“Why?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“You’re ridiculous. You are insane asking me this. I invented the Order. You know what it means to me.”
“I do. Doesn’t that tell you that I have a really good reason if I get what the Order means to you and I’m still asking?”
I watched an ant cross the length of a flagstone.
“Don’t call Graham or Viv. Shut your cell off. Tell your dad not to answer the home line. Stay in your room all night. We’ll explain to Graham and Viv tomorrow that I asked you to flake. Okay?”
“I’ll think about it.” Liar. I would not give up this slice of the Order for Harry, not after he’d torn my heart out and left it to be picked at by the seagulls. I wanted him to leave and I couldn’t figure out a quicker way of accomplishing that without appeasing him.
Harry took the lawn in a few strides before one last look back. His eyes bright and burning with the electricity of thoughts, beliefs, and dreams. “I love you, Isadora Anne Pendleton. I think your perfect song is mine too.”
The air went out of my lungs watching his caramel figure take off in a sprint. I only whispered “I love you too” when he was too far to hear.
I called Graham from my room. “Have you watched the footage today?”
A long pause and then a loud exhale. “I haven’t. Hold on, let me pull it up and I’ll e-mail it to you.”
I flipped open my laptop and waited.
“There. Sent. I’d go through it but I’ve got to prepare the truth serum for tonight.” We said good-bye. Thirty seconds later, I rang him back.
“Graham. The camera’s aimed at the ground, not the tunnel. How long has it been like this?”
“It is? Shit. Your armband must have loosened.”
“You said you watched it yesterday though, right?”
“Uh, yeah, I was going to, but I didn’t.”
I glared at the cell. “It could have been like this for forty-eight hours? What if we missed him?”
“We didn’t. C’mon. The plan wasn’t going to work. At first I thought, maybe. But the more thought I give to it, the less likely the whole thing seems. No one’s going to incriminate themselves like that.”
“I’ll see you at the rock.”
“Don’t hang up angry. If you believe it’ll work, we’ll walk up there in the morning before school, okay? We’ll fix it first thing tomorrow.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
“See you in a couple hours.”
“Yeah.” I hung up.
I paced like a caged animal for about five minutes. I yanked my hair, kicked at worn pajama pants on the floor, and decided it was stupid to wait for Graham to help me fix the camera.
I’d do it myself. A twenty-minute hike up, a fifteen-minute hike to the rock. I wore red—a dress as Viv made me promise—slipped on leggings underneath, and boots, a fleece coat she never had to see over it.
Equipped with a flashlight, I entered the open space through the gate in our backyard. The rock formations and trees melting and wavering in the orange sunset. It would be dark soon. I took the trail worn into the grass that ran behind the Driftwood properties. Where the pines dotted the hills, the grasses couldn’t grow because of the acidity of the needles they shed. I used the flashlight under the broken canopy and kicked the pinecones from my path. Once, Viv and I had collected a basketful. We were going to paint them gold until pincher bugs began escaping their crevices and headed for her bedroom carpet.
In passing, I rested my hand on the tree with a constellation of hollows in its straight trunk that made it easy to climb. Graham and I dared to its top. Neither of us got higher than ten feet. There was still the frayed rope on its lowest branch from our rope swing.
A few scant sunbeams filtered in through the trees. Specks of dirt and pollen hovered in and out of the light. Then, as if a giant had shuttered the sky, the bolts of light were gone. The sun had tucked under the Pacific. Near to the tunnel I began to wonder: What if the exact moment I visited the camera was the exact moment Goldilocks’s killer checked the tunnel for a witness?
I sniffed and swung my arms harder. I was not afraid. How unlikely—near impossible—that would be. A tiny quivering voice in me answered, As unlikely as a meteorite not leaving a crater. There was the tree ahead. I spotted a knot about four feet up its trunk to step on. I flipped the flashlight off, tossed it to the ground, hiked up my dress, and grunted and shimmied my way up. The branch really wasn’t so high, eight or ten feet from the ground. I was unfastening the Velcro of the armband when a distant crunch froze me.
