Black Iris (8 page)

SEPTEMBER, LAST YEAR

T
he mattress was the last thing left. I was about ready to collapse atop it, but Blythe kicked my ankle and said, “Not yet, lazybones.”

My entire life fit into the bed of Dad’s truck. Kind of crazy that you could pack it up and drive for an hour and become part of a new universe. It was the last weekend before college began, autumn stealing in, wrapping the edges of leaves with gold foil, cranking up the blue in the sky till it reached that agonizingly pure shade that hit you square in the gut like a fist. I sat on the tailgate in the shade of an elm, sunlight lacing through the leaves and laying a filigree of fire over my skin.

“Got a smoke?” Blythe said, joining me.

I gave her my pack.

“There’s only one left.”

“All yours.”

She lit up and took a drag, then gave it to me.

The radio was on in the truck, playing Lorde’s “400 Lux,” the backbeat slow and boomy like the last languid pulses of summer. I laid my head on the mattress, drumming one foot on the tailgate. Blythe snapped her fingers with the snare and we kept time together perfectly. In moments like this I could forget I ever had a past life. There was just now, blue sky, warm asphalt, our skinny colt legs in cutoffs, me and my
best friend. I’d worried about moving to Chicago because the more people there were around me, the more alone I felt. Little wolf in a big wood. With her, though, I was never a nobody. She scorned the hangers-on who mooned after her and instead got into poetry-quoting matches with me, asked my opinion on a work in progress, listened to me angst about my writing. We’d stay up late drinking coffee and smoking and talking. We could talk forever. I traded the cigarette back after each drag and during the bridge she caught my hand and said, “I’m glad you’re here,” and my heart felt so large and light I could let go and watch it shoot up into the leaves like a balloon.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” an unfamiliar voice said.

Someone stood in front of the tailgate.

“Holy fucking shit.” Blythe jumped down and tossed the cig, though we’d only finished half. “What are you doing here?”

“Nice to see you, too, slut.”

They flung their arms around each other. It took a moment before I saw the new girl clearly: tall and tawny-skinned, a mane of sable hair raveling around her shoulders. She wore a tennis skirt and tank like a ball gown. Blythe could be cocky, but this girl was operating on a whole other level. She exuded majesty as if her every step fell on red velvet. Her big, dark eyes made me feel infinitely small.

I instantly knew who she was.

“When did you get here?” Blythe said, still hugging her. The girl’s eyes stayed on me.

“Drove up this morning.”

“He didn’t tell me you were coming.”

The girl smiled indulgently.

“He doesn’t know,” Blythe said. “Christ. He’s gonna freak.”

“Is he here?”

“Yeah, upstairs. We’re moving in—” She finally remembered me, and yanked my arm. “Get over here, you misanthrope. This is my roommate, Laney. Laney, this is Armin’s sister, Hiyam.”

Cue dramatic organ music.

“Nice to meet you,” I said.

“Likewise.” Her eyes narrowed in cool amusement. She raised her face to the sun, breathed in deeply, then looked back at us. “I’m dying for a cigarette, bitches.”

———

After the squealing (Hiyam) and the sighing (Armin) and the private talk (Blythe and I pressed our ears to the bedroom door but only heard her whine “Armin-
joon
” over and over), I finally had my own room in my very first apartment. Our place stood at the top of four steep flights like something out of Edward Gorey (L
is for Laney,
who fell down the stairs
), in a neighborhood that pretended not to be Humboldt Park, but basically was. Armin called it the kind of place where you could play “Firecracker or Gunshot?” on a summer night. Blythe called it “an authentic American experience” and refused to let Armin buy us anything, including a nicer neighborhood.

“Don’t let anyone own you,” she said, “and don’t be owned by anything.”

“And try not to get shot,” Armin said.

Blythe rolled her eyes. “Drama queen.”

She disappeared with Hiyam on a cigarette run. Donnie had come with me, and we helped Armin clean the apartment. My brother and I spent half the time horseplaying while Armin grew increasingly withdrawn. When I walked into the bathroom he was kneeling on the tile, forehead and arm propped on the sink. He’d stripped down to his undershirt, a fine rime of sweat glazing his skin, buffing it like bronze. Sweat turned
his scent into the aroma of wet cedar chips. I drank the air, mesmerized.

“So why’s your sister here?” I said.

“She deferred college for a year.”

“Because of rehab?”

“Yes.”

“Is she going to live with you?”

His shoulders heaved. “We haven’t worked that out yet.”

