Black Iris (3 page)

I kissed him to shut him up.

God, I was high. So close to that numb semiconsciousness
I craved. The place I imagined Mom had been when she was tying the noose. If she hadn’t been such a prude, she could’ve dosed herself with little pieces of oblivion, like me.

If she’d been more like me, she’d still be alive.

Josh stripped down to his boxers, his erection poking out. I ran my fingertips lightly over the head and he shuddered.

“Get a condom,” I said.

He lowered me to a bed that smelled of sun and grass and lost summers. My head was a million miles away from this. I was thinking about the old wood chipper rusting in our garage, wondering how it’d feel if I stuck an arm inside. If the bones would snap like dry wood, skin tearing, muscle fraying, a rag doll ripping apart. Mom chose the coward’s way out. I’d have done it as messily as I could, made myself really
feel
something, because why not? If you know you’re going to die, what’s left to fear?

That’s the thing. Maybe we’re not really afraid of pain. Maybe we’re afraid of how much we might like it.

Josh kissed the inside of my thigh and I stopped him. “Put a condom on.”

“I want to make you come first.”

“I can’t even feel my legs.”

His hand slid into my panties, his fingers doing something I couldn’t figure out. “This doesn’t feel good?”

“It doesn’t feel like anything.”

He sagged against me, cratering the bed.

“You can fuck me,” I said matter-of-factly. “It’s okay.”

“This feels wrong. You’re not into it.”

“Like it matters.”

“It does to me.” He took a deep breath. “Can I just hold you for a while?”

Wow.

His arms circled me and I pressed my palms to the moon-
painted sheet. My chest moved with each breath but I had no sensation of actually breathing, as if it were someone else’s body. Half my life seems to have happened to someone else’s body. This phenomenon has a name. I told Mom about it once, and before I even finished describing it she said
depersonalization
.

Sometimes I feel like a deperson.

“You seem so sad,” Josh said.

Funny, how they mistake emptiness for sadness.

I lay quietly. After a few minutes we sat up and he put the dress back on me. I let him do it, and when he was done I kissed his cheek, picked up my bag, and left.

———

My mother used to say there are two kinds of people in this world:

Those who want, and those who take.

Most of us are sheep who spend our lives in want. We follow the path worn smooth and velvety from the hooves before us. There’s no need for leashes or fences—we call those things law and morality. Man is the only animal that can reason and all he does with reason is shackle himself. We eat what we’re fed and we fuck what we can’t outrun and it’s never what we dream about but it dulls the screaming edge of desire just enough. Enough so we keep our heads down, our eyes on the ground. Our fetters are fashioned from conformity and fear.

But sometimes an animal can’t be contained. Sometimes a head lifts from the herd and a wolfish intelligence kindles, the nostrils flaring, the eyes catching sickles of moonlight and a hot, earthy breath clotting the cold air, and someone realizes there’s really nothing stopping us from taking whatever we want.

And everything is prey.

———

On the street I lit a cigarette and leaned against the iron fence, watching my smoke fly away. The wind shook the trees softly, the leaves shivering, a sound like dry rain. The heart of the city felt like the middle of a wilderness. No one but Donnie knew I was here. I could disappear into the night, dragging a carcass behind me.

I could disappear forever.

Something pale shifted in the shadows below a tree, and I tensed.

“I’m not sure why I still go to these things,” a male voice said. He stepped into a ring of warm streetlight. The paleness was his shirt; his skin was dusky bronze. “It’s a meat market in there.”

“Pretty sure meat has a higher IQ,” I said.

He propped himself against the fence a few feet away, smiling. I couldn’t make out much save a shock of white teeth, his face all hard planes of shadow fitting together in sharp chiaroscuro. Music swelled from the house and cut off abruptly at a door slam.

“Waiting for someone?” he said.

“About to leave.”

“Not into Greek life?”

“Not into human connections.”

His head tilted curiously. “So why come?”

“To skulk around in the shadows outside. Like you.”

Soft laugh. “Touché. But it’s more hiding than skulking.”

I almost asked,
What could a frat boy be hiding from?
, but that would go against my human connection rule.

“Did you find him?” the guy said.

I froze with the cigarette halfway to my mouth, a corkscrew of smoke twisting slowly above my hand. “Who?”

