First We Were IV

by Alexandra Sirowy

  Amanda egged Viv’s house. Viv brought our class peanut butter cupcakes, knowing Amanda was allergic to peanuts.

  Amanda made a meme of Viv, illustrated pee trickling down her leg. Instead of retaliating, Viv bided her time.

  Then, middle school. Amanda wasn’t herself when we started the sixth grade. She appeared sallow and wore bandages on her thumbs. And hats. She was never without a beanie. That year, when Graham and I faked the chicken pox, Viv got her mom to write a note excusing her from PE. Amanda was permanently excused. Viv and Amanda sat idly on the sidelines.

  They bonded over snap-in highlights, French manicures, and musicals. Viv opened up about her mom’s cancer. Amanda confided in Viv about her anxiety disorder. Amanda peeled the cuticles back from her thumbnails. She gnawed at them until the pink skin bled. Then she began to lose her hair. Under all those hats, Amanda’s scalp was patchy. Viv had played the role of friendly confidant perfectly. No more biding her time. Viv ripped Amanda’s beanie from her head in the bustling school quad.

  Kids aren’t reliably cruel, though. There were those who snapped pictures. Who leaped away shrieking to suggest Amanda was contagious. There were more who wore beanies in solidarity. Who brought Amanda candy or said hey or smiled because inside they were nervous wrecks too.

  Amanda’s hair regrew. The friendly feelings Amanda had for Viv that lone week in the sixth grade never did.

  No one tattled on any of Amanda’s offenses because we’d seen Viv hunker down, take it, her threshold elastic, until the perfect moment to strike. It was the game Viv wanted to play.

  I should have known her offensive was coming; that it was only a matter of time until she saw the Order of IV as the weapon to end their war.

  15

  After school I dropped my bag in the farthest row of seats from the stage. Mr. Lancaster the drama teacher was making a few final remarks. I kicked my sneakers on the seat back in front of me and dove into the reading for Post-Colonial History as I waited for Viv.

  I didn’t notice Graham slump beside me until a rush of air hit my ear from him blowing in it.

  “Ah, tickles,” I said.

  “Where’s Viv?”

  I dropped my feet and lifted to see the stage. Deserted.

  “What the?”

  “Did you fall asleep?”

  “No, it’s been like two minutes,” I said, reaching for my cell. “Twenty.”

  “Sometimes she goes out the back,” he said.

  “She must not have seen me.” I frowned faintly at how pathetic I sounded.

  “Harry got called off from work. He’s waiting in the car.”

  Graham scooped up my bag before I got to it.

  I texted Viv while walking to Graham’s car. Harry sat on the trunk, headphones on, mouthing the words until he saw us approach.

  “You guys just missed her,” he called. “Viv said to tell you she’s going to the mall with Jess. Dance dress shopping.”

  I stopped walking. I held up my cell. Why hadn’t Viv texted me? Invited me? I could play a role in her revenge scheme.

  Graham clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t take it personally.”

  I brushed his hand off. “Easy for you to say. You’re going to homecoming with her, riding in the limo. You probably won’t want to be my friend once Jess recruits you for her axis of jadedness.” My frown wavered. Graham grinned goofily. Harry bent laughing. What I’d said was that absurd. Graham would never ditch me; neither would Vivy—not for real.

  The three of us stopped at Cup of Jo for supplies before heading to the barn. Without Viv present, the barn remained our territory.

  The boys sprawled on the rug with laptops and notebooks between them. I was hungry after my chai latte and the barn’s fridge was empty except for mustard, a can of whipped cream, and cider.

  I tapped on the French doors of the main house’s kitchen. Before Ina’s diagnosis, she had worked as a pediatrician at the big hospital over the hill. Recently she’d started to see patients at the tiny clinic in Seven Hills, her schedule unpredictable. I hadn’t seen her car in the driveway. Scott would be at his office downtown. I let myself in.

  I had a wheat cracker in my mouth when I spotted the brown jacket on the dining chair. Soft brown canvas, brass buttons, a collar you could pop up or fold down. Water resistant. A hidden pocket in the lining. A gift to my dad on his last birthday. From me. I stopped chewing.

