“Don’t lump me in with Graham’s perviness,” Harry told her.
Viv patted him on the shoulder and then said to Graham, “Harry’s basically a monk compared to you.” Graham snorted. “He is. We didn’t even know he was going out with that shy little what’s-her-name from work until he broke it off.”
A stich formed between Viv’s brows as she stared into the dark of the rear window. No one was certain where to go from there. Viv had been furious that Harry had developed a crush on a girl, taken her out twice, and kept it from us. Harry insisted it wasn’t about having a secret. It didn’t work out with her anyway, although he’d never said why.
“May I please get back to the story?” Graham asked, exasperated. “I’m not screwing with you guys. They gassed the cows, but the gas wasn’t fatal. They were paralyzed by it and couldn’t struggle when hoisted up on big hooks to be butchered.” He dragged his finger across his neck. “They would bleed out, mooing.”
At a swell in the road, we had an unobstructed view of the slaughterhouse. Windowless, anonymous, with the atmosphere of all creepy abandoned buildings. Cars were parked haphazardly around it. Our classmates were a shadowy mass at the entrance. My hands were shaking and I slipped one in Graham’s. His fingers folded over mine.
He continued, “This one employee couldn’t stand to see the cows suffer anymore. He planned to burn the place down, stop all the carnage. He thought that once the flames caught, the cows would stampede to freedom and the slaughterhouse would close. So he set the fire and the alarm sounded, but rather than open the gates for the cows to run, someone hit the gas button and all the cows were paralyzed.” Graham paused. Viv’s fingers on the headrest were dappled red and white. “They burned alive.”
“Crap,” Harry said.
Graham spoke, waving our joined hands. “But the fire was extinguished before it finished the cows off. They were burned. Thrashing and beating their skeleton heads on the ground.”
“I’m going to vomit,” Viv said, rolling the window open. We got a strong, hot whiff of ash and death. After sixty years, how did the place still reek of decaying flesh? “This is why I’m a vegetarian,” she muttered, rolling the window back up.
We were quiet for a minute until Harry said, “Cheeseburgers smell much, much better.”
I laughed through my nose, failing to hold it in. Viv said, “You’re becoming as gross as Graham, Harry.”
“Really,” Graham said, “that’s the big insult all of a sudden? You’re as bad/vulgar/pervy/substitute-the-negative-adjective-of-your-choosing as Graham is?”
The car slowed as Harry searched for a parking spot. The smell was suffocating, all hot and heavy, inescapable. I bounced my heels in place and flapped the pages of a paperback I had pulled from my purse to give to Graham, but had forgotten about. I was snapping the cover open and closed when Graham pressed it shut.
Light from outside shone as a bar across his flinty irises. He wore wire-rimmed spectacles that would have appeared boring on a face less complicated than his. “There aren’t actually bovine corpses left in there, Izzie,” he told me softly.
“I know that.”
“Do you?” He tapped my bouncing knee. I dug my heels into the car’s floor.
“You have to read this one next.” I tossed the paperback to him. He turned it over to the front cover.
“If I’m lifting the moratorium on dystopian, you’re going to start reading detective novels again.”
“We’ll see.” I sounded wrong, nervous. He cocked his head. Slumber Fest was not my scene any more than it was Graham’s. Or Harry’s. We didn’t go to our classmates’ house parties or beach ditch days, half because we weren’t invited and half because we had more fun in the barn. We could be ourselves there.
For some reason I wanted to convince Graham I wasn’t as miserable as he suspected. “There’ll be Jell-O shots—I’ve never had one. And it won’t kill us to mingle with the kids we’ve gone to school with forever.”
“Uh-uh,” Harry said. “I’m here on official news blog business. Covering the story. No mingling.”
“Slumber Fest is an adventure,” I said emphatically.
“What I don’t get is why Slumber Fest is at a slaughterhouse,” Harry said.
“Because that’s the tradition. It’s . . . it’s an institution,” Viv told him, her voice high and adamant.
He gave her a look like, But why?
“I don’t think it’s because our classmates like the idea of mass cow homicide,” Graham said. “The slaughterhouse bit of Slumber Fest is irrelevant. The chills are the point. Chills and thrills are like a permission slip to do whatever or whoever you want.” Graham crinkled the corners of his eyes at me.
“There are so many better places,” Harry said. “Like down on the beach.”
“Or the picnic spots on the hills,” I said.
“Or the lighthouse in Berrington,” he answered.
“Or the old pier’s carousel house. Or Ghost Tunnel,” I said.
“Oh, there’ll be ghosts. The spirits of massacred cows will haunt all the meat eaters,” Viv boomed, and cracked up.
I laughed too, though nervously. I wasn’t all hyped up on adrenaline because of chills and thrills. It was our senior year. Soon we’d scatter. We wouldn’t live on the same street. The four of us wouldn’t go to the same college, and even if we were no farther than me at UCLA, Graham in Santa Barbara, Viv in San Francisco, and Harry who knows where because he needed financial aid, it wouldn’t be the same. Siblings move but stay close because of blood and bossy parents. I wanted a force as strong for us. I wanted something gigantic to happen that would make geography irrelevant.
There was a sense of shared anticipation among our classmates at the slaughterhouse’s entrance, like in class right before summer break. It made me jump a little, even though circles of conversation didn’t open up as we squeezed in. The artsy alternative kids, poetry girls, and the Brass Bandits shared space. The lacrosse players, arms bracing coolers, had declared temporary peace with the soccer team, and they were knocking around and feinting punches.
Viv’s arm tightened around mine. The year before, three senior girls had started the night single and ended up coupled. Viv didn’t have a specific boy in mind—Luke McHale was a hundred crushes in the past. She wanted a tall, creative, anything-but-blond guy. The slaughterhouse was where she planned to make it happen.
Right then I followed Viv’s narrowing eyes. Her last and most important criteria for a boy: They couldn’t be tainted by her nemesis, Amanda Schultz. Amanda was flanked by her two best friends, the girls Graham called imminent sorority girls, Rachel Wyndamer and Jess Clarkson. To Graham, the title wasn’t a judgment but a fact.
Viv’s features pinched as she stared at Amanda and her plush pink beanie with rabbit ears. Viv nudged my side for me to look. “I think Amanda’s stuffed animal hats begin as actual stuffed animals she steals from little kids.”
“But she only steals them from kids with cancer,” Graham chimed in, propping an elbow on my shoulder.
“No, not kids, babies,” Harry said.