Black Iris (17 page)

“Come back here, then,” Blythe murmured. “You look cold.”

It was true. But I stood fast in my T-shirt and underwear, my shadow piercing the wall behind them. “It’s my turn now, right? I truth myself. Who was that guy in the parking lot, Laney? The one you freaked out over?”

Armin straightened, suddenly alert, but Blythe sank into the couch, light touching her eyes like the flicker of a serpent’s tongue.

“He—” I closed my mouth, opened it. “His name—” Curled my hands into fists, relaxed them.

“Laney,” Armin said, “you don’t have to do this now.”

“Now is the only time I can.” I stared at his long hands, the elegant lines of his bones. “I feel so close to you right now. Both of you.”

“Come here, sweet girl,” Blythe said.

I went and sat between them. Armin tucked a lock of hair behind my ear. Blythe’s hand braceleted my wrist. I wished I could disappear, dissolve myself into their skin, their scent. My summer gods.

“His name,” I said, my voice creaking, rusty, old, “is Brandt Zoeller.”

And then I started to cry.

DECEMBER, LAST YEAR

I
’d been crouching so long my knees had stopped burning and gone numb. Before us ice spread across the asphalt like ground-up glass, the cold so clear and sharp it hurt to breathe. All this poignancy was fitting. Very bad things were about to happen. At least the world knew when to wince.

I was reaching for another cigarette when the burner phone buzzed.

Armin and I glanced at each other, anxious. Even after hours of waiting, when it finally came it felt too soon. I pulled the phone out and we read the screen together.

Phase 2.

“Help me up,” I said.

He gave me a hand. I almost fell, blood thawing my frozen veins too quickly, that awful hot lifestuff gushing through me. Nothing hurts more than being alive.

I strode down the alley, Armin trailing behind. He kept trying to drag it out, feeding me chances to second-guess myself, renege. If he really knew me, he wouldn’t have bothered. There was no turning back.

I ducked into the lee of a Dumpster and signaled him to get in position across the alley. He paused in a long fang of moonlight, that white wolf face solemn, fixing me with an eye pure as a drop of liquid midnight.

“Armin . . .”

He stepped into the shadows.

This was it. God, this was it.

My high was gone. The tingle in my hands and feet was sheer adrenaline. I couldn’t feel the cold. I was colder than anything in this world.

I heard her first: that Roman candle laugh, the snarky Aussie drawl. Before I could hear him, I saw him. Two blond heads above heavy wool coats. Blythe’s dress shone in the streetlight, a slit of red running down her chest like a wound. She held her shoes by the straps and walked barefoot on the ice, impervious. Zoeller ambled beside her, listing, overcorrecting his steps. Drunk.

Good girl, I thought.

“Just up the lane here,” she said, smiling. The closer they got, the more canine that smile looked.

Zoeller stumbled into a trash can and knocked it over.

“Come on, then. I drank more than you.” Blythe hauled him up by the elbow and he leaned on her heavily.

His gaze brushed my hiding spot as they staggered past.

“You’re fucking beautiful,” Zoeller mumbled, and for a terrifying second I thought he was speaking to me. But his hand slid down Blythe’s back, curving against her ass. “I’m gonna fuck you till you scream.”

A small crack popped in the ice inside me.

“Hands off, mate,” Blythe said, twisting free. “Let’s get to the car first, yeah?”

Zoeller came to an abrupt halt. Something snapped through him like a whip. Then he straightened and took a few steps toward her, fast. His hands clamped onto her shoulders. Blythe spun, fist raised, and he caught it like a viper.

My heart went hard and still.

“Let go of me,” she growled.

He wrenched her arm, forcing her to turn. “Where are your friends?” No slurring now.

“My friends are at the chapter house,” she said loudly, “and if they don’t hear from me in five minutes, they’ll call the fucking cops.”

Call the cops
was the code we’d given her for
I need an escape.
My hand drifted toward the small of my back.

Zoeller beamed at something in the distance. “Call them. Then I can tell them how you tried to drug me.”

