Black Iris (9 page)

Blythe broke away suddenly and I made a sound against her mouth, half a cry.

“Where are you two?” Armin called, and we jumped apart, grabbing the bottle and glass, and sang in unison, “Coming.”

I stared at her. That moment when the spell breaks, the madness clears. Then we started giggling wildly. We were drunk. On cheap rum and each other. We hid the bottle and almost broke the glass and had to lean together for balance. She looked into my face, her eyes electric. “Keep it together, you bloody lightweight,” she said, and I wanted to kiss her again. But she pulled me by the hand into the living room and everyone was there, watching. What had really changed? Nothing. I felt the same about her as I always had. I lit a cigarette and blew
smoke like a cloud of frost, gave them my bitchiest
what are you looking at
look. Just normal Laney. When I kissed Armin later he frowned at the taste of rum. “It’s from Blythe,” I said, and laughed. He didn’t get the joke.

That evening Hiyam decided to paint my room. We all went down to the basement to scrounge for spare cans, but found only cobwebs and a giant centipede. Hiyam screamed
O
h my god kill it
and Blythe scoffed
Don’t be a softcock
and Donnie stomped on it. Hiyam attached herself to my brother, her new hero. We split up to search. I wandered off alone, my head a whirlwind. I couldn’t think straight. Couldn’t stop replaying the memory of his kiss, and hers. Getting drunk: mistake. Letting my guard down: mistake. Losing control: mistake mistake mistake. I was bent over a dust-caked crate of vinyl records, touching my mouth softly, remembering, when hands slipped around my waist.

I closed my eyes. “They’re right there.”

“I can’t get you out of my head,” Armin said.

We were hidden behind an old washing machine piled with boxes, but I could hear them—Donnie and Hiyam murmuring, and Blythe’s explosive laugh, like a firework, a gorgeous shriek bursting and dissolving into sparkling peals.

“Good,” I said. “Suffer a little.”

His arms flexed, pulling me closer. “You’re cruel to me, and I think you like it.”

“You should talk.”

“Do you know how much I care about you, Laney?”

“God, don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“You’re just going to tell me to stop getting high. Or drunk. Whatever the doctor orders.”

“Wrong. I’m going to tell you I want you. With me, in this moment. Completely.”

He pressed his mouth to my neck. It felt like a hot blade going in, a liquid stab of heat straight to the brain stem. I tilted my head away, my hair tumbling into my face. Armin kissed the cords of my throat, his hands sculpting over my collarbone, my breasts, pulling me back against the hard ridge in his jeans. My palms thumped onto the washing machine, my shirt riding up and my belly touching cool steel. His mouth was right against the carotid, that thick thread of blood that supplies the brain. In a hanging the carotids are usually compressed, causing unconsciousness in a matter of seconds. It’s more common with women. Our necks are thinner. I was dizzy, still drunk, but when his knee nudged my legs apart I said, “Don’t stop, don’t stop,” and when his leg pressed between mine I quit using words. I made some kind of animal noise that meant
more
. There was only the color white in my head, an amalgamation of all colors, all senses. White is the color you see right before that final blackness. It’s possible to survive a hanging, but for the brain to be so blood-starved you’re nothing but a vegetable.

“Laney,” Armin murmured, “come back to me.”

He turned my face to one side and kissed me and I bit him, hard. Hot gush of sugar and iron in my mouth. His arms tightened, one hand slipping inside my jeans, between my legs, and at that point there was not much human left in me. Crazed fantasies filled my head: him tearing my pants off, spreading my thighs and fucking me right there in that damp darkness. And Blythe lifting my face to the sunset lamp, the soft collision of her mouth and mine. And a pillow beneath my knees, a sweaty muscled abdomen rippling above me. Desire mixed with memory. I was all want, nothing but a hunger with a mouth. I could have taken him right then. I wanted to. I wanted to be fucked like I hadn’t been in so, so long. My head was a cyclone of fire and if I weren’t so drunk I might have screamed, the way Hiyam screamed when she saw something
horrible. I was the horrible thing. Locked in here alone in the cage of my skull, with these claws for thoughts and all this red, wet want. I leaned into Armin’s hand, the hard finger grinding against my panties. My thoughts split in a million directions. Closing my eyes only made it more disorienting, so I opened them and I guess I already sort of knew what I’d see.

Vaguely I remembered someone calling
We found it, come on, Laney
, and footsteps receding, yet Blythe stood less than a dozen feet away, her mouth hanging open. It wasn’t her face—it was the look in her eyes that stabbed straight through me. Hurt, but a knowing, unsurprised hurt. Like this was something she knew was coming but thought she could hold off a little longer.

