“How did you make the model?” I asked. That’s when I noticed Graham’s mischievous smirk. “You still have it, don’t you?”
Graham raised his hands. “If I did, we could use it to recreate the paw prints. But the tracks would have to go somewhere that lots of people would see this time.” He rubbed his stomach, leaving his shirt rucked up. “I’m starving.” Harry handed him the whipped cream, and Graham nozzled a pile of it into his open mouth.
It was one thing knowing where we wanted our second rebellion to end up, another figuring out how to get there. “Ideas for where the tracks should go?” I directed to Harry.
“I’ll brainstorm,” Graham said. “You two figure out how to get enough blood.”
I balked. “Why do we need blood?”
“The tracks can’t just be left in dirt.” He looked cocky at the unilateral decision. I began to wish I hadn’t told him he was forgiven so easily.
? ? ?
Harry and I walked home in the rose glow of dusk. A cold mist rolled off the ocean and I hugged my arms close. Another few minutes and the fog would overtake us.
Harry lagged a half step behind. There was the faint burr of music from his headphones at his neck. “When you went for food,” he said, “I told Graham we’re going to homecoming.”
As friends, I added in my head. I let up on my pace a little. “Did he ask if I bribed you?”
“That’s what I expected, only the opposite, me bribing you to be my date. He said, ‘Score, we both have dates.’?”
I tripped. “He said that?”
“He’s going with Viv. And there was that whatever with the kiss. He can’t complain.”
“Or tell us that high school dances are beneath us.”
“Or lecture us on the history of homecomings.”
“His lectures have reached soliloquy level.”
“Viv gives monologues. Graham soliloquies. Shocker—everybody thinks we’re mutants.” He laughed lightly.
I swung around to face Harry. He halted so abruptly his backpack slipped off his shoulder. “Oops, sorry,” I said. I started to bend to retrieve it, but Harry beat me to it. “All this sudden interest in Viv and us, Amanda has to suspect we’re IV. What if she tells someone?”
He hooked the backpack onto his shoulder. “She’d probably have ratted us out already.”
I let out a doubtful huff and listened to Harry’s jean cuffs shuffle against the cement the rest of the way home.
In my front yard, I said, “It’s make-your-own-pizza night. You want to stay?”
“I wish. I told my dad I’d help with dinner.”
“Tell Simon I saw that barn owl again,” I said, starting up the path. “Maybe he can help me build one of those owl houses to put on the roof.”
“Izzie,” he called. I spun and waited. “You were upset when you got back with the crackers. When you want to tell me why, I want to hear.”
I smiled and jogged to the front door.
I hardly had an appetite for pizza. Mom and I used to be creative with topping combos. We’d pair purple potatoes with fresh mozzarella and truffle oil. With goat cheese we added yellow squash and thinly sliced heirloom pumpkins. Not that night. Mom’s laughter sounded forced. Dad’s smile was a decoy. And I intentionally left his personal pizza in the oven until his crust charred black.
Retrieved from the cellular phone of Isadora Anne Pendleton
Transcript and notes prepared by Badge #821891
Shared Media Folder Titled: IV, Wed., Oct. 2, 2:04 a.m.
Video start.
I. Pendleton’s face is lit by bars of white light, shadows between them. “I can’t sleep,” she whispers. “I can’t stop thinking about how we’re going to get revenge on Carver and Denton for Goldilocks. How the Order—my crazy idea—is making it possible.” She shakes her head wordlessly.
“Four. It’s just a stupid number. There is an infinite amount of them. Numbers that could crush the universe with their size. How come one so tiny is so important?” She rolls onto her back, the camera held above her face and the bed. “Four seasons. Four forces of nature. Four directions. Even hearts have four chambers.
“While I was blocking Dad out at dinner, I tried to remember the four forces of nature from physics. I looked at my notes from class once I came up to my room.”
Izzie holds a notebook to capture the scant light coming through the blinds. “So one-year-younger Izzie wrote: ‘The four forces of nature are the four fundamental interactions of our universe. Gravitational, strong nuclear, weak nuclear, and electromagnetic. They can’t be reduced down to smaller reactions.’?”
“They’re ground zero. Rules of the natural world. What I didn’t write down but I remember is that the forces have different strengths, like gravity is surprisingly weak—except when physicists mess with the forces at really high energy levels and the forces get more and more similar. That makes scientists wonder if they aren’t really manifestations of the same force.” She drops the notebook to the bed.
“Graham, Harry, Viv, and I are like that. I believe we come from the same place—and no, Graham, I don’t mean vaginas or sperm or whatever preciously you comment you’ll make when you watch this someday. I mean we have our very own force that created the four of us for one another and that under pressure, when it matters, we’re really all the same.” She blows a kiss to the lens. “Of course there are four of us.”
Video stop.
16
We called our next rebellion the blood rebellion.
Graham—glitter of mischief in his eyes, dare in his voice—suggested drawing our own blood to use. I wiped my clammy hands on my jean shorts and reminded him that there were police and DNA to consider. Briefly we cased the biology lab at USB. The plan, accessing their sterile stores with Graham’s mom’s faculty key card, was abandoned when Viv spied the camouflaged campus security cameras.
We settled on a butcher shop. During my grandmother’s yearly visits, she’d buy a pint of blood for a traditional stew recipe from her old country.
In preparation for the blood rebellion, Graham took midnight walks past our targets. We schemed to hit them the Thursday night before homecoming dance.
Nearly a week had passed since the blood moon ceremony, two since we’d spurred our classmates up the mountain to the tunnel. I craved the net of invincibility that descended over us after a rebellion’s show of nerve; the fire that raged in our chests as we bent others to our will; the strange stare of my reflection that said I was not the kid I once was.