First We Were IV

by Alexandra Sirowy

“Me too,” Viv said.

  “They’ll deserve it,” Harry said, meeting my gaze.

  I was walking again, around the sofa. “It isn’t enough to say it.” I kicked at the edge of the carpet when it caught my sneaker.

  “Please, Izzie. You’re making me dizzy. There’s too much blood in here.” Viv pinched her nose.

  “There needs to be blood.” I pounded a fist in my hand. I smiled. That was it. “There needs to be more blood to show we’re serious.”

  “To who?” Viv whispered, but her gaze cut to our idol.

  I wanted to feel the night’s mark. For it to leave a scar. Writing IV in Sharpie on our wrists wasn’t enough. Sharpie was kid stuff and the Order was not. Ten years before, Graham and I gave ourselves tattoos with a safety pin and an inkwell. The outcome was identical freckles on the pads of our right thumbs.

  “We’re going to need a pin and your mom’s inkwell,” I told Viv.

  No one questioned me. I lay on the rug when it was time.

  “Remember when I pierced our ears?” Viv asked, kneeling at my stomach, wearing Harry’s sweatshirt like a dress since she’d shed her ruined clothing.

  “Hold still,” Graham ordered with the authority of a physician.

  Viv placed one hand on my waist and the other to hold my shirt up, revealing the side of my rib cage and the little IV in Sharpie she’d drawn as a guide. Graham sterilized the pin in the flame of a lighter. The pin lowered into the well of black ink. I closed my eyes.

  The heat spread. Harry’s fingers gently rested in my hair; Viv’s nose brushed mine; Graham’s free hand pressed steadily to the small of my back. I stared down Harry’s black T-shirt with the slogan Free Tibet, what looked like a bloody checkmark streaked across the F.

  I wiped away the excess ink and blood with an alcohol-soaked cotton ball as Viv declared, “Me now.” Harry pulled his T-shirt up wordlessly once Viv’s was done.

  Graham handed me the pin after finishing Harry.

  I stare at my tattoo in the mirror a lot now. In the future, some of us will need to explain their origin. I imagine the reasons we’ll give for having a IV messily branded on our torsos. Will we tell the truth? Or will we gloss over the tattoos like we do all the other scars we share?

  Retrieved from the cellular phone of Graham Haverbach III

  Transcript and notes prepared by Badge #821891

  Shared Media Folder Titled: IV, Fri., Oct. 11, 6:09 a.m.

  Video start.

  G. Averbach sips from a ceramic mug that reads Professor. “Consciousness is that we perceive the world around us and ourselves.” His tone is pedantic. “First-person subjective experience of the world is the best definition I’ve come across. Most scientists think consciousness comes from the cerebral cortex in our brains, but it’s mostly a mystery why and how humans have it. Altering your consciousness means changing your perception of the world and yourself in relation to it.

  “Shit. Izzie, I can see you rolling your eyes while watching this. So here’s your stinking point. I believe that last night my consciousness was altered.

  “There are all sorts of rituals where ancient civilizations used trancelike states in order to feel closer to invisible elements and gods. There was rhythmic dancing, visionary plants, fasting, drumming, and consumption of serpent poison. And no, I wasn’t dipping into the absinthe or snake venom last night.

  “I became a beast. I’m not sure what conditions allowed me to feel . . . so detached from myself. There was blood everywhere. The wind and the waves hitting the shore sounded like music. Viv was a wraith in white, flitting up the mayor’s lawn, then gradually, covering herself in blood.

  “And Viv . . . you’ve never looked more beautiful.” He drags a hand through his hair. “I don’t mean this to be offensive, but I was incapable of not staring at your butt as you crawled around like an animal on the ground, blood up to your elbows. You were this close”—he pinches the air—“to getting kissed on the mayor’s front lawn.” He leans closer to the camera. “Graham went away. I wasn’t him. The concerns and thought processes that make me me flew from my mind. I forgot that I was a person, not a mystery predator from the hills. It was like wearing a new skin for the night. And for the first time since maybe I was born, I stopped thinking. Utterly euphoric.”

  Video stop.

  18

  How must Denton’s and Carver’s houses looked to that first neighbor who went for her newspaper on the lawn or to the guy trudging to his driveway, intending to go for bagels?

