1
By the time the police arrived, there were three of us left. Three originals. Three best friends. Architects of what was once a secret society.
The difference between leaders and initiates was evident. We designed it that way, dictated that initiates wore the white of sacrificial lambs and us bloody red. No confusion over who appeared to be in charge.
There was a chaotic minute under the star-choked sky. Volleying accusations and bodily threats. I tried to kick out of the arms of an officer because I still hadn’t had my fill of revenge. Never would I. And you know, the dagger tipped in blood didn’t exactly help our case for looking faultless.
They herded the initiates into a line, ordered them to keep their mouths shut. Still, those kids, those snakes, whispered stories and secrets in the way the dying confess, anticipating forgiveness. Good little boys and girls, eyes innocent saucers, except they’d terrorized a whole town.
Our dagger lay a little outside the ring of fire. There was the truth serum, a few muddy, crimson sips they’d dredge up from the bottle to test. And the idol on a pile of rocks, her smile calling out from on top of her burial mound. No sense would be made of her origins.
Police circled the meteorite, probing the scene, coming up short in front of us three, searching faces for clues. Accident or murder.
They would ask the wrong questions later on, after the ambulance left without its sirens wailing, when the three architects and our six recruits were in the police station.
There was lots of hand-wringing and Make me understand. Parents arrived. Our initiates had been shaking their fists and snarling at authority just an hour before. The rebellion had drained out of them and they buckled with relief at the sight of their moms and dads. I didn’t acknowledge mine. All the adults needed help understanding how the night happened.
“October happened because September did.”
An officer warned me to stop being snarky.
“I’m not,” I whispered, voice all cried out.
“Then answer,” he demanded.
“Because August. Because July. Because June. I can keep going if you need me to.”
That was the only answer they’d get from me. Afterward, I stopped talking. For a few weeks. I sat in my room, on the top of my desk, watching the Pacific battle the shore. I sketched the four of us. Together. Hardly needing to watch the progress of my pencil. There was something unnerving in our eyes when the pictures were done. A glimmer of foreshadow that I hadn’t noticed was present before. Had it been? My best friends. The loves of my life. Strangers. Reeling. Ferocious.
I held my tongue and the lesson sunk in.
No matter how much you see, there are bottomless seas you don’t.
What I am certain of is the heart of it.
First we were four.
Now we are three.
2
There is an ancient rock at the edge of Viv’s apple orchard, where the foothills bubble up, brittle gold grasses encroaching on the sky. The rock’s gray metallic face is smooth, except for pits and crevices on its north side. At the height and width of a house, it’s unmovable. Its top is as flat as a stage.
Graham, Viv, and I were eight, sucking on watermelon Blow Pops, our scabbed knees under our chins, Graham’s ankle in a cast, as we watched the scientists cut up from the road alongside the orchard in jeeps.
They were real-life versions of the scientists in khaki vests, baggy cargo pants, and hiking boots from the glossy pages of our National Geographic magazines. We crept around their tents and stole the wooden stakes used to cordon off the rock so Viv could play at stabbing Graham and me, the vampires, in our hearts. After a few days, a strawberry-blonde scientist with a face full of freckles caught Graham, who was surprisingly swift on crutches. She must have hoped that we’d quit vandalizing if we felt included, so she told us about the rock in the whispery tone adults use when they want to impress kids.
The rock was one of the largest meteoric fragments to hit North America. Someone dated it to have been there for at least 50,000 years, an age Freckles called recent in terms of meteorites. What baffled them was that there was no crater, no giant gash torn into the land from it shooting from space. The meteor appeared to have been placed there, gently set in the rambling foothills.
The rock itself wasn’t even the significant part, not then.
The drawings were.
The three of us had discovered the drawings—actually, Graham broke his ankle and then we discovered them. Graham, Viv, and I had been stretched out on the rock. That was back when we’d pretend it was a desert island and water ran to the horizons. We liked to act as though we were stuck on top with no choice but to stay until the sky dimmed. It was one of those afternoons drowning in sun; I was biting an apple, making shapes in the red skin with my teeth. I showed Viv a butterfly as a tiny green worm poked through the alpine-white meat of the fruit.
“Eat it,” Graham said.
“Worms can live inside your belly,” Viv cried. “Don’t do it.”
Graham sprung to his feet. “If you eat it, I’ll jump.” He pointed to the undulating expanse of grass. It was twelve feet, at least.
“Will not,” Viv countered, lips twitching with uncertainty.
“Will too. Just like when you thought I wouldn’t climb to the barn roof, or that Izzie couldn’t hold her breath for a minute underwater, or”—he began hopping in place—“that Izzie and I wouldn’t race through the Ghost Tunnel and we did, we did, we did.”
“On the count of three,” I said.
“One, two . . .” Graham paused, glancing over his shoulder where he was poised at the edge of the rock. I held the apple, worm-side to my mouth. Graham and I met eyes before he gave an exhilarated whoop and yelled, “Three!” He shot into the air, his eyes on mine until he disappeared. Graham didn’t believe in looking when he jumped.
The worm popped between my teeth as Graham shouted out in pain.
Viv and I found him clutching his knee to his chest, his lips grimacing, his eyes intent on a vague brownish-red design I would have mistaken for dirt smeared on the rock. Even back then, Graham noticed ancient and in-the-ground things.
The freckled scientist called it one of the oldest and most complete surviving figurative drawings done by ancient humans. The scene was of the space rock, surrounded by men and women kneeling. Above them, on the rock, there were four-legged animals of an unidentifiable species. Whatever they were, the animals either didn’t exist anymore or couldn’t be classified using the pictures. Some experts thought they could make out paws, others hooves; still more saw horns rather than ears. The geochemists and archeologists went digging.
They found eight birds of different species, their tiny skeletons fully accounted for. Each was buried on its back, wings splayed open to the sky. Long stripes of linen fabric were wrapped from one wing tip to the other, mummifying the remains.
We were there, this time on lawn chairs we’d dragged up to the string and stakes demarcating the excavation. Sweat streaked Freckles’s forehead as she blinked dirt away, her arm shaking as she uncovered the first bird in its burial shroud. The birds were buried at quarter segments around the rock, two in each grave. Eventually someone observed that their wings were oriented pointing north, south, east, and west. Each tiny bone of the skeletons was marked. Scratched in a series of designs. Tests were done in laboratories and bone-dating specialists decided that the birds hadn’t been buried at the same time but at different points over hundreds of years.