An hour later, I sat on the porch waiting for Harry to pick me up. While I did, I thought about what Dad had shared at breakfast.
A neighbor at the base of our street arrived home late last night from Santa Barbara. His high beams streaked across houses as he turned into his driveway. There was red on the front of his neighbor’s house. It was nearing Halloween—decorations, he figured. Then a sensor triggered his porch light. Red on oak. His front door was marked with an X. All of the front doors on our street were. He heard a crash a couple houses away. Spied a masked figure. He ran after him, but fell over a shallow retaining wall dividing his neighbor’s property from his own.
His wife woke at his shouting and parted her curtains to see what the matter was. It snowballed from there, neighbors calling neighbors, people in their robes and slippers on front lawns. Dogs barking. Those with broken windows dialed 9-1-1. Officers with flashlights searched backyards. A manufactured dawn lit the street for half the night.
Dad came inside after half an hour of the bedlam, assuming I’d gone back to bed. He was shaken up enough to set our alarm for the first time in years. He wondered aloud at breakfast, Why were the doors marked? Was it a threat?
Harry’s sedan puttered up to the sidewalk, coming from downhill rather than his house.
I dropped into the front seat. “Hey.”
He fixed my injured hand with an intense stare. “Graham called this morning. He said it’s bad. ER bad. I’ll take you if you want. I don’t care about getting caught.”
“I do.” I held it up. “It’s nothing. See.” Flexed my fingers. Swallowed the urge to scream.
“It isn’t nothing. You got hurt because someone didn’t follow our instructions.”
“I didn’t throw the rock with the letter hard enough. I had to pick through the glass in the yard. Totally my fault.”
“This never would have happened if Conner hadn’t gone early.” Conner, he said, like the name tore at him.
“The first window break came from down the street—Trent. Not Conner,” I said. “And it wasn’t his fault. His neighbor came home and it was probably a now-or-never situation. If Trent had just run rather than follow through, the neighbor might have called the cops and one of us could have been caught as we waited outside for seven more minutes.”
Harry’s huff was so derisive and unlike him that I did a double take.
I could see the effort it took him to smooth out his scowl. “Where’d you just come from?”
He stifled a yawn. “I’ve been up since five. Interviewing and taking pictures. Sorry for the bad mood, I’m just tired.”
“Interviewing?”
He looked at me sideways. “I’m a reporter for the Seven Hills news blog and last night my entire street was vandalized. It would be suspicious if I didn’t write about it.”
Harry honked as he pulled into Viv’s driveway.
“Lemme see your damaged goods,” Viv demanded, climbing into the car a minute later.
She grabbed my wrist and I winced at the ferocity of her inspection. “At least it’s not so big you can’t wear a bandage.” She tugged my sleeve down over it. “Keep it covered. The cops are looking for vandals who busted windows. Even a bandage is suspicious.”
As we drove, I stared at a couple of adults bent over a bird illustration. Harry pointed at a group of middle school–aged kids snapping pictures of a giant IV painted on the siding of a gray house. “There’ve been kids out the whole morning taking pictures and selfies with the graffiti.”
Graham was particularly keyed up, his blue eyes extra piercing as he greeted us with, “IV is trending. Trending. Across platforms. Whole streets are not usually vandalized with iconography that doesn’t appear to be gang related. We’re an anomaly and it’s gotten people’s attention.” He rucked up his sleeves rather than wearing his usual neat roll.
The red paint ended abruptly as we turned from Driftwood.
Viv pressed her nose against the car window. “Stuff looks the same.”
“Did you expect citywide looting and fires in the streets?” Graham asked. “That Seven Hills would revert to tribal law or that bands of cannibals would be hunting for breakfast?”
I glanced at Harry to share in a laugh. He stared straight ahead, the muscle in his cheek flexing and releasing.
Viv may have been disappointed with the scene out the car window. I was not. There were the subtle signs of a population unnerved. Cup of Jo was closed, an event so rare and unexpected that a throng of confused patrons had formed under its awning, peering through its windows, rapping knuckles on the door. The owner of Cup of Jo, Lottie Cooper, lived on our street. Her house had been defaced with the others.
Holy Bagels was the only game in town for caffeine today, and in line, Graham overheard that Lottie had packed her three kids in the family minivan and driven to her parents’ house in Portland. The abrupt departure was attributed to the eerie graffiti and broken windows. We’d scared a single mother out of town. I flexed my wounded hand, named the pain a souvenir from the night, like the tattoos had been, and smirked.
“Satisfied?” Graham asked Viv as we returned to the car.
She indicated her to-go cup of coffee. “That I won’t have chai or espresso for the foreseeable future? No, I most certainly am not.”
“I am,” Graham said. “People are going to unwind without their fancy espresso beverages. First triple shot mochas, then what, running water goes? We’ve got hysteria in the making.” He shook his fists in the air, happily crazed.
In the school courtyard, Jess’s upraised arm beckoned us to the flagpole. Our six initiates had deer-in-headlight expressions. A thrilled energy manifested in ragged surges of conversation. They snapped their lips closed almost as soon as the words escaped. They couldn’t believe what they’d pulled off.
“We’re famous,” Rachel crowed, indicating the feed on her cell. “Everyone I know has posted pictures.”
A scolding finger in the air, Graham said, “IV is famous. Not you.”
“My dad was on the phone with the security company the whole morning,” Conner gloated. In his excitement, he forgot to look superior. “He was so pissed. Kicked a door right off its hinges. Hurt his foot and everything. He’s having a camera installed up on the gate. He’s hiring a rent-a-cop to sit on his new development at night.”
“Overreact much?” Viv said.
Amanda batted Conner’s shoulder. “Conner gets his temper from his dad.”
“My mom caught my little sister with her chalk trying to color in the bird’s wings in the driveway,” Trent said, eyes growing large. “She lost it.”
Conner channeled his pleasure into destruction, kicking at the branches of a rose bush in the planter surrounding the flagpole. “I got rocks off into three houses before I made it home.”
“You were only supposed to hit one,” Harry said.
Conner kicked harder.
Trent shook his head. “Not me, man. I barely got one off before this dude came bum-rushing me.”
“About that,” Graham said.