Chapter Eleven: The Seven

[Trigger Warming: This chapter introduces characters who have experienced domestic abuse, some of the details of which are discussed. For a summary of the chapter that elides these details, CLICK HERE. Both the summary and the chapter touch upon the subject of suicide. There is no way to convey the plot without this information, but in the summary I have made the mention of it as brief and nonspecific as possible.]

They meet in the Garden. It’s the first time they are seeing one another in the flesh. They could be nervous, but none of them are. Because in all of all of their lives, little has ever felt as right as this does—this collective protest, this sacrifice that seems more like salvation. 

They found one another online. The girl who they call Red posted a manifesto of sorts on her blog—a real, old-fashioned blog, just a collection of thoughts on her WordPress .com, which almost no one knew existed. Almost no one followed her on TikTok either, but she uploaded a video there, a précis of the polemic, “Free Virginia Dare,” that, by some algorithmic magic—or maybe fate—made its way onto the For Yous of the other six, each in their disparate worlds, who got to talking in the comments section. 

The argument Red was making was: we have to stop using women as symbols. Virginia Dare was the perfect example. Who was she? Just a child. The first born to English parents in America, on August 18th, 1587—439 Augusts ago—right here on Roanoke Island where The Seven are about to assemble. 

Her grandfather, John White, had been dispatched to America by Sir Walter Raleigh, at the behest of Queen Elizabeth, to establish the first permanent English settlement there. Among the boatload of middle-class Londoners he brought with him was his pregnant daughter, Eleanor. A real sign of his misplaced faith in their mission, which we know today as the Lost Colony. 

Less than a month after their arrival, Eleanor gave birth to Virginia, and ten days later White set sail back to England for supplies. When he returned three years later, delayed on account of the Anglo-Spanish War, he found the colony was gone, completely vanished, leaving behind no evidence that could prove what had become of it. 

Had the settlers left Roanoke to live with the Croatoan Indians? Had they been slaughtered? Or taken prisoner? Was Virginia Dare yet living? 

No one then and no one since has found the answer to these questions. 

But, in the absence of fact, fantasy has flourished. She has been transformed—by authors, advertisers and activists—from the newborn we know she was into an Indian bride, into Pocahontas’ mother, into an alien abductee, into a vampire slayer, into a demon, into a witch, into a white doe. 

Often, she is associated with white, often made to symbolize purity and innocence, fresh hope and new beginnings. It’s all, always a marketing strategy. Brands have used her name to sell vanilla, wine and tobacco. White nationalists have suggested her birth legitimizes their claim to this continent. And feminists have invoked her name, too, promoting the Equal Rights Amendment as a way to “honor Virginia Dare.” 

One use is no better than another, Red argues in her essay. Cast her as the hero in your story, grant her the role of the strong female lead, you are still committing the fundamental sin of ignoring her reality to advance your own agenda. And if it seems like a victimless crime, when she is so long gone, let me assure you, it is not. In using her to serve your purposes, you normalize the practice of usurping women’s lives, of reducing them down to ideas or ideals at the expense of representing their totality. And, therefore, the blood of our oppression is on your hands. 

Red knows of what she speaks. Her name used to be Constance. She was raised in what its adherents called a commune, but in fact it was a cult—the Elysian Enclave. Supposed to be a heaven, in fact it was a hell. Preaching freedom, the Council—the patriarchs of the Founding Families—actually sought control, weaponizing the idea of virtue to keep their Daughters in line. 

That’s where their names came in. Harmony. Felicity. Honor. Grace. Names equating to expectations. Standards of behavior set not to foster gladness, but to bind them into service. “The flower opens to the sun and is blessed by its light and its nectar feeds the world.” So the teaching went. This was Nature’s Way! And woman’s way, like the flower’s, was to yield. They had been given life so that they might, in turn, give of that life, back to the Sacred Community. 

Accordingly, Red learned the many forms of care-taking: cooking, cleaning, darning, knitting, making candles and making soaps, babysitting. She learned to tend to the gardens and the chickens and the goats. And then, she learned to tend to the men. To kneel down and open her mouth, to lie back and open her legs. To be, ever and always, submissive and sweet. 

And when she did as she was told, they told her she was Good. 

But when, instead, she listened to her heart’s command, when she knelt and parted Mercy’s legs, then the Council called her Wicked. 

