First We Were IV

by Alexandra Sirowy

  It was later, almost five o’clock, and we’d ignored the chirping of both our phones two or three times, when we were brushing the sand off each other. His hands racing down my jeans was almost as exciting as our mouths linked. The sea had calmed as it darkened. Harry took my hand and we started up the gentle slope of dunes.

  As we walked over a red IV and two grooves in the asphalt where one of the curfew signs had been in the parking lot, Harry asked, “Are you afraid for tomorrow night?”

  I squeezed his fingers. “No way. We’re pros by now.”

  “We could get busted. It’s been all trespassing and vandalism so far. The train car, the fire, the gazebo—I don’t know what they’ll call it, but it’s serious. Unlawful destruction, maybe.”

  I rocked my shoulder into his. “How is unlawful destruction different from lawful destruction?” Fear didn’t exist in that moment. The swelling thing in my gut had deflated. Harry was someone I’d never had before. I was used to having three best friends. But Harry, he was a one and only.

  “Still not afraid,” I said. “You?”

  “I should be, because—consequences.” He emphasized that one word and I knew all he meant by it. Each of us had plans that would be messed up by getting into trouble with the police and school. It seemed so far beyond worth-the-risk that the consequences became dull annoyances, flies to swat at or ignore.

  He stopped and faced me. Light shone from his eyes—the sky was gray again and I was convinced that the sun had come from him. “Are we—going out? Dating? Hanging out? What do you call it?”

  “According to Viv, people mostly say going out. We should call it whatever we want, though. I’ve never had a boyfriend,” I added, unnecessarily since surely Harry knew. “Why didn’t we hang out with your last girlfriend?”

  “Because.” He swayed his head side to side. “Because, you.”

  “Me. That was like a year ago.”

  He looked to the sky, counting. “Ten months.”

  “You liked me ten months ago?”

  “I loved you ten months ago.”

  “Oh,” I said, and shrugged. “I’ve loved you since I met you. All three of you.”

  Harry laughed. I didn’t understand why. “C’mon,” he said. “I want to buy my girlfriend a pizza before the barn.”

  • • •

  Graham laid his map out on the table. His finger traced a double line he said represented the railroad tracks. The map included the knoll and the foothills that ran from behind the stores on its east side. They rambled slowly to the Ghost Tunnel, before shooting up in altitude, forming a ridge as good as a wall around our town. The gazebo was indicated with a red circle. A rectangle with wheels marked where the town’s railway station used to be, where the knoll was now.

  “I checked the railway car and you were right, Har,” Graham said. “The air compression brakes aren’t on.”

  “The air used to control them comes from the locomotive,” Harry said to Viv and me. He added, “That’s the way train brakes have worked since the 1800s, according to the Internet.”

  “The tracks follow this course.” Graham indicated the double line. “It runs a mile downslope and a mile of flat ground before it hits the knoll.”

  “If it’s moving too fast, it could derail. Go off the tracks,” Harry warned.

  “The area’s deserted. No houses,” Graham said, zigzagging his finger over the blank space he meant.

  “Does it cross the road?” I asked.

  “A couple times—but that late at night, no one’s going to be driving on a road that only goes to a lookout point,” Graham said.

  Viv pursed her lips at him. “Night is when people visit lookout points, Graham Cracker.”

  “At four a.m.?”

  “People have been known to make out even at four a.m.,” she said, toeing my foot under the table. I looked up from the pen I’d been using on my fingers. On the inside of each knuckle I’d written a letter, all ten spelling “Goldilocks.”

  She considered me with grave eyes as Graham wrung the back of his neck and said, “If we wait any later, people could be awake, commuting to work.”

  Harry had his elbows on the map, studying it. “You said it’s a mile of flat ground leading to the knoll where the tracks stop?”

  “I tried to calculate speed but the grade of the hill is different in so many spots and it grew too complicated to solve,” Graham said.

  “Physics,” I muttered, trying to poke my recollection. “There’s a formula for finding the velocity of an object on an inclined plane. But we’d need its rate of acceleration and something else. Forget it, I think a mile’s plenty of space.”

