First We Were IV

by Alexandra Sirowy

  Campbell hurried away. I opened my mouth to call his name, but Jess was already gliding past me. “I’ll talk to him,” she said, giving me a meaningful look. “Don’t worry.”

  • • •

  But I did. Campbell had said so much to me in that last glance of his. He looked at me like he didn’t just consider me a monster. He thought me the maker of monsters.

  Conner and Trent going off book, the sense that I was somewhat culpable, Harry’s and my fight, the increased patrols, and the school administration’s promise to find and prosecute whoever had been responsible for the death of the bunny made the day feel like it was closing in on me.

  “They’re not satisfied with sitting in the wings,” Viv explained at lunch. “Who wants to be an understudy when you can have a starring role? Jess and Amanda say Trent and Conner are sorry. They thought we’d be happy.”

  Harry choked on a sip of water. “Happy?” he coughed.

  “After we use them tomorrow night, we’re going to need to put the fear of the gods in them,” Graham said. “We need them to back off the Order. Convince them it’s a necessity because of increased police activity.”

  “How are we going to do that?” Viv asked.

  When I’d thought about the end of our rebellions for Goldilocks before, disengaging the initiates had seemed easy. But the Order had its claws hooked in them all, except for Campbell, who was eager to be done.

  We four went our separate ways after lunch. A text came in silently to my cell in between sixth and seventh periods. It was from Harry, asking if I’d meet him in the parking lot after school. I didn’t respond, but when I was halfway to Viv’s car I veered to where I could see Harry waiting under a palm tree. I couldn’t ignore him.

  His smile was sweet and shy. “Will you go with me to the beach?”

  I tugged open the passenger door of his car and climbed in.

  He took my hand as he steered with the other, but it was a loose, friendly grip. Out on the sand he cleared away the driftwood. I was biting back tears. Were we about to break up? Had we already ended things the afternoon before? Had we ruined our friendship?

  After we sat and watched the whitecaps of the waves for a while, Harry spoke. “We shouldn’t have started, not with everything that’s going on. It was too soon.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It took us five years. Way too soon.”

  Harry’s stern expression faltered. “Graham.” He nodded and drove his sneaker into the sand. “Graham would be better for you. He’s liked you forever. Don’t play like you don’t know. You have to. You and Graham.”

  “Graham. Do you realize what a paternalistic jackass you sound like? It’s not your job to tell me who would be good. Girls aren’t just hungry for boyfriends, like any boy will do.”

  “I know that. Maybe—listen to me, Izzie.” He freed his shoes. “Maybe someday when we’re out of here and older, you and me—we’ll talk on the phone and we’ll meet up and it will be the right time and it’ll work.”

  “It was working now.”

  “Graham and you.”

  I laughed meanly. “That’s what you keep saying.”

  “I just—don’t you think you like him a little? You guys have all this stuff in common.”

  It was beyond insane. “We have stuff in common.”

  “I know we do.”

  I held my hands up. “I’m not going to talk you into being my boyfriend, Harry. I shouldn’t have to convince you. But you can’t talk me into being with Graham, so stop trying.”

  I threw myself up from the sand and drove my feet into the white puffs like they were snowbanks. I never looked back. If I had, I’d have seen him pull out his cell phone to record the video.

  I walked home, checking over my shoulder the whole way that Harry wasn’t about to pull up and offer me a lift. I held myself against the crisp autumn edge of the day. The tang of rotting leaves settled in the back of my mouth. Their rust-colored, slippery skins made my sneakers shoot out, tipping my balance.

  What Harry said about Graham snapped over my eyes like lenses. I peered back at the last month through them. Saw the altered reality—reality itself. Graham was methodical, even in his missteps. Didn’t say anything by accident. Bringing up our kiss, kissing Viv; confessing to having been in love with Viv and me hadn’t been accidents at all. They were hints aimed at my head. He’d been talking about liking Jess for years, and then once he actually had a shot with her his interest dried up. He wouldn’t say anything explicit, except she wasn’t what he really wanted. All this struck me with a force that sent me careening to Viv’s, where I sat on her bed, talking and crying as her skilled hands braided ribbons into my hair.

