Our rebellion didn’t feel as final as I understand it is presently. Our initiates were safely one town over, on the bluffs of a beach, each armed with a prepaid burner phone Graham and Harry bought with cash at gas stations along the inland highway. Jess had been successful in convincing Campbell not to walk away from the Order, though I am not sure how. The initiates would wait for midnight to call in their sightings. At their designated times, two minutes apart starting at the stroke of twelve, they’d call the police to report seeing a woman roaming the streets of Seven Hills, all in white, a bloody IV painted on her front and back. They would draw the police from one location to another. Each fake location would be gradually farther from the knoll and its clock tower. When our initiates were done with the lure, they’d dump the phones into the ocean and take one car back to Seven Hills. If they were stopped, they’d tell the police they were coming from a party at USB.
The skeleton rode in Viv’s trunk, her wings already wired on. At midnight the texts began dinging, confirming that the calls were being made. We headed to the knoll. Halfway there, the sirens began to sing. Mist was wafting off the ocean, the moon’s light netted in it, giving the town a fairy-tale glitter.
Viv and I held hands at the foot of the clock tower. We wore our beanies with eyeholes and had removed Viv’s front and back license plates. Her black SUV was common enough; there were at least five just on our street.
Any minute a police officer who recognized the reported sightings as subterfuge could drive by. Danger was as intoxicating as Graham’s truth serum and I found myself twirling under Viv’s arm, collapsing against her side as she kissed my forehead and hummed.
Graham had reconstructed the skeleton, fastening her wires together. A rope looped around her spine. Harry wound the opposite end around his wrist and used the stones protruding from the facade of the two-story clock tower to climb twenty feet to the clocks hands. He threaded the rope over the hands and ran the slack toward the ground. Graham caught it and pulled. Viv joined him, gradually raising the skeleton as Harry scaled down.
I stepped off the curb, just to take the whole scene in. My three friends dizzyingly beautiful, like three bolts of light. And though my heart felt raw and pummeled, there was so much love inside me for them that I was convinced the Order of IV had served its purpose. We were bound together. We would grow old loving each other.
? ? ?
In the barn we relived what we’d pulled off and toasted the Order with ciders. The Mistress of Rebellion and Secrets lay in Viv’s lap. Harry slipped out without saying good-bye as Graham spouted facts about the history of fermented beverages. I pressed my cheek to Viv’s feverish one. Graham walked me home.
We sat on the porch swing. My feet didn’t touch the ground and their swinging made me feel carefree, like when we were little. He took my hand. We looked at each other. His flinty stare threw me back to being a little kid whose heart was in her throat and whose pockets were full of cookies, racing into the hills behind her house, her mother’s voice a distant reprimand.
Graham was my oldest friend. He loved me and wanted me.
My fingers walked up his arm and pinched his earlobe. I smiled drowsily at him, attention shifting to his mouth. So familiar, it wasn’t any stretch to imagine my lips on his. Graham kissed me. His nose brushed my cheek. I tasted the cider and something spicier on his tongue. A sweet, little groan escaped from him. A noise I’d never heard him make before.
I thought I knew what was coming next.
Graham yanked himself away, slid to the far end of the swing with the look of someone restraining himself. “I delivered a secret rite to Amanda instructing her to get Harry to ask her out. I made it clear that if she succeeded, she’d bypass any additional rites and be made a full member before her friends,” he said as one long blast.
I dragged the back of my hand across my mouth. The clove taste lingered. “Smart. It’s what she was asking for before she told us that horrendous secret of hers, but instead Viv promised her a better role in the Order, after initiation.”
“Har wouldn’t bite. She came on to him. Nothing. She made up that preposterous rumor about sex behind the barn. He told me, completely horrified, that she was sexting him as some kind of booty call. He didn’t want any part of her.” We blinked at each other for a long time. “Don’t you want to know why I’d try to break you and Harry up?”
I stared at the scars on my knees. “This one’s from when we learned to roller blade.” I pointed to another. “This one’s a burn, when we lit matches to see who’d drop one first.”
“We kneeled facing each other and I dropped mine first,” he said. “I burned you.”
“And then you started to blubber like a baby.”
“I was scared I had hurt you.”
I just kept staring at that scar, considering all the years Graham had been my steadfast friend. “The Graham I know would never try to hurt me.”
“You’ve been mine since we were five,” he whispered. “You don’t need to say it. You’re yours. You’re Viv’s and Harry’s, too. I know. But I didn’t want to share you. I wanted you to pick me. I went crazy when you didn’t.”
“Pick you? Did I miss you asking me out? Am I not remembering you asking me to a dance or telling me you liked me or being honest about your feelings? All you’ve done is talk about hot Jess and check out other girls.”
“Are you shitting me?” The disbelief in his eyes needled me. “That’s how you see years of me throwing myself at you?”
“Throwing yourself at me?”
“Holding you. Holding your hand. Hugging you. Letting you sit in my lap and ride on my back. Staring at you. I’ve never had a real girlfriend, Izzie, because I was waiting for you. And we kissed freshman year.” His words shook. They tore at me. “You had to have known how much it meant to me, and then you never wanted to talk about it. I tried a hundred times after. You hugged yourself and acted like it was nothing but a trauma to kiss me.”
“That doesn’t excuse you hurting me, Graham. You hurting Harry.”
“I’m not trying to say it does. My scheming was inexcusable. Unforgivable. But let’s not pretend that you haven’t always known that all you had to do was say yes. This wasn’t an unrequited crush. You wanted me there, running after you. The question was out there, always. Even now, even after I’m sick to death of standing in line behind Harry.” His face hardened to stone. “Are you through with me?”
I regarded his figure all in black. The meaning of everything that had passed between us over the last months had been laid bare. Only Graham’s nervous fingers rolling up his shirtsleeves betrayed his composure.
“No,” I said. “Angry and sad, yes. Harry’s through with me, though.”
“Never.” He caught my chin as I turned away. “I’m not going to kiss you again,” he said as my eyes warned him off. “I just want you to pay attention. Harry is not through with you. He’ll get himself sorted out and he’ll be groveling for your forgiveness.”
I removed Graham’s hand, probably holding on to it longer than I should have wanted to. “Maybe he really is done with me and I’ll fall madly in love with you in ten years. But you’ll already have fallen for Viv and it will be a real catastrophe.”
He winced ever so slightly, but he said, “Is it a deal?”