“We’re not breaking the law, Viv,” Graham chewed on the words. “Something that punks all of them, everybody who isn’t us, but ultimately isn’t without reason.”
“And why stop at one prank?” I said. “We do a sequence. We start a group dedicated to clandestine activities. We’ll have rituals.” I waved the idol at them. The good ideas were falling from the sky. “Ones that we swear to repeat. We confess our secrets.” It seemed a silly thing to say since what secrets could we have? “We form a secret society and it doesn’t end with high school.”
Graham said in his professorial tone, “Aren’t secret societies mostly a bunch of rich white men huddled around a campfire, colluding to rule the world?”
I flicked my bangs from my eyes. “Who says they have to be? Lots of things started out as old white dudes because they made them that way. This is about our bond.”
“You sound so touchy-feely. Can we make this more badass?” Graham said. “Like we’re going to wreak havoc and undermine social order and end up anarchist heroes who get laid by Jess Clarkson?”
“She’s all yours,” Harry said.
“Okay.” I nodded enthusiastically. “So our charter is as follows.”
“Charter? How do you say that with a straight face?” Viv wondered.
“If we don’t take it seriously, what’s the point?” I asked.
“She’s right,” Harry cut in. “You guys talk about college and roomies and new cities. I’m getting the broke-as-a-joke version. Stuck going to community and living here until I transfer. If Izzie’s charter is going to keep us seeing one another and talking, I’m serious about it.”
Viv tugged at Harry’s T-shirt sleeve. “Har, you are not a loser. Even if you live at home until you’re forty.”
Graham bobbed his head, the cynical smirk gone. “I’m in. I’ll make our secret society as touchy-feely as Izzie and Harry want.”
“Yes, yes, yes.” I fanned the air with the idol, unable to sit still. “We have to swear allegiance.”
“Before we know what we’re swearing to do?” Graham said with a chuckle.
I sprang to my feet and held the souvenir to the rafters. “Swear on this, our most holy—”
“Not holy,” Graham said. “Not if this is about social change, mischief, and subverting the hierarchy of old white dudes.”
“Okay. Swear on”—I tapped the idol to my head—“swear to our irreligious idol of mischief, chicanery, rebellion, and eternal friendship that we’re now the Order of”—I looked around the group—“Four? There are four of us. And we’ll carry out clandestine rituals and pranks in the Order’s name.” And then I said this one last thing. “We swear that the Order doesn’t end, ever, not until one of us dies and we aren’t four anymore.”
“Izzie Pendleton.” Graham threw his arm over my shoulders.“You are a mad genius.”
6
The airy fizz of morning gossip and the timbre of the espresso maker met us Monday at Cup of Jo. Viv and I claimed a space at the front window. Harry and Graham joined the sea of high school students waiting to order.
Viv swiped through the feed on her phone. “The whole school went to Amanda’s after the slaughterhouse,” she murmured, scrolling down the band of photos for me to see. Amanda and her friends caught midair doing cannonballs into the pool. A series of Conner and a bunch of guys with a floating beer bong. Half-lidded selfies under the sunset glow of hanging lanterns. Candid snaps of a sing-along, vodka and beer bottles used as mics.
“Why were we the only seniors not invited?” she asked, thumbing back to Amanda’s profile where her pictures appeared professionally staged and shot.
I took the cell out of Viv’s hand, closed the app, and tucked the phone into her purse. “Most of them probably weren’t officially invited.” I read Viv’s emotions clear as if her skin were transparent. She knew what it felt like to be accepted and this wasn’t it. At performing arts camp, the theater kids wrapped her up in their cast circles like big group hugs. She got used to being applauded and admired. Anyone would. It made the silence at home deafening.
As they found us, Graham was in the middle of telling Harry, “No way, it was loaded. Weird. Cryptic.”
Harry passed around cronuts and said to Graham, “You’re being paranoid. She was smiling a normal barista smile when you paid.”
Graham lifted the first cup from its carrier and I saw that Icky, rather than Izzie, had been scrawled up the side. I winced taking it. He examined the next, a shadow passing behind his eyes. “Dr. Spectasaurus at your service,” he said grimly. “I knew the barista was trying not to laugh at me.”
Harry gave his cup with Rags written across it a long, protracted blink. “Sorry I called you paranoid.”
Viv held hers, displaying its Nobody to us. She rose up on her tiptoes. “I didn’t even see Conner here. How does he do it?” It wasn’t the first time Conner’s special nicknames had appeared on to-go cups.
“Pays off the barista,” Graham suggested.
“Or threatens them,” Viv muttered.
“But why?” I said. As far back as I could remember Amanda had it out for Viv, but my recollection of Conner in grade school wasn’t so sinister. I remembered Conner letting me win at tetherball the day I returned to school after my grandfather’s funeral; Conner being one of the only boys to give Valentines to every single kid, not just those who were his friends.
“Why does a scorpion sting?” Graham asked. “It’s in his nature. Last week he left a flaming paper bag of dog crap on the band room’s doorstep while the Brass Bandits were practicing. He’s a pathological bully.”
Viv’s free hand riffled through her purse. “Usually this would bum me out, but today it seems pathetic that he went to the trouble.” She freed a purple Sharpie, uncapped it, and scribbled on the cup. Then she traded hers for mine. The Nobody was blacked out, and IV was penned beside it. “Voila,” she said, “no more Icky, Nobody, Dr. Spectasaurus, or Rags. We’re the Order of IV.” She continued on with the boys’ coffees. “The Roman numeral is more badass, huh?” It was.
The simple, penned IV blunted Conner’s insult. We ate our cronuts, our only care in the world getting equal parts raspberry filling and chocolate ganache with each bite. Those IVs were beacons reminding us we had a secret.
I carried our secret with me like a shield all day. When Conner rapped his knuckles hard on my desk as he passed in third period, just like he did almost every day, I didn’t startle. When his best friend, Trent, who sat to my right, leaned over and chortled, “Hey, Icky, how was Cup of Jo?” I smiled and said, “Super.” When I wanted to speak in class, I did, unafraid of Conner’s or Trent’s usual barks of “Icky.”
We ate lunch on the rectangle of lawn between the band room and the auto shop. Other small groups ate there too, but like us, they were peripheral. Not outcasts per se, just gathered in the hinterlands where the lunch real estate wasn’t as contested as the courtyard.