First We Were IV Read online

  She was dead. Not bleeding. Not moving. No blood that I could see on the rock.

  “Oh my God,” Viv whispered. I hadn’t heard her crawl up. She stood with the back of a hand to her mouth, the other clutched her stomach. She lurched to the side and dry heaved.

  I returned to the girl. Not a woman. Not old enough. But older than me. She wore a real bra, not a tiny one with padding like I did. Her breasts were like hills as she lay on her back. Death made her look caught, trapped. I wanted to swat the flies from her brown hair. Knock the rocks and her wings away. Help her up so she could run.

  My stomach churned, tears stung, arms lost feeling at my sides. She was not so different from me and Viv. Except she had wings.

  The vulture had swallowed by then and it cawed shrilly. Its head bowed for another bite. I rushed forward, shouting. It hobbled to the edge of the rock, faking indifference, but kept one gleaming eye my way.

  I was directly over her. Gravel decorated one side of her face. Her knees were dirty and cut. The single white sneaker she wore was stained, the rubber sole partially detached and wilting from her foot.

  “What happened to her?” Viv whispered.

  “A nightmare,” I said.

  “Why is her shirt open like that?”

  “Like wings,” I said and then shook my head.

  We called 9-1-1 before Graham hiked up, the watermelon braced on his shoulder. Then we called my house, where my dad answered, and he called Mom because she wasn’t home. Viv’s dad was away on business and we left her mom for last because she was in recovery after surgery to remove a tumor from her chest a few weeks earlier. Viv and I sat in the dirt, waiting for the grown-ups. Graham stood by the girl on the rock, keeping the vulture at bay.

  The rest of that afternoon was superimposed horror on our familiar kingdom. Where we played and pretended and dreamed and dared. Viv had to wait inside with her mom for the police because Ina had buckled against an apple tree, too weak from surgery. Dad steadied Ina and walked them back through the orchard. I sat with Graham and the watermelon as the EMTs and firemen checked the girl. I knew she couldn’t be saved. My legs stopped being legs. Graham kept muttering stuff like, How could our rock be involved in this? We’d just been there two Saturdays before. Sleeping bags. Flashlights. Liter of root beer over ice cream in Ina’s giant lobster pot. The rock was just an extension of the orchard and the orchard an extension of our barn. Ours.

  Police cruisers parked along the weed-dotted access road connecting the street with the orchard. A few neighbors hiked up to watch. A boy our age came the nearest and froze, a scarecrow in between trees. I watched him pull a notebook from his back pocket and take notes. Graham walked in his direction. My mom had arrived by then; Dad had returned from helping Ina.

  My parents told me to pay attention to the plainclothes officer talking to me. He asked if I recognized the girl, and suddenly I wasn’t sure. “Maybe,” I said.

  I closed my eyes and saw my face instead of hers. The officer asked if I could take another look. It was important. I wanted to give her a name. Help her. My parents and the officer crawled back up the rock with me.

  She was a stranger. The wind became a dusty, battering force, snatching sheets of paper from a clipboard, skimming them across the dirt until they netted in the weeds. Graham was alone with the melon. The new boy and his notebook were gone.

  As my parents guided me away, I turned to glimpse the girl’s face between the officer’s legs.

  “She’s like me,” I said to my mom. A girl.

  It was the officer who replied. “Nah, hon, nothing like you, just a runaway asking for it.” He licked his thumb and brushed away a fleck of dirt on his otherwise shiny boots. “These girls leave their nothing towns and head west or south to Los Angeles and they end up hitchhiking on the interstate. Get into the wrong truck. Get hooked up with the wrong people. Drugs—” Mom’s hands pressed over my ears. Too late.

  When we were home Mom made chai and put my iPod on in my bedroom. Dad brought out an old nightlight that projected stars on the ceiling; its white constellations hardly registered in the summer evening light. A tear leaked from his eye when he kissed me on the forehead. After they left me, I sat in my desk chair at my window staring out at the gray ocean. Nah, hon, she’s nothing like you, just a runaway. I couldn’t get the officer’s voice out of my head. She was a girl. Untied sneaker. Temporary tattoo of a heart on her ankle that had faded with washing. Ordinary. I was ordinary. How had she asked to be hurt?

