I chuckled, pretending I thought he was joking
Graham’s bluster drained from his face. He was watching me too carefully. Waiting. I wanted to say it back to him. To make his smile warm with sincerity. Out of the four of us, we were most alike, and loving him felt most like loving myself. Some hunch kept me from saying it, though. Some tiny rodent inside my head clawed its message: I wouldn’t mean it as he had.
Graham didn’t want to dance with Viv. He refused to ask Jess to dance. Graham was dancing with me. He’d returned to paying me more attention. That selfish pit in my stomach tingled.
“You are my favorite,” he said, his eyes growing large and wounded, “but on our rock you told Viv that you loved her more than anyone, ever.”
“I was trying to cheer her up,” I said.
“You tried cheering up your friend by telling her how much more you liked her than your other two best friends, in front of them?”
“Guys?” Harry said, likely not for the first time. He’d been standing there, I don’t know how long.
“That’s messed up,” I said to Graham.
“You are.”
Harry brushed my arm. “Don’t fight. You want to try the macarons?” Graham’s hands still cupped my waist. They dropped away. Their heat lingered in the fabric of my dress.
I couldn’t taste the chocolate of the first cookie. The second, vanilla and lavender, was sweeter. By the raspberry I was happily accepting sparkling lemonade in a plastic champagne flute from Harry.
We didn’t rejoin Graham and Viv. We danced and talked, and it never felt like wrestling for control. There was no sharp edge to Harry. No scrape to him. No hidden meaning to what he told me.
I laughed and he laughed and we talked about space again—and music and Simon and where we’d go first if we were backpacking across Europe, and how we should make a plan to travel the summer after our first year of college—and by the time we walked to his car, our hands were hot because they’d been clasped for so long. I was smiling, blissed out, strappy sandals hooked on my finger, unembarrassed that my dress had a lemonade stain.
It was simple, sweet, and smooth with Harry, like the summer breeze that had blown him through the orchard to the barn in search of us five years before. I decided that he’d come not in search of us but in search of me. And for a little while, I forgot how the summer breeze that brought Harry had also stirred Goldilocks’s hair.
20
Harry and I took a roundabout way to our neighborhood. The car was parked on the street and we walked through the orchard, stalling. Harry carried me on his back, a closeness that gave me goose bumps down my front so that I didn’t need to put my shoes back on.
I liked the way he smelled, of grown-up aftershave but also of crayons because Harry had been helping Simon with an art project before leaving for the dance.
Harry was slightly winded, the echo of his breath in my ear even after I’d slid down his spine. “You sure you wouldn’t rather get pizza and eat on the beach?” he asked.
I looked up the path, beyond the trellis. The barn, usually diffused with warm light, our real home and clubhouse, had lights and music blaring.
“This place is ours,” I said. “How can we not be here for a party? How can we not be here when you-know-what comes up?”
He inclined his head, understanding.
We hovered over the glass slider’s threshold. The barn looked under attack. Our sleeping bags and blankets had been booted out of the loft. They were on the wood floor in a confusion of color, faux fur, and nylon sheen. Amanda, Rachel, and Viv had arranged themselves on the piles. The effect reminded me of a photograph of Victorian explorers camping with Bedouins in the Arabian Desert, but with a lot more tan thigh and cleavage revealed. The girls were midgiggle attack, but Viv’s eyes were open now. Sobered. Darting.
Conner stood on our couch, wing tips gouging into the satin, his smile bored, one hand strangling a bottle of cider by the neck while he shouted at Trent, who was raiding our fridge.
Graham sat at the edge of our table, ankle propped on his knee, spinning our ceremonial dagger beside him. Campbell and Jess were listening with upturned faces like they were kids at story time.
Our idol considered our potential recruits from her throne on the antique armoire. Hands palmed, eyes closed, a wolf’s smile. The stars on her cloak darkened, coming into focus, until I saw them as a harbinger. Harry and I were preoccupied with space as kids. Our meteorite came from the stars. Goldilocks was placed at its altar. The day we discovered her, Harry found us. Me. What were the odds that Graham’s mother picked up an idol in the Mekong Delta covered in stars? Without the Mistress, would the Order have occurred to me? Without the Order, would we have ever put together what we knew about Goldilocks? The idol smiled like it had been her plan all along. Mistress of Rebellion, Secrets, and Dead Girls.
That smile said, Let the others join us. Let me have them. Let us fill the streets with blood.
I took a step into the barn with an understanding that faded as I tried to seize it, grow it. This was not random but a cosmic weave.
“Last chance for pizza.”
I started a little, pulled back to the present.
“We can’t leave Viv and Graham to the wolves,” I said, mimicking the idol’s smile.
Really, we were the wolves. Neither Graham or Viv appeared swept away in the tide of attention. Viv’s eyes were probing.
Graham was in the middle of a story. “The Ancients believed in ritual madness. Not madness like you’re mentally ill but madness as in losing your mind as a release into the universe, and”—he waved hello without pausing—“you’re consumed by the rush of it.”
“What’s that?” Conner called out from where he’d sat on the couch. His finger indicated the idol.
Graham and I met eyes. Yes, let’s make them our initiates. We were dressed for homecoming, but I felt costumed for the stage.
“Nothing,” Graham said too harshly. “Who wants another drink?” Exactly the right amount of forced cheer and nervous bumbling as he offered around a bottle of cider.
“Amanda?” Conner called. “Hey.” He snapped for her. She turned from the girls, begrudgingly. Our Mistress was staged on a leather-bound book, her pedestal, and white pillar candles surrounded her. I imagined Viv scheming: invite over a bunch of kids suspicious that you’re up to something, ply them with cider, and wait for someone to notice the mysterious statue on an altar.
Amanda’s eyes landed on the idol. She wobbled to her feet, yanking down her short hemline from riding up as she went. Her hands closed on the bottom shelf for a steadying moment.
“Don’t touch her,” Viv said. The barn went quiet.