  “So four a.m. in the Ghost Tunnel. We hit the gazebo on the knoll at, what, three thirty?” Viv said. “Cover it in blood.” She wriggled her fingers in my direction and cackled like a witch.

  She was being silly. Involved in planning. But our plan as it was left me racking my brain for more. “I want to frighten them,” I said, my fist smacking the table and jolting their water glasses. Harry slid back into his seat and regarded me with concern.

  “We’re talking blood and fire on a grand scale,” Graham said. “What’s not scary about that?”

  “This rebellion needs to be an obvious escalation. It needs to send the message that we’re not fooling around. We told Denton and Carver to resign. They didn’t do it. Everybody knows IV is angry over Goldilocks. She’s dead. I saw her dead body. Blood that looks like paint isn’t enough. It’s not the same as showing people a body.”

  The wind whistled through the gap in the sliding door.

  “The bones are for the final Goldilocks rebellion,” Graham said gently. “Not this one.”

  I pushed away from the table and stood too quickly. Stars firing off before my eyes, I blinked at the bandage on my palm. Its corner had caught on the table. The scab was a black divot, like a wormhole on my hand that led anywhere. I said, “Not bone. Flesh and blood.”

  “Like the dove,” Viv stated.

  Driving pins into the dove’s heart made the initiates more malleable. Doing something that forbidden changes you. It brings all the other taboo acts out of the middle distance. No longer on the horizon. They’re possible. Close. Just say yes.

  I wanted to leave a symbol like the dove for Seven Hills. But not to make them conspirators like our initiates. Sure, our neighbors worried they’d get hit again with spray paint. Maybe they even slept with the lights on, bats rested against the bedframes to be ready for the vandal. But it wasn’t the same kind of fear Goldilocks had experienced right before she died. Real fear didn’t live in Seven Hills. I wanted to crook my finger. Welcome it. Not to actually hurt people. Never, I told myself. Fear was enough.

  “All those books you’ve been carrying around”—I pointed at Graham—“ritual sacrifice and guerilla movements and insurgencies . . . You’ve been reading about secret groups.”

  He thumbed the dimple in his chin. “I have. Mostly because it’s an academic interest.”

  “We’ve started a secret society, Graham.” I spread my arms, spun. “You had us recruit initiates. We’re calling ourselves an order. You haven’t been reading to help us?”

  “Curiosity, Izzie. You understand that. These aren’t the kind of groups you want to model us after.”

  I shook my head, ponytail swinging defiantly. “Isn’t there one thing—one thing you can think of to use? C’mon, Graham. Don’t chicken out on me now.” It was unfair appealing to his ego. It did always work, though.

  Elbows on the table, he tented his hands under his chin. For a long time we stared at each other, unblinking. We were the monster the other had created—all our pushing and daring. We scooped up the line, tossed it far afield. Finally he sighed. I’d won. “There was a group in South America. They hung dogs from the lampposts while everyone slept.”

  I swallowed. Viv covered her face. “Not dogs,” she said weakly.

  “It was in Peru,” Harry said. “The Shining Path and the d
ogs represented the dogs of capitalism. They were a Marxist group.”

  “And it worked,” Graham said. “People were terrified.”

  “What about an animal that’s already dead?” I asked. “Like roadkill?”

  “We just go driving around looking for corpses?” Graham said.

  Viv rested her head on her folded arms. “I can’t believe we’re discussing this. I am not here.”

  “I just . . .” I held my head. “Denton and Carver haven’t resigned. They didn’t take our note seriously. A girl is dead. A girl is dead.” My voice cracked. I felt apart from my three friends sitting calmly, watching me. I was closer in spirit to the night through the sliding door. I wanted to break something. Leave its pieces all over Seven Hills.