“The person you were looking for.”

Before I could respond, the gate banged open and a golden whirlwind swept between us, spinning around in the light.

“I swear to fucking God,” the girl said in a low, accented voice, “you are a total shit for leaving me with those—” She noticed me then and laughed, so suddenly I jumped. It was the girl from the bathroom. The one I’d photographed. Of course. “She’s here. Good. Did you find out why she’s stalking me?”

“We were just getting to that,” the guy said.

“I wasn’t stalking you,” I muttered, trying not to sound sheepish. “I thought you were someone else.”

“How insulting. I’m incredibly stalkable.” She snapped her purse open and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “Got a light?”

It was an Australian accent, a mischievous twang in the vowels. That same mischief was in her face, in the curve at one corner of her mouth, the slyness in her heavy-lidded eyes. I handed her my lighter and she studied me, the flame splashing her face with amber, giving her a diabolical look.

“So.” She exhaled. “Invite her yet?”

“I don’t even know her name,” the guy said.

“You’re crap at picking up girls, Armin.”

“That’s why I leave it to you.”

Aussie girl smirked. She wore that strapless black dress like a weapon, lithe and sleek, femme fatale–ish. The tats sleeving her slender arms soaked up the light. I still couldn’t get a good look at the guy.

“The bloke with no discernible social skills is Armin,” she said. “I’m Blythe. We’re getting the fuck out of here. Want to come?”

“Where are you going?”

“Umbra.”

The club from the flyer. “I’m not twenty-one.”

“Maybe this isn’t a great idea, Blythe,” Armin said.

“Oh, piss off.” She flicked her cigarette away in a pinwheel of sparks. “I was clubbing at fourteen, and look how I turned out.”

“That’s exactly my point.”

Blythe laughed, so infectiously I did, too. She turned that incandescent smile on me. “Get a good photo?”

Blush. “I didn’t look.”

“Give me your mobile.”

I gave it to her. She seemed like the kind of girl it was pointless to say no to.

She laughed again when she saw her pic. When she showed Armin I caught a better glimpse of him: the lean lines of his face, the smokiness around his eyes, as if smudged with coal dust. His hair was a rich brown streaked with rust. Latino, maybe, or Middle Eastern. As Janelle would have said: fuckhot. The two of them bent their heads together, and I realized they must be a couple.

“I look wretched,” Blythe said. “You got me without my mask on.”

“ ‘I like a look of agony, because I know it’s true.’ ”

Yes, Laney. Totally fucking nerd out on them.

But she surprised me. “Emily Dickinson. The woman in white.”

“English majors,” Armin groaned.

“The plot thickens.” Blythe returned my phone. She was looking at me differently now. “You know poetry.”

“A little.”

“A little is dangerous enough.” She shot Armin an arch glance. “He only reads textbooks and image memes.”

“Not true. I read your stuff.”

“It’s crap anyway.”

“Oh, the false modesty. Blythe’s good, and she knows it. Don’t compliment her, though. Goes straight to her head.”

“He thinks I’m egotistical.”

“It’s called pathological narcissism.”

“They don’t even have a clinical term yet for what’s wrong with him. What about you, English major? You write?”

I was trying to follow their rapid-fire banter. “Sort of.”

“Sort of how?”

“I’m working on a novel, but it’s terrible.”

Blythe laughed. “A girl after my own heart. What’s your name?”

“Laney.”

“Well, Laney, terrible novelist,” she said, hooking one arm through mine and the other through Armin’s, “you are cordially invited to join a bloody know-it-all and a pathological narcissist at Umbra tonight.”

“I’ll keep you away from bad influences,” Armin said.

“He means me.”

“She knows, Blythe.” He eyed me over her head. “Coming?”

As if that was even a question. These were the smart, charmingly weird people I’d dreamed of meeting my whole life. Dad said college would be different, but adults just tell you that so you don’t kill yourself.
It gets better
is the biggest lie they’ve sold to our generation, unless
it
means the meds. But here were a girl and boy too brainy and bizarre to fit in with the red-cup-and-condom crowd, and already I was half in love with them both.

These were the people I’d been waiting for.

How could I say anything but “Yes”?

