I developed new habits, little ways to prove to myself that I was as special and powerful as I yearned to be. I tagged IV in Sharpie on the bathroom stalls. I escalated, carving IV into the window frames of my bedroom, the barn, the school library. I scrawled our insignia on the spines of library books and on the faces of lockers when the halls were empty of students.
Daily I drained the sugar bowl into the garbage disposal, and my dad, the lone coffee drinker in the house, glanced perplexed around the kitchen. I swiped his newspaper from the front porch; poured water into his sheepskin slippers; was a ghost stopping the dishwasher’s cycle after he hit start. Each act as a vandal and saboteur whet my appetite for the next. Nothing counted unless it outdid the last in risk and destruction. At last I took his credit card and ordered three dozen red roses to be sent to Ina Marlo at her clinic, the note signed from my father. The doctors and nurses would talk; those were the kind of rumors that spread, weren’t they?
These tiny mutinies were not mine uniquely.
The IV tagged on Harper’s car by a copycat was not an isolated incident. I liked to think my classmates found my carvings and graffiti and became further inspired. Why not? Defacing the school and its symbols of authority was fun. I counted ten red IVs scribbled on locker faces in one day alone. In the girls’ restroom, IV was written on the mirrors in pink lipstick and black mascara.
Then there were my friends.
Graham parked in the staff lot at school; he graduated to leaving his car idling in the red zone in front of Cup of Jo; shredding the parking ticket waiting under his wiper, its pieces ghosting in the street once we’d sped away. He stayed in the barn long after the rest of us left for home; the air stale with pot and cider the following day.
Viv arrived to lunch with Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and pored through its pages. She was grave-faced when questioned about her revenge machinations; her black fingernails tented as she murmured, “I swear to tell you soon.” Her makeup escalated: the line of her eyes hell black; her lips bloodred; a black triangle of birdcage veil in her updo, as though she was preparing for a funeral. She spent more time protectively hunched over her phone, tucking it into the folds of her skirt or caftan when someone scooted near.
Harry pilfered cans of red spray paint from work. His five-finger discount was pragmatic, necessary for our blood rebellion. But when he pulled the first two cans from his vest, I gave a theatric and sincere gasp.
I may have indulged in other plans to nudge Dad and Ina’s affair into my mother’s purview. My father getting caught—even if the evidence was fabricated, the crime was not—was better than me telling my mother about the affair. Better for me.
But then came the Thursday before homecoming and the night of our blood rebellion. All of my restless energy could once again be channeled into the Order.
Directly after school, Harry and I drove to the butcher shop in Berrington, an hour south. We paid cash—as anonymous as we knew how to be.
Harry and I tore out of the shop, each holding a white plastic vat of blood. The metallic scent swelled in my mouth and nose until I tasted it. The heavy liquid sloshed inside the buckets, slapping the top, a red glaze leaking out to streak my fingers. I gagged halfway to the car. Harry held his vat far away from his torso, his whole body weighted forward with its anchor, a look on his face of comic determination.
After we strapped each vat in with a rear seat belt, I was laughing hard, a stitch in my side, elbows on the car roof. We stood there, smiling across at each other, winded. The magic of a new rebellion was zinging through me and bringing out golden prisms in Harry’s eyes.
We trudged into the dark at midnight, about the time Goldilocks left the Ghost Tunnel for chips and, unwittingly, to die. Ours was a coffee-colored night, murky with fog. Difficult to see more than fifteen feet ahead of us. The flashlights were unreliable, the fog bending the light.
Three of us in black. One of us in white. Rangy and stretched shadows overlapping in the beams of light. If you caught us from the corner of your eye, we looked like villagers marching a virgin off to be sacrificed. Except Viv carried a water bottle filled with blood, a can of stolen red spray paint, a second skin of leather gloves, and a mask. All of us did.
Seven Hills’s long, crescent lanes ran parallel to one another, on either side of the knoll. Backyards didn’t touch. Instead, green belts with trails separated them. A dirt path in the belts connected the orchard with parklike open space two streets removed from our targets.
Insects were out in full force. I felt a winged critter land on my shoulder and flicked it away, its ping off my nail loud. The air fizzed and dampened as we sloped downhill, closer to downtown and the ocean. Our shoes were cushioned by the dirt that became fine and sandy.
We reached the first canal of black, glittering asphalt and paused at the edge of a tall fence to peer around its corner. I listened. Nothing. One by one we flitted across the street to rejoin the jungle of brittle grasses. A few yards into this new ribbon of green space a scamper of rocks had us swinging around. The light caught in the obsidian eyes of a cat. It raked its calico body along a fallen eucalyptus branch.
“Shoo,” Graham whispered.
It meowed.
Viv kicked the tip of the branch, sending its silver leaves juddering like diamond fish scales. The cat shot into the fog.
We crossed one more street and came up behind the pastel rainbow of Seven Hills’s oldest homes. Victorians that had been built by the founders, way back when isolated towns were like fiefdoms, their founders royalty. Normal families lived in most of them now, all except for two the town kept, for the mayor and the police chief.
Harry and I followed a thin reach of yellow grass in between neighboring houses to Landmark Lane. Viv and Graham continued on the belt until the Carvers’, three houses down. Where the sidewalk began, I disguised myself. The black plumes fringing Harry’s mask twitched in the breeze. His belonged to Viv’s grandfather, the silver vines, delicate and diverting as veins, were hand-painted in Venice. Mine was thick with dust from Viv’s attic, but it also smelled of her grandmother’s leather trunk, a trace of the Chanel No. 5 she taught us to dab behind our ears, and the sourness of old wine.
The fog boxed us in. Nothing beyond the luminance of lampposts, each diminished from the last. I inched to the center of the street, turning slowly, straining to see through its layers for witnesses.
In both directions the gables of second stories ran like mountains peeking through the fog. I licked the salty mist from my lips.