Armin hadn’t seen her. His head was bowed over my shoulder, his hand moving agonizingly, sweetly, right against the poison in me. I let myself gasp once, loud enough to be sure Blythe heard.

She turned and walked away.

———

I was the last one upstairs. Everyone was in my room. The music was loud, their voices louder. I went to the kitchen and turned on the cold water and splashed it into my face.

There is a goal, I thought. Remember that. This is a means to an end.

They are a means to an end.

My skin pinkened, then paled in the water. I willed the numbness to seep through to my core.

I didn’t hear anyone behind me but when those hands slipped around my waist again I eased into them, sighing. Even when I realized the difference I didn’t stop. I knew their skin so well. His was coarse like the head of a match. Hers was just soft, pure fucking softness, like air blowing over silk, the
barest glide against mine. One hand slipped under my shirt and cupped a breast. I stiffened the way you do in electrocution, the inside of your body roiling and manic, the outside paralyzed.

“Did he get you off?” Blythe breathed against my ear.

“No.”

Her hand tightened on my breast and my teeth clamped so hard it felt like they sparked.

“Too bad. I would have.”

She pulled away and I turned with her. Caught skin, clung with my nails. I raked the inside of her forearm as hard as I could, gloriously savage, uncaring, and we stood there inches apart, our teeth bared and our hair scattered across our faces. Three ragged strands of rubies welled up from her skin. The air had that impeccable stillness that comes right before lightning.

“Did I hurt you?” I said, my voice guttural.

“Like you wouldn’t believe.”

We weren’t talking about blood and skin.

“I never meant for this to happen, Blythe.”

“How long do you want to keep pretending?”

“Pretending what?”

“That we’re just friends.”

My heart shot into my throat. “I never pretended.”

“I knew you didn’t mean what you said that night. You’re just another straight girl messing around.”

“I meant it. But there’s a reason I’m so cautious.”

“You want to have your cake and eat it, too.”

“I want you.”

Her eyes were cold. “What you want is in the other room with your come all over his hands.”

“What the fuck is going on?” Hiyam said from the doorway.

I jumped back, my nerves so charged with crazed electric
ity it would’ve taken nothing to let go. I wanted to. I wanted Blythe’s skin under my nails, her mouth under mine, the two of us tearing each other apart. She didn’t even glance at Hiyam. Only me. No heat in her face, no fury. Sheer ice. Blood crawled down her arm and pattered on the floor.

I couldn’t say it. What I really wanted. Not here, not like this.

Coward. Scared little girl.

I turned and walked away.

———

That night, and for weeks afterward, we barely saw each other. Barely spoke. We lived together like ghosts, seeing only closing doors, mysteriously moved objects. In the mornings the bathroom mirror was steamy and I looked for a message.
I’m sorry. I miss you.
Nothing. I wrote a line from Plath—
I am not cruel, only truthful
—then smeared it out. Days flickered past, slowly shading into silver and gray like someone going over the world with a graphite pencil. New classes and new faces filled my head. I read books on trains that smelled like cold aluminum and newsprint, intentionally missing my stop, taking them to the end of the line and switching at the terminus to take them all the way back. On the nights Armin deejayed Blythe was never at Umbra. I walked through the crowd alone, feeling halved, my whole side one raw wound. Even Armin with his syrup-slow kisses didn’t make that ache stop. Only pills. Lots and lots of them. Late at night when her door slammed I crept to the laundry basket and picked up her cardigan, crushing it to my face. Still warm. Voices behind the door, hers and a boy’s, low and muted. Always a different one. Always. I breathed in the smell of blackberries. Bit the wool, shredded it with my nails. Left it looking like a cat had destroyed it. She never said a word.

Girls love each other like animals. There is something ferocious and unself-conscious about it. We don’t guard ourselves like we do with boys. No one trains us to shield our hearts from each other. With girls, it’s total vulnerability from the beginning. Our skin is bare and soft. We love with claws and teeth and the blood is just proof of how much. It’s feral.

And it’s relentless.

MARCH, THIS YEAR

S
eventeen steps. Exactly seventeen steps from elevator to apartment. Down the concrete hall, past steel doors to a bare bulb in a wire prison, a shriek of light in my eyes. I stared until my retinas burned white, blind. Pulled at the chain around my neck till it cut off circulation for a second. I don’t know how many times I walked those seventeen steps there and back like a caged wolf, lean and vicious, ready to snap.