  How to say what unfolded in our final rebellion the following night?

  The original four met at the barn.

  I threw every inch of my focus into the rebellion. When the sight of Harry threatened to make me cry, I thought about how the Order would keep going. We’d pick up a new mission. Turn back time to tell secrets, though surely we didn’t have any left, and dance under the moon. Eventually I would stop remembering how Harry’s hands had skated under my shirt to press against my back as we kissed. I would forget the taste of Harry’s skin as I kissed his neck. I would be able to listen to my perfect song without it slashing open my chest. Wouldn’t I? We’d return to loving each other as friends forever.

  Our rebellion didn’t feel as final as I understand it is presently. Our initiates were safely one town over, on the bluffs of a beach, each armed with a prepaid burner phone Graham and Harry bought with cash at gas stations along the inland highway. Jess had been successful in convincing Campbell not to walk away from the Order, though I am not sure how. The initiates would wait for midnight to call in their sightings. At their designated times, two minutes apart starting at the stroke of twelve, they’d call the police to report seeing a woman roaming the streets of Seven Hills, all in white, a bloody IV painted on her front and back. They would draw the police from one location to another. Each fake location would be gradually farther from the knoll and its clock tower. When our initiates were done with the lure, they’d dump the phones into the ocean and take one car back to Seven Hills. If they were stopped, they’d tell the police they were coming from a party at USB.

  The skeleton rode in Viv’s trunk, her wings already wired on. At midnight the texts began dinging, confirming that the calls were being made. We headed to the knoll. Halfway there, the sirens began to sing. Mist was wafting off the ocean, the moon’s light netted in it, giving the town a fairy-tale glitter.

  Viv and I held hands at the foot of the clock tower. We wore our beanies with eyeholes and had removed Viv’s front and back license plates. Her black SUV was common enough; there were at least five just on our street.

  Any minute a police officer who recognized the reported sightings as subterfuge could drive by. Danger was as intoxicating as Graham’s truth serum and I found myself twirling under Viv’s arm, collapsing against her side as she kissed my forehead and hummed.

  Graham had reconstructed the skeleton, fastening her wires together. A rope looped around her spine. Harry wound the opposite end around his wrist and used the stones protruding from the facade of the two-story clock tower to climb twenty feet to the clocks hands. He threaded the rope over the hands and ran the slack toward the ground. Graham caught it and pulled. Viv joined him, gradually raising the skeleton as Harry scaled down.

  I stepped off the curb, just to take the whole scene in. My three friends dizzyingly beautiful, like three bolts of light. And though my heart felt raw and pummeled, there was so much love inside me for them that I was convinced the Order of IV had served its purpose. We were bound together. We would grow old loving each other.

  • • •

  In the barn we relived what we’d pulled off and toasted the Order with ciders. The Mistress of Rebellion and Secrets lay in Viv’s lap. Harry slipped out without saying good-bye as Graham spouted facts about the history of fermented bever
ages. I pressed my cheek to Viv’s feverish one. Graham walked me home.

  We sat on the porch swing. My feet didn’t touch the ground and their swinging made me feel carefree, like when we were little. He took my hand. We looked at each other. His flinty stare threw me back to being a little kid whose heart was in her throat and whose pockets were full of cookies, racing into the hills behind her house, her mother’s voice a distant reprimand.

  Graham was my oldest friend. He loved me and wanted me.

  My fingers walked up his arm and pinched his earlobe. I smiled drowsily at him, attention shifting to his mouth. So familiar, it wasn’t any stretch to imagine my lips on his. Graham kissed me. His nose brushed my cheek. I tasted the cider and something spicier on his tongue. A sweet, little groan escaped from him. A noise I’d never heard him make before.