They did their best—or, worst—to shame her into the shape of a girl they desired. But Red was born to be a rebel. And she had tasted the truth, there between Mercy’s thighs, which no whip, no fist, no fucking, no exile to The Darkness, could erase from her mind. 

The knowledge lived within her, and grew into a righteous voice that one day, when Adam requested her companionship, issued its own command: “Go!” 

She fled the Enclave that night with nothing—without Mercy, who’d repented and declared Red had bewitched her. She set fire to every building on the land and she swore she would keep lighting fires everywhere she went, in the minds of all the women who had been instructed to comport, to comply; who had been told they should shrink themselves into the form of an ideal instead of expanding into the totality of their complexity. Which is to say: every woman. 

I single out Virginia Dare, she wrote in that fateful post to her Inflammatory Blog, because her example is so stark in its extremity. How much she has been made to mean corresponds directly with how little we know about her. And maybe this reveals a second truth: how unwilling we are to live with mystery. To let it be. But, there is no greater show of respect than to say, I do not know. Admit: she will always be an unanswered question. Like the universe. Like you. And so, when you learn to free Virginia Dare, you will also free yourself.

The girl who they call Orange saw Red’s TikTok when she was waiting, in the bathroom, for her boyfriend to chill out—or, better yet, pass out. He was drunk, again. He was screaming, again. He was calling her all the worst names, which she’d heard so many times before that, without quite noticing, she’d come to believe they were really hers. Bitch. Whore. Harpy. Cunt. Slut. Witch. Waste of my time. Between each one he slammed his fist against the door. Or he took whatever was ready at hand and hurled it across the room at something else. 

All of this was occurring for the umpteenth time. It was so routine, it was almost boring. Orange pulled out her phone and she didn’t, as she once had done to disastrous effect, text her best friend about Donny’s rage. She wasn’t allowed to text Tilly anymore. Or her mom. Or her sister. She didn’t even consider it. She just started scrolling, just to pass the time. And there was Red, outside, beside the statue where they are about to meet, wind whipping at her hair, riffling the microphone. She was too close to the camera, unpracticed in the art of social media presentation, but it all underscored the urgency, the sincerity of her message: “What they’ve done to Virginia Dare? They’re doing it to you! Making you play a role in the story they’re telling that hasn’t got a thing to do with who you really are. I know this happens all the time. I know we act like it’s just normal. But, it’s not! I’m here to tell you. This is violence. It’s where abuse begins. With a lie. With a fiction that aims to make you a pawn in someone else’s drama.” 

Orange clicked the link to the essay, where she read: An easy way to spot a Usurper is to notice what they call you. Does their language honor your autonomy, your multiplicity, your mystery? Or does it cut you down to size?

At that particular moment, there could be no question about the intent of Donny’s language. But, Orange protested, Blotto Donnie wasn’t the real Donny. Right? This was just a way he got. A rage beyond his control. Blame the booze, blame the world, blame his own shitty dad. But not him, he was a victim. In the morning he would apologize. He would profess his love. He would call her Sugar, Honey, Sweetie, Boo. And wasn’t that how he really saw her? Wasn’t that what he actually meant? 

It’s no better, Red wrote, when they make you an angel. They did it to Virginia. But the effect is still erasure.

Orange read the whole post through twice while she waited for Donny to fall silent on the other side of the door. The first time through, she was thinking about him, cataloguing the ways his actions fit the bill of one of Red’s Usurpers.

But on her second read, her focus shifted. Now, she was thinking of herself. In particular, of the self that she had been before. You know, before him. She had been a dreamer. And she had also been a dancer. Was that fair to say? It was how she had identified. She’d taught herself, with the aid of the internet. In her childhood bedroom, memorizing the latest choreo had been her first trustworthy source of joy. It was when she was stomping it out to “Happy” or “Fancy” or “Uptown Funk” that she knew her body was her own. And, because she was a dreamer, when she danced she also imagined how that dancing could be more: not only a release, a relief, but also a means of escape. She dreamed of being chosen by Gaga or Doja or Dua. Of setting out on the road to do her favorite thing and never coming back to this godforsaken island. 

But Donny didn’t like it when she danced. He said it wasn’t right to want so much attention. His attention should be all she wanted. That should be enough. And she’d disagreed once, but somehow he’d convinced her. A long time ago; so long ago that his opinion—his opinions—lived in her bones, and she understood, there in that bathroom, thinking of who she’d been and knowing who she’d become, that this realization would never be enough to break her out of the prison of his perception.