———

I sat between them in the cab, though Blythe was the natural center of everything. Listening to her banter with Armin was like standing between two ballet dancers in a gunfight. They circled each other elegantly, feinting, pirouetting, setting up the
fatal shot, and Blythe was usually the one to fire it point-blank to Armin’s chest. He accepted his wounds with a gentleman’s grace, and the dance resumed. I sank into the seat and let their voices hum on my skin. Ribbons of light threaded through the streets, cars flowing like pulses of illuminated blood into the city’s steel heart. When we crossed the river Blythe grabbed my elbow and made me look: the water was a thick black stroke of ink speckled with gold flakes and silver chips, the shattered reflections of a thousand bright windows, shimmering. Her eyes sparkled the same way, filled with a thousand tiny lights.

“You’re not looking,” she said.

But I was.

Armin nudged my knee. “So who were you hunting, detective?”

If I wasn’t still so high, I might’ve reacted more viscerally. Instead I felt it in a scientific way, his touch like an electromagnetic pulse, disturbing something in me at a particle level.

“Nobody.”

“You took my picture,” Blythe said.

“Wrong person.”

“Who’s the right person?” Armin said.

“Nobody.”

They both laughed.

“How fun,” Blythe said. “I love a game.”

“It’s not a game,” I said.

“Oh, but you’re wrong.” Armin spoke to me, but he was looking at Blythe. “Everything is a game to her.”

For the first time she didn’t have a witty comeback. She just stared at him, eyes glittering, and somehow I knew he’d fired the lethal shot that round.

We cruised through dead streets where neon perfused the air like colored smoke. Traffic lights blinked on and off, emerald and citrine and ruby splitting in dazzling shards across our faces.

“So you guys are Greek?” I said to break the silence.

“I’m a Pi Tau alumnus,” Armin said. “But those days are behind me.”

“I’m Australian,” Blythe said. “We don’t pay for friends.”

Armin leaned into me and stage-whispered, “Her culture is far more advanced. They wrestle crocodiles.”

“Please. You Yanks are the worst. My first week here, I was propositioned by a porn director.”

“It was not porn,” Armin said, laughing.

“It totally was.”

“This guy was casting students for an ‘erotic art film,’ ” he explained. “It was tasteful.”

“Art film, my arse. Like, literally.”

“Blythe has little appreciation for cinema nouveau. I had to bail her out of jail. She was almost deported.”

“What happened?” I said.

“Caught this perv filming my bum and smashed his camera. Should’ve been his face.”

“She’s a hands-on problem-solver,” Armin said.

“Pervo kept talking about my ‘star quality.’ FYI, Laney, that is a euphemism for fanny.”

“What she’s failing to mention,” Armin said, “is she tried to negotiate a higher rate. He didn’t have the budget. Only then did she break his camera.”

Blythe eyed him coolly. “But enough of my misadventures. Let’s regale her with the enchanting tale of Armin buying Australian porn.”

“It was ironic,” he protested. “I didn’t think you were actually in it.”

I started giggling. Legit giggling.

“Holy shit.” Blythe touched my chin, turning my face. “Look at her eyes. She’s high as a fucking kite.”

“No drugs,” the cabbie barked. “You leave.”

“Relax, mate. We don’t have any drugs.” She leaned closer. “They’re all in your bloodstream, aren’t they?” Her breath was warm on the side of my neck. “I’d have to be a vampire to get them out.”

“Blythe,” Armin said, suddenly stern.

“Christ. Everyone’s a judge.” She pulled away.

Another charged, tense silence. There was something I wasn’t getting about the two of them. Some subtext. I moved my bag to my thigh, brushing Blythe’s leg. She glanced at me, at my curled hand, and her eyes lit up. No one saw her take the pills, not even Armin.
Good girl
, she mouthed.

If you’re keeping score, that’s the first time I sided with her against him.

Then the driver turned and there, tucked between high-rises, was an enormous mansion like something out of Poe. All black granite and gables, brimming with ominousness. The marquee read
UMBRA
. Behind it the logo glowed, a circle of shadow slipping over a white sun.

Armin paid the driver and popped his door. So did Blythe, and I froze when they both offered hands. Choose a side. Make a statement. High school all over again. I took Armin’s and got out quickly. Blythe’s gaze followed us, and something snagged behind my ribs, a fine, sharp wire catching hold. Of what, I didn’t yet know. I just felt the catch.