  I thought I knew what was coming next.

  Graham yanked himself away, slid to the far end of the swing with the look of someone restraining himself. “I delivered a secret rite to Amanda instructing her to get Harry to ask her out. I made it clear that if she succeeded, she’d bypass any additional rites and be made a full member before her friends,” he said as one long blast.

  I dragged the back of my hand across my mouth. The clove taste lingered. “Smart. It’s what she was asking for before she told us that horrendous secret of hers, but instead Viv promised her a better role in the Order, after initiation.”

  “Har wouldn’t bite. She came on to him. Nothing. She made up that preposterous rumor about sex behind the barn. He told me, completely horrified, that she was sexting him as some kind of booty call. He didn’t want any part of her.” We blinked at each other for a long time. “Don’t you want to know why I’d try to break you and Harry up?”

  I stared at the scars on my knees. “This one’s from when we learned to roller blade.” I pointed to another. “This one’s a burn, when we lit matches to see who’d drop one first.”

  “We kneeled facing each other and I dropped mine first,” he said. “I burned you.”

  “And then you started to blubber like a baby.”

  “I was scared I had hurt you.”

  I just kept staring at that scar, considering all the years Graham had been my steadfast friend. “The Graham I know would never try to hurt me.”

  “You’ve been mine since we were five,” he whispered. “You don’t need to say it. You’re yours. You’re Viv’s and Harry’s, too. I know. But I didn’t want to share you. I wanted you to pick me. I went crazy when you didn’t.”

  “Pick you? Did I miss you asking me out? Am I not remembering you asking me to a dance or telling me you liked me or being honest about your feelings? All you’ve done is talk about hot Jess and check out other girls.”

  “Are you shitting me?” The disbelief in his eyes needled me. “That’s how you see years of me throwing myself at you?”

  “Throwing yourself at me?”

  “Holding you. Holding your hand. Hugging you. Letting you sit in my lap and ride on my back. Staring at you. I’ve never had a real girlfriend, Izzie, because I was waiting for you. And we kissed freshman year.” His words shook. They tore at me. “You had to have known how much it meant to me, and then you never wanted to talk about it. I tried a hundred times after. You hugged yourself and acted like it was nothing but a trauma to kiss me.”

  “That doesn’t excuse you hurting me, Graham. You hurting Harry.”

  “I’m not trying to say it does. My scheming was inexcusable. Unforgivable. But let’s not pretend that you haven’t always known that all you had to do was say yes. This wasn’t an unrequited crush. You wanted me there, running after you. The question was out there, always. Even now, even after I’m sick to death of standing in line behind Harry.” His face hardened to stone. “Are you through with me?”

  I regarded his figure all in black. The meaning of everything that had passed between us over the last months had been laid bare. Only Graham’s nervous fingers rolling up his shirtsleeves betrayed his composure.

  “No,” I said. “Angry and sad, yes. Harry’s through with me, though.”

  “Never.” He caught my chin as I turned away. “I’m not going to kiss you again,” he said as my eyes warned him off. “I just want you to pay attention. Harry is not through with you. He’ll get himself sorted out and he’ll be groveling for your forgiveness.”

  I removed Graham’s hand, probably holding on to it longer than I should have wanted to. “Maybe he really is done with me and I’ll fall madly in love with you in ten years. But you’ll already have fallen for Viv and it will be a real catastrophe.”

  He winced ever so slightly, but he said, “Is it a deal?”

  What else to say about me and Graham?

  Graham and I had been connected since we were five years old. In a parallel universe without Harry, Graham and I started dating in ninth grade. We had our first kiss before the truth or dare party, it was every bit the whispered secret it should have been. We went to prom and snuggled on the rock as Graham talked about the stars and I wondered about what else fills space. It was all romantic and built on friendship and our adventures. We graduated college and spent a few years traveling, returning for Viv’s opening nights and movie premieres. Maybe we got married, maybe we decided we didn’t believe in it, but we did have a sly-smiling, cookie-stealing kid who we loved.

