Black Iris (20 page)

My mouth tasted like melted copper. It took a while to process that he’d hit me.

In my head was a haze of confusion and pain and a poem. One of my favorites, “Invictus.”

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud . . .

His lips moved but I only heard bleating. Everything was black-and-white save the red stain on the wood and my hands. I touched it with wonder. My blood.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

I stood up and walked home, dizzy, aching, exultant.

Alive.

———

Monday morning, first day of my suspension, I woke late to an empty house.

I showered, dressed. White pants, white hoodie. White beanie over wet hair. My lip was still puffy but I didn’t put makeup on. I wanted everything to show. Every glorious spot of color. Especially the reds.

I dumped out my book bag and took it into my parents’ bedroom.

Mom had driven her car that morning. Didn’t matter.

Before I left I eyeballed myself in the foyer mirror. Aside from the dark petal of hair slipping over an ear I was pale as death. Ghost flower with see-through skin, my veins blue roots. A black iris blooming in snow.

I didn’t smoke on the walk to school but did when I got there. Once more for old times’ sake. A dozen drags before fire reaches your fingers, the closure of that final crush against pavement, the cherry bursting into a hundred sparks.

I entered through the backstage theater door that was always propped open. Thanks, smokers. No metal detector.

Precisely six minutes until homeroom ended.

Nearest girls’ bathroom. A cheerleader eyed me in the mirror. I swung my bag onto the sink with a heavy clank.

She capped her lip gloss and hurried out.

I didn’t bother barricading the door. Didn’t matter.

Dad never wanted a gun. It was Mom’s doing. She couldn’t get it in her name because of her mental health history, so she convinced him: recent burglaries in the area, home invasions, what about
the children
. Dad caved but kept it in a safe. He gave me and Donnie the combination. Mom raged that she’d never kill herself but he had another fear: that she’d turn it on one of us.

Funny, how he’d always worried about the wrong person.

I walked down the hall two minutes before the bell, bag on hip, hand inside. Head clear. Just a touch of oxy to stop the shaking. I was surefooted as if I walked on four legs, not two. I passed classrooms where dull-eyed sheep baaed in their pens. When I walked into room 211 Luke would be standing up, torso exposed. Bells and locker slams would drown out the sounds.

Zoeller was right. Letting go was control.

Thirty seconds. Fifteen steps.

I flicked off the safety and drew my hand from the bag.

Something heavy and python-strong clamped around my chest. At first I thought it was a panic attack.

Then it dragged backward, pinning my arms, and a voice in my ear that sounded uncannily like Zoeller said, “Put it in the bag. Quick, before the bell.”

I aimed at his foot.

“Don’t do it, Laney. You’re better than this.”

“Give me one good reason not to.”

His massive hand covered mine on the .45. “Because I’d miss you.”

The bell rang.

Zoeller’s arm uncoiled. His hand lingered a moment, released.

I stood there holding a gun as kids spilled from doorways.

This was it. Let go or keep holding on. Give in to the hate or swallow it for one more day.

The world was full of people like Luke and Mr. Klein. I could take out one or two and billions more would line up to spit, mock, hurt me. Humiliate me. Hate me. Because I had the audacity to exist.

It was full of girls like Kelsey, too. Girls who’d toy with my heart. Break it. And I’d let them.

What was the point of it all? Why not kill one asshole and then myself? Why stick around for a lifetime of this shit?

Because of my brother.

And because of the psychotic boy behind me who seemed to almost care.

Maybe all you need to pull you back from the ledge is to know someone would miss you if you fell.

I put the gun in the bag. My heart beat like Plath’s heart:
I am, I am, I am.

Zoeller’s hands were on me again.

“One foot. Then the other. There you go.”

He walked me out into the sweetest sunlight that had ever touched my face.

NOVEMBER, LAST YEAR

I
t’s easier to tell truths in darkness. We let the candle die, let the apartment fill with a sea of shadows. Blythe and Armin sat on either side of me. I lay against his chest, one leg in her lap. Briefs, bras, panties, skin. Their hands were gentle.

“Would you have done it if he hadn’t stopped you?” Armin said.

“Yes.”