It’s a trap, this life, The Seven agree. But together they have found a way out. Planned their prison break. And knowing that freedom lies at last on her horizon, Orange at last can dance again. 

“Dance Again” is what she’s listening to—Selena Gomez—in the flow as she drives, as she pulls into the parking lot of the Elizabethan Gardens, in which stands the statue of Virginia Dare that The Seven plan to steal. 

It’s a beautiful day for a stroll through the Gardens, mild for the season, a dappling of altocumulus ornamenting the sky. It’s a Saturday, too. The place should be packed. But there is only one other car in the lot, which must belong to one of The Seven. 

This is on account of Orville. The hurricane is headed straight for the Banks, all modeling now agrees, and any minute now the Governor is expected to issue the order to evacuate. In anticipation of the exodus, the Elizabethan Gardens has—like every business on the Banks has or soon will—closed for the foreseeable future. Which is, really, ideal for The Seven. 

As Selena’s last, lingering “good” fades away, Orange hops out of her hatchback, humming, and starts off down the cobbled path to the wrought iron gate she guesses they will have to climb. As she’s considering the best method of ascent, “Hi!” she hears sung out behind her. 

Spinning into the lot comes a girl on a bicycle, which she rides right up onto the sidewalk, dismounting deftly while the bike’s still rolling. She’s a scrawny thing, this white girl, but beautiful. Her pale skin is flawless, lightly made up to accentuate her lips, her eyes, to conceal the pallor of controlled starvation. She’s perfectly put-together: hair blown out, sweet floral sun dress, polished Mary Janes, making Orange self-conscious of her lint-covered bike shorts and faded concert tee. 

This must be Yellow, the youngest of The Seven, still in high school. The first thing Orange thinks is, she’s too young. Not that most of The Seven haven’t experienced one type of abuse or another since girlhood. But, it’s one thing when it’s happening to you, who are probably still under the impression that you deserve it; it’s another when the victim is this peaches-and-cream sweet teenager and you know for damn sure she doesn’t. A chill flashes down Orange’s spine on this hot August afternoon. But isn’t that exactly why they are doing what they’re doing? To protect the Yellows of the world. 

She waves back. “Hey!” 

Dropping her bike into a bush, Yellow bounds across the distance between them. She is very thin, and she is tall, and so her gait makes Orange think of a fawn.

“I’m Orange,” Orange says, extending a hand. 

Ignoring the gesture, Yellow flings her skinny arms around her. 

“Oh!” Orange says, in the grip of the girl’s embrace, which shows no signs of letting up. 

“We’re sisters now!” Yellow at last releases her and steps back, giving her an appraising head-to-toe. “You’re just how I imagined you.”

“Oh god. And how is that?”

It was Yellow who suggested the colors of the rainbow, when they noticed they were Seven, when they resolved to leave behind the names they had been given, as one more way to lay claim to their own identities. There are so many Sevens of significance. They could have been days, seas, continents, wonders, sins, virtues, sisters, chakras, notes in a scale, stages of grief. But when Yellow offered colors in the chat—by then they had a Snapchat going, a space where it felt safe to speak frankly—they each instantly felt, they later agreed, that she had hit upon the truth. That these hues—the constituent parts of white light—were not masks, were not personas, as any other category they might have chosen would have been. They were—and always had been—the real essences of who these Seven were. Which was what they would become again, more than one of them believed, when the ocean swell released them from the confines of their bodies. 

How giddy Yellow felt when the others cheered her suggestion. She’s never had friends, not really. But you can hardly blame her peers. She doesn’t. She understands. She is too idiosyncratic to fit in, too hard to reach, cloistered as she is in the ivory tower of her mother’s many restrictions and protections. 

Yellow’s mother lives in fear, which she regards as the only appropriate response to the world. A position she believes is well supported by the evidence of her life. Because, Mary Sue did have a life once, if you could believe it. A life that culminated in the birth of her daughter, which coincided with the desertion of her husband, at which point she resolved to devote the rest of her existence to, singlehandedly, preventing any pain from ever befalling Yellow. 

You had to be on the alert. Danger came in many disguises. It was there in the catty gossip of other girls. In the hungry gaze of boys and in the hungrier gaze of their fathers. In the over-kindness of some teachers, and the unkindness of others. In explicit lyrics. In violent films. In library books. In video games. In an overactive imagination. In an under-active fight or flight reflex. In the ocean. In planes, trains and automobiles. In political opinions. In big expressions of emotion. In sex and drugs and whatever had replaced rock ’n roll. In processed foods. In pesticides. In sweets. In fats. In calories of every kind. 