  The floorboards on the level above whined.

  I flew out of the house, forgot to lock the door behind me, probably didn’t close the fridge. I slipped on the pool deck wet from a sprinkler’s runoff, the box of crackers dropping and skidding short of the deep end. A jolt in my elbows as I caught myself.

  I collected the crackers. My eyes watered. I paused under the trellis covered in dainty white blooms and ignored a fat black bumblebee streaking close to my ear.

  The math was plain. If Dad was at Viv’s, and Viv and Scott weren’t home, Dad was with Ina. Alone. Upstairs. An affair. That word teemed with melodrama. I kicked the trellis, dislodging a shower of white snowflakes.

  I was picking the flowers from my hair as I rejoined the boys.

  Desperate to stop thinking about Dad and Ina, I started talking about the teachers I planned to request recommendations from and how I wished I’d done more extracurriculars other than my lone season of track and field freshman year and that one meeting of the Steampunk Fashion Club Viv dragged me to. “But I hate staying at school after class. I want to go home. Read. Be here. Do homework.”

  “Izzie?” Graham said.

  I looked up from the blameless pillow I’d been squeezing to death.

  “I have a confession.”

  He and Harry had been passing the can of whipped cream back and forth, and Graham had a tiny dollop on his top lip.

  “I’m the one who left the picture of Jane Doe—your Goldilocks—for the newspaper.”

  I sagged into the foot of the sofa. “What?” I said, as Harry murmured, “How?”

  Graham took a deep breath, gave a little nod, and plunged in with a practiced shine to his performance. “I was on the rock alone for a while as we waited for the grown-ups to arrive. I kept the vulture away. I got caught up. This sounds deranged, I realize. But kids get excited by macabre stuff. Finding Jane Doe was huge. I wanted a souvenir. You wait for something that big and insane. Like one of our mystery or adventure books. It happened to us twice. The rock and the girl. But then a couple days passed and still no word about the T-shirt and rock wings from anyone. Mom said the authorities didn’t want to make the crime seem sensational. They didn’t want people thinking a killer was on the loose looking to sacrifice girls. Mom knew better than to believe that.” The sincerity in his eyes shifted to smugness. “She knew that if it had been a ritual killing, it would have been more authentic, actual feathers or birds, not a hasty copycat using what was there and easy. She thought Goldilocks wouldn’t have been the first victim or the last.”

  Graham stared at his hands as he continued, “I was ashamed over the picture on my phone. Horrified I’d taken it. I thought maybe I could use it for good? I slipped it under the newspaper’s door. Once I was acting, it was hard to stop. I had the idea to leave the prints in the dirt around the rock.” I coughed deliberately to cover up my gasp. “Like the animals in the cave drawings had come to life and circled it. Make it look even more sensational. Draw more attention. I thought it would frighten the cops into investigating. I never imagined they’d weave a story about a few kids and a séance or something getting out of control.”

  His eyes were as round as his spectacle lenses. How could I judge Graham for keeping a secret about Goldilocks when I’d also kept one? Graham had been trying to manipulate the police into paying her death more attention. Trying to make the town pay attention. I also understood what it was like to be caught up in a mystery. If I’d really wanted nothing to do with Goldilocks, I wouldn’t have looked for her face online. Wouldn’t have hiked up to the tunnel.


  The police hadn’t searched the orchard the day we found Goldilocks and so they assumed the prints had been there, along with her body. Her death and the animal prints were linked by proximity. In the cops’ two scenarios, Goldilocks’s wings were either her killer’s effort to make his ordinary crime seem ritualistic or just part of the pageantry created by teen runaways acting out a sacrificial ceremony inspired by the rock. The police pointed to the paw prints as another related effort, fitting into either scenario.

  Graham unfolded a piece of paper he pulled from his pocket.

  “This is a scale drawing of the model I made,” he said.

  I studied the pencil rendering. I knew what it was to keep a secret like this alone. How the guilt blinkered you from seeing anything else but your mistake. I met Graham’s eager, hopeful eyes. “You were a little kid,” I said. “The cops had made up their minds not to investigate way before the tracks.”