  Harry walked over and put his arm around me. “We know, Izzie. We’ll make the rebellion horrifying. Maybe we can—”

  I held my hand up, silencing him. “Let’s just get back to going over the plan, okay? Please?” I softened my face. I needed to focus. I wanted to think and plan, and if they didn’t have the stomach for what needed to be done, so what, I did.

  His hand ran down my arm, fingers catching on mine, as he nodded.

  • • •

  The interior lights were all out except the foyer lantern when I got home. Dad was asleep. I still hadn’t thought to return my mom’s calls; five had registered on my cell as missed since the morning after she left. I wasn’t angry with her; I just didn’t want to think about anything other than the Order.

  Not entirely true. I wanted to bring Harry inside. I thought about kissing him more. Keeping him in my room with me the whole night so I didn’t have to be alone. But more powerful than that desire was the pull of my fingers, itching to flick through photos of dead girls on my laptop. My anger needed more fuel. More fire for tomorrow’s rebellion. For what I believed needed to be sacrificed.

  29

  The next morning I woke up with the sun. I got dressed hastily, hit the button on the coffee maker in the kitchen, and waited for it to brew as I ate a Greek yogurt. With one thermos of brimming-hot coffee in my cup holder, I drove up the hill to Conner’s house. I could have walked, but I sensed that out on the street, Graham or Harry or Viv would see me, stop me, want to tag along. And then I couldn’t ask Conner for a favor. Give him a secret rite I didn’t want anyone else to know about. Break our rules; well, rules we hadn’t been explicit about. And misuse the secret rites in exactly the way I worried someone else might.

  The four of us had agreed that the night’s rebellion was too sensitive to commit to paper. Instead, we’d tell our initiates where and when to meet us and what to bring.

  It was a little after seven as I parked behind the other vehicles in the Welshes’s driveway: an SUV, a four-door sedan, a two-seater, and a boat. They were displayed, sparkling clean, with not so much as a frond from the palm trees on them. Even the sleek, modern design of the house made me feel like I was on the set of a music video.

  I listened at the front door. Somewhere in the house there was the thump of bass. My finger fell away from the doorbell without pressing it. What if Sebastian Welsh opened the door? He was the most disturbing thing about Amanda’s secret.

  The door was opening inward when I realized I should have texted Conner that I was coming or, better, to meet me out front. A woman in a plain gray dress and white apron stared at me.

  “Hi. I’m here for Conner,” I said.

  I hugged myself on the way to Conner’s room. The thumping bass grew louder as we got closer. It was noticeably colder inside the house than outside, all the polished concrete floors creating an atmosphere of refrigeration. Or a crypt. I could vaguely remember Conner’s eighth or ninth birthday and a party he invited the whole class to. I hadn’t been inside his house since then.

  Conner’s room was immaculate. All polished chrome and black lacquer and a TV that took up most of the wall. Every surface dusted. No clutter of magazines or books or clothes. He looked up, startled, half stood, knocked his breakfast onto the carpet, and hit mute on the music playing.

  “You must have a serious case of OCD,” I said in way of a greeting.

  He descended on the fallen bagel, blotting up jam from his rug with a paper towel. “My dad gets on my case if my room’s messy,” he said.

  I snorted. “I’m not sure my dad’s been inside my room since middle school.”

  I closed the door behind me and hovered between the bed and the TV.

  “Lucky.”

  “Not really.”

  “You’re dad’s a decent guy. He helped me change a tire once on the side of the road.”

  “So.” I rocked up on my heels. “I bet you’re wondering why I’m here.”

  He was done cleaning up the bagel and returned to the foot of his bed. “Nah. Remember?” A suggestive lift of his eyebrow. “I had you pegged for the freaky one from the start. Knew you’d want some of this.”

  “Shut up,” I said. “It’s Order business.”

  “Oh.” He straightened up, attentive.

  I took a calming breath. “I have a secret rite for you and Trent today. In addition to the instructions you’re going to be given at school.”

  “I’m in.”

  “You don’t know what the secret rite is yet.”

  “This IV thing has been more fun than I used to have”—he lowered his voice to a whisper, eyes flicking to the closed door—“busting up my dad’s model homes.”