I tried to peer to the ground by looking over my shoulder without losing balance. Crunches like footsteps came from the direction of the turnout where we’d parked the SUV the other night. My breathing picked up, lungs suddenly desperate for air, hands soggy gripping the bough. Let it be Graham. Of course it had to be him; he’d got off the phone with me, realized what a jerk he’d been, how important fixing the camera’s angle was. I opened my mouth to call out his name, but the strobe of a flashlight and a brown sleeve attached to it locked my jaw shut.
I knew that jacket. The evening wasn’t so dim that I couldn’t recognize my father.
Dad grimaced as he walked. His pace slowed approaching the mouth of the tunnel. He disappeared into its shadow. Emerged after an amount of time I measured only by how deeply my fingernails dug into bark. He stood undecided, shifted his flashlight back and forth. I could no longer make out his face.
He trudged the way he came. When my nails were pulling away from their skin, I dropped from the branch. Nothing caught me, not my feet or my hands. I rolled forward onto my shoulder, needles stuck in my hair and jacket as I staggered up.
Panic came in waves. Rolled up from my gut to my chest to my head. The tree trunks doubled, tripled, the sparse wood transmuted to a forest. I careened down. Running. White sheets fell over my thoughts. Not blankness. Shapes moved under them. Rippled them. Things I couldn’t let myself think yet.
I clipped a trunk, spun out, hit the ground. Stayed on all fours. I was angry at a jacket; I tore mine off. Left it in the dirt. Up again. I’d lost my flashlight, or maybe left it by the tree. I ran from memory. I could see the rock, or rather the golden eye of the bonfire saw me.
There were figures milling around on the meteorite. Mine. It wasn’t a scary place. It wasn’t responsible for Goldilocks’s death at all. Our games and dares and questions didn’t draw her in. Not us kids. The grown-ups did it. I shook my head into the night. Clamped my mind shut. I wasn’t ready to think. To acknowledge.
I crossed the field for the rock. Caught my breath. There: this is how lungs work. Breathe in. Out. I picked pine needles from my hair. Let each one fall to the ground. Reordered my features until they belonged to an ordinary girl who knew nothing.
“Where’d you come from?” Graham asked as he noticed me prowling around the rock.
Harry turned. His features fell. I didn’t imagine that. Both boys wore red like I did.
Viv was amid the initiates. They’d come, all in white like we’d instructed. Viv swung her hips between Rachel’s and Jess’s, dancing to music I couldn’t hear, the red tulle of her skirt flaring out. I smiled at her. Felt warmth in my chest; felt alive again. Why had I experienced such ugly panic minutes before? I’d washed the reason from my thoughts. It no longer existed. There was Viv. Celebrating. Happy. As radiant as she was onstage.
I went to her. Took her hand. Twirled her under my arm. “You’re late,” she said, pretending to pout, eyes like gemstones, a tiny red rose tucked behind each ear.
“I’m here now,” I said, words tinny and strange.
She offered me a flower. “For you.” Viv slipped it behind my ear. She opened her arms and wrapped me in them, pressed her cheek to mine, and whispered, “No matter what happens, I am so grateful that you are my best friend.”
Graham cleared his throat. Called out for everyone to gather around, make a circle. For the life of me, I couldn’t remembe
r my lines. There was a script. But my mind was wiped. Viv would jump in; she was good about memorizing every line in a performance. The initiates’ faces were out of focus, like pencil drawings I’d taken my finger to. I felt like I was standing unnaturally still. Like glass. No. Not glass. A stronger substance, surely. Iron. Space rock.
Graham pointed our dagger to the sky, nicked his palm with it, took a drag of a new batch of his truth serum, and passed both items on.
My eyes landed on Harry. His lines were sharply drawn. He was beautiful. Staring back at me. I mouthed “I love you” because I could. Because it was true. Because vaguely I remembered him saying so to me the day before in my front yard, and even before that, at the beach, and standing on the rock, front heated by the fire, I got that he had not meant it in the same way we loved the others.
There was a trace of a smile on Harry’s lips and his glowing eyes were on mine until the second Conner stepped in front of him.