  I handed it to Harry, who silently chewed his thumbnail.

  “How did you make the model?” I asked. That’s when I noticed Graham’s mischievous smirk. “You still have it, don’t you?”

  Graham raised his hands. “If I did, we could use it to recreate the paw prints. But the tracks would have to go somewhere that lots of people would see this time.” He rubbed his stomach, leaving his shirt rucked up. “I’m starving.” Harry handed him the whipped cream, and Graham nozzled a pile of it into his open mouth.

  It was one thing knowing where we wanted our second rebellion to end up, another figuring out how to get there. “Ideas for where the tracks should go?” I directed to Harry.

  “I’ll brainstorm,” Graham said. “You two figure out how to get enough blood.”

  I balked. “Why do we need blood?”

  “The tracks can’t just be left in dirt.” He looked cocky at the unilateral decision. I began to wish I hadn’t told him he was forgiven so easily.

  • • •

  Harry and I walked home in the rose glow of dusk. A cold mist rolled off the ocean and I hugged my arms close. Another few minutes and the fog would overtake us.

  Harry lagged a half step behind. There was the faint burr of music from his headphones at his neck. “When you went for food,” he said, “I told Graham we’re going to homecoming.”

  As friends, I added in my head. I let up on my pace a little. “Did he ask if I bribed you?”

  “That’s what I expected, only the opposite, me bribing you to be my date. He said, ‘Score, we both have dates.’ ”

  I tripped. “He said that?”

  “He’s going with Viv. And there was that whatever with the kiss. He can’t complain.”

  “Or tell us that high school dances are beneath us.”

  “Or lecture us on the history of homecomings.”

  “His lectures have reached soliloquy level.”

  “Viv gives monologues. Graham soliloquies. Shocker—everybody thinks we’re mutants.” He laughed lightly.

  I swung around to face Harry. He halted so abruptly his backpack slipped off his shoulder. “Oops, sorry,” I said. I started to bend to retrieve it, but Harry beat me to it. “All this sudden interest in Viv and us, Amanda has to suspect we’re IV. What if she tells someone?”

  He hooked the backpack onto his shoulder. “She’d probably have ratted us out already.”

  I let out a doubtful huff and listened to Harry’s jean cuffs shuffle against the cement the rest of the way home.

  In my front yard, I said, “It’s make-your-own-pizza night. You want to stay?”

  “I wish. I told my dad I’d help with dinner.”

  “Tell Simon I saw that barn owl again,” I said, starting up the path. “Maybe he can help me build one of those owl houses to put on the roof.”

  “Izzie,” he called. I spun and waited. “You were upset when you got back with the crackers. When you want to tell me why, I want to hear.”

  I smiled and jogged to the front door.

  I hardly had an appetite for pizza. Mom and I used to be creative with topping combos. We’d pair purple potatoes with fresh mozzarella and truffle oil. With goat cheese we added yellow squash and thinly sliced heirloom pumpkins. Not that night. Mom’s laughter sounded forced. Dad’s smile was a decoy. And I intentionally left his personal pizza in the oven until his crust charred black.

  Retrieved from the cellular phone of Isadora Anne Pendleton

  Transcript and notes prepared by Badge #821891

  Shared Media Folder Titled: IV, Wed., Oct. 2, 2:04 a.m.

  Video start.

  I. Pendleton’s face is lit by bars of white light, shadows between them. “I can’t sleep,” she whispers. “I can’t stop thinking about how we’re going to get revenge on Carver and Denton for Goldilocks. How the Order—my crazy idea—is making it possible.” She shakes her head wordlessly.

  “Four. It’s just a stupid number. There is an infinite amount of them. Numbers that could crush the universe with their size. How come one so tiny is so important?” She rolls onto her back, the camera held above her face and the bed. “Four seasons. Four forces of nature. Four directions. Even hearts have four chambers.

  “While I was blocking Dad out at dinner, I tried to remember the four forces of nature from physics. I looked at my notes from class once I came up to my room.”

