“I guess that’s only half false if you consider the guys who actually call the shots and push the buttons that end up blowing kids to pieces.”
He frowns. “After my dad’s attack, I stood over him as he was sleeping in his hospital bed and he looked way smaller than the giant who lifted me onto to his shoulders or the one I thought could keep us safe from anything.”
His eyes close. “And that’s when I realized that no one was going to do shit about my dad’s attack. Whoever hurt him was going to get away with it.”
His eyes open. “But the Order of IV is an unseen hand.”
Video stop.
9
Do you see anyone?” Viv whispered. “My false lashes are screwing up my vision.”
“Move your head,” I said. “No, the other way.” I peered through the windshield. “Maybe I see a group of—”
“Shhhh,” Graham hissed behind the wheel as a figure streaked by on the far side of the shrub concealing the car. He flicked the visor mirror shut, cutting off its glow.
“If my lash ends up looking like a caterpillar hanging from my eyelid, I’m holding you responsible,” Viv said, a death threat implicit.
Darkness fleeced the hillside outside the car. For the last fifteen minutes we’d listened to the slam of doors. Harry put his lips right at my ear. “I hear something new.”
“Voices?”
“Uh-uh. Music,” he whispered. I shuddered at the warmth of his breath on my neck and then, embarrassed, held my hand to my ear to listen in an exaggerated way.
Viv twisted around. “That makes at least twenty kids and music. Enough waiting. I’m ready to find my future boyfriend.” Our Slumber Fest reboot had rekindled her plans.
“Five more minutes,” Graham insisted.
Viv’s hand was on the door lever. “I am physically incapable of being patient for one more second.”
Graham gave a defeated sigh. “I guess fifteen minutes is enough to avoid suspicion.” But Viv was already out of the car.
The tunnel burrowed into the mountain a quarter mile up, the spot burned into the darkness by a lit haze. Cars filled the dirt turnoff; every few seconds a new set of headlights swung like light saber beams across our path. Pine needles crunched under our shoes as we began hiking.
We converged on a herd of our classmates at the railroad tracks. Viv was a gymnast balancing on the rail in platform espadrilles. She carried a shopping bag full of whimsical party hats, mostly unicorn horns; glow-in-the-dark wands and bracelets; and temporary tattoos. I doubted the gameness of our classmates, but Viv assured me, in a haughty tone, that it was the kind of paraphernalia she heard was found at raves.
Harry and Graham carried two sleeping bags each. I hugged a big camping thermos full of spiked hot cocoa. Bottles of cider clanked in Graham’s backpack.
Our classmates carried lumpy armfuls of similar supplies. Shouts, squeals, and laughs chipped away at the night, making the dark seem less dense. Kids chanted “Slumber Fest.”
Four days earlier, the Order of IV had unanimously voted to revive Slumber Fest.
Though Graham and Harry hadn’t been enthusiastic about the tradition in the first place, they jumped at the chance to show our school that IV could dethrone a vice principal and follow it up with a party. Slumber Fest was student gov’s domain. But those kids didn’t even try to relocate or reschedule it. It was time we usurped their power, said Graham. So the Order of IV had taken what it wanted.
Invites were low-tech. The message simple:
Slumber Fest
Friday
9 p.m.
The Ghost Tunnel
Spread the word and BYOB
-IV
Invites were slipped into only ten lockers belonging to reliably chatty social butterflies of the senior class. The fewer invites circulating, the less likely one would fall into the wrong hands. They were delivered Friday morning, giving the recipients twelve hours to spread the word and show up. The Ghost Tunnel was ideal: outside of town, up an isolated road, soundproof. Out of sight. A spooky enough reputation to make the invited gape with happy nerves.
Equipped with a crowbar, three hammers, and one ax, we had pried the boards from both ends of the tunnel late Thursday night. We arrived earlier than our classmates to the party and set up the bonfires and candles. We waited in Graham’s car until we could join the party with everyone else. Invited by the mysterious IV.
Thirty or forty kids crowded the opening of the tunnel. They were hanging back, hesitant to move deeper, a ruckus horde around the first bonfire. As our group and others arrived, kids broke off, loping for the next fire, then the next. There was the shadowy outline of an abandoned passenger car, still on its rails. Then a wall of black, the unseen stretch of tunnel running half a mile.
The smell of fire, earth, and wet stone evoked the sense of being in a castle. The stir of cold on my legs was the wind rushing through its never-ending corridors. The murkiness beyond the fires’ reach was a good place for ghosts to haunt. The IVs painted in red on the walls wavered in the firelight; bloody warnings to invading clans. This was IV’s territory.
I pressed deeper. More kids arrived, pushing to get inside, joining the ballad of greetings and calls for drinks.
Voices from yards away jumped over to you, like stones skipping on water because of the tunnel’s acoustics. These tricks were why kids called it the Ghost Tunnel.
The keg was overwhelmed by clamoring cups. I wondered who’d lugged the cumbersome thing up, because we’d left only a few twenty-four packs of beer Harry got from a guy who ran a register at Hilltop Market.
Maisy Horowitz and Anna Spalding stood in the middle of a Twister board, taking neon-colored shots from mini paper cups.
“Hi, Izzie, Graham, Har. Drunken Twister later?” Maisy called.
“Maybe,” I answered.
Maisy and Anna pointedly ignored Viv; they’d learned that Viv wasn’t interested in smiles and casual hangouts with them. In the fifth grade, I found a list of names in the silver jewelry box on Viv’s dresser when I was trying on her earrings. Two days later I figured out what those names had in common: Viv never forgot the kids who teased her in grade school. And though the teasing by everyone other than Amanda’s lot ended years ago, and Maisy and Anna were nice now, their names somewhere near the bottom of that list, Viv’s loopy childhood cursive kept me from getting close to them.
If not for Viv, our small group of friends would have been larger. But without Viv, it also would have been boring, joyless. Mostly we were outcasts of our own making.
The crowd parted for a multiheaded beer bong jouncing through like a desert queen carried on her man-servants’ shoulders.