Trent exhaled, coughing out smoke in bursts. “C’mon, dude,” he said to Campbell. “They’re obviously here for the privacy.” He jerked a thumb at the passenger car. “To bone.”
Trent swung under the rail to the ground. “And here I thought you guys were into goats and shit.” He scattered rocks as he stalked in the direction we’d come from. Ina had invited our entire fifth-grade class to a birthday party for Viv. Since then, Amanda had spread rumors about the barn and what the four of us might be getting up to inside of it.
Campbell went after Trent, pausing for a moment by us. “See you in class, Izzie. Bye, dude.”
I wanted to crack a joke at Trent’s expense, but Harry was uneasily reordering his hands—front pockets to back pockets to hanging at his sides. The boning comment hadn’t bothered me, but Harry’s obvious discomfort made feel wrong for it. Like I’d crossed a line.
“Want to head back?” I offered. “Go tell Graham and Viv about Harper’s car?”
“Someone probably already told them.” He scratched the back of his head. “Unless you want to head back.”
“Not really.” I started up the metal risers to the car. “I hiked here once, right after Goldilocks but before the tunnel was closed up.”
“Goldilocks?” he asked.
I tripped on a metal stair. I’d never called the dead girl Goldilocks aloud. “That’s what I named the girl from the rock because that cop asked us if we’d noticed stolen food or—”
“Or signs she was camping or sleeping in the barn. Goldilocks,” he said. “Makes sense.”
I hesitated where the compartment door should have been, its old brass hinges dangling purposelessly. I spun to face Harry and gave a stiff bow. “Good afternoon, sir. Ticket, please.”
Harry made a show of retrieving his imaginary ticket from his pocket, smoothing its wrinkles on his thigh, and handing it over. I held it up to catch the firelight. Pretended to examine it. “You forgot yours,” he said, waving his pinched fingers, grinning. I laughed, falling out of character. He offered me his arm. My hand slid into the crook of his elbow.
The passenger car was dark, only a few candles balanced on the window frames and in the eaves of the luggage compartment. The red of the seats and the purple of the glasslittered carpet richened as my eyes adjusted. The candle flames beat at the air we’d carried in, making the whole car seem alive, like the passengers had just disembarked, their shadows still with us.
“I think Viv decorated in here to have somewhere to bring a guy,” I said.
“Operation Boyfriend Hunt,” he said with a comical twist. “It was nice of you to think of doing Slumber Fest for her.”
I thumped the head of a seat to my right and imagined a plume of dust rising. “I didn’t. I wanted Slumber Fest for myself.”
His brows tugged together.
“The Order went from being a game to making us powerful,” I explained. “You are powerful.” A doubtful flare of his nostrils. “I’m powerful. We even inspired a copycat. Before, I thought of myself as weird Icky, one of those four loners, the plain one who actually laughs at teachers’ jokes, too young to do anything about her parents’ fighting. I wasn’t powerful because power was tied to stuff you can see.”
“Like money,” Harry whispered.
“Yeah, or age, gender, race, looks. But now it’s like power can be invisible too. A breeze you capture and aim to send people in any direction. The direction I wanted was Slumber Fest. Here.” I waved a hand, noted that it was shaking. There was too much eye contact and spilling of guts. “I felt like a joke before the Bedford flyers.”
“You’ve never been a joke,” he said.
“Thanks, but you’re not exactly impartial, friend.” I half turned to show him a grateful smile anyway. “So how come you went along with the Slumber Fest reboot?”
He shrugged. “I don’t have a big, complex reason. You wanted to. Viv wanted to. Graham was going on about usurping student gov’s domain. It wasn’t going to hurt anyone.”
With a twist of my stomach, I was glad to be alone with Harry. Harry, who wanted to make his friends happy. There was the delicate tinkle of breaking glass crunching under my sneakers. I brushed the litter from two of the seats and took the one by the window.
“Tell me about coming here after Goldilocks,” he said.
I breathed in and out. It was about time I confessed. That it would be to Harry made the words neatly queue up in my head. “You remember the cop who came out to the meteorite?”
“Denton. He’s the police chief now.”
I nodded. “He wanted to know if I’d seen Goldilocks before, and I was so upset I didn’t know. We went up on the rock again, to look. I said that the girl was like me because . . . because she was. Her purple bra looked like it matched one I’d been begging my mom for. She had a heart tattoo on her ankle—I loved doodling hearts. And Denton goes, She’s nothing like you, just a runaway asking for it.”
A parenthesis formed between Harry’s eyebrows.
“He was a police officer. Don’t they always tell the truth? If he said it was the girl’s fault, wasn’t it?”
“Hell no,” Harry said.
“He thought Goldilocks was a runaway. You remember how there’d be girls on the beach? Girls who weren’t from here. And they looked like they’d been camping, partying outside. Viv said she heard that teenagers who came to surf or party on the beach camped up here. I thought maybe Goldilocks did. I had to wait a couple of days, but the first chance I got, I hiked here.”
“It could have been dangerous,” Harry said.
“Could have been. But she was on our rock, Har. Before Goldilocks, Viv and I used to take turns laying on the rock. Pretending to be Sleeping Beauty. Just a dumb game. Whoever wasn’t Sleeping Beauty was the prince and the prince had to kiss his princess to wake her up. But sometimes we’d play dead, refuse to open our eyes.” My cheeks burned hot. “Finding Goldilocks didn’t feel random. After the scientists left and we understood that our rock was a meteorite from space, we were obsessed. Its mystery became a part of us. It was there in our choice of books. It shaped our adventures. We played on the rock a lot before, but it became our epicenter. Camping and stargazing. Leaving messages in chalk so that if aliens were looking down on us, they’d see we wanted to talk to them.” I laughed self-consciously. “Goldilocks on our rock—it felt like a message. It was like the meteorite drew her in. Like we did. Like we tempted the universe into sending us an actual mystery. And none of the people who were supposed to help were doing anything.”
His hand cupped my knee. “So you did something. What’d you find?”
“A few girls. Teenagers or a little older. At first they let me sit by the fire. Even offered me a puff on one of their cigarettes. Laughed because of how much I coughed. I brought up the dead girl—God, I tried to do it casually. But their expressions just slammed shut. The one with the cigarette came in here. I followed. Her eyes were red. High or crying.” I looked across the aisle. There she was again, balled up in a seat, blond hair uncombed, dirty bare feet. “I asked if she knew Goldilocks. Described her.”