  Izzie holds a notebook to capture the scant light coming through the blinds. “So one-year-younger Izzie wrote: ‘The four forces of nature are the four fundamental interactions of our universe. Gravitational, strong nuclear, weak nuclear, and electromagnetic. They can’t be reduced down to smaller reactions.’ ”

  “They’re ground zero. Rules of the natural world. What I didn’t write down but I remember is that the forces have different strengths, like gravity is surprisingly weak—except when physicists mess with the forces at really high energy levels and the forces get more and more similar. That makes scientists wonder if they aren’t really manifestations of the same force.” She drops the notebook to the bed.

  “Graham, Harry, Viv, and I are like that. I believe we come from the same place—and no, Graham, I don’t mean vaginas or sperm or whatever preciously you comment you’ll make when you watch this someday. I mean we have our very own force that created the four of us for one another and that under pressure, when it matters, we’re really all the same.” She blows a kiss to the lens. “Of course there are four of us.”

  Video stop.

  16

  We called our next rebellion the blood rebellion.

  Graham—glitter of mischief in his eyes, dare in his voice—suggested drawing our own blood to use. I wiped my clammy hands on my jean shorts and reminded him that there were police and DNA to consider. Briefly we cased the biology lab at USB. The plan, accessing their sterile stores with Graham’s mom’s faculty key card, was abandoned when Viv spied the camouflaged campus security cameras.

  We settled on a butcher shop. During my grandmother’s yearly visits, she’d buy a pint of blood for a traditional stew recipe from her old country.

  In preparation for the blood rebellion, Graham took midnight walks past our targets. We schemed to hit them the Thursday night before homecoming dance.

  Nearly a week had passed since the blood moon ceremony, two since we’d spurred our classmates up the mountain to the tunnel. I craved the net of invincibility that descended over us after a rebellion’s show of nerve; the fire that raged in our chests as we bent others to our will; the strange stare of my reflection that said I was not the kid I once was.

  I developed new habits, little ways to prove to myself that I was as special and powerful as I yearned to be. I tagged IV in Sharpie on the bathroom stalls. I escalated, carving IV into the window frames of my bedroom, the barn, the school library. I scrawled our insignia on the spines of library books and on the faces of lockers when the halls were empty of students.

  Daily I drained the sugar bowl into the garbage disposal, and my dad, the lone coffee drinker in the house, glanced perplexed around
the kitchen. I swiped his newspaper from the front porch; poured water into his sheepskin slippers; was a ghost stopping the dishwasher’s cycle after he hit start. Each act as a vandal and saboteur whet my appetite for the next. Nothing counted unless it outdid the last in risk and destruction. At last I took his credit card and ordered three dozen red roses to be sent to Ina Marlo at her clinic, the note signed from my father. The doctors and nurses would talk; those were the kind of rumors that spread, weren’t they?

  These tiny mutinies were not mine uniquely.

  The IV tagged on Harper’s car by a copycat was not an isolated incident. I liked to think my classmates found my carvings and graffiti and became further inspired. Why not? Defacing the school and its symbols of authority was fun. I counted ten red IVs scribbled on locker faces in one day alone. In the girls’ restroom, IV was written on the mirrors in pink lipstick and black mascara.

  Then there were my friends.

  Graham parked in the staff lot at school; he graduated to leaving his car idling in the red zone in front of Cup of Jo; shredding the parking ticket waiting under his wiper, its pieces ghosting in the street once we’d sped away. He stayed in the barn long after the rest of us left for home; the air stale with pot and cider the following day.

  Viv arrived to lunch with Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and pored through its pages. She was grave-faced when questioned about her revenge machinations; her black fingernails tented as she murmured, “I swear to tell you soon.” Her makeup escalated: the line of her eyes hell black; her lips bloodred; a black triangle of birdcage veil in her updo, as though she was preparing for a funeral. She spent more time protectively hunched over her phone, tucking it into the folds of her skirt or caftan when someone scooted near.

  Harry pilfered cans of red spray paint from work. His five-finger discount was pragmatic, necessary for our blood rebellion. But when he pulled the first two cans from his vest, I gave a theatric and sincere gasp.