To save Yellow, she banned them all. 

“Why do you hate me so much?” Yellow asked her one time, knowing even as she did what a grave mistake she was making. Mary Sue cried for a week after that. 

“I don’t hate you,” she said when she could speak again. “I love you more than anything. I’m trying to protect you! Don’t you see that? Don’t you see?”

Yellow did. She does. She understands. She loves her mother. More than anything she wants to protect her mother—with the same ferocity her mother wishes to shield and shelter her. Which is why she has complied, accepting every restriction; never again offering a word of complaint. 

But something else Yellow understands is how this pattern will play out. As long as her mother is alive, she will never be free to truly live. And the reverse is also true. As long as Yellow is yet living, Mary Sue will remain trapped in the prison of her apprehension. 

Yellow knows she can’t guarantee that her death will set her mother free. But it is the only thing in all the world that might. That’s why she’s joining The Seven. And that’s why she’s going to her death with gladness—because of the beautiful picture she has painted in her mind, of Mary Sue stepping back out into the world; after she has mourned, realizing she has nothing left to lose and bravely stepping back out into the world, making friends, making mistakes, learning it’s not so bad to make a mistake, uncovering new passions, taking chances, finding joy, maybe even finding love. 

Prohibited from almost everything, Yellow has developed a powerful imagination. And, in the weeks since she stumbled upon Red’s blog and started talking to the others, she has put it to work, imagining the lives of her new and oh-so-colorful friends. 

“You,” she tells Orange, “are the smoldering ember. Maybe at first glance you look like charcoal—spent, inert. But the fire is inside you still, waiting for only any breath of wind to come roaring back to life.” 

Orange laughs, hoping this is true. “A breath of wind, like maybe a hurricane?” 

Green hears them coming before she sees them, and sees them before they see her.

She has been waiting in the Gardens for nearly an hour. Time enough to tour the whole property, from the Ancient Oak to the Sunken Garden, and still be sitting at Virginia’s feet when Orange and Yellow make their appearance. Green is that kind of woman, always early, always perfectly prepared, with a purse full of everything you’d need for any eventuality. The consummate mother—which she is three times over. 

She’s been on the road for two days straight. Yesterday, she drove north nine hours with the boys, from their house in Greenville to her sister’s in Pittsburgh. Natalie must have been surprised to see her. They were practically estranged. But she didn’t say one accusatory word. She didn’t even raise an eyebrow, as she was wont to do. She took one look at the four of them, and she beamed and bent down to welcome her nephews with a big bear hug; high-fived them and sent them sprinting to the pantry for Takis. 

Even then, when the sisters were alone, all she said was, “I’m so glad to see you.” 

She didn’t ask why Green had come. But she did ask if Dale knew where they were. 

Natalie had sussed out who Dale was long before her sister cottoned on. This was the reason Green had cut her off, had cut her out. Because Natalie made it that much harder to pretend her husband was the standup guy he’d advertised himself to be.  

“He thinks we went to Disney,” Green told her sister. “He’s on a work trip for the week.” 

Natalie nodded and said again, “I’m really glad you’re here.” 

And for a fraction of a second Green wondered if she could stay there, stay forever, begin life again in the shelter of her kid sister’s wings. But she knew who Dale was, how he would never allow it, how, if she tried, he would ruin everyone’s lives, not only hers. 

She’s done everything she can to protect Natalie and her boys from whatever wrath of his might follow her death. She has an email scheduled to send to her sister tomorrow afternoon, with all the evidence she’s collected of his unfitness to be a father. Natalie will know just what to do with it. She’s a lawyer, after all. And Green suspects that Dale is frightened of her. Isn’t that why he drove the wedge between them? 

Green has to believe that, when she’s gone, all will be well, all will be made right. For Natalie, yes, but above all for her boys. 

“You know I’d do anything for you,” she whispered, standing in the doorway of Natalie’s spare room this morning, before the sun or anyone else in that house had risen. Matthew and Mark were sharing the twin; John was on the cot. She took a long last look at each perfect face, memorizing their freckles, their pimples, their placid sleeping smiles. She’s written them each a letter. Another declaration of love, and an explanation, the best she is able to offer. She knows that most people, certainly Natalie, will believe her suicide was selfish. Just a way to escape her problems. But it isn’t that. It’s the opposite. And she prays one day her boys will understand—that, before they understand they will feel it to be true—how removing herself from their father’s game board is the greatest act of love she could perform; the best, maybe the only, protection she could ever really offer them. 