  My world doubled on the porch, and alongside Graham I saw the parallel life unfold. Harry was a lot like our meteorite. He wasn’t only the flash of a meteor; he was the cosmic debris that made it into your atmosphere. He left his mark. He spun Graham and me off course.

  I both hate him and love him for that.

  33

  It doesn’t say anything good that the Seven Hills police department missed the skeleton dangling like an angel of death from the clock tower.

  A little after dawn, on Halloween morning, an assistant arrived to the real estate office at the first floor of the tower. She told the 9-1-1 dispatcher that a monster was hanging from the clock. A line of police cars raced over, officers brandishing guns. The opening crew at Holy Bagels who’d been at the center of the previous week’s disaster came running. One of them snapped a bunch of pictures while the police waited for the interim chief and Mayor Carver to arrive.

  The police weren’t forthcoming with details. Meetings were behind closed doors. Mayor Carver announced by lunch that in light of new evidence recovered, unrelated to IV, the police department had reopened the case of Jane Doe’s death. She stated that it was possible that upon reexamination, new leads might come to light. Graham said the police were saving face. They couldn’t appear to be caving to the pressure of a vigilante, a criminal, an arsonist, a vandal. As for IV, the police vowed to continue looking for the parties responsible.

  The initiates had ideas for new rebellions. Can anyone get a real cadaver? What if we set the school on fire? They were sledding downslope, ice hard and shiny under them. Destined for collision.

  “We’ve got to convince them to lay low for a few months,” Graham said.

  “Or maybe that the Order’s got to end. Period,” Viv said. When she focused on my look of dismay, she added, “Not for real. It won’t end for us.”

  Harry ruminated silently.

  We needed to dismantle the Order in a way that prevented the initiates from picking it up and keeping it going themselves. Not just behead the snake; make sure it didn’t sprout a new head—or six. We’d tell them IV needed a hiatus until the police pressure had eased.

  Our next move was hazier. Either we’d stall and eventually the initiates would lose interest—senior year was bound to distract—or we’d stall and they wouldn’t lose interest, in which case we’d reinvent the Order again. Its reincarnation would be benign: parties and bonfires.

  For the four of us, the Order could return to what it had been at the start. Our little universe. We were afraid of letting another day go by without telling the initiates the Order was going into hibernation. If we waite
d, how long until Trent and Conner acted out again? What if they got caught?

  The Order and its initiates, who were full-pledged members at that point, would meet for a bonfire. That night. We’d break the news. If needed, I’d use the Polaroid picture to force them into submission.

  Harry showed up on my doorstep. He knocked and retreated to the lawn where he waited.

  “What’s up?” I said from the doorway.

  “Can you come and sit out here?” he asked.

  I wanted to slam the door. I went out and sat on the bottom step with him.

  “I know you’re angry. Really pissed. But would you do something for me if I asked?” When I didn’t answer, he kept going. “I have been your friend—one of your best—for more than five years. Hopefully I’ll be your friend forever and the four of us can be buried in the same plot.” I laughed despite myself. “Seriously. Will you promise me something? The why will be obvious to you in a day or two. And you can chew me out and I can start delivering the first of a million apologies I owe you.”

  “Okay, what.” I toed the lawn and avoided looking at him.

  “I want you to stay home tonight.”

  “No,” I said, firm and fast.

  “I want you to stay home for the rest of the night and I’ll see you at school tomorrow.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “Why?”

  “It’s important to me.”

  “So what, Harry? Being there is important to me. It’s important to Graham and Viv. Why should what you want matter more to me than what I want?”

  “It shouldn’t. But I’m asking you for a favor.”

  “You don’t deserve one. You broke up with me using bogus reasons. You insulted me. You called me sneaky. You hurt me, Harry. More than anyone ever has. Do me a favor and spare me your requests.”

  “Please.”