I met Armin’s eyes across the alley, two faint white rings. Shit.

“The fuck are you talking about?” Blythe said.

“GHB?” Z smiled. “Please. You’re dealing with a master.”

“You’re crazy, arsehole. Get your fucking hands off me before you regret it.”

He just kept smiling. Waiting.

My phone vibrated. Armin’s text:
Abort?

Rather than reply, I stepped out into the alley.

Zoeller released Blythe as soon as I appeared. Armin came to my side, the bat against his leg. We faced off in pairs. Blythe skirted us all warily, but Z slipped his hands into his trouser pockets and relaxed his stance.

“That’s better,” he said. “Now we can have some fun.”

Blythe sized up the situation and improvised. “Oh, I see. You and your mates think you’re gonna have a go at me. Cops are on their way, fuckwits.”

I made my voice harsh. “Get out of here, bitch.”

Even though she knew what I was doing, she blinked.

“I said get the fuck out.”

Tell Donnie, I thought. Be ready. This is about to go horribly wrong.

Blythe turned and walked rapidly out of the alley.

As she left Armin and I moved toward Zoeller, positioning
ourselves to either side, rotating. Z pivoted, keeping us both in view. Mostly he focused on me. The speaker. The leader.

“The wolves are circling,” he said, and chuckled.

In my peripheral vision I caught Armin’s hands flexing on the bat.

“Little alpha wolf is bold.” Z ignored Armin and turned with me. “She doesn’t even carry a weapon.”

“Shut the fuck up, faggot.” The word passed my lips like a blade, slicing me on the way out. Laney Keating would never call anyone a fag. Laney Keating was terrified she was one, so Kenosha Tech girl had to say it. “Get on your knees.”

Zoeller grinned. “Want me to suck your dick?”

“Drop him,” I told Armin.

Armin hesitated. Of course he did. When it came to inflicting pain, his instincts were all wrong. I’d warned him not to hesitate. Zoeller had reptilian reflexes. Any softness, any exposure, and he’d strike.

“Now,” I barked.

Armin winced and swung the bat at the backs of Zoeller’s knees. Z dropped, but the grin stayed on his face. He’d sensed our disunity.

I slapped him as hard as I could.

He wasn’t expecting it. His head jerked to one side and a jet of blood flew out. Where it hit the ice it congealed instantly, like red molasses.

My gloves retained a trace of paint and left a white stripe on his face. Blood marbled it, seeking fissures. I thought of the spiderweb cuts on my hand after I punched the window to reach Mom the morning she died and I hit him again, harder, as he looked up at me. Then once more. A nerve in my wrist sparked and burned like a fuse. That tiny fire worked toward my brain stem, toward the stack of dynamite piled at the back of my skull.

“Easy,” Armin said.

The rage dispersed. I was cold and in control. “It’s time someone taught you Corgan pussies a lesson,” I said, reciting the script.

“What lesson is that?”

“How to keep your mouth shut, you stupid cunt.”

“Misogyny
and
homophobia.” Zoeller smiled with bloodstained teeth. “You are one messed-up little girl, aren’t you?”

I almost hit him again. I almost said,
You’re the one who was always spouting that shit.
I should have seen what he was doing.

“Big words,” I said, maintaining the persona. “Your boyfriend teach you those?”

“I learned them from women.”

“What else you learn from women? How to bend over and take it?”

“How to get inside their heads.”

Armin stepped next to me. He didn’t say a word, but his expression beneath the wolf paint was poised on the tense wire between dismay and acceptance. He pressed the bat into my hands.

Good boy, I thought.

Zoeller watched my hands on the grip tape, the way I stroked the barrel that would soon destroy his flesh. I ran a hand up and down the aluminum shaft deliberately.

“You’re not from Ken Tech,” he said.

I slipped the head of the bat beneath his chin and made him look up at me.

“This is something personal,” he whispered. “I can see it in your eyes.”

“Good guess.”