Still, her conviction doesn’t make it any easier. She thinks of them instantly when she hears the girls’ laughter, Orange’s and Yellow’s, as they wend their way down the Magnolia Walk that leads to the allée that leads to Virginia Dare. She cries a little, not only for her boys but for these girls—she can’t think of them as women, though Orange, properly, is—but she’s wiped her tears away by the time they reach their turn. She stands from what she has come to think of as her bench, and, when they see her, she raises a hand in salute.

Yellow runs to her, and Orange is not far behind. 

When they have hugged, when they have made their introductions, they all turn to Virginia Dare—or, to the statue of a woman who’s been given her name. Naked, but with a fishing net draped around her waist like a sarong, preserving her modesty. Carved from white Carrara marble, mounted on a granite pedestal, she gazes out over their heads into the middle distance with a look of serenity, a subtle smile, with maybe just a touch of disdain for the mere morals of the world. 

“She’s bigger than I imagined,” Orange says, stepping into the flower bed at her feet, giving her a quick little shove, which doesn’t budge her.

Their plan is to topple her backwards, making use of the live oak behind her as a winch, to smash away the granite pillar to which she is affixed, to make her that much lighter, to drag her onto a hand tuck and, thus, to wheel her through the Garden to the parking lot and up a makeshift ramp into the back of the van Blue will be driving. The getaway van!

As they devised their plan, they did feel like characters in a caper. Their mission does feel like a lark, despite how it will end. Or maybe all the more because of it. Because, they are not just breaking the law, they are breaking a taboo. To choose to end their lives, and in just the way they want. To assert their autonomy, and to use that action to condemn the same society that has so spectacularly failed to protect them, as it has failed to protect millions, hundreds of millions more. They feel like radicals, like revolutionaries, like warriors for a cause. 

But they don’t want to damage her. Destroying a work of art, that isn’t the answer, that isn’t their point. In fact, the more pristine she is, the more powerful their message will be. 

Their plan is to take her, in Blue’s van, to the very tip of Cape Hatteras, to unload her there and bind themselves to her, then to let the storm surge come and submerge them. 

Virginia Dare will be the anchor that dooms them. 

“The symbol to end symbolism,” is what they are calling it, their suicide. Look how we die tethered to this idea of womanhood. Look how the imposition of your story on a woman’s life can do nothing but destroy her. They—which is to say, mostly Red and Blue, with lightest input from the others—have written a declaration to accompany the act, which they will post online tonight and send in a scheduled email to the press. 

Red meant to die alone. That had been the first plan, her private plan. After five years out of the Enclave, trying her damnedest to believe that the wider world was a kinder place than the cult, she’d come to the conclusion that it wasn’t. The same cruelty, the same huger for control, she had witnessed on that small scale, was operational on the larger. And she wasn’t willing to experience its effects any longer. So, she would exit the torture chamber of existence with a bang, making a statement that might, she hoped, improve the place she was leaving. And then, at least, at last, she would feel that what she suffered had not been for naught. 

She’d intended to kill herself beside the statue where it stood. Maybe with a gun. She hadn’t made up her mind. But when Orville had spun up out of the ocean and then swung toward the Outer Banks, when meteorologists began remarking on the irony of a hurricane sharing the name of one of the Wrights setting its sights on the same spit of land where their famed first flight had taken place, she saw an opportunity to make her statement that much grander. In order to move the statue to Hatteras, however, she would need help, and this is why she confided in the others. And once she shared her intention with them, they all wanted to go with her every step of the way. 

According to the models, Orville is scheduled to make landfall around midday tomorrow, just as the tide is reaching its zenith, the perfect recipe for just the sort of surge they will need. 

This meeting is their reconnaissance. Having determined their best methods and route, they will return, in the earliest morning, in the cover of pre-dawn darkness, to whisk Virginia away and down the lone road that leads south, along the crest of the Banks, to Cape Hatteras—to the tip of the spit of sand, where the Atlantic stretches out in three directions, where you feel you have come to the end of the world. 