I put a hand on his back, lightly. The hard curves of muscle made me want to press tighter, to follow them as they spun around his bones. Boys are so beautiful when they don’t realize how powerful they are. When they hold it with quiet grace, oblivious to how easily they could rip the world apart. Once, in one of her Byronic fits, my mother said she wished I’d been born a boy.
You’re like me
, she said.
Hunter. Taker. This life will be a cage for you.
I didn’t understand until I got older. Then I wished it, too. Every fucking night.

Armin tilted his face upward. “Laney.”

“Yeah?”

“No pills around her. Please.”

“I won’t.”

“Promise me.”

I took my hand away. “I said I won’t.”

“I’m not trying to be a dick. She’s my—”

“I know. I have a brother, Armin. I would kill you if you ever put him in danger.”

He stared up at me with those dark doe eyes. “You should stop, too.”

“I can handle it. I’m sorry your sister can’t.”

I made for the door and Armin stood, reaching past me, swinging it shut. His arm hung over my shoulder, his heat enveloping me without touching.

We didn’t move or speak. Only breathed, slow and deep.
Every tendon tensed and drew my skin so taut the pressure of air against it was agony. A body has a way of wanting to be touched so badly that the touch itself will hurt, but so will remaining untouched. Nothing helps.

“Don’t lead me on again,” I said, turning. “Don’t touch me if you’re not going to fuck me.”

He pushed me against the door, his mouth coming down on mine.

I had nothing to hold on to but him. He lifted me beneath the knees and his skin was like hot metal, sticking to me, searing. I’d kissed him dozens of times but this time was different. This time led to something irrevocable. My fingers curled in his hair and kept curling till he groaned and bit my lip. I tasted salty tin and laughed. He silenced me with another kiss. This one was less vicious but more intense, too intense, his tongue finding mine again and again, his torso coiling against me, snakelike. My legs tightened around him. I was wet as fuck. I was coming apart. I had kissed boys, fucked them, taken them into my mouth, given my body up to everything they could do to it, and it hadn’t felt like this. It hadn’t felt like anything. Every time I tried to get space and regain control Armin filled it effortlessly, driving me back until I was walled in on every side, nowhere to go but into this heat, this blazing white-hot oblivion.

A door slammed and girlish laughter spilled through the apartment.

I pressed my cheek to Armin’s, breathing hard.

“We’ll finish this later,” he said, his voice raspier than usual.

Then the party began. We ordered pizza and mixed cheapo cocktails of Bacardi and Fresca, which Hiyam said was “so college.” We limited ourselves to one drink out of respect for her sobriety but that was enough to make Donnie flushed and bright-eyed. When Armin turned up the music, Donnie danced. My shy little brother who hid in his hoodies like a
turtle in its shell. Blythe whispered something in Donnie’s ear, and his flush deepened, and the two of them pressed close, her hands sliding over his hips.

I looked away.

Hiyam blew a smoke ring and said, “Your brother is so hard for her.”

My brain smoldered. People moved around me, talking and laughing while I sank into the couch, chain-smoking, lost in my own head. Shadows tilted across the room, folding up the light into little squares, sealing us in dark envelopes.

“Laney. Come here.”

Blythe peered at me from a doorway, looking like she was up to no good.

I met her in the kitchen. She had the bottle of Bacardi and one glass.

“Bottoms up,” she said, handing it to me.

Her eyes were already shiny. I shook my head, but swallowed it in one gulp. The stuff was like warm acid.

She poured another finger.

“You’re bad,” I said softly.

“So are you.”

I smelled the alcohol on her breath, razor sharp. She downed it and set the glass on the counter a little too loudly, and I filled it again.

“Be normal out there,” she said. “Armin’ll kill us if we’re fucked-up around Hiyam.”

“I fake normal every day of my life.”

Her face grew solemn. I drained the glass and set it down soundlessly.

“This is sad,” she said.

“I know. I hate Bacardi.”

“
This
is sad, you twat. That we need to get fucked-up just to be normal.”

“Sarah McLachlan commercials about homeless puppies are sad. This is reality.”

Blythe gave me her thousand-lumen smile. “Little Laney. My ball of bloody sunshine.”

I looked down at the counter, thinking, Call me more things. Call me yours.

“I’m glad you brought Donnie,” she said. “I’ve been dying to meet him.”

“How come?”

“To figure you out, mystery girl. How are you so tiny when he’s so tall?”

“He got all the height genes.”

“What’d you get?”

“All the crazy.”

She laughed. “And all the cuteness.”

God. Maybe I wasn’t ready. Change the subject. “Be honest. Were you this messed up before you met me?”

“You think this is messed up?” She leaned on a palm. “I used to drink every night till I blacked out. Couldn’t go to bed sober. And you know Armin, Mr. Straight Edge. Never let me enjoy it.”

“Why’d you drink?”

“To slow down.”