I swung right through the cloud of my breath and connected full force with Zoeller’s throwing shoulder. It sounded and felt like hitting a side of beef. He didn’t scream, but an
animal sound tore from his diaphragm. He fell forward, balancing on one palm, and I swung again at the same shoulder, overhand. This time something cracked and he collapsed to his elbow, coughing, and looked up at me.

“Again,” he said hoarsely.

I obliged.

It felt softer, wetter, when I hit this time, and he screamed now, high-pitched. When it petered out his voice crumbled into rasping laughter.

I walked a circuit around him, the bat light as air in my hand. On a whim I slammed it into his elbow. He moaned. I aimed for a kidney and he doubled over, dry heaving. My feet moved faster. The bat was a silver blur. Each breath I took felt like a bump of meth.

“Fight,” I said.

Zoeller wheezed. Blood drooled out of his mouth.

“Get the fuck up, pussy.” I swung at his ear, the first head blow, and he toppled to one side. “You weak piece of shit. Get up. Take it like a man.”

“Stop,” Armin said.

I wedged the toe of my boot beneath Zoeller’s chin. “Look at me, you pathetic fuck.”

His eyes had closed. He grasped feebly at my foot.

I kicked him square in his perfect mouth. A tooth snapped and rolled across the ice like a loose pearl.

“
Stop
,” Armin said again, grabbing my arm.

I almost swung at him. It was as if he interrupted me jerking off, that burst of hatred for ruining the purest pleasure.

“That’s enough.” Armin took the bat. Blood candy-striped the shaft. He knelt, feeling for Z’s pulse, as I stood in a trance and watched him lift the coat, palpate the bones gently. Zoeller didn’t even groan. His breath made a soft, moist sound. “I think you punctured a lung. He needs an ambulance.”

I stared rapturously at my handiwork.

“Are you listening?”

Z peered up at me through a bruised eye. “Didn’t work,” he said haltingly. “Did it?”

I stepped closer.

“You’re still. Hollow.” He smiled, grotesque with blood and missing teeth. “The hollow girl. The stuffed girl.”

T. S. Eliot.

“Get away from him,” I said to Armin.

Armin shook his head. “Call 911.”

“ ‘Between the motion and the act,’ ” Z said, “ ‘falls the Shadow.’ ”

My hand slipped into my waistband. That hard, cold weight shaped itself to my palm as if it had been made for me. To fill the hollowness. To complete me.

“Get away from him,” I repeated, raising the gun.

It almost broke my heart, the way Armin reacted. Slow-dawning shock, his mouth falling, a glaze of distance filming his eyes. He kept his gaze trained on the muzzle as he stood.

“What are you doing?” he said sadly.

“Move.” I flicked the safety off. “Now.”

Zoeller laughed, which became a cough, spluttering blood. “Listen to her, Apollo. She’s not. Fucking around.”

Armin’s stare bounced to Zoeller and back to the gun. He retreated, fumbling in his pocket. “I’m calling 911.”

He faded from my consciousness. All I saw was the body laid on the ground before me like an offering. My prize. My prey. Even broken and mangled, Brandt was a beautiful boy. Those full cupid lips smiled at me tenderly.

“I’ve waited so long,” he said. “For you. For this.”

I cradled the grip in both hands. A .45 has a beastly kick, and I’m a small monster. “ ‘There will be time, there will be
time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet. There will be time to murder and create.’ ”

He ruined that pretty smile by showing teeth.

“Did you get off thinking about this?” I pointed the muzzle unwaveringly at his forehead. “I did, too. You’re the only boy who could make me come.”

Zoeller didn’t look at the gun. His eyes were fixed on mine.

“Do you know why?” I breathed slow and deep, filling my body with winter. Persephone in the underworld, her belly full of pomegranate seeds, her veins full of ice.

“Why?”

“Because you taught me how to let go.”

I squeezed the trigger.

MARCH, LAST YEAR

T
he first Monday of March, someone replaced the front door of my high school with a portal to the Twilight Zone. When I stepped into the foyer, a rainbow banner fluttered in my face and Luke North, wearing his customary Chicago Blackhawks cap and a shirt that read
LOVE IS LOVE
, smiled and handed me a peanut butter cookie.