  Sleep in their eyes. The shock of a red paw print on the sidewalk. They blinked to behold their cozy world painted in blood. Petals of it blossoming into wild flower shapes on the sidewalk, mailboxes having wept blood overnight.

  Perhaps a shout roused Denton from bed, his police ears picking it up before his wife, asleep in bed with him. Did he grab his gun and dash through his front door? Did Carver let her Labradoodle free in his ridiculous outfit for a morning tinkle? Was the dog lapping at dried blood by the time she followed him?

  However it began, there were sirens when I woke. Sirens because when confronted with blood painting two of their neighbors’ porches—windows, driveways, cars, and mailboxes—they called 9-1-1. Those same citizens who barely batted an eye at a victim remaining a Jane Doe and her killer going unpursued.

  A student news blogger from school anticipated the need for pictures and drove over once she heard about it, snapping and posting photos to the blog of the gruesomely striking red paw prints. Other kids reposted the pictures on social media. Our unwitting accomplices, spreading the blood. They proliferated in the same way the snapshots of the spray painted IVs at Slumber Fest and the Bedford rebellion did. Bloody paw prints and red porches and scabby mailboxes turned out to be sharable too.

  I scrolled through the hashtags as I waited for Graham to arrive. Even the photos snapped of Denton’s house were jarring, strange in the daylight. I stared at each for a long time, catching myself wondering who doused the welcome mat with blood or the white blooms of the hydrangea? I did. I was the gutsy, angry girl who had. My mom called through the screen door for me to have a nice day, sweetheart. Couldn’t she see the rebellion on me? The change? I was not her pliable, simpering little girl anymore.

  I was watching a short video of Carver’s house as I heard Graham’s car turn into my driveway. Ornamenting Carver’s front yard was a pretty stone fountain, three-tiered like a wedding cake, stone birds drinking up the water. There wasn’t a spot of blood on the birds. But the water ran red, bubbled from tier to tier. I turned up the volume, caught the happily sinister gurgle of the fountain. The little stone birds drinking up the bloodied water.

  “Have you seen them?” Graham said as soon as I slid into the front seat.

  Harry said, “Look,” and passed me his cell. He was a few pictures past me on the feed I’d been scrolling through. He’d expanded the comments left by users. I recognized a lot of the usernames as belonging to our classmates. Lots of WTFs. Lots of exaggerating. Harry tapped one in particular. “He’s a junior.” His comment claimed that a bloody X had been left on his door.

  “Where does he live?” I said.

  “Not at Carver’s or Denton’s,” Harry answered.

  Graham waved impatiently. “Show her the other one.”

  “Here,” Harry said.

  Another comment, this one alleging that a bloody noose had been left on her doormat.

  “She goes to school with us too,” Graham said.

  “Unbelievable,” I was saying as the car stopped for Viv. “They’re making stuff up just to have something to add.”

  “Drive down Landmark,” Viv demanded, leaping into the backseat, the top half of her face pixelated by her black birdcage veil.

  The usually sleepy residential street was clogged with traffic. Cars slowed to a halt with the morbid curiosity that makes motorists gape at ambulance lights. Middle school kids on bikes rode back and forth between the two bloody scenes. An officer stationed on Denton�
��s lawn was gesturing for a few high school kids to keep walking. Their cells were angled at his reddening face as they snickered and moved toward Carver’s.

  “They’re not cleaning it up?” Viv said.

  I flattened my forehead against the glass. “Not until they’re sure it’s not an actual crime scene. Like with human blood.”

  We drove past Carver’s at a crawl. “The fountain was brilliant,” I said.

  “Thank you.” Viv bowed her head. “Can you see the sundial?”

  I got up on my knees, could barely make out the central dial on Carver’s lawn before Graham turned right, off Landmark Lane.

  “I told you I’d find a dramatic place for IV to autograph its work,” Viv said with hubris.

  In class it was the pictures of IV written in blood and spray paint on the sundial, on the welcome mats, on the wood siding, that stirred up whispers and had my classmates hanging into the aisles to gawk at one another’s phones. IV was at it again. Hitting the police chief’s and mayor’s houses. Badass. Flipping the finger at authority.

