Graham looked up, surprised, and then smiled showing his teeth, eyes twinkling at being pegged. He was four and stealing cookies again. “Sure, I wish she’d brought me to Myanmar or that I’d at least met the old dude before she married him. He teaches at NYU. He won’t even show his face until Thanksgiving.”
“Then nothing’s changed,” I said. My eyes stuck to the idol. It was carved from pale yellow wood, smooth and glossy. Graham had stomped into the barn when he and Harry arrived to pick us up for the slaughterhouse, tossed the figurine on the couch, and barked, “Don’t ask.” But it was all he went on about after we returned. “Where’d she find it?” I wondered.
Graham jumped up and knelt on the faded Turkish rug, instantly cheerier that there was a story to be told. He propped the doll so it was standing on my knees. The idol was featherlight. Harry twisted for a look and Viv sat, one pointy shoulder poking out of the netting of her swimsuit cover-up. We huddled around the idol like it was special, as though deep down we knew that stupid, nothing doll was a spark to our kindling. I brushed a finger along the lines of its crescent moon and the curve of its robe. A woman. Indeterminable age. Hawkish features. A charge ran into my fingertip when I touched her cheek and I snatched my hand back.
“My mother found it in the market of a village where she was doing research.” Graham’s mom studied near-extinct cultures all over the world. “The village is on the Irrawaddy Delta. She’s the idol of a cult that worships her. An ancient cult. They make tea from a special plant they find in the jungle to have ritual visions.”
“To get high?” Viv asked.
Graham’s dimples deepened. “More of an altered state of consciousness to communicate with her.” He thumbed the idol’s head. “They make blood sacrifices, too.”
Graham’s whirling thoughts showed through his gunmetal eyes, like waves through a spyglass. I smiled. “Is any of that not bullshit?”
He smirked. “Could be. It’s stuff I’ve read. All I know for sure is that my mom found her at a market and she has no idea where the idol originated from.”
Viv stuck her tongue out at Graham. I didn’t mind that he loved to slip lies in with the truth. The opposite. I was good at spotting them. I loved his stories. “She’s a mystery,” I said.
Viv stroked the idol’s face. “She’s pretty. Can I have her?” Graham tipped his head and handed it off. He forgot about the figurine as soon as it left his hands. I did too, for a while. Viv tossed it aside, wanting it a little less now that it was hers.
“Are we swimming or what?” Harry asked, heaving himself up with a grunt. He and Graham stood side by side, same tall height, one caramel and one pale sugar. I felt a tiny nibble of fear. I pulled my Polaroid camera out from under a throw cushion and snapped a photo. I fanned my face with the picture, waiting for their figures to appear. They were so beautiful. Next year, other girls would see it. College girls would appreciate Graham’s sophisticated, brainy confidence. They’d flock toward Harry’s thoughtful sincerity. They’d date the kind of girls who drink espresso, smoke hookahs, and backpack across Europe. How could I compete? Graham and Harry’s memories of their childhood buddy Izzie would be replaced with shiny new ones of reaching up shirts in dorm rooms.
Viv was destined for a million boyfriends. She’d make friends who knew what to look for at vintage clothing shops and who knew what to say about new Broadway plays. In college, there’d be snapshots of roommates and Cancún spring breaks on her walls, rather than Polaroids taken by me. Would we all even visit Seven Hills at the same time once we were gone? Graham used to say that in a zombie apocalypse, this town was exactly the kind of remote that keeps you alive. They’d be done with this place.
I needed to find a way to seal us all together. For good. In more than a picture.
“I’ve been thinking about a way we can make this year special,” I began, picking at the edge of a temporary tattoo I had on my thigh. A heart.
Graham turned to listen, halfway to the door leading out to Viv’s mom’s raised planter boxes.
“There’s a senior prank on the principal after homecoming,” Viv replied brightly. She thumbed the heart tattoo, identical to mine, on her wrist. I smoothed the edges of its twin. I wanted it to last. We’d bought them together on our last trip to the mall.
“We should do something just for us,” I said. “Not a prank voted on by student gov. That’s weak.”
Viv said, “Senior prank night is legendary.”
“It’s not,” I blurted. She stopped tracing her heart tattoo. “Vivy, we’re not going to be reminiscing about driving a golf cart into the pool or putting a pig in the principal’s office in forty years.” I looked to Harry and Graham. “We’ll laugh about it for a night and then poof, we’ll forget. This year is all we have.” The words were final. I sunk up to my shoulders in the sofa cushions.
There was a shuddering skeleton of thought in my head and all it needed was vital tissue so it could dance. A sharp bit was poking me in the kidney; I tugged out the wooden statue Viv had flung aside.
I turned it over in my hands. There were tiny starbursts engraved in the fabric of the woman’s robe, her eyelids were closed, and her fingers were steepled. There was a quality to her that reminded me of those drawings we’d discovered on the ancient rock. The commonality: They made me think of invisible things. Of fear and love and belief. “I want us to have something that matters.” I was uncertain. Grasping. “Not matters to the world, but to us. I don’t want the world to know about it. And even if we haven’t talked for ten years—”
“That will never happen, Izzie,” Viv said fiercely. She stood.
“It will, Viv. It’s what happens. But not if we had more.”
“More?” she said with a scoff. “We are best friends. We are bonded. We spend every day together.”
“But we won’t see each other every day,” I said. “Not even once a week after this year.” I glanced at the idol—was she smiling? “What if we invented something? An event that was bigger than us. Something that would keep us together because we’d do things for it that no one else would know about.”
“You mean sex things?” Graham asked. His brow cocked and there was pink in his cheeks. He’d unbuttoned his shirt for a swim.
I frowned at the divot in his square chin. “Secret things.” The words tickled my tongue like a serpent’s hiss. Who didn’t want secrets? “Remember how our dares made it feel like we had our own world?” Where nothing could get to us, I almost added.
Up on the rock, I learned that wasn’t true.
Graham took his time answering. “Sure. When I wanted to escape from dinner with Stepdad Number Three, I switched my brain to thinking about beating you swimming to the sea lion rocks or down the dunes on cardboard.”
Viv was nodding. She’d been the frequent observer of our challenges. Harry’s eyes went back and forth between us. He’d missed our games. Most of our daring stopped with Goldilocks. “We should make up our own mischief rather than the unoriginal stunts the rest of our class is pulling,” Harry said.