“No. Mom texted about making pesto earlier. She used emojis. I have to reward the effort.”
“Have they been fighting since you got home?” She sounded unimpressed by my stalling.
“They’ve stopped.”
“It’s not like when they throw things and your dad leaves?”
“No,” I whispered.
She waited a few seconds. “I didn’t think we had secrets.”
I flipped on the battery-operated strand of fairy lights inside my chair. They were white and bright in my eyes. “I was embarrassed.”
“You want to tell her, don’t you? You want her to know because then they will get a divorce.” It wasn’t phrased as a question.
I flipped the lights off. “I never said that.”
“You said you’d rather have two houses than one full of screaming.”
“It’s not what I meant.”
“Because you get that you wouldn’t just blow up your family. You’d blow up mine.”
“Hold on. I’m going into the closet.” I pressed between the sweaters. With the door closed behind me I had absolute privacy. “We made a promise. I will never tell my mom what we saw. I’ll never tell my dad that we know.”
I could hear her breathing deeply on the other line. Her face was probably going runny like it did when she tried not to cry. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “If you want to tell, I won’t be a bitchface about it.”
I shook my head into the dark. “Subject change, okay?”
“Okay.”
“I was thinking about Slumber Fest.”
“Why? Wait—oh my god.” Her voice jumped high. “Are you thinking what I am?”
“That it doesn’t need to be canceled?”
“Throwing it would make the Order a legend,” she said. “But they put up a barbed wire fence blocking the road to the slaughterhouse.”
“Forget the slaughterhouse,” I said. “What about the old railway tunnel?”
“The Ghost Tunnel,” she said with delicious exuberance. “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. What’s the plan?”
A few minutes later she hung up for dinner. I sat on my desk and drew my knees to my chest. I stared out at the beach visible over rooftops. I tried to resist it, but what I saw in Viv’s garden six years before demanded to be remembered. Fully.
Viv and I hopping along the stones set into an ocean of clover. My legs kicking out, following their archipelago by memory around the corner of her house. The wink of the sun off the glass walls of the hothouse as it came into view. A figure inside. Her mom in the poppy-red turban she wore during treatment. Another head, taller than Ina. My dad stooped over her and then their mouths fitted together. I froze, one foot off the ground in a doomed jump. Viv’s pinkie finger hooked mine. Tears sprung to her eyes.
How could we tell? Her mom had cancer. And then the cancer was in remission, a miracle for Viv. And maybe the kiss had been a mistake, and what if we told and her mom got sick again? Who would we tell? What if grown-ups kissed in private all the time?
Later we understood. We named it cheating. On TV, families broke apart because of it.
It wasn’t fair to us to decide between the lives we had and whatever would come after our parents splintered. They’d break apart because of what we saw. That’s how we thought about it. It was what we saw, not the wrong they did.
That was wearing off the older I got.
It was easier to imagine telling. But I believed that Mom sensed the space between her and Dad, and because I thought Mom knew Dad was up to something I convinced myself that it wasn’t my job to be honest.
Awful things happened all the time and people didn’t do anything about them. Just the way the world is. Grown-ups had affairs, deaths went uninvestigated, Goldilocks was killed, and mean-spirited kids called you names.
Except the Order of IV had started to right the wrongs in Seven Hills.
Retrieved from the cellular phone of Vivian Marlo
Transcript and notes prepared by Badge #82827
Shared Media Folder Titled: IV, Mon., Sept. 16 9:08 p.m.
Video start.
V. Marlo sits with her back to a mirror. In it, the reflection of a window and the Marlos’ apple orchard.
“How do I look? Oh god, forget that. Blah, okay,” She gives her head a shake. “In super-serious mode. I thought we’d get busted for the first rebellion. Laymen don’t think of actors as artists—laymen losers. But I am an artist. I just thought of our rebellion as performance art. And hello, silver lining: If we got caught, my face would have been on at least the local news. Stars have been discovered from less than that. But we didn’t get caught and the rebellion worked. It’s all anyone is talking about. People are losing their shit over who IV is and what they’ll do next. The girls all think IV is a really hot guy, tattooed and bad boyish with a conscience, and the guys all think it’s a girl in a full-body leather suit like a Marvel superhero. Seriously, no one is even mentioning homecoming, which is in less than two weeks. I have stolen homecoming’s thunder.”
She waves her free hand at the lens. “I kind of wish everybody knew IV was us. That would shut Amanda and her hyenas up for good. Forever. It would knock the stuffed animal hat right off her head. No one would ever buy that Amanda Gasbags and Witches Schultz had forgotten my name again.”
She looks past the lens. “She would never get to treat me like I’m not as good as her. Everybody would not just know my name, they’d be saying it.”
She focuses anew on the lens. “G, I, H, don’t freak if you cheat and watch before graduation—and FYI, you’d be cheating baby diarrhea receptacles—I know we can’t tell anyone. Duh, it’s a secret society.” She smiles. “I can’t wait until the Slumber Fest reboot. IV is literally going to rule the school.”
Video stop.
Retrieved from the cellular phone of Harrison Rocha Transcript and notes prepared by Badge #82827
Shared Media Folder Titled: IV, Mon., Sept. 16, 10:31 p.m.
Video start.
H. Rocha sits on the floor with his back to his bed. Posters of musicians cover the wall. The shadows of a ceiling fan whirl across his face.
“Holy crap.” He uses an excited whisper. “We got Bedford tossed out of school. We were a silent and unseen hand flicking that creep away. Mind blown.” His free hand mimics an explosion. “I’ve read about revolutionary leaders and how they started out. Usually just normal teenagers who don’t clean their rooms and worry about asking who they like out until one day something happens, like boom. Reality gets right in their faces. And then they know it: The world is a dick.”
He tugs at his hair absently. “I used to like history because reading it was like reading fairy tales, but way more jacked up, like video games on ’roids. Even though I was reading about this world, I pictured the places as alien, ruled by trolls with really small gonads, nothing to do with me or Seven Hills.