  She looked like one of the girls who were sometimes on the beach. Viv and I had seen them once or twice. Viv had radar for girls just above high school age. Free girls. Those who didn’t live here. Dramatic lives full of shrieking and chasing one another around their circle and falling into the laps of boys with them. Viv tore a slit up her Free People dress after we watched them. Stretched the neckline so it hung off her shoulders. For a while she talked about hanging out with them, in the same dreamy tone she used when speaking about Luke McHale. She heard from a classmate, who heard from their older sister, who bought pot from a girl on the beach once, that there were teenagers who came to Seven Hills for its fabled beach and waves. Word had spread that you could camp at night in the Ghost Tunnel, officially the Golden Hills Tunnel, that there were plenty of orchards to steal fruit from, and that the police wouldn’t bother you unless you drew too much attention.

  I wondered then, in my room, after finding the girl’s body, was she one of those surfing-by-day-and-camping-by-night-in-the-tunnel girls?

  Neighbors gathered on the Marlos’ front lawn the next day. Viv tried to eavesdrop from the porch swing. They shooed her away before she learned anything useful. But she could tell the adults had hunches.

  That same day, a woman I recognized only from seeing her on parade floats visited us. Dad introduced her as Mayor Carver. Mom said they needed to have a grown-up talk with me. The woman started out nice. So sorry you had such a scare. Her tone grew accusatory as she warned me not to share details of the incident with anyone but my parents. You don’t want to scare people more than they already are, do you? I didn’t think so. Then you shouldn’t mention how she looked. No need to tell anyone about the T-shirt and the rocks and all that nonsense. I didn’t answer.

  On the third day after, Viv, Graham, and I were in the barn. I was sprawled on the floor, back of my skull on the flat of a raised nailhead protruding from a plank. It hurt, but I was the kind of bored that makes you pick a scab, that used to make Graham and me dare each other to reach into a snake hole. Viv was tossing chocolate-covered raisins at the book in Graham’s hands, and he was complaining that I’d given up on the true crime paperback we were three-quarters of the way through, each taking our turn with a chapter, when there was a knock on the slider. I sat up too fast. Amid the stars firing off, the strange boy with the notebook waved through the glass. There was a rush of relief, like I’d been raw and itchy waiting for him to show up already, and once he had I could be normal again.

  Harry’s family had moved into the ranch house up the street, the one the grown-ups called the rental. Harry’s dad was trying to resuscitate its patchy lawn; his mom was giving the shutters a fresh coat of paint. Harry came searching through the apple orchard like we’d drawn him in as the sirens had three days before. It seemed close to magic to me. Really, Graham had hung out with Harry the day before and invited him to find us in the barn the next afternoon.

  It was obvious that our threesome had been inadequate once he was with us. He plopped down on a beanbag chair and showed us his notebook, full of observations from the few days he’d lived in Seven Hills. He’d noticed things from when I found the dead girl that I hadn’t. Like that an officer started taking pictures of Graham’s watermelon in the dirt like it was a part of the investigation. And that a woman who had a dog wearing a sweater stood chatting with the police. Mayor Carver, Graham informed us. Harry was born to be a journalist.

  Before I realized it, I admitted that I’d been dre
aming about the dead girl. Graham admitted he’d been late with the watermelon because Stepdad Number Three refused to give him a ride; Graham hoped his mother would divorce him soon. Harry had a way of getting you to say what you were dying to, just by being a good listener.

  Viv, gnawing on her nails, stayed quiet and eyed Harry. He tossed one of her chocolate-covered raisins into the air; her caution waned as one after another pinged off his teeth. He was terrible at catching them, but his eyes shone as he kept trying. He was nothing like the boys at school with their easily shattered egos, boys who lashed out if you laughed at them. Eventually Viv blurted, “You didn’t see me at the rock when we found the girl because I had to go in the house and wait for the police with my mom. She has cancer. It means she gets tired really easily. But I was there.”