Neither of them recoiled. Armin took a deep breath and my body rose and fell against his chest.

“I’m glad you didn’t,” he said finally.

There was a silence where I was supposed to say
Me too
.

“You can tell us anything. We’ll never judge you.”

It sounded like he had something specific in mind for me to tell. I gazed over my shoulder at Blythe, streetlight falling through leaves in urban camo patterns on her skin. The only tat I could make out was the new one: a girl’s red-nailed hand clawing across her collarbone. Below the wrist the skin became black fur that was actually, if you looked closely, iris petals.

She called that one Little Wolf.

Our truth or dare game had become my life story. I’d been telling them about senior year, ramping up to the grand finale of Mom’s death, but I danced around certain things because, as you’ve already guessed, I’m an Unreliable Narrator.

Armin sensed my reticence.

“Laney, I found something on my laptop I’ve been meaning to ask you about.”

I said nothing. In my mind I twisted the air into a rope and strung it through my fingers like a cat’s cradle.

“There are searches in my browser history I didn’t make. ‘PTSD’ and ‘suicide.’ ” His next words were thin. “ ‘Sexual assault symptoms.’ ‘Rape survivor.’ ”

“So ask,” I said.

Shadows shifted over the wall, Rorschach monsters.

“Was it you?” he said.

“Yes.”

He touched my face. Pulled me in delicately, fragile as a paper doll. I let him hold me. Blythe’s fingernails dug at my thigh and I tensed the leg, making it hurt more.

“Poor thing,” she said in a low voice.

I buried my face in Armin’s neck and breathed in balsam and winter.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I should have known. The signs were all there.”

Blythe’s fingers carved into the gracilis, the slim ribbon of muscle on my innermost thigh. She’d taught me their names, traced each one with the scalpel of a nail so I’d remember.
Anatomy is poetry
, she’d said. Then she showed me.

“You don’t have to talk about this now,” Armin said.

“I’m not.”

“Does anyone else know?”

“I thought I didn’t have to talk about it.”

An incision of pain cut across his face. I watched him struggle with the need to know more versus respect for my boundaries versus clinical professionalism versus love.

Blythe had no such inhibitions. “Brandt Zoeller,” she said,
curling the name on her tongue and holding it like a razor blade. “I’ll fucking kill him.”

Adrenaline jabbed my heart, a burst of intense aliveness. When she got wild it made me wild, too.

Armin looked fretful.

“If you have any empathy you’ll agree,” Blythe said.

He said nothing.

“Zoeller deserves it,” she said.

Still nothing.

“Christ, this isn’t the time for Hippocratic bullshit. Do you love her or not?”

The big arm around my shoulders flexed. “Of course I do.” Then he touched my cheek, gazed into my eyes. “You know that, right? I love you, Laney.”

In a typical college romance novel, this was the moment I would’ve been waiting for. The validation of all my shame and suffering at the hands of other men: a beautiful boy loved me. What had been done to my body didn’t ruin me for Mr. Right. Zippity-fucking-doo-dah.

I looked back into those sweet brown eyes and said, “I love you, too.”

He kissed me, and despite myself the core of me tightened, rose toward him. Blythe’s hand slid off my leg, raking skin as it went.

“Well,” she said. “That’s that.”

We kissed a moment longer. He pressed his forehead to mine. We both looked back at her.

“What?” Armin said.

“We kill him.”

“Blythe.” He reached past me to touch her. His body felt both like shield and shackle. “Everyone’s emotional right now, but talking like that doesn’t help.”

“We have to do something. He’s a fucking frat boy on an athletics scholarship. Blokes like that never pay for what they take. The world is their playground.”

“Let’s calm down.”

“I can’t calm down. If someone hurts her, then we hurt him.”

This time Armin didn’t argue. We let the words hang, settle, coat our skin in a fine electrostatic dust. It thrummed between us, crackling. Our codependence. Our potential for violence. Our love.

“Then we hurt him,” I said.

DECEMBER, LAST YEAR

W
hen I pulled the trigger Armin crashed into me, sending my shot into the asphalt.