  “That is some dark shit,” Trent told me during third period, thumbing his screen. “I bet they’ll hit homecoming too.”

  “How do you know it’s more than one person?” Campbell asked from behind me.

  Trent gave him a pitying glance. “No way does one dude pull this off.”

  “It could be a girl,” I said, thumbing through my notebook, pretending I hadn’t been committing to memory every last comment.

  Trent spared me a pitying glance. “Maybe, but I bet the mastermind’s a dude.”

  I scowled. “Why?”

  “Girls lack the balls to think of hitting a cop’s house.”

  “But it was all bloody,” Campbell said, so eagerly his desk screeched forward. “Girls are comfortable with blood, bro. Trust me, I’ve got sisters.”

  I smiled down at my notes.

  The whispers continued, evidence of our power. I floated a head taller in the school halls. Blood-warm satisfaction made me buoyant each time my T-shirt snagged the raw edge of the fresh tattoo. I was dangerous. The Order’s invisible hand was tightening its grip on Seven Hills’s throat. Merciless, we would paint the whole town in animal blood.

  The four of us ate lunch in the courtyard because Viv wanted us to be in the middle of the action. At the center of the courtyard was a small outdoor amphitheater. Seven or eight cement bleachers rose up in a half-moon shape, the flagpole on the flat expanse of cement used as the stage. The drama department performed their spring shows there, right where Amanda and her crew always ate lunch. By the way Viv glared at their presence, I imagined she felt like an ousted queen, an enemy force permanently occupying her territory.

  We sat up on the top row of cement bleachers. I didn’t usually like the noise that came with hanging around the courtyard, but that day the buzz was about IV.

  Amanda, Jess, and Rachel spied us and, led by Amanda, flocked over.

  “Insane that IV struck again, huh?” Amanda said, standing on the riser below us.

  Rachel tossed her ponytail from her shoulder and said, “Hope you guys have an alibi.”

  Amanda gave her a cutting look. “God, you banshee—keep your voice down.”

  Rachel retreated down a step like a kicked puppy. “I’m just teasing,” she said. “God,” she added, crossing her arms and turning away from us. As far as I could tell, Rachel was a watered-down version of an Amanda-Jess love child. Too aware of where she put her hands to act as cool as Jess thought she was; too eager to be heard to boss people around.

  Graham said casually, “We all sat around, shooting the shit, talking about climate change last night.”

  “I bet you did.” Jess gave a clipped laugh. Something stirred behind those usually bored eyes as she watched him. Her tongue went to her front teeth, like she was waiting for him to quip back, silently begging him to play, even. Graham had magnetism, but rarely did anyone outside of our circle notice. Usually our peers gave fake laughs at Graham’s shameless wit before shuffling away. Their loss.

  Graham became absorbed in removing the butcher paper from his deli sandwich. “Yeah,” he said absently. “Meteorologists say this is going to be an El Niño year. I don’t buy it. They said the same thing last year and the one before.”

  Jess’s nostrils flared. “They’re probably in the pocket of the rain boot lobby,” she said. I laughed. Graham didn’t glance up.

  Harry had deserted his sandwich on its plastic wrap to listen to his headphones, eyes closed. He was waiting for the girls to leave.

  Jess bent for a red licorice whip from our shared package. She twisted, offering Graham a view down her top. He looked. If he hadn’t, I might have leaned over to check his pulse.

  “I get it,” Amanda said. “Playing coy. Okay. I’ll let the charade go on a bit more. No one knows anything about anything over here. Bye—for now.” A cross between a threat and a so long. She returned to the flagpole flanked by Jess and Rachel.

  Lunch slipped by, my last opportunity to tell Viv about my date with Harry, before the homecoming parade. Rather than bloat larger, the urgency of the confession shriveled. Viv knew Harry and I would be at the dance. She probably figured we’d drive together. What did the tiny detail of it being an official date matter when the stakes around us were so much higher?