  “You know how there are always goats along highway eighty-nine eating grass? Along that deserted span after the Oak Hurst exit?”

  “Yeah. It’s near a goat farm or something.”

  “I need you and Trent to go after school and get one of them. But not a baby, okay?”

  “A kid—that’s what the babies are called,” he said unexpectedly.

  I nodded. “Swear you won’t get a kid.”

  “Sure.”

  “So you and Trent will do it?”

  He shrugged. “Yeah. Trent’s got a pickup.”

  “Don’t let anyone see you take the goat, though, okay?”

  “No, really?” He rolled his eyes.

  “And you’ll bring it with you tonight?”

  “If that’s the rite. Yup.”

  “Okay. And don’t mention it to anyone—not your friends. Not even mine.”

  He smirked. “Not your boyfriend?”

  “I don’t want him to feel culpable about the goat. Bad for it.”

  “You don’t care if I do?”

  “No. I don’t, Conner. You’re an irredeemable asshole.”

  “You didn’t think I was an asshole when I forfeited my title of Tetherball Champion of Seven Hills Elementary to let you win after your grandpa died.” He smirked. “How could I forget? I got teased so bad for a month because the boys thought a girl beat me.”

  “A lot’s happened since then, Conner.”

  He inclined his head. I gave him an awkward nod good-bye. Halfway out the door, I added, “Oh. Here.” I set the thermos on his dresser. “I brought coffee in case I had to bribe you to steal the goat.”

  “As people do.”

  My smile was genuine, because in that moment I hated Conner a little less than usual.

  • • •

  We met our initiates in the turnout on Old Creek Road at three a.m. It was a quiet side street; head north and you’d hit the Ghost Tunnel; head south and you’d end up at the beach. Eucalyptus trees with great swaths of peeling bark framed the turnout.

  I stepped out into the chilly night scented by the trees; almost like peppermint balm. Amanda, Jess, and Rachel sat on the tailgate of Trent’s truck. Campbell paced, hands gripping his beanie, muttering to himself.

  Conner kicked haphazardly at the gravel of the shoulder, sending rock sprays against one of their parked cars.

  Graham spoke to them first. “Did you see any other cars on the road? You remembered to take Lagoon here rather than Main Street with the traffic cam, right?”

  Rache
l dabbed the corners of her eyes with a sleeve. Amanda’s face spasmed. Conner spun around like he was waiting for someone to come out of the trees. “Trent,” he called, “hurry up pissing.”

  “God,” Amanda muttered, “shut up already.”

  The four of us traded uneasy glances.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “Trent killed it,” Conner said, gesturing wildly at the truck bed.

  A cold nausea swept through me, my skin turning clammy, my ears ringing. I was the only one out of my friends who understood. I was going to have to explain why I wanted the goat and what fate I’d had in mind for it.

  “Uh, killed what?” Viv asked. Silence. “Jess?”

  Jess rapped a fist on the truck. “Better look for yourselves.”

  “You gave them one job. One job. And they screwed it up,” Amanda said empathically. “This is so not on me.”

  “Or me,” Rachel echoed.

  Graham, Harry, and Viv walked tentatively for the truck bed. Harry glanced uneasily back at me when I didn’t move in tandem. Their harsh intakes of breath came as they made sense of the motionless lump.

  “What is a dead goat doing in the truck?” Harry asked.

  Trent came from the trees fidgeting with his zipper, apparently having just relieved himself. He took in the scene. Raised both hands like he was surrendering to the police. “It was an accident. I drove the truck into their pasture because I thought it’d be easier getting a goat with the truck right inside the gate. And it was. But then I backed up.”

  “And?” Graham said.

  “I ran over one.”

  “And rather than bringing you a live goat like you asked for, they showed up with this dead one, and then told us the whole story,” Amanda said. She was angry not over the goat’s death, but because she thought our rebellion required a live animal. My fault. I’d unleashed Conner and Trent on the goats in the first place. I had intended to kill one. To take another life.