We toppled to the pavement and the gun spun out of my hands and skittered over the ice. I lunged for it but he held me down. I screamed and so did he, neither coherent. My elbow met his jaw. Spit flew and froze midair. He pinned my arms to the ground.

“Are you insane?” he yelled into my face.

“Get off me.”

“I won’t let you throw your life away.”

“He already took it,” I screamed back.

Tires screeched. A car door popped open.

Armin restrained me until Blythe reached us. She’d changed into a hoodie and jeans and knelt beside me, wide-eyed.

“What happened?”

“She brought a fucking gun. Hold her.”

He let go and I sat up. Deep breaths. My necklace had tangled around my throat and I almost twisted it tighter, wanting to hurt something, anything. My body buzzed with unspent violence. Blythe pulled me to my feet, fetched the bat. Armin carried the .45 as if it might explode.

“Put the safety on,” I said.

He grimaced helplessly.

I pointed to the side and mimed flicking the switch.

“Bloody hell,” Blythe said, seeing Zoeller.

Z had lost interest in our drama and closed his eyes, breathing shallowly, slowly. His throwing arm was twisted beneath his body at an angle that would have hurt if not for massive nerve damage.

“Bloody
hell
,” she said again.

I bent to pick up the wasted bullet. When a hollow-point impacts a target, something beautiful happens. The tip splits into petals that peel back from the center and it becomes a metal flower. It was almost lovely, the thought of filling Z’s body with a garden of them.

Down the alley, Donnie honked. Time.

“Got everything?” Blythe said.

Armin was still hung up on the gun. He looked at it in his hands, his eyes far away.

“There’s a problem,” I said. “He’s not that drunk. He’ll remember this.”

“You hit him in the head pretty hard,” Armin said.

“That’s not a guarantee.”

“You want to fucking kill him? Is that what you want?”

Armin rarely swore or raised his voice. Blythe moved to my side.

“He identified you,
Apollo
,” I said. “You don’t want him to remember that.” I eyed them each in turn. “We all need his blood on our hands. We have to be in this equally.”

The implication was obvious:

In case he died.

Blythe didn’t hesitate. She moved to Z, lifted the bat, swung viciously at his flank. Ribs crinkled like paper. His lungs emptied. I felt nothing.

She held the bat out to Armin.

“Now you,” I said.

“No.”

“I’m not asking.”

He still cradled the gun as if it were the delicate thing, not the thing that destroyed delicacy. “This is not what we talked about. This isn’t justice, it’s sadism. This is not okay.”

“Let’s discuss what’s okay.” I scraped the bat on the ground, the jaw-grinding brux of metal on stone. “Is what he did to me okay? Is the way I am okay? You said you’d never judge me.”

Donnie honked again, two sharp blasts.

“I’m not judging you,” Armin said.

“You are. You don’t think this is right, but it’s what I need.”

“His mind’s made up,” Blythe said. “Let’s fucking go.”

I looked at her, then back at him. “If you really loved me, you’d do it.”

Jealousy is the rust that eats away at morality’s hard steel. It’s cancerous, and once it starts it spreads, and spreads. At first it lets small concessions through. He watched me drink, do drugs. He looked the other way when we stole things. He was in love. He never realized all these lapses were weakening him, that a moment would come when I’d push harder than before and the entire structure would crumble into red powder.

Armin gave me the gun. Took the bat. Closed his eyes and inhaled. Opened them and swung and exhaled.

He’d gone for the head.

———

My hoodie was soaked with blood straight through to the shirt beneath. I didn’t notice till we were in the car and Blythe touched me and her hand came away red. Surreal, that this stuff that had been inside Z’s body now belonged to me. I sat with her in the backseat, restless, feeding on her energy. She took a wet cloth to my face and scrubbed the paint off. In the front seats Donnie and Armin were silent.
Armin had put the gun in the glove box. Donnie’s eyes rolled to it occasionally, frightened.

“He’s alive” was all I had said about Zoeller.

We’d called 911 from a burner phone, used a voice changer app to report the beating, smashed the battery. Donnie had thrown a brick through the picture window of the Pi Tau chapter house. The note wrapped around it read, simply,
LOSERS
.

Star quarterback beaten to within an inch of his life by thugs in Ken Tech face paint. Pretty clear how it’d all play out.

