large, pink pastry box after informing us it was her half birthday.

  The members of the Order of IV had been thrown off the stage and into the audience. I felt like I was watching a play I’d spent the fall writing, and the version being performed was spinning off-kilter. Out of my control.

  Retrieved from the cellular phone of Harrison Rocha

  Transcript and notes prepared by Badge #821891

  Shared Media Folder Titled: IV, Wed., Oct. 23, 1:35 p.m.

  Video start.

  H. Rocha stares at the lens. “I have to vent about Conner, the wizard of assholery. Fifth period. That’s where I’m supposed to be right now. But I’m here.” The phone pans to show school tennis courts. “I was going to explode in class. I had to get out. I thought he was giving all that Rags and Riches stuff a rest. Except no. Why would he? He’s a lying, sadistic . . . He’s inhuman. He texted me: ‘You think your dad needs extra cash? Mine wants to pay the gardener to clean up the graffiti from last night on the house, but I could tell him your dad’ll do it for a twenty spot or something.’

  “No way is my dad cleaning up the graffiti he put on his house. Not after everything. I’d break both Conner’s arms before. Is he insane?” Harry drags his hand over his face.

  “I can’t do this for much longer. The others—I don’t mind them. They’re not friends but they’re not enemies. Campbell’s okay; even Trent’s standable. But Conner. I just. I just can’t keep on. I tried. I’ve been trying so hard to let it go. Think about next year. But truth is, next year, best-case scenario is I get financial aid and go off to school and my parents still live in that house. Dad will still work here. There will be other Conner Welshes looking down at him like he’s nobody. They don’t know. My dad listens to me. We build stuff together. We laugh. He taught me to surf . . . before. He’s worth ten of them. No. A hundred.”

  Video stop.

  27

  Graham had the skeleton from the attic laid out on his mother’s expansive desk in her study. We’d been at his house all afternoon. Harry was working at Hilltop Market and Viv was at school for rehearsal. Antigone was set to open in three weeks.

  Graham stroked his chin, appraising the bones like he was considering reanimating them. From the swivel chair I drew the skeleton, with one modification: her torso and limbs remained bones, but her face was fleshed out and belonged to Goldilocks. The ends of her hair curled at her collarbone. “Won’t your mom find her in here?” I asked.

  “Mom’s gone until Friday. I’ll bring the old girl to my room before then.” He touched its left foot affectionately.

  He’d set me up for a so-you’ll-finally-have-a-girl-in-your-room joke. I shaded in Goldilocks’s hair. “You’re getting a little touchy-feely with the skeleton. Should I have Jess ask you out for her super-secret rite?”

  “Izzie.”

  I fluttered my eyelashes. “Yes, darling?”

  “Please, do not.”

  “I’d just be giving her an excuse,” I muttered. “I can tell. She’s into you.”

  “I’m thinking I’ll have Trent draw a penis in marker on his forehead. Wear it to class,” Graham said.

  I looked up from the fringe of bangs I’d given Goldilocks. “You can’t. Trent’s my initiate for secret rites.”

  “I thought after the first round we’d reselect initiates?”

  My head wobbled. By my design the rules had gone unsaid.

  “Then I’ll have Rachel do it, if I’m stuck with her.”

  “Be nice,” I said. “She’s so . . .”

  “Grating. Obnoxious. Exhausting.”

  I tried to scold him with my eyes. “Lonely seeming.”

  “Okay. You’ve won her clemency.” I smiled at him. “I found my spy cam,” he added.

  I tucked the pencil into the spiral of the sketch pad. “Good. I figured out the rest of my plan.”

  Graham slouched against the deep jade grass cloth, leg bent, foot against the wall. “Tell me again why your plan is so much safer than mine?”

  “Because your plan involves solving Goldilocks’s murder by asking lots of nosy questions. Mine doesn’t involve alerting the killer that we’re looking for him. It just forces him out of hiding.”

  His mouth scrunched up. “See, that’s the part you were vague about the other night.”

  I glared at him.

  “You were. Graham, rather than solving the murder”—he spoke in a breathy voice that dipped up and down, his smile wicked—“we’ll just force the killer to identify himself by setting a trap that can’t be traced back to us.”

  “Come over here so I can flick you in the nose.”

  The cleft in his chin darkened. “Tell me, Pendleton, what incentive would prompt someone who’d gotten away with a killing to reveal themselves as a killer?”

  “We convince them they haven’t gotten away with it.”

  He tilted his head, stumped. “But they have. The physical evidence is gone. The police never investigated to begin with. They a
re the Webster’s definition of gotten away with murder.”

