“No, Spectasaurus,” Conner said, shaking his head with an impatient sigh. “Only Rags can help.”
“Conner, there’s a trash can right there,” I said.
Viv had curled up, her knees to her chest, her vintage sunglasses hiding her eyes.
Harry took his time wrapping up the leftover half of his turkey sandwich in its aluminum foil. He placed it neatly on his paper lunch bag and pushed up from the ground. “I’ll help you out, Con,” he said, nobody home behind his eyes. “No worries.” My eyes stung watching his long, bouncy gait to the trash can with Conner’s soiled lunch tray. Harry took his time scraping off all the bits of food before placing the plastic neatly on the designated rack.
Conner watched Harry, barely reacting. “Good man,” he told him as Harry rejoined us. “Thanks for your help.” He nodded, a customer thanking staff who’d waited on him. “I can always count on you, Rags.”
No one watched Conner go.
Viv sniffed loudly behind her sunglasses.
My nails bit into my palms.
Graham rested his elbows on his knees and after a heavy silence said, “I think it’s time we invent our secret society.”
7
Viv was on her knees, elbows on my hatchback’s center console, chin cradled in her hand, fingers thrumming the corner of her mouth. “What kind of secrets could the boys have?” she asked. The rear car doors were ajar and a gentle fall breeze crept in. I nuzzled my chin into the chunky collar of my sweater.
“Video game addictions. Porn on their laptops,” I mumbled through the cotton weave. Her nostrils flared.
It was the second Sunday since the slaughterhouse, and we’d been busy creating our secret society. We started where good students do: with research. Graham utilized the university library. Harry, Viv, and I scoured the Internet.
It wasn’t hard to uncover articles about groups like the Bavarian Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Freemasons, and the Bohemian Club. Even some of the habits of the groups rumored to be the most secretive could be uncovered. For example, membership to the Seven Society at the University of Virginia was so secretive that members were only indicated when they died, with a wreath of black magnolias in the shape of a number seven on their graves.
Telling fact from fiction in the accounts wasn’t necessary. Our search was for inspiration for our very own superclandestine group of pranksters. We didn’t care if what inspired us was conjecture or reality.
As far as we could tell, secret societies had a few things in common. The first was secrecy. Those who belonged adhered to a code of silence. The members usually worked in secret to achieve a hidden agenda, anything from drunken debauchery to world domination. Most secret groups had rules about who got to boss who around, who made decisions, how membership and recruitment worked. And many of those groups had rituals and ceremonies that made them unique, terrifying, bizarre.
Our Order’s structure would be democratic. There would be three rules: never tell, never lie, and always love each other and be friends. Our mission was mischief in Seven Hills.
The Order began as something out of my head, yes, but each of us gave it its shape.
Viv decided we needed a ceremonial holiday. Inspired by the crescent moon on the idol, she consulted a lunar calendar. It was fate: a blood moon in two Saturdays.
I added the secret-telling ritual. I knew almost everything about the others. I reasoned that learning more would make us even closer. I recalled the stories my mom had told about the midnight initiations of her girls’ school. They crowded around the lake and sent little slips of paper with their most guarded secrets onto boats sailed across the water’s glassy surface. They were lit on fire; the paper burned; the secrets were released into the night. Rather than send our secrets up into the universe, we’d trust them with one another. It would be declaring I trust you three more than anyone.
Graham and Harry liked reading about revolutions and they said we should call our pranks rebellions. And they were rebellions against everyone who wasn’t us, so we did.
There, on that first night we were out as the Order of IV, under the cloak of darkness, I felt rebellious. The car rocked and the boys finally returned from scouting our school parking lot. Graham’s head bobbed between Viv and me. A black beanie cut off his eyebrows.
“No cars in the lot. Good to go,” he said.
We drove down the lane used for the campus security golf cart squad and circled to the auditorium. The cart port was the best place to conceal my hatchback while we snuck through the halls. The clock tower a few blocks away in the knoll chimed to twelve as we slipped from the car and kept to the shadows along the rectangular building.
We were two blocks from the ocean, and waves beating the shore sounded like a million distantly whispered secrets.
The secret-telling ritual had been easy. Inventing our first rebellion, not as much. Sedition wasn’t boiling our blood—not then. When we tried to brainstorm, we drew blanks. Viv succumbed to giggles over our dumb silence. She rolled off her beanbag chair and landed unceremoniously in the tangle of her skirt, the fabric riding high on her tan thighs. I pounded my fist into the couch and yelled that she was a flipping genius.
Viv had been written up at least ten times for what our all-male school administration called indecent dress. Seven Hills High’s dress code only included policies for skirt length, heel height, and bra straps. It was sexist, but the code was also unevenly enforced. If you only got written up three out of ten times for letting your hot-pink bra straps show, the odds were in your favor. Don’t be a killjoy, let it go, girls would grumble if you complained. What if protesting the rule led to a crackdown on platform wedges? Everyone kept their mouths shut. I was done with that.
The Order of IV made our voices louder.
The four of us stalked into the one hundreds hall, beyond the courtyard and its amphitheater. We’d start there and plaster our flyers every few lockers up the halls. Graham and Harry tailed Vice Principal Bedford during lunch on Thursday and Friday. It could have taken weeks to get the evidence we needed; instead it took one and a half lunch periods. Harry snapped a photo of Bedford, twelve-inch ruler in hand, leering after two girls passing him in the corridor. His eyes were trained on their butts; then Graham, in a feat of bravery I was sure he’d exaggerated, slid down the hall on his knees, got right behind Bedford, and took a picture as he measured one of the girl’s sundresses.
I smacked the first flyer against a locker and Viv tore off a piece of tape with her teeth. She bared them and growled. I smothered a laugh, tasting latex dust from the gloves we wore. No fingerprints. No security cameras. No staff scheduled at night since Harry’s dad was jumped on campus a year before.
“I cannot wait to see Vice Principal Pervert’s face,” Viv declared. “ ‘There are better things to measure. Stop ogling your students,’ ” she read the caption. Each flyer was signed IV. Four seasons, four directions, four chambers of a heart, four elements, and four of us. Before we’d left for campus, Viv gave us Sharpie tattoos of the symbol on our wrists, a IV, the official sign of our membership. I felt that IV tingling on my skin. Our secret order, its rebellion, was in my blood.
The prank made me feel more exotic than I was used to feeling. Our perfect universe had expanded from the barn and the orchard to include our school, a place where I mostly flew under the radar and focused on studying until the moment the day’s final bell rang and we could leave for our real lives. As we used up all five hundred flyers, our magic rubbed off in those halls and I was actually looking forward to returning to class on Monday.