The elevator opened and a woman stepped out. I watched her walk fast to her door.

I may have snarled.

It was late when the elevator chimed again and this time I was waiting in front of it.

Armin raised his head from his phone and startled.

“Jesus, Lane. I’ve been calling you all night.”

“Don’t talk. Unlock your door.”

“Blythe said—”

I stuck a hand inside his coat and grabbed a fistful of silk shirt, twisting. “Unlock. Your. Door.”

He put the phone away. Watched me with wary eyes. We went into the apartment together. I closed the door behind us, slamming the dead bolt.

“Laney—”

“Is Hiyam here?”

“Are you okay? What’s going on? Why didn’t you—”

I slapped a palm on the kitchen island. “We are being blackmailed. Is your sister here?”

Armin ran a hand through his hair, quick and nervous. “No. She’s not.” Ran it through again. “What do you mean, ‘blackmailed’?”

I showed him my phone.

All the lights were off, but through the windows the gold haze from a hundred skyscrapers tinted everything sepia, like an old photo. I watched Armin’s face, lit eerily from below. His eyes moved over the screen.

“Who sent this?”

I leaned against the counter, suddenly exhausted. I hadn’t eaten today and my throat felt coated with ash. I was all smoke and bone, skinny, shivering. Worn down. Unwell. Hatred is a poison and you cannot carry it inside your skin without getting sick, too.

“Laney?”

“I googled it. No records. Probably a burner phone.”

“Burner phone.”

“Yeah.”

He smiled uncertainly. “Listen to what you’re saying.”

“What, it’s paranoid?”

“You’re jumping to—”

“We had burners. Someone else does, too. Armin, they’re not fucking around.
They know
.”

He put my phone down and walked to the end of the kitchen. Then back. Then away again, combing his hands through his hair. Blythe had been a tornado of energy and fury, desperate to do something, anything. Armin always circled the problem first. Analyzed it from 360 degrees. Careful, considerate boy. So careful with everything. With me.

“Okay,” he said after a while. “Okay.”

Only my eyes moved, following him.

“This photo was shot—” He glanced at the screen. “That’s her kitchen. This is from the south. What’s south of her building?”

“Empty lot, then another building.”

“Maybe one of the tenants—”

“That building’s only three stories. This angle is from straight across.”

Our eyes met.

“The roof,” we said simultaneously.

Someone had climbed onto the roof of the adjacent building. Waited for us.

Armin began pacing again.

“Okay. Let’s assume this is . . . a threat. How did they follow us? We were fast and clean. Unless Donnie—”

“They didn’t follow us.”

Shadow. Light. Shadow.

“Someone was already up there,” I said. “They knew where to go, where to look. Where to see
us
.”

The three of us. Together. Like always.

“
I saw you.
” Armin’s throat rippled with a swallow. “It’s not even about him. They don’t care about revenge. They care about hurting us.”

Come on, I thought. You’re so close.

“This is someone who knew what we were planning that night,” he said. “Someone who was waiting.”

“Just say it.”

He stopped pacing, that handsome profile in silhouette. “It’s one of us, Laney. One of us turned.”

OCTOBER, LAST YEAR

O
n Homecoming Day the air had a sweet dry tang of rust, like old blood. Corgan University sat on the edge of Lake Michigan, a sprawling ivory palace we’d nicknamed Hogwarts, perching atop shelves of cracked granite as if part of the city had broken off centuries ago and crumbled into the lake. I liked the sense of being surrounded by massive, ruined things. Hiyam and I wove arm-in-arm through tailgate partiers, our hair wind-tossed, sunglasses flashing. My body was wired. I could navigate by feel, follow the electric crackle that leaped from body to body and skittered over gravel and snapped in blue arcs at the corner of my eye.

Hunting always brings me to life.

“You don’t have to babysit me,” Hiyam said for the umpteenth time. “I won’t get fucked-up.”

“I’m not your babysitter,” I said.

I was basically her babysitter.

She’d moved in with Armin, so her sobriety was everyone’s problem now. It takes a village to keep someone out of rehab. At first Armin was nervous about letting his newly detoxed sister hang out with his habitually toxed girlfriend, but Hiyam policed herself pretty well, and it wasn’t exactly clear I was Armin’s girlfriend, anyway. This ambiguity became poignant when we’d make out for half an hour until he’d grab my wrist,
removing my hand from the erection in his jeans. I’d be so pissed I’d hit him. “If you don’t want to fuck me, fine, but stop leading me on.” He’d pin my wrist to the couch, his body over mine. “I want you so much I can’t think,” he’d growl. Which led in circles. “Then why are we still talking?” I’d say, and he’d say, “It’s complicated,” and I’d guess that
complicated
meant Blythe.