  Harry gave a solemn nod, seeming to understand that even in this awful thing, no one wanted to feel left out.

  How didn’t the three of us combust without Harry?

  In the middle of all the intrigue, we became four.

  Within the week, Viv’s dad found tracks circling the ancient rock and leading through the orchard. They were slots made by something between a paw and a hoof. The plainclothes officer snapped pictures. He asked if we’d seen signs of the girl squatting in the barn or camping in the orchard. Did food disappear or sleeping bags vanish? Had we ever found the remains of candle wax on the rock? Bizarre symbols drawn on top? Which didn’t make sense because in the next breath he told us she wasn’t killed here in Seven Hills, but elsewhere, where a bad person hurt her and tried to get away with it by dumping her in our nice little town.

  Regardless, I thought of her as Goldilocks.

  Picture it. Charming seaside town. Seven golden foothills forming a wall around it. Past the threshold of sight and sound from any neighboring cities. More pastel beach cruisers than cars. Rooftop decks with barbecues and chairs facing the sea. A scatter of sand across sidewalks, blown in by the wind. And kids of the summer, barefoot, freckled, and sunburned. In Seven Hills, windows and doors stayed open to catch the salt spray off the Pacific.

  A body shows up. A girl. About nineteen. Blunt force trauma. Strangulation. No sign of sexual assault. At first the police hide that she was staged. And then a photo of the body is sent anonymously to the Seven Hills newspaper, and the whole town learns that she was killed and staged to have wings, on an ancient meteorite, its own history involving birds, buried in the identical position. The mysteries pile up. No one does a thing.

  The police never talked to us about her again. School started. Viv and Graham had also received visits from the mayor, asking them not to scare our peers with what we saw, like Goldilocks had been a particularly grisly nightmare, better forgotten in the light of day.

  From a classmate whose parent wasn’t careful about being overheard, we gathered that Goldilocks remained a mystery. During the first week of classes he reported to a grave audience of middle schoolers in the cafeteria. The police believed one of two things had transpired: Either the runaway was dumped by someone who didn’t live in Seven Hills or the whole killing had been committed by her band of runaway teens. They’d heard about the meteorite and traveled to worship an alien-devil on its altar. They were troubled youths—drinking, drugs, sex—and one of them ended up sacrificed on the rock. Our classmate reported his mother saying Surprise, surprise. Girls like that always think it’s a game until it isn’t.

  Whichever explanation, the police said whoever committed the crime had moved on. Fled. Would never risk returning. Had never meant any harm to Seven Hills or its residents. Nothing to fear. You’re safe here.

  All those strange pieces were laid out, begging us to pick them up. We wouldn’t until five years later, after the night of the slaughterhouse. When we did, rather than setting out to solve Goldilocks’s killing, I’m ashamed to say our motivations were closer to this:

  I wanted to play a game.

  Boredom was always chasing us.

  I dreaded saying good-bye.

  Revenge seemed like a bright idea.

  4

  The slaughterhouse’s silhouette was black and flat against the sky. It was the first Friday night of September, a little past ten, the heat stubborn, stuck like the backs of my thighs on the vinyl upholstery. Radio stations turned to static in Seven Hills, but even if they hadn’t, Harry’s speakers didn’t work. The air conditioner blasted lukewarm air. We would have been more comfortable in my hatchback, or Graham’s sedan, and especially in Viv’s roomy SUV. But Harry was the only one of us who’d bought his car with money he earned; what kind of jerks would we have been to refuse riding in the spoils of all that hard work?

  Harry’s car dipped and jumped over the road’s potholes. He drove so slowly that there wouldn’t have been a breeze with the windows down, but plenty of mosquitoes. Viv periodically slapped her neck until, with an elongated sigh, she shook her hair out of its braid and hid under it.

  “If one more bloodsucker bites me, I’m going to start biting back,” she said. She didn’t stutter on S words anymore, just overenunciated them in a way that made me think she was remembering having been teased.

  “I’d like to see that,” Graham said.

  Viv twisted, snapped her jaw, and smiled. “I bet you would.”

  She flipped the front vents closed. “I think they’re crawling through the air conditioner.”

