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.
Freckles and her team had plans for more excavating until Viv’s parents were fed up and ordered everyone to clear out. Ina and Scott Marlo didn’t want scientists mucking about their orchard during harvest. They wanted to make their own hard apple cider. The rock would just have to remain a mysterious space rock. Those four-legged animals would have to stay unidentified. The birds would be studied elsewhere, packed up and carried away.
For weeks it was all we talked about. At first it was the birds that captured my imagination. Birds had a little magic in them—they had wings and flew. Nightly at dinner I’d ask my parents about them. Why were they buried? How did they die? Who buried them? Nothing they said could appease my curiosity. I re-created the birds, wings spread, in my yogurt parfaits, on the beach, in pictures I snapped of Graham and Viv staged on the ground. Finally, when Dad found me doodling birds on his and mom’s architectural plans, they intervened. Mom ordered me a ready-made rock collection to try to encourage an interest in geology, but it was the telescope Dad set up on the veranda that hooked me enough to move on from the birds.
Viv’s parents furnished their backyard barn, wrapped a red ribbon around it, and gave it to Viv as a play fort, hoping to distract her from the meteorite. To draw our play in closer to home. But the mystery of the space rock kept us buzzing. How were there horned four-legged beasts that scientists didn’t know about? Who were the people pictured on the rock? Were they predators or prey?
Graham and I filled his wagon with library books—fantasy and science fiction paperbacks from the library’s rummage sale, archeology texts from its shelves, a few we stored under our beds about human sacrifice and ancient burial customs. We looked for answers in their pages. We pored over bad illustrations of Papua New Guinean cannibals. I made my mom print out every news article she could find about the comet probe Philae that had been launched a few years earlier and wouldn’t land on its comet for six more.
We searched for answers. But the threads we followed led us farther from the space rock. The ploy of the barn worked. It was better than a fort. We grew preoccupied with other play. Our universe returned to revolving around what it had before the drawings were discovered: us.
From the time I was four years old, my universe had been steadily expanding.
I started as one.
First day of preschool: I remember the odor of crayons, the grainy cracker crumbs in my pockets digging under my nails, and how much I wanted to talk to the other kids, all sparkly in their first-day bests, but I kept chewing my tongue because I had nothing good to say.
Snack time rolled around and the teacher handed out sweets. I was cross-legged and bouncing over cookies. We sat in a misshapen circle, and I watched the boy across from me take a cookie out of a bigger boy’s lap, smile at me with his mouth full of stolen chocolate chip cookies, chew, swallow, and then deny it emphatically when the victim tattled. Graham was halfway to the time-out corner when I piped up.
I had no idea that Graham was acting out because his dad had moved to Chicago. Graham was the most interesting kid in the circle and he was being sent away. I’m not proud of lying, although I’m also not sorry. Graham and I were awarded an extra cookie each; one for the wrongly accused and one for the honest witness. Our bond was instantaneous. I’d broken the rules for him; I’d saved him from the solitary horror of time-out.
I was one and then: Graham. We were two.
Viv came next. She lived down the street. I considered the orchard behind her house an enchanted forest and she was the enigmatic creature who ruled it. I’d spot her rocking on the porch swing with her mom. Dad would stop the wagon or call for me to slow on my bike. He and Ina knew each other from growing up in Seven Hills. Mom didn’t seem to know Ina, although eventually I realized there was another reason Mom ignored the Marlos. I couldn’t ignore Viv. She was a sliver of a figure, imposing because of how decorated she was: swallowed by voiles, feathers fanning her hair, her mom’s heels swimming on her feet, lipstick hearts on her cheeks. The brave survivor of a dress-up chest explosion.
First day of first grade, Viv wore a silk dress with a train that dragged behind her and carried a grown lady’s handbag. Kids circled Viv, sang little old woman at her. The next day they made fun of the way she stuttered words beginning with S—a problem she went to speech therapy for. As that got stale, kids said she wasn’t in speech but in resource, which was code for her having a learning disability. The whole thing spiraled when they called her retarded.
Graham and I found her crying at the sunlit reach of the tetherball courts. She was curled on her side, velvet cape sticking to her sweaty neck, cheek on the warm asphalt, mouth open as she sobbed.
Graham and I were in the middle of one long game of chicken. It was fun to see how deep we’d walk into the hills before turning and fleeing. How long we could stand the dark of Graham’s creaky, musty attic before the ghosts scratched our arms. Other kids were boring. Our minds sparked. Our hands danced. But Viv wasn’t boring. Like us, she was engaged in her own battle of will.
She kept wearing costumes and vintage women’s apparel even though she was picked on. She didn’t stop laughing in her raspy way even when kids imitated her meanly. The feathers and tassels were her armor.
Graham and I had been two. With Viv: three. We had a whole apple orchard as our kingdom. We didn’t need to fit in with the others. Three was plenty.
The business with the rock when were eight was a hiccup; an anomaly that the external world became a part of our adventures. It was a temporary stretch of our universe. But the universe snapped back, shrank to accommodate only us.
Until Harry’s family moved to Seven Hills when we were twelve.
Until the girl was found on the rock.