If only Zoeller forgot who we were.

If only he lived.

I took Blythe’s hand, chained my fingers with hers. I needed to touch someone. I needed to expel this wildness inside me.

Every time I’d hit his body it had felt like fucking him. Like being inside him, torching his nerves, igniting his blood, making him feel exactly how alive he was by destroying him one piece at a time. Violence is a violation of the body. I had violated him.

I shivered, not with cold.

In the passenger seat Armin sat with his head bowed.

Donnie dropped us off a block from my and Blythe’s apartment. I couldn’t hug him because of the blood but I kissed his cheek.

“Everything will be okay,” I said.

His face said he wanted that to be true.

I took the stairs two at a time. Flung the door open and stalked through the apartment from one end to the other, pacing, no destination. My hands twitched. The three of us met in the kitchen and insanely I imagined I could smell their emotions, the animal reek of revulsion and lust.

“Are you all right?” Blythe said.

“I’m a fucking werewolf.”

Armin flipped the switch and blood-orange light tinted the
room. We were filthy, caked with paint and sweat and frozen fluid.

“Come here,” I told him, moving to the sink.

I soaked a towel and ran it over his face. His eyes were solemn. Blythe leaned on the counter, watching.

I wiped away the last vestiges of white and said, “ ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust.’ ”

Armin blinked at me, startled.

“Are you afraid Brandt will die?” I said.

“I’m afraid of who we really are.”

Something dark coursed between the three of us. It was not a new thing, but it was new that it was this palpable. A black flicker at the edge of vision. A skulking, shadowy presence.

“We’re in this together now,” I said. “No doubts. No regrets. Even the smallest crack will shatter us. We have to be hard. Unbreakable.”

Blythe laid her hand on Armin’s back, the first time I’d ever seen her so tender toward him. There was history in that touch. His breathing changed, a different energy flowing through him. When he looked at me his eyes were full of shadows.

“The blood,” he said.

Blythe unzipped my hoodie and pulled it off. Armin peeled the shirt over my head. He washed my body and she washed my face. Oh, the symbolism. How fucking literary. I wished I were filthy everywhere so I could feel their hands all over me, so I could be touched again and again, cleansed of my sins, stained with new ones. His hand stroking my belly drove me crazy. When Blythe finished she eyed me a moment, then grabbed the discarded hoodie and bloodied her fingertips and smeared them over my mouth.

I took her face in my hands and kissed her.

In a heartbeat the beast in me came loose. We were wolf
girls, kissing wildly with teeth and nails. Our hair fell in our faces and our fingers drew blood and we didn’t care. We’d always been savage with each other. My hand found Armin’s and I pulled him close and tore my mouth from hers and kissed him. He was slower, stunned. Blythe kissed like she wanted to tear me apart and Armin kissed like he wanted to make me whole again. Her teeth grazed my throat and his lips moved over mine and our limbs intertwined, mine with hers with his. I pulled away from them, breathless.

“I want you both,” I said.

It was a floodgate opening. This had been in us all from the start, this mutual wanting. It had just been waiting for one of us to release it.

He brushed his knuckles across my cheek. She kissed my palm. When they looked at each other my heart stuttered. Knowingness brewed in her eyes, the way she’d size up men at Umbra. In his the old flame smoldered. The thought of them fucking each other was as intense as the thought of them fucking me.

Blythe seized my face and we kissed again, brutish and raw. I bit her lip so hard it bled, hers and Zoeller’s mixing in my mouth. I ripped at the zipper of her hoodie. She knotted my hair in a fist. We were feral and we wanted to ravish each other. I drove her toward the wall and Armin enclosed me from behind, those iron arms enveloping me, around my waist, between my legs. Then we shifted and Blythe slammed me against the wall and unclasped my bra and put her mouth to my breast. My spine curved, my hands finding her face. I swore and begged for more, more. Armin slipped off her hoodie, inhaled the scent of her hair, strangely tender in the midst of our ferocity.