“Slow what?”

Her eyes flicked to one side. “There’s something inside me that spins too fast. Sometimes it makes me crazy.”

I knew what she meant. Mom used to hide empty wine bottles in the garage. She’d get up early after passing out drunk on the couch, dispose of the evidence before Dad saw. When she didn’t drink she’d be up all night, doing things. Once when I was little I dreamed I lived in a house made of cake, the walls painted with frosting, and when I woke at dawn I found her pulling cupcakes from the oven. The kitchen table was covered with them.
Hundreds. Carrot and gingerbread and black currant.
Delaney
, she’d said, laughing,
you’re dreaming.
But I knew I wasn’t.

I felt uneasy. “Is that why you get high with me?”

“You’re different.” Blythe peered up at the light, the sunset tint bleeding through the old Tiffany-style shade. “It’s different with you. I feel—never mind, this is silly.”

“Come on. What?”

She didn’t quite look at me. “You’re so fucking intense. When I’m around you everything is amplified, acute. You’ve infected me with it. Today I got off the train early and walked home, tasted the autumn air in my mouth. Watched leaves blowing out of the trees. Felt the skeleton inside my skin, this part of me I can’t see that will remain when I die, outlast me. Everything was bloody poetry. I need to numb myself a little or I’ll go mad.”

My heart beat too fast. “I don’t want to make you crazy.”

“Bit late for that,” she said wryly, but her pulse thrummed in her throat, quick and hard.

“This is dangerous. Me and you. We’re pulling each other over the edge.”

“Let go, Laney. Falling feels amazing.”

“Right until you hit the ground.”

She jumped onto the counter and tilted her head back. She was every bit Artemis tonight, wild-eyed and tangle-haired like she’d just stalked out of the woods from a kill. Her tattoos were painted on with blood and rainwater.

“Come up here.”

I boosted myself beside her, shakily.

“Feel how high we are. Wouldn’t it be lovely to fall?”

What did she really mean? “We should stop, Blythe.”

“Should, should. ‘I should wear tiger pants, I should have an affair.’ ”

“ ‘We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.’ ”

She gave me a sly half smile.

“Plath was crazy, you know,” I said.

“In a beautiful way.”

“Like you.”

Blythe only laughed again. God, that laugh did something to me. “You’ve got to admire her balls. Stuck her head in an oven. Biggest feminist fuck-you ever. Fuck domesticity, fuck depression, fuck everything they thought about her.”

“That’s how you make me feel.”

“Like you want to stick your head in an oven?”

“Like I don’t care what anyone thinks. Like I’m crazy, in a beautiful way.”

Know what else is crazy? That was the first time I said I loved someone.

Blythe leaned so close I could see every flyaway wisp of hair gilded by the kitchen light, every throb of blood along her jaw. The golden swan arch of her throat daring me to kiss or cut it. She laid a hand against my cheek, cool skin to warm, and said, “Look at you. You’re a crier when you’re drunk.”

“I’m not crying.”

“What’s this, then?” Her thumb brushed a tear.

“Falling.”

She watched my mouth as I spoke, then raised her eyes to mine. “You’re so pretty, Laney.”

“I’m really not,” I said, lowering my face, and she lifted it and leaned closer and kissed me. Just once. She caught my bottom lip and held it, lightly, so light it seemed the breath I exhaled against her mouth could break this. We were perfectly still, nothing moving but the air between us and the blood crashing through our veins. Then both of her hands were on my face and she was holding me there, kissing me for real. Still slow and soft, like an echo of something that had already happened, or was about to. My eyes were slightly open but all I saw was a
twinkling haze, tears dotting my eyelashes like the city skyline at dusk. When I’d kissed Armin, it was fire. Something visceral happened at the deepest cellular level of me. I’d felt it low in my belly, hard and tight, animal, unreckonable. But when I kissed Blythe it was all air. High in my chest, a rising lightness, an evanescence, all the dark, heavy things in me breaking up and scattering like dandelion seeds.
Things fall apart
, I thought.
The center cannot hold.
It was happening, finally, finally. I cupped the back of her head, combed my fingers through her hair. Tried to match her lightness but it wasn’t light anymore. My tongue grazed her teeth and I tasted rum and vanilla and something that was just her, something I couldn’t get enough of. I couldn’t stop. We hopped off the counter and she pressed me to it, pinning me there. We kissed like we were coming up from some cold depth and the only air was in each other’s lungs. Pure oxygen. Tingling spread through me until every atom buzzed, shimmering, scintillating, the way you come back to life at the water’s surface and every cell blazes with that first fiery-sweet breath, and I was just a billion tiny points of light condensing into heat and skin for a moment, for this kiss.