Something in my chest tightened until it snapped. “I love you, Vivian,” I said, feeling all at once hollow. It was not difficult hanging up on her, and each time the old urge to call her again sent me reaching for my cell, Vivian wondering if someday she’d be able to use Harry’s death in her acting was in my head. I thought of how she’d revealed Amanda’s secret so that others would call her slut or whore or find a way to shame her.
I had enough credits to graduate a semester early. I took the necessary finals, told them to mail me my diploma, and was done with Seven Hills High School before the year ended.
Graham and his mom are in Amsterdam now. Graham writes letters, although they are short and too generic to be from him to me. No lectures on what he’s learning. Impersonal notes about the weather. There was once a haunted I miss him most when I’m breathing.
For a full week after I read that, I obsessed over using my graduation checks from my grandparents and buying a ticket to Graham. In the end, I couldn’t do it. Graham loved me, wanted me. I hadn’t wanted him enough in return. And losing Harry made every thought of Graham feel stolen and wrong.
I was accepted to the University of Southern California in the history department. Imagine, me and Viv in the same city. I deferred a year. I’m still in Seven Hills. I live with my mom; Dad is in San Diego. I see Ina at the farmers market. She tells me to come over, to have tea or take a swim with her. She reminds me that the barn is still mine if I want it. I nod and pretend like I might come. Like I don’t hate her. Like I don’t imagine the reckonings she and my father deserve. I wonder who would be alive if Dad and Ina never met.
For a while I blamed the Mistress. Calm, immortal apathy rolled off her after she’d been returned to me by the police, once the investigation into IV was closed. We’d pledged our blood and swore an oath to her—in pretend, I kept needing to remind myself. I couldn’t find a place to keep her, so she sat on my desk. Mistress of Death and Sacrifice. Lay your lovers and friends at my feet so I may devour them. I’d catch her out of the corner of my eye, maw dripping with Harry’s blood. I’d turn to see that cruel, cold, unchanging smile gleaming at me. So I burned her on a pyre of sticks. Watched the jaundiced smoke spiral into the night. I hummed that eerie little snippet Viv liked from her play about witches.
And then I turned on our meteorite. Not ours. Never again. Another universe’s. It had drawn Goldilocks in. Planted a writhing little whisper inside our heads, Wonder, ask, search, imagine. I climbed on top and took an ax to its crown. Ax blade collided with stone, sparking, sending violent jolts through me. Three swipes and I was done. Breathless. Muscles crimped in my neck until I cried. Pathetic.
I needed a softer surface to scrub our history from. Make it like it never happened. I raced home, ax deserted in the sleeping orchard. I pushed through the clutter of a kitchen drawer. Selected a box cutter and ran for my bathroom. There, IV was inked on the left side of my ribs, under my arm. The tattoo seemed to pulse in the mirror. Alive. I held the tip of the blade to the V. It pricked my skin. But those tattoos bound us together. Wherever we were. The blade clattered into the sink. The tattoo remains untouched.
I spend most days driving to record stores, where I hunt through albums. I buy what Harry’s collection is missing and then rush home to listen. I won’t stop until I find Harry’s perfect song. Once or twice a week I go over and build robots or practice Italian with Simon. It comforts me to think that in a way he has an older sibling. Someday, when I feel music as well as hear it, I will likely be happy to have Simon, a little more family.
There is so much to rage against.
I will never know Goldilocks’s real name. Never be able to tell her family that I tried to make things right for her. I’ll be sorry for the rest of my life for the actions of my father and Ina, and for what they took from Goldilocks.
I wonder how things got so out of hand. We invented a secret society. We invented its history, rituals, and rites. We never wanted to say good-bye. We were sick of being told what to do, what was important, what to care about. In this we were not alone. All those IVs scrawled on backpacks, armbands, T-shirts, and bathroom walls were proof. To see a broken world through young eyes and to not rebel would have been madness.
Was there a better means to an end than revenge? Would it have been so hard just to say, We care about what happened to the girl on the rock? Goldilocks had no voice; we felt like ours was too quiet. The Order of IV got people’s attention in the only way it could; in a language of blood, bones, and fire. Did we give it its power or did it bestow invisible power on us?
In the end, we weren’t so different from those cult members that Graham and I had read about. We pushed one another, none more than I. Our fiendish grins fed fiendish deeds. There had to have been another path.
Harry had that name buried inside him. Conner, Conner, Conner. He’d shoved it down deep like a sleeping monster, until it awoke, snapped its jaw in rage, and destroyed him. I am angry with Harry. I wish he had told me what he knew. I wish we’d been able to hold Conner accountable together. Harry made a sacrifice I don’t believe he should have.
I wonder at what point the secret rite for Conner wormed its way into Harry’s head. Was it the night we strung up the goat? Did my secret rite prove to Harry that Conner would follow through with ugly tasks? It was easy deciding a goat would be sacrificed. No pause. I needed an animal. I would have killed it with my own hands. Sweet Harry told me never to apologize for doing what I believed needed to be done. Did I blow that dark thought into his head?
I am furious with myself. Not with Izzie, Icky, at the mercy of her parents fighting, so afraid she’ll lose the three people who know and accept her. I’m angry with Izzie who had power to aim: Princess of the Night; Inventor of the Order; Master of Mischief, Rebellions, and Blood; and Acolyte of Revenge. I’ve spent months locking that girl up inside of me. I shoved her down into a place that looks a lot like the Ghost Tunnel. She’s hunched by a fire. There are other girls crouched around it too. Lost girls, surviving. I am more like them now than I used to be. Warming my hands, gripping a shard of glass if ever I need to fight again, and I’m worried I’ll let her loose someday. I’m worried I’ll let the anger blind me. The world probably needs someone like the girl inside of me, avenging all the nameless girls. Fighting for those who are thrown violently by the world, just as Harry was thrown violently from the rock.
I want to believe there’s a way to change the world without burning it.
I still think about the invisible forces that make people collide. I will always believe that the strongest things we do not see are friendship and love, their evidence as tangible as they are not. When I forget this lesson, I need only to think three names.
Harry. Graham. Vivy.
However much you think I loved them, I loved them more.
And because they are not here to share my final secrets with, I’ll share them with the universe and hope that wherever my three soul mates are, they’ll sense the invisible forces swirling around them.