It was so unexpected that no one believed it was happening. One boy throwing himself at another. The boys slammed to the rock, one of them on his back and the other on top. The boy on top throwing fists. Conner delivering three or four punches before they started to roll. I let out a scream that was echoed by others. The edge of the rock was close. They thought they had more room. Harry was trying to regain a little ground.
But Conner and Harry flew from the rock. They fell, embracing. They were on their own, together, plummeting to Earth like the meteorite had tens of thousands of years ago.
The difference: Harry was flesh, blood, and spine when he hit.
Conner’s weight was on top of him.
Graham ran for the edge of the rock. He jumped. I scrambled down its side, found Graham shoving Conner’s body off Harry. One of them was crying, big, shuddering sobs. I thought it was Harry; he was the hurt one. His eyelids were half closed, crescents of irises and pupils stared up at space.
Conner cried, “No, no, no man. You okay? I had to do it. I was supposed to do it.”
“Har?” I leaned over him. “Harry?”
Nothing. His eyelids began to make a slow drop.
I stopped being a human girl. I was a crouched animal at Harry’s side, terror all I tasted. There was more shouting from the rock. Viv’s voice shot through the racket. “An ambulance is coming,” she yelled.
“Get your mom!” Graham screamed.
I must have turned to see Viv go, skirt tangling around her ankles as she ran, or else I’ve played the night over and over and I’ve invented memories so that I can see it from every angle.
Graham was on his phone, dialing 9-1-1.
“They’re coming,” I said up to him. But he stood over us. Conner’s outstretched arm reached for Harry. Graham was there, heaving him back, shoving him hard. “Don’t touch him,” he bellowed, knocking his glasses from his face, leaving them in the dirt.
Back on the phone, a precise, clinical voice that had panic slowly bleeding into it. “Tell me what I can do for him. No—listen—he’s fallen onto his back, twelve feet up. Tell me what to do. I know you’ve sent an ambulance, but what can I do now? Now. Tell me.”
I held one of Harry’s hands between mine. It was burning up but strangely limp, like the dove in the moment after I drove the pin through its heart. Harry’s lids had finished their drop. I leaned over, put my ear near his parted lips, and caught the barest whisper of breath. I moved my mouth to his ear.
“Harry, the ambulance is coming. Viv went to get Ina. Harry, please, just keep breathing.” My ear went to his mouth again. I waited. I held my breath. I can’t explain it except to say that it was the roar of the ocean trapped in a seashell coming from Harry. My ear pressed to his mouth, capturing the last sound he’d ever make. I kissed the corner of his lips.
I whispered to him, “Harrison Rocha, I have loved you since you showed up to save us from boredom and our bad tempers and the incomplete lives we had before you. Graham and Vivy and I love you, Harry.”
34
Modern medicine pulls off all kinds of miracles, and even after the paramedics had set his neck in a brace, shined lights in his undilating eyes, and administered three bursts from paddles on his chest without results, I held out hope. How could I not? He was Harry. We’d been sent on a course to find each other. We had invisible forces on our side. We were the Order of IV.
They loaded him in an ambulance as the police arrived. I took three running strides to chase it. Arms closed around me—a police officer—and I tried to throw them off. I was shoved between Graham and Viv. Ordered to stop fighting.
“If I’d stopped him,” Graham kept saying, rubbing hard at his forehead. “If I’d stopped them in time.”
The ambulance had taken too long to arrive. Fifteen minutes of waiting for it to spot Campbell and Jess, who went to flag it down at the mouth of the access road. Viv had returned from her house in that time; Ina wasn’t home but at work.
The police took their time processing the scene. Photographing. Shouting urgently when they found the dagger tipped in blood. The IV drawn on the rock. The truth serum they sniffed warily. The Mistress of Rebellion and Secrets on her throne of rocks.
The police drove us to the hospital in the back of a cruiser, and two officers came into the emergency room with us. Sat by the door, silently watching. In the waiting room, Graham sat doubled over, tears spotting the tops of his shoes, his glasses abandoned by the rock. Viv spoke urgently to the woman across the receiving desk. She raised her voice when answers weren’t given. She could really project—I think about that a lot, what a set of lungs she had, how she could make herself heard, how I was counting on spending my whole life hearing her talk and act and laugh and sing.