“Gay/straight, no hate,” he said.

My mouth dropped.

The Rainbow Alliance was doing a baked goods sale, and not only had Luke tricked his way in, but so had Nolan, Gordon, and Quinn—the same hyenas who’d filmed my Valentine’s debacle. I glanced around for Zoeller. This was exactly the kind of elaborate gaslighting scheme he’d cook up.

“We’re having a rally Friday,” Luke said, still smiling maniacally. “You should join us, Laney.”

“You should kill yourself,” I said.

His smile didn’t crack. “This is a bullying-free zone. Have a great day.”

I dropped the cookie in the trash before whatever he’d infected it with could seep into my blood.

The day got weirder.

When I slammed my locker closed after the last bell, Kelsey
was waiting behind the door. I made a surprised noise midway between shriek and sneeze.

“God bless you,” she said. “Are you busy?”

The hall emptied, no one paying us attention. “What’s up?”

That lopsided grin. “Brandt was going to give me a ride, but he canceled at the last second. Like usual.”

A month ago, I would’ve died and gone to heaven if Kelsey Klein asked me for a ride home.

“I’ve got a ton of errands to run,” I said, feigning regret.

“That’s fine. I’m not doing anything.”

“And the car’s really dirty.”

“You should see my room.”

Oh my god. “Okay.”

“You want to see my room?” she said, laughing.

“No. Yes. I mean, I can give you a ride.”

She smiled, strawberry lips shining with gloss. I’d kissed that mouth, and I’d thought of kissing it again, pretty much every night.

“Okay.” Her eyes held mine a beat, enigmatic.

We both looked away.

Kelsey insisted on errands first. Since I’d stupidly pluralized the lie, I had to invent at least two. At the library I prowled through the poetry section while she drifted in YA. That old-book smell blissed my senses, glue and gracefully rotting paper, a leafy decay, autumnal. I flipped open a thick omnibus and sank to the carpet. My head floated in words.

“What are you reading?”

Kelsey sat beside me, cross-legged.

She was the polar opposite of Zoeller: his soulless irreverence versus her wide-eyed sincerity. Naive but endearing. I started to tell her about the book, and then something took hold of me and changed the words in my mouth, and instead
of saying
This is a collection of poems by T. S. Eliot,
I began to recite.

In my mind dark clouds pass over a garden. A shadow falls like a spell, every leaf and petal, every flutter of wing and air, every breath and green-blooded heartbeat going still. Eternity suffuses this moment. On a branch a bird flicks its wing once and looks at me, a stray sunbeam gliding off turquoise feathers, and when that wing

Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still

At the still point of the turning world.

I lowered my eyes to the page. Kelsey stared.

“You know that by heart?” she said.

Shrug.

“It’s beautiful.”

You’re beautiful, I thought. But you don’t love me.

I closed the book. “We can go.”

In Walgreens we wandered the aisles, touching everything. Kelsey picked up a bottle of nail polish, asked what I thought of the color, set it down. “Don’t you want it?” I said. She was broke. At the end of the aisle I spun her around, walked it again. A cool vial of violet polish slipped into my pocket. She smiled her crooked smile. We left wearing stolen sunglasses, laughing.

“Where’s your house?” I said.

“Fuck my house. Fuck everyone. Let’s get high.”

I parked behind a Subway, sheltered in the blue shade of dirty snowdrifts. I’d saved two tabs of X in an Altoids tin because doing ecstasy by yourself is just depressing. We took them and split an Orange Crush and listened to the Silversun Pickups. I ran my hands over the heated leather seats and felt as if I were touching someone’s body.

“Your car is sexy as hell,” Kelsey said.

“It’s my mom’s.”

“Your mom is sexy as hell.”

I laughed, horrified.

“Drive,” she said, tilting her head back.

There’s something maddeningly beautiful about a girl baring her throat. The kind of beauty that makes you want to put your mouth to it, your teeth. The kind of beauty you want to destroy.