  “You’re forgetting something.”

  “I am?”

  “Someone. Someones even.”

  “I give up.”

  I grinned. “The blonde who cut me. The other girls in the Ghost Tunnel. The killer may know Goldilocks was sleeping in the tunnel. He might even know she wasn’t alone. He might not. Doesn’t matter because we know both for sure. We mention this to our most gossipy neighbor. Swinton, I say. We tell her that a bunch of high school kids were at a party in the Ghost Tunnel the other night and a woman showed up, ragged clothes, late twenties. She was talking about the girl who was killed five years ago. Claimed to be her friend, even that she was with her here, camping in the tunnel. She’s tried to get over it. Forget what she saw. But she can’t. She knows it’s someone who lives here, on our street, and she can prove it.”

  “Under what pretext do we spill all that to Swinton, an elderly woman you and I haven’t spoken to since we sold her wrapping paper in grade school?”

  My posture went straight and my pitch high. “Hi, Mrs. Swinton. You know me, Izzie, from up the street. I write for my school news blog; yeah, it’s on the Internet, and I’m covering the recent acts of vandalism on Driftwood and Landmark and their connection to the murder of Jane Doe five years ago. You remember her, yeah? I got a lead from some kids at a party last week and”—I fell out of character—“simple as that.”

  Graham’s nostrils flared. “And Viv thinks she’s the actress.”

  “Swinton gets wind of that and she’ll tell people. They stood on Viv’s lawn and admitted to hearing the girl’s murder and not doing crap about it.” My fist pounded the sketch pad. “They gossiped about criminal negligence. They’ll gossip about this. If the killer lives on this street, even just in town, they’ll hear.”

  “And then?”

  “They’ll go up to the tunnel to see for themselves who it is. To kill her. To buy her silence. To scare her. Who knows. They won’t be able to resist.”

  “But they’d risk revealing themselves to a possible witness.”

  “If he or she doesn’t go, they risk someone else or the cops going up there to find a witness who may know who they are.”

  “You want to leave the spy cam by the tunnel. To catch whoever it is on film.”

  “Abso-freaking-lutely.”

  “Best-case scenario is we capture someone on camera we think is responsible for the killing. It won’t be evidence enough to convince the police.”

  “Who needs the police?”

  Graham mimed tipping a hat.

  “That’s why I don’t want us to tell Harry or Viv. Setting the trap isn’t dangerous, but the information we’ll have afterward, what we do with it, will be.”

  “We’re never going to tell them?”

  “It’ll be dangerous,” I said emphatically.

  An understanding passed between us. Graham and I had always toyed with danger. We would protect Harry and Viv from this.

  “I have a working theory of who,” he admitted, staring at the floor.

  “Tell me.”

  “It isn’t ready.”

  I kicked off the desk and the swivel chair rolled in front of him. “When?”

  “I’m going to Trent’s tonight. Video games.” His hand passed nonchalantly through his bronze hair.

  “Are you being coerced?”

  “No, it’s . . . complicated. I’ll have a better handle on my theory afterward. Your plan may very well confirm it.”

  • • •

  Forty-five minutes later I balanced unsteadily on the step of Graham’s laced fingers. We picked a pine nearest to the mouth of the Ghost Tunnel. He boosted me to the lowest branch. I shimmied up, cursing under my breath when the bark bit into the wound. The bough was thin and I flexed my thighs around it to stay put. Stared at the blood seeping through the bandage on my palm.

  On the second toss of the camera, I caught it. I’d dug up my old iPod armband, the one I used to run with when Viv and I decided it’d be cool to be girls who jogged. Really, that lasted a week. The tiny camera fit into the clear plastic pocket. The armband stretched taut around the tree bough and fastened in place.

  “Can you spot it from there?” I called to Graham, who went to stand at the maw of the tunnel.

  “Not at all.” He checked the camera feed on his phone. “Tilt the lens to the left. Your left.”

  I hung sharply to the side of the bough and fiddled with the lens through the plastic. My clenched thighs began to shake. “Good?”

  “More to the left. No. Wait. Up a little. Good, good, good. Freeze.”

  I held my hand in the air. “You sure?”

  “Perfect.”

  He jogged through the pine needles as I squirmed to sit.

  “How do we know it won’t die?”

  “The camera accesses my cell plan. I have service here so it won’t black out. I’ll be able to watch from my phone. The battery life is supposed to be at least a week as long as I’m deleting old footage, so it doesn’t need to store a lot.”

  He extended his arm. “Catch you.”

  I jumped down beside him, wincing at the jolt to my ankles. Picking the dead ants and bark from my injured hand. “Let’s go see about hijacking that train car,” I said.