Blythe fucking McKinley. She was always there with us. Between us. Part of us.

“It’s not that you’re boring,” Hiyam was saying now. Hiyam had a way of making everything sound like a backhanded compliment. “It’s just that I’m an adult.”

“Eighteen is not an adult.”

“Legally it is.”

“Legally you could join the Marines or have a kid. If you think you’re ready for that, you’re nuts.”

“I’ve done
actual
adult shit.”

“Doing adult shit doesn’t make you an adult.”

The sunglasses swiveled to me. “You remind me of someone.”

Before he enlisted me as babysitter, Armin had warned me about Hiyam. “Keep her away from drugs, and from girls her own age. She has a habit of abusing both.”

“I’m a girl her own age.”

He’d frowned, reconsidering.

“Look, I’ll handle her,” I’d said breezily. “If I can keep Blythe from jumping off a rooftop on X, I won’t let your sister walk all over me.”

It hadn’t even occurred to me what he was doing. Why he paired us together. Well played, doctor.

“Heads up,
Princess Diaries
,” I said now, steering Hiyam away from a group of sloshed frat boys. She wore skintight jeans and a cling-film T-shirt, white leather boots, gold hoop
earrings. She looked twenty-eight, not eighteen. The frat boys hooted.

“That’s her shirt,” she said, ignoring them.

“What?”

“You’re wearing Blythe’s shirt. I bought it for her.”

“I’m borrowing it.”

“I thought you two weren’t on speaking terms.”

Shrug.

“Then why are you wearing her shirt?”

“So she can’t.”

“How petty.” Her eyes narrowed. “Did something scratch you?”

I pulled the collar higher, not answering.

We bought canned drinks and headed for the stage, passing various club tables: frats and sororities, activism, geekery, all the stuff that’s supposed to make college the Time of Your Life™. Of course Hiyam dawdled near the giant rainbow flag staffed by a boy band of Adonises (mostly in vanilla flavor), their smiles gleaming violently in the sun.
PRIDE
, the banner said. Like that wasn’t obvious from the gaggle of sorority bimbos fawning all over them. If they fawned any harder, they’d leave a stain.

“People are so tolerant here,” Hiyam said.

“Yeah, it’s so tolerant for straight white girls to lust after hot, unavailable white boys.”

She finally cracked a smile. “Such a bitch, Keating. I like it.”

Up onstage Armin spun AWOLNATION for the crowd, his long, lean torso in a V-neck, a beanie slouching on the back of his skull. Those lithe hands moved over the mixer with confidence and finesse. The same way he touched me. He knew how to make me crazy, his thumb gliding down my throat and between my breasts, pausing over my heart. His fingers could span my entire rib cage. I felt hot. I took my shades off—and spotted the golden-haired girl onstage, watching me.

Blythe and I eyed each other coolly. That almost-smile curved at the edges of her mouth.

Armin was midset but when I climbed up he kissed me in front of everyone, lifting my face until I stood on tiptoe. His skin was sun-warm and his lips tasted like beeswax balm. I closed my eyes and dissolved into heat and honey. People whistled. Armin let go and my heart seemed to hang in place, stuck in midair. It made feeble little flutters, like a pinned butterfly.

“If you’re done sucking each other’s faces off,” Hiyam said, “I’m thirsty.”

“Be good,” Armin said in my ear.

“If I’m not, you won’t know.”

He ran a thumb over my bottom lip. There was a faint ember-like light in his eyes. I’d seen it before. I knew what it led to.

Today I would take it there, one way or another.

I carried our drinks to the rear of the stage. Blythe passed me cups without speaking. When our hands brushed I yanked mine back as if I’d been burned.

“Oh, the tension,” Hiyam said. “I’m tingling.”

I poured, and Blythe pulled out a pint of Seagram’s and spiked the cups.

“That is so college,” Hiyam said.

I handed her a virgin soda. “Don’t touch Armin’s. It’s Red Bull.”

“Like I want that nasty shit.”

“I mean it.”

She looked at me as if a dog had just spoken to her.

The three of us sat on a road crate, me in the middle. The air was so saturated with bass every breath felt thick, thrumming in my lungs. It wasn’t quite like Umbra but something untamed worked its way through the crowd, stretching the
skin of the bodies it entered, dilating nostrils, glazing eyes. That wolfishness.