I drove out of the dollhouse suburbs into rural nowhere. We didn’t talk, just let ourselves feel. The engine purred deep in my bones. I felt the grain of the asphalt as if I skimmed my bare feet over it, my skin a dense fabric of electrons buzzing euphorically at every collision with the world. Rolling on X feels like you’re right about to kiss someone, constantly. As if you are endlessly coming up to the brink of something heart-shatteringly beautiful. It makes your lungs so big you can barely fill them and every breath is huge and warm and too much.

Dusk came on. The sun fizzled out in the snow like a snuffed cigarette and I kept driving till the tank ran dry. At the gas station Kelsey walked in wearing her ridiculous sunglasses and calmly placed a bottle of Grey Goose on the wooden counter. The clerk didn’t blink.

“That’s how it’s done,” she said in the car. The smile beneath those mirrored lenses made my belly tighten.

“I thought you were broke.”

“It’s not my money.”

Zoeller had given it to her. I started the engine, wondering what she’d had to do to get paid.

Kelsey wouldn’t tell me where she lived. She routed me from one edge of Naperville to the other like a broken GPS. I didn’t mind. It got later and our X mellowed. The car was heady with the scent of nail polish and girl skin. I drove smoothly so she wouldn’t spill and she flashed me a row of
glitter-flecked nails. By tacit agreement we stopped in a forest preserve where the firs were still fleeced with snow. Found logs to sit on and cracked the vodka, sipping it raw. It was icy and it burned like nitrogen going down. Every time I spoke I felt as if I froze the world with my breath, reducing chaos to stillness, clarity.

“Did you fuck Zoeller?” I said.

Kelsey took a sip off the bottle. We weren’t drinking to get drunk. We were drinking for courage.

“No.”

“How come?”

“He doesn’t want me.”

I took the bottle back. The vodka had a sharp steel taste, like licking a razor blade. “He’s a scumbag anyway.”

“I know.”

“You deserve better.”

Kelsey looked at me. Mostly it was shadow and blur but here the moonlight cut through the trees, a clear arc showing half her face. “Why?”

Because I’m in love with you, obviously.

I drank.

When I passed her the vodka she took my gloveless hand instead. I let the bottle fall, not knowing if it landed upright.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“Do you still want me?”

Yes. God, a million times yes.

“This isn’t a good idea,” my traitor mouth said. “You’re just high.”

“I don’t care.” She brought my hand to her cheek. Her skin was chill but a red rush surged to the surface, meeting my palm. “You’re the only one who actually wants me how I am.”

“You’re straight.”

“That doesn’t mean I’m not lonely.”

Our eyes finally met then, and I saw myself reflected there, small and alone. For a moment I was like everyone else in this world: I wanted to be loved. Even selfishly, even just for a second.

I leaned in and kissed her.

It was soft this time, too, but sweeter. I’d done this in my head a hundred times and fell into it now like a familiar daydream, warm and numb, my skin scintillating somewhere between shiver and shimmer. When we’d kissed before I hadn’t put my hands on her but now I cupped her face. She was different. Didn’t try to lead. Let me control it, tilt her chin and open her mouth, twine my tongue with hers. Sensation whirled through my body but at the center I was the untouched eye, the still point. Paused in this perfect moment forever while the world spun on. This was what I’d wanted for so long.

And it was only happening because ecstasy made you love everyone. Anyone. I pulled away.

“What’s wrong?” Kelsey said.

I stood too fast and sat back down in the snow.

She laughed, reaching for me. I scrambled to my feet. We hadn’t parked far off but in the darkness and my drunkenness the forest expanded, becoming an eternal winter wood like something out of Dante, black trees twisting in impossible geometries, whispering of their suicides. Somehow I had snow in my mouth. I spit it out and the car wavered suddenly before me like a mirage. Right as I touched the door, Kelsey touched me.

“What—” I began, and she shoved me against the door and kissed me.