  • • •

  Graham dropped me of at my house before driving to Trent’s. I went inside to change into my most believable student-journalist ensemble. A cardigan and pearl studs would make me appear above suspicion to Ms. Swinton. The kind of outfit I wore for lunch with my grandmother.

  It went according to plan. Ms. Swinton invited me inside. She apologized for having to entertain me in the dining room, since the window hadn’t been fixed yet and the living room was cordoned off with thick sheets of plastic.

  She served me chamomile tea and we sat on either side of the oval table. I chatted about the school news blog and the bullshit article I was writing on the spree of vandalism. I rounded it out with, “My friend was at this party in the railroad tunnel—you know the one, right? Up in the hills behind my house? Well, there was a woman there saying she saw the car that hit Jane Doe five years ago and that she’s not leaving until she figures out who was driving it. My friend thought she was maybe camping up there? Isn’t that all just bonkers?” I spoke fast and blinked too much from nerves—how often did honest people blink?— and was it suspicious I was hiding my hurt hand in my lap?

  I left my tea untouched; the dredges settled at the bottom of its pool. Practically fell down her porch steps I was so eager to get away from the seed I’d planted, like it was a magic bean a moment away from sprouting to crush me.

  The air was full, leeching moisture into my hair. Maybe Graham wasn’t paranoid for worrying over rain. Viv would be home from play practice and I needed to talk to her about the secret rites for the initiates. None had been delivered, as far as I knew, since that first day with Campbell eating cat food, Trent doing a pole dance, and Rachel’s speech in her and Graham’s history class. We had been busy with the rebellions and we’d agreed not to let these smaller rites overshadow what mattered. But I’d seen the hurt in Campbell’s eyes over the cat food, and I worried about the storm gathering for Amanda. Not worried for Amanda, per se, but the possible fallout.

  Through the glass door of the barn, Viv sat cross-legged, palms on the floor. The lights off. A candle flickered on the book that lay open in front of her.

  I tapped the glass. Her face snapped up. Shiny with tears.

  “Hey,” I said, closing the door behind me. “You reading something sad?”

  “Hi. No.”

  I hung at the outskirts of the candle’s glow, which fell softly around her. She pulled a tissue from a skirt pocket and blew into it. I went to sit across from her and waited until she was ready.

  “I failed.” Her voice was low, holding back. She took a steadying breath. “You’ve got to understand that Amanda, Jess, and Rachel—they’re not all equally friend
s. Anyone can see it.” Viv’s hands trembled. “Amanda only ever asks Jess to do stuff. Jess brings Rachel or Rachel just shows. Amanda does sneaky shit. Every time Rachel talks, Amanda winces and holds her ears like Rachel’s too loud. Or she’ll tell Rachel not to be rude or obnoxious right before they go into stores to shop, as if Rachel doesn’t know how to behave.

  “Amanda always has stories about how wasted Rachel got once, or how she’s so sloppy and desperate. Rachel denies it, but Jess says, why would Amanda lie?” Viv huffed nasally in disbelief. “Because she’s evil. I bet that’s why Rachel actually started drinking too much. She became the lie. There are holes in their little triangle. I tried to stick my fingers through them.” Viv gave a scathing bark of laughter. “As if destroying Amanda could be as easy as getting her to fight with her friends.”

  “Why make them fight? If Amanda and Rachel already have issues.”

  “I wanted them to have their last fight. The fight that would end the group. Their fights were never so major that Jess had to pick a side. So . . .”

  “So?”

  “I started repeating what the other said. Not when Jess was around. Stealthy, like, Oh, Rachel, Amanda said you keep a flask in your backpack. Can I have a sip if you do? Or, Hey, Amanda, I don’t want to get her in any trouble, but Rachel was reminding a bunch of kids about when you lost your hair.”

  Viv let out a long sigh, deflating. “It didn’t work. Rachel got sulky. Amanda didn’t care. She’d shrug or laugh or say, Whatever, she’s probably drunk. I failed. I had this unicorn of an opportunity to destroy Amanda, and I barely made her frown. Once Amanda lost Jess, the boys would have gone too. They like her way more than Amanda. Then Amanda would be alone, like a lame animal forgotten by her herd. No one to protect her. Then IV could have cut her down.”

  I looked away as she wiped her runny nose on her shoulder.

  “Maybe it’s okay, Viv? This year’s going to be over like that.” I snapped. “You’ll never see Amanda again. The Order did what it was supposed to—it gave us all these one-of-a-kind memories.” I grabbed both her hands and held them tightly. “We’ll be friends forever.”