  By the last period of the day, Harry’s article for the school news blog had posted. It wasn’t something he’d discussed with us. And I was glad it came from only his brain. He contextualized the pictures taken that morning. He wrote of the paw prints and compared them to the paw prints found five years before on the Marlo property, in the days after a still-unsolved murder occurred. He recapped the facts from Jane Doe’s murder, for readers who needed a refresher. People would have likely remembered the paw prints from years before themselves, but Harry’s blog made it impossible for people to pretend they didn’t. Harry made it impossible for Seven Hills to ignore their deeper meaning. The town could interpret it however it wanted to—as a threat, a promise, a taste of what was to come, or a punishment.

  The city of Seven Hills’s official news blog even included a link to Harry’s coverage in their own. They posted updates throughout the afternoon. The police identified the blood as belonging to an animal. Mayor Carver issued a statement assuring the town that the perpetrators would be found and prosecuted, and that despite rumors, there was no evidence of the incident being anything other than an isolated one of vandalism, targeting herself and the police chief.

  These things, as tasteless as they are, happen in the safest of communities. The vandals want to foster unrest and confusion by targeting community leaders. We won’t allow them to win.

  Denton issued no comment. I wondered if that was because we’d succeeded in unnerving him. As crappy an officer as I thought he was, he was still police. Wouldn’t the connection to Jane Doe strike him as a personal attack? He knew what he’d done wrong, and just in case he’d forgotten, there was a little blood-stamped reminder all over his front yard.

  That evening, Harry, Graham, Viv, and I watched the homecoming parade from the knoll, the square of park that was the center of downtown. Dressed for summer, a breeze the only proof of fall, our hands colliding in a party-size bag of candy. The sidewalk around the route was packed. We’d conquered a bit of grass near the sno-cone booth, making the streams of people divert, stealing bits and pieces of their conversations as they squeezed by.

  Two men, one with a toddler on his shoulders dripping sno-cone slush in his hair, paused by us. “There were other reports,” the man said, trying to wrangle the soppy cardboard from his little girl’s hands. “Someone found a bloody rope,” he finished.

  His partner wiped at the dye between her eyes with a napkin, the little girl crying and squirming in response. “A teenager claimed he did on the Internet.”

  “Doesn’t mean he wasn’t telling the truth. What about that old codger with the prize vegetables on Driftwood? He a troubled youth lying for attent
ion?”

  That was the first we’d heard about Kirkpatrick. His house had appeared spotless when we drove by in the morning, and I had wondered if standing on his lawn had been a dream.

  “But the mayor didn’t mention any of that,” he continued, wiping the little girl’s sticky hands. “No deviating from her isolated vandalism line—oh look, there’s a better spot.” He led the way. “And don’t tell me . . .” Their voices faded into the noise of the crowd.

  I turned from watching them go. “Interesting,” I said as I saw that the others had been listening to them also.

  Graham nodded. “Indeed. Who knew that our classmates’ desperation to seem relevant would be reliable enough to help our cause?”

  “I did,” Harry said, a flick of his eyebrow.

  “Me too,” Viv piped up. “First the copycat hitting Harper’s car. Now kids lying online—all so they can feel in on it.”

  “Smells like team spirit,” Graham intoned.

  “For someone who hates school spirit, you sure do wear school colors a lot,” Viv said of Graham’s navy jacket and white polo.

  “Accidentally,” Graham said, sulking playfully. “I’d never deign to be so establishment on purpose.”

  Viv had ribbons of white and blue threaded in her twin French braids, silver glitter making blades of her cheekbones, and a black vintage cheerleader’s cape on her shoulders. “How about you practice keeping your very bossy opinions to yourself for tomorrow night, ’kay?” Viv said, offering Graham a toothy grin.

  Graham tugged one of her braids. “Are you saying I shouldn’t be myself?”

  Viv pulled it free. “Bull’s-eye.”

  Graham’s hands dove into her cape, tickling her sides. Viv’s laughter came out in high peals. I looked away. They’d been cozier. More playful shoving, hand-holding, and whispering. While planning the blood rebellion, Graham had wanted to walk the route we’d use from Driftwood to Landmark at night. He’d texted Viv to come along rather than me.

  Graham used to measure his words and actions carefully. His first secret, that he’d once been in love with Viv and me, was exactly equal. When had he stopped—the kiss? The homecoming date? Another moment I’d missed?