There’s a difference in the kiss that comes before sex. It’s less a desire than a devouring. She kissed me hungrily, meanly, and I stopped caring why because this felt better than any guilt could feel bad. I pulled her closer and took her lip in my teeth, slid my hands inside her coat, over her breasts. Pushed her against
the car and held her down. I’d never done this with a girl but my hands knew what they wanted. They slipped beneath her shirt, touched the taut skin of her belly. So fucking soft.

“Is this okay?” I said, making a little cloud of breath.

She kissed me again and I tasted vodka and strawberry lip gloss. “You are so sweet.”

I couldn’t get enough of her. I could barely hold on—the incredibility of what was happening made everything ethereal, as if I gripped nothing but warm smoke. I kissed her harder, willing it to feel real. Her thigh slid between mine. Fingernails grazed the small of my back. The kiss became a rough brush of lips, too desperate to stop and focus. Our bodies pressed together and it felt so different than it had with boys, so supple, so fluid, no end to the ways we could melt and dissolve against each other. She made me high. I wanted more. I wanted to overdose on her.

I fumbled in my pocket for the keys. “Get in.”

In the backseat our coats came off awkwardly, impatiently. She wrapped her legs around me. I undid her jeans with one hand while she took the other in her mouth and sucked my middle finger to the knuckle. Something ineffably strange happened inside me then. I didn’t feel so much like a girl as both girl and boy, or neither. I wanted to fuck her and to be fucked, cycling rapidly between the two, relenting helplessly when she took my finger deep and bit the bone and growing fierce when I slid my hand between her legs and found her already wet. Her mouth opened plaintively. I touched her the way I touched myself when I got off to her, fingered that hot edge, raised gooseflesh over her skin, dipped into her wetness and stroked an oval until my palm was slick and she was grinding against my hand and saying, “God, fuck me, fuck me.”

And I did.

———

Two girls sitting side by side, both facing forward, quiet. Too drunk to drive, waiting for Donnie to come pick us up. The silence made me want to claw off my skin.

“Smoke?” I offered.

Kelsey shook her head at the windshield.

Mom forbade me from smoking in her car, but she’d probably also have forbidden fucking girls in it if she knew that was a possibility, and now that it already smelled like pussy I figured what was the harm. I lit up and popped the moonroof. Burning tobacco grains crackled like little fireworks. The world was immersed in the icy licorice liqueur of midnight.

When I took a drag I smelled Kelsey on my hands. She’d made me come in my jeans with her leg between mine.

How the fuck were we ever going to go to school together again.

“Are you okay?” I said.

“Yeah. I think. I don’t know.”

“That means no.”

She shifted in her seat.

“What are you feeling?” I said, not wanting to know.

And she proved me right by saying, “Nothing.”

Nothing. It meant nothing to her.

Donnie’s friend dropped him off and he drove us home, casting worried glances at me the whole time. “She’s pissed” was all he said about Mom. Kelsey asked to be let out a block from her house. To freshen up. Scrub herself of me. We didn’t say good-bye.

I thought of Plath:
I felt very still and very
empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel.
The opposite of Eliot’s stillness. Not an illuminated clarity arrived at through beauty, but the void at the center of disaster.

I texted her in bed. Couldn’t help myself.

Sorry if shit’s weird now.

I know you’re not like that. Like me.

It’s not a big deal.

We can still be friends. Or not. Whatever you want.

Just let me know you’re okay.

My texts went unanswered so long I thought she’d gone to sleep. But when I finally started to doze, my phone buzzed.

All she said was,
This never happened.

———

Back at school, Luke North appointed himself my new BF-fucking-F.

“Rally Friday,” he reminded me on Tuesday.

I ashed on his shoe.

On Wednesday he slipped a Rainbow Alliance flyer into my locker. I wrote
STOP PRETENDING TO BE HUMAN
on it and stuffed it in his.

Thursday he paid someone to deliver a box of cookies to me in homeroom. Everyone stared. I gave them away. The attached card read
UR ONE TOUGH COOKIE
.