  Harry made a noise like a snort and flicked it off.

  We were ten miles outside of town, navigating a one-lane road through a ravine, headed to its only destination, the slaughterhouse. It was easy to forget this place existed. Who’d want to remember? A hundred or so seniors every September, that’s who. And the four of us, along with our peers, as the timeworn tradition of Senior Class Slumber Fest dictated, were about to spend the night there. Basically we were planning to slumber it in hell.

  Graham lifted his flask. His mother had arrived home the day before after a summer-long absence. His head touched the car ceiling each time we hit a bump and his strawberryblond hair stood with static electricity. “This one’s for Izzie. The only girl who’s seen me naked and managed to resist jumping me.”

  I tucked my legs beneath me and took a nip of the spicy liquor. “I don’t think you being six, scarfing too many cookies, puking on your pants, and needing to take a bath at my house counts as me seeing you naked.” Viv laughed so suddenly she snorted. She covered her face. Her eyes smiled out between her fingers; there were tiny glow-in-the-dark skulls painted on her nails.

  “How were you not scarred for life?” Harry asked.

  Viv giggled. “Who says she’s not?”

  Harry mimed tipping a hat to her.

  I threw my arm to my forehead. “It’s only because I’ve seen hundreds of guys naked that I’m able to block out the trauma of Graham.”

  Graham pinched just above my kneecap, a spot that made me laugh abruptly and shove him away. “More like my naked glory ruined you for all others.” He took the flask as he slouched back.

  Viv winked at me and said, “I think Graham’s teensy-tiny little baby weenie is why Izzie won’t go farther than kissing.”

  “She’s right,” I whispered, hands over my heart, “I imagine it in place of the boy’s face. It’s why I can’t stomach baby carrots.”

  Harry groaned. “Now I need a lobotomy.”

  Viv flipped the mirror down. “Baby carrots are an abomination of nature,” she stated without a trace of humor curling her mouth’s reflection.

  Graham tapped his window. “Why are there no other cars on the road?”

  “I told you, you made us late,” Viv huffed. “Every senior is going to beat us and they’ll take all the good spots.” Our headlights illuminated long-abandoned farming equipment scattered in the barren landscape.

  Harry drummed his palms on the steering wheel. “How do you know a good sleeping spot from a bad one in a slaughterhouse? Don’t they all inherently suck?” He raked his hand through his brown hair, leaving the sides verti
cal banks. Viv laced her fingers watching him, trying to resist licking her palm and styling his hair. “And there will be at least three missing seniors other than us. The Animal Rights Club isn’t coming,” Harry directed to Viv, “out of protest.”

  “Fascist bullies.” Her chin jutted out. Viv was club treasurer sophomore year. She’d had three rescue bunnies, her parents had trained assistance dogs, and she’d teared up during those animal rescue commercials with puppies behind bars. One unlucky day she was spotted in leather riding boots; Viv was shunned.

  Graham perked up. “Did I tell you about that lecture in my Ethics and Activism course on how the slaughterhouse caught fire?” Graham loved to audit classes in his mom’s department at the University of Santa Barbara.

  “Some disgusting smoker dropped their cigarette and burned the place down,” Viv replied absently, riffling through her purse. She craned around and held a chandelier earring to her earlobe, sending a whiff of honeysuckle perfume into the rear seat.

  “Space empress chic,” I declared. The pressure I felt when Viv asked for my opinion on accessories and clothes led to theatrical embellishments. Better to overdo it than disappoint.

  Graham pitched forward for our attention, one finger raised. “But it wasn’t an accident.”

  The car shuddered over a metal grate. “What happened?” Harry asked.

  Graham settled forward, elbows on his knees, hands tented under his chin. “Sixty years ago”—he got his eager-to-teach expression—“there weren’t laws about the treatment of animals. None of this free-range, veggie-fed yoga meat. They would just pack the cows onto the killing floor, gas them, and butcher them.”

  Viv crawled up on her knees, propped her chin on the seatback, and glared. “If this is just meant to frighten me, I’m going to tell Jess Clarkson about your baby carrot.”