I was walking again, around the sofa. “It isn’t enough to say it.” I kicked at the edge of the carpet when it caught my sneaker.
“Please, Izzie. You’re making me dizzy. There’s too much blood in here.” Viv pinched her nose.
“There needs to be blood.” I pounded a fist in my hand. I smiled. That was it. “There needs to be more blood to show we’re serious.”
“To who?” Viv whispered, but her gaze cut to our idol.
I wanted to feel the night’s mark. For it to leave a scar. Writing IV in Sharpie on our wrists wasn’t enough. Sharpie was kid stuff and the Order was not. Ten years before, Graham and I gave ourselves tattoos with a safety pin and an inkwell. The outcome was identical freckles on the pads of our right thumbs.
“We’re going to need a pin and your mom’s inkwell,” I told Viv.
No one questioned me. I lay on the rug when it was time.
“Remember when I pierced our ears?” Viv asked, kneeling at my stomach, wearing Harry’s sweatshirt like a dress since she’d shed her ruined clothing.
“Hold still,” Graham ordered with the authority of a physician.
Viv placed one hand on my waist and the other to hold my shirt up, revealing the side of my rib cage and the little IV in Sharpie she’d drawn as a guide. Graham sterilized the pin in the flame of a lighter. The pin lowered into the well of black ink. I closed my eyes.
The heat spread. Harry’s fingers gently rested in my hair; Viv’s nose brushed mine; Graham’s free hand pressed steadily to the small of my back. I stared down Harry’s black T-shirt with the slogan Free Tibet, what looked like a bloody checkmark streaked across the F.
I wiped away the excess ink and blood with an alcohol-soaked cotton ball as Viv declared, “Me now.” Harry pulled his T-shirt up wordlessly once Viv’s was done.
Graham handed me the pin after finishing Harry.
I stare at my tattoo in the mirror a lot now. In the future, some of us will need to explain their origin. I imagine the reasons we’ll give for having a IV messily branded on our torsos. Will we tell the truth? Or will we gloss over the tattoos like we do all the other scars we share?
Retrieved from the cellular phone of Graham Haverbach III
Transcript and notes prepared by Badge #821891
Shared Media Folder Titled: IV, Fri., Oct. 11, 6:09 a.m.
Video start.
G. Averbach sips from a ceramic mug that reads Professor. “Consciousness is that we perceive the world around us and ourselves.” His tone is pedantic. “First-person subjective experience of the world is the best definition I’ve come across. Most scientists think consciousness comes from the cerebral cortex in our brains, but it’s mostly a mystery why and how humans have it. Altering your consciousness means changing your perception of the world and yourself in relation to it.
“Shit. Izzie, I can see you rolling your eyes while watching this. So here’s your stinking point. I believe that last night my consciousness was altered.
“There are all sorts of rituals where ancient civilizations used trancelike states in order to feel closer to invisible elements and gods. There was rhythmic dancing, visionary plants, fasting, drumming, and consumption of serpent poison. And no, I wasn’t dipping into the absinthe or snake venom last night.
“I became a beast. I’m not sure what conditions allowed me to feel . . . so detached from myself. There was blood everywhere. The wind and the waves hitting the shore sounded like music. Viv was a wraith in white, flitting up the mayor’s lawn, then gradually, covering herself in blood.
“And Viv . . . you’ve never looked more beautiful.” He drags a hand through his hair. “I don’t mean this to be offensive, but I was incapable of not staring at your butt as you crawled around like an animal on the ground, blood up to your elbows. You were this close”—he pinches the air—“to getting kissed on the mayor’s front lawn.” He leans closer to the camera. “Graham went away. I wasn’t him. The concerns and thought processes that make me me flew from my mind. I forgot that I was a person, not a mystery predator from the hills. It was like wearing a new skin for the night. And for the first time since maybe I was born, I stopped thinking. Utterly euphoric.”
Video stop.
18
How must Denton’s and Carver’s houses looked to that first neighbor who went for her newspaper on the lawn or to the guy trudging to his driveway, intending to go for bagels?
Sleep in their eyes. The shock of a red paw print on the sidewalk. They blinked to behold their cozy world painted in blood. Petals of it blossoming into wild flower shapes on the sidewalk, mailboxes having wept blood overnight.
Perhaps a shout roused Denton from bed, his police ears picking it up before his wife, asleep in bed with him. Did he grab his gun and dash through his front door? Did Carver let her Labradoodle free in his ridiculous outfit for a morning tinkle? Was the dog lapping at dried blood by the time she followed him?
However it began, there were sirens when I woke. Sirens because when confronted with blood painting two of their neighbors’ porches—windows, driveways, cars, and mailboxes—they called 9-1-1. Those same citizens who barely batted an eye at a victim remaining a Jane Doe and her killer going unpursued.
A student news blogger from school anticipated the need for pictures and drove over once she heard about it, snapping and posting photos to the blog of the gruesomely striking red paw prints. Other kids reposted the pictures on social media. Our unwitting accomplices, spreading the blood. They proliferated in the same way the snapshots of the spray painted IVs at Slumber Fest and the Bedford rebellion did. Bloody paw prints and red porches and scabby mailboxes turned out to be sharable too.
I scrolled through the hashtags as I waited for Graham to arrive. Even the photos snapped of Denton’s house were jarring, strange in the daylight. I stared at each for a long time, catching myself wondering who doused the welcome mat with blood or the white blooms of the hydrangea? I did. I was the gutsy, angry girl who had. My mom called through the screen door for me to have a nice day, sweetheart. Couldn’t she see the rebellion on me? The change? I was not her pliable, simpering little girl anymore.
I was watching a short video of Carver’s house as I heard Graham’s car turn into my driveway. Ornamenting Carver’s front yard was a pretty stone fountain, three-tiered like a wedding cake, stone birds drinking up the water. There wasn’t a spot of blood on the birds. But the water ran red, bubbled from tier to tier. I turned up the volume, caught the happily sinister gurgle of the fountain. The little stone birds drinking up the bloodied water.
“Have you seen them?” Graham said as soon as I slid into the front seat.