“He’s Harry,” I said. “He’s going to be okay. Isn’t he, Graham? Isn’t Harry going to be all right? They’ll fix him. Induce a coma. Stop a brain bleed. Give him medicine. Maybe he has internal bleeding?” I couldn’t say enough. If I kept listing off possibilities, hope hadn’t run out.
Harry was dead on arrival. Dead before the paramedics got to him. No way to save him. Broken neck. Severed spinal cord. Brain-dead instantly. More than his broken body, the thought of Harry’s mind being gone was unfathomable. How if a song had been playing, he wouldn’t have been able to say if it was his perfect one or not.
Harry’s parents arrived, bracing each other, quickly ushered back to Harry. Beyond the nurses’ station, in a white anonymous room they’d probably never forget. Simon was there too. Simon didn’t have a big brother any longer. When the officers watching us went to get coffee, Graham whispered to Viv and me what Harry set in motion.
“I was supposed to drag Conner off once he got a few good hits in. It was Harry’s idea. Let him split my lip or break a couple ribs, he said. Begged me. Pull him off once he’s done damage for the cops to see. He’d slipped the secret rite in Conner’s locker the day before.”
“Why?” I wanted to know.
“Harry’s dad,” Graham said. “It was Conner; Conner’s older brother, Bowden; and his brother’s friends, partying on the bleachers by the soccer field. His dad saw their faces. Took the beating. Didn’t tell anyone. I guess he didn’t want to get into it with Sebastian Welsh. Harry’s mom loves their house. Loves this town. Harry’s dad was groggy and medicated after one of the last surgeries, muttered something to Harry. Harry put it together.”
“Harry—”
“He did it so one of the fucks who hurt his father would be held accountable for something,” Graham said.
Graham, Viv, and I didn’t need to promise not to breathe a word of this to anyone. There was nothing in this world or the next that would make us implicate Harry in provoking Conner. We would keep his last secret no matter what.
Soon, we were taken to the police station. The questioning began friendly enough. All of us together. Our parents, except for my mother, standing around.
An officer said, “Tell us about the events leading up to your friend’s death. Tell us about the events of October
and September.” The Seven Hills PD was not so dim after all, given that they suspected us immediately of a larger conspiracy—of being IV.
I said, “October happened because September happened because August happened.”
Graham sounded like he had a bad cold telling them the only official answer we’d give them. Ten kids around a bonfire. Peaceful. Shooting the shit. Conner Welsh, a boy who’d always been a bully, rushed Harry. Fists flew, a deranged Conner knocked Harry off balance, the two boys fell twelve feet from the meteorite. Harry’s head smacked a rock, neck crimped, Conner on top of him.
Our version was obviously a lie. What about the dagger? Why were you four in red? Why the others in white? What was the wooden doll by the fire, on a throne? A break in our questioning. Then the others started talking. Not all of them. Jess, Amanda, and Campbell denied knowing anything about IV. They denied that we were involved. They told a story almost identical to ours. Conner had snapped. Gone after Harry. The boys had fallen. Whether they lied to the police out of self-preservation or loyalty to us and the Order, I never found out.
It was Conner, Trent, and Rachel who bleated the truth to the police—the truth as they knew it. Not a party, but a ritual ceremony. A secret order born from the history of our town. They divulged all of what they knew about the Order of IV. They spilled our rites and rebellions on the linoleum floor of the police station. Conner swore he’d received a secret order to go after Harry on the rock. A note in his locker. No proof, though; he’d thrown it away. He’d figured Harry had sent it himself. He wanted a fight with Conner but was too chickenshit to throw the first punch.
The police weren’t treating us like criminals yet. They hadn’t found Harry’s IV tattoo. They didn’t know if the IV in blood on the rock had been a bit of rebellious pretend, as harmless as the kids’ armbands and emblems at school. We hadn’t been cautioned or arrested. Their official opinion of us was too colored by what good students we were; what nice Seven Hills families we came from.
Mom flew home from Denver on the red-eye. She arrived with the sun the morning after Harry died. Harry. He would never see the sun again.
First We Were IV Page 31