Blue’s father owns a moving company. Which is to say, he owns three vans and employs a rotating cast of college students to do the heavy lifting. Blue knows he will suspect any one of them, every one of them, before he thinks it was his only daughter who drove off with the sprinter. Blue’s father loves her, and the way her suicide will hurt him is her one regret. 

Blue alone, of all the Seven, had a happy childhood. In spite of her mother’s death (breast cancer when she was four; a memory more of her father’s mourning than her mother’s passing). In spite of the long hours her father worked to pay off her medical debt. In spite of how little, besides the necessities, they ever had. She had his love and she had the worlds of fantasy in which she immersed herself—Le Guin, L’Engle, Pullman, Tolkien, Zimmer Bradley… She had her teachers’ admiration and encouragement. She had her peers’ acceptance if not their full embrace. 

She was, in other words, supported. And because of it, and because of her fine mind, which everyone was always complementing, she dreamed a dream for her future which she never doubted could come true: to graduate at the top of her class, to win a good scholarship to a great university, and there, to study mythology; to become a mythologist. And then…

“What I wanted to do,” she tells Red and Indigo, who she’s just collected from outside Red’s apartment in Kill Devil Hills, where Indigo, up from Baton Rouge, has been crashing these past two nights, “what my whole project for myself was, was to find an answer to the question of: what’s the myth that we need now. Like, on a global scale. Is there a single story that could unite us as a species in the quest for a higher good? That could repair the considerable harm we’ve done to this planet and one another? My interest in mythology, it wasn’t in how people had lived, it was in how we could.” 

She had her purpose and she had her plan, and everything was proceeding according to it until she stepped into her freshman lecture on “The Myths of Creation” and there, at the lectern, was Émile. Émile Crane was a minor celebrity in the world of comparative mythology. His new translation of Ovid had just been published to great acclaim, and, because his charisma matched his scholarship, he’d been invited on the talkshow circuit. He’d filmed a series for MasterClass. He was consulting on an untitled Chloé Zhao production. And he was French. And he was very handsome. 

The opportunity to study with him was one of the reasons Blue had chosen Duke from her long list of college acceptances. She’d expected him to be brilliant. She’d only dreamed he might approve and support her work. She’d never imagined he would take such an interest in her. 

Blue hadn’t dated in high school. It wasn’t part of The Plan. She was too focused on her own ambitions. And too in love with ideas that boys her age didn’t begin to comprehend. But with Émile she could talk about anything, everything. This is how it began. Just with talking. For a few minutes after class, then for hours in his office on the third floor of Monroe, and then at the cafe in Carrboro, just a little farther afield than the Duke community was likely to stray. 

A symbol is alluring, Red wrote in her essay. That’s why this trouble persists. In our longing to understand the world, the absolutely incomprehensible world into which we are born, we cling on to anything that seems to simplify the chaos. And, when someone is clinging to you? For a time, it might feel like love. 

Blue had loved to be Émile’s secret. At first she had. The suggestion, that she was so irresistible, so singular, that he had to break the rules to be with her…she was flattered by it. She felt elevated. Elected for a starring role. 

Émile had a wife and three children, but this was not—he lied to her—the reason they had to keep their romance secret.  No, no—he lied—his wife was very understanding. She had affairs of her own. They had an arrangement. It was all above board. The only impediment was—he lied—the school. Duke’s frankly Victorian notions of propriety. The way academia had been spooked by Me Too. 

Blue didn’t want to get Émile in trouble! Didn’t want to jeopardize his job, his research, his reputation. So she preserved their secrecy like a badge of honor. And in a thousand other ways, learned to forsake her own desires in service of his. 

For instance, she didn’t tell him when she missed her period. He was completing an essay for NatGeo, and it would have absolutely ruined his focus. So, instead, she went to Planned Parenthood alone. And alone, in her dorm, she tucked the pills under her tongue as instructed, waited in terror, threw up, and commenced to bleed. 

They’d told her when to be worried. What was too much blood; what was too high of a fever. She’d waited long after she passed those thresholds; she’d waited until she felt on the verge of losing consciousness. And then, she hadn’t called 911, imagining how the ambulance arriving to campus would be very bad for everyone. She’d called him. Something she was never supposed to do. 

She’d known he would be angry, but she hadn’t imagined how much. How, in his response, there would be not even a hint, not a trace, of concern for her health, for her life. True, he didn’t want her to die, but, even through the fog of pain, despite the drain of blood, she felt clearly that his concern had nothing to do with her, was an animal instinct for self-preservation. 