I don’t know how we got to my bedroom. It was madness, all skin and mouths and hands. They undressed me first. Her
touch was furious and rough while his was gentle, soothing. My wild girl and my sweet boy. She hurled me to the bed and held me down, her knee between my bare legs, and I rode her thigh and made her jeans wet. Then another shift and Armin and I were over her, and he took her clothes off while I dipped my tongue into her navel. Then us girls on him, our small hands on the cascade of muscle pouring over his body. She grabbed his erect dick unflinchingly, stroked it. God, that made me so hot. So hard. So wet. So I-didn’t-know-what-the-fuck except turned on like all hell. The wolf in me surged and she was the one I wanted to devour. The monster always eats the pretty girl, right? I pinned her to the mattress and we wrapped ourselves around each other, hands between legs, lips fused. With girls I lost myself, all the softness and fluidity enough to drown in. I couldn’t stop kissing her. Even when all I was doing was gasping into her mouth, I couldn’t stop. But Armin’s presence changed things, and when he clutched my hips and jerked me back against that hard cock I cried out, let go, let him take me. His hands moved over my back, my breasts. He fucked me hard but without making me feel used, fucked me like it wasn’t for his pleasure but only mine, and I gave it to her like he gave it to me, obsessively, relentlessly. I took his dick so deep my whole body ached with fullness, ran my fingers along her lips until she was so wet I slipped inside like water. I don’t know which got me off more. I wanted to fuck that sweet tightness out of her and I wanted him to fuck it out of me. At some point I stopped noting whose hand or mouth was whose. Identity was irrelevant. Feeling was everything. Only the slick silk thickening around my fingers, the steady strokes thrusting into the core of me. Our bodies blurred into one animal. Kissing was too overwhelming now but Blythe held my face, our eyes locked. When she got close to coming a dreamy lostness stole over her that broke me up in
side, and I breathed her name and she arched against my hand, her mouth a dark half-moon tilting upward, the slender cord of her throat stretching taut. There is nothing more beautiful in this world than a girl when she comes. It’s everything, our delicacy and our fierceness made one. I came then, watching her, and Armin with me. Ours was bestial, graceless. The crudeness of boy and girl. It twisted through every cell in me like some paranormal transformation, a monster briefly emerging, pushing from behind my face, shredding the inside of my skin. My blood boiled and every bone snapped and nothing was left of the girl whose skin I had worn.

Then silence, stillness. The fouled bodies of beasts inexplicably intertwined, him inside me, me inside her.

We parted. I pulled Blythe to my chest, our limbs fitting together perfectly. Small as I was, I could hold all of her in my arms. My face nestled against her cheek, softness to softness, and Armin curled up behind me and put his arms around us both. The solidity of him against my spine was the boulder at the edge of the cliff, a place I could not fall from.

The three of us had held each other like this before in the sand at the lake at dawn. We’d been in love then, too, but it had taken blood and violence to make us admit it.

“I love you,” I whispered. I didn’t attach a name. It didn’t need one.

Armin said it back. Blythe didn’t. Her hair obscured her face and I couldn’t read the emotion there. Maybe there was none.

After a while we became three again, our separate, secretive selves.

“We should check on Donnie,” Armin said.

“In a bit. I don’t want this to end yet.”

After this came darkness. Subterfuge, paranoia. Eventually the police would connect me to Z (
Did he have any enemies,
Mrs. Zoeller?
). I’d leave this apartment for the new one Armin leased. I’d pretend I didn’t know the girl in the red dress Zoeller was last seen with. For so long all I’d focused on was tonight, reaching him, ruining him, and now it was done and I was hollow and all I could think was how this would end, this closeness between us. I slipped my hand through Blythe’s messy hair. Those heavy-lidded eyes were drowsy with ecstasy, pure pale blue.

“You know what really got me off?” she said. “Watching you being fucked.”

Armin stiffened against my back. I traced Blythe’s cheekbone with a finger. Her face had a chiseled quality, the bones sharp and fine as diamond facets, her mouth chipped garnet. Indestructible.

“You got everything you wanted.” Armin couldn’t see her, the layered meaning in her gaze. “You got your revenge. You won.”

If he was the last thing to hold on to at the cliff’s edge, she was the drop. The exhilarating free fall into annihilation.

“Is it worth it?” she said.