He’d driven her forty minutes to an ER in Greensboro, hoping the distance would preserve his anonymity. But it hadn’t worked. His wife found out. The University found out. The press found out. And the consequences unfurled. 

“You have ruined my life,” were the last words he spoke to her, ruining hers. 

After that, Blue stopped believing in the power of myth. She stopped looking for the story that could save the world. She forgot she had even ever tried to do something so absurd. 

Until she found Red’s essay. 

“And then,” she says, “ I understood! I got it! I saw the answer. It’s just what you say: reality is what we need. And avoiding it, that’s our problem. We don’t need to invent some new myth to live by. The history of the universe, including us, is the grandest, greatest story there could ever be. We’re living it, the truth that could set us free if we would only just recognize it. If we could just wake up to that fact.” 

Sitting on the floor of the van behind Blue and Red, Indigo listens to their heady banter, their philosophical discourse. As Blue pilots them across the Melvin R Daniels Bridge…as Red points her right, right, left, right and right again…as Blue signals their final turn, and pulls into the lot, into a spot between Green’s mint-condition SUV and Orange’s dinged-up hatchback…as the three dismount and stroll, past Yellow’s bike in the bushes, to the gate and then, one-by-one, clamber over…as Red leads them down the paths she knows well…as, before they have reached the statue, simultaneously their three phones sound the alarm, broadcasting the Governor’s order to evacuate…as they high-five and break into a jog…as they round the bend to find Orange, Yellow and Green waiting…as the other five trade hugs and hellos…throughout all of this, Indigo remains silent. She has taken a vow of silence, because what she has endured is unspeakable. Even in present company, it is on another level. And so, she hangs back at Red’s elbow, a little like a shadow. But the others won’t let her be an outcast in their midst. Having exchanged all their greetings, they turn to her—“Indigo!” Yellow says—and as one they surround her in a great web of an embrace. 

Violet is late, but what’s new? She warned them she would be. “It’s how I roll.” She is also high. “It’s how I roll.” She has no intention of quitting drugs when she’s a day away from quitting everything. She’s going to go out feeling good. 

And, she does feel good. Speeding down North Croatan Highway, windows down, Pink Floyd blasting—“So you thought you might like to go to the show!”—she laughs and laughs, making liberal use of the center left-turn lane to pass the slow-pokes and fuddy-duddies, the sorry law-abiders. 

Violet has long been an anarchist. She worships Shiva, the god of destruction. She welcomes chaos. She courts violence. She’s carved her arms with Vedic sutras. She’s branded boyfriends’ names on her ass and over her heart. She’s been tied up and choked out. She’s snorted, swallowed or shot up every substance she was ever offered, and been brought back from the brink by NARCAN twice. Because, this is life, baby! It’s pain. It’s suffering. Why deny it? Why not embrace it? Learn to love it, if you can. 

But Violet’s secret is, she wishes she believed in something different. Believed in Goodness. Believed in Meaning. Believed in an Elegant Design. Uncle Rick got to her too early for such a thing to be possible. But the girls, Red and the gang…it isn’t that they have persuaded her. Nothing could. But their presence, their being, the sacrifice they are about to make, that she’s about to make with them, introduce enough doubt that she is able to allow, at least, that she might be wrong. The happiest thought she’s ever had! 

Her heart is pounding with the thrill of it, feels like it’s pounding right in time to Nick Mason’s beat, her heart’s a rock ’n roll drum kit, and she and the band and the day are all, yes, in tune. The wind’s picking up. The call to evacuate has been issued. Sure she’s late, but she’s not too late. Which feels like, right on time. Perfection! She’s flying. She’s got this intimation that maybe somehow order and chaos are the same thing. She’s wondering if she believed in God all along?! Her mind is fireworks of thought and she’s about to unlock the secret of the universe, which she suddenly does believe exists, an impossible wish fulfilled, when she catches sight of—

“Fuck!” The record scratches. The revelation floats off into the air. 

They’re closing down the road, the only road that runs south, down the Banks, from Nags Head to Hatteras. Highway 12. Violet sees it as she’s turning west, onto the bridge to Manteo: a coterie of DPW trucks, and the men unloading barricades to block the entrance to the southbound lane, so the whole road can carry traffic north, to speed the evacuation. The road, the route, they were supposed to take, to get themselves and the statue to the beach. And there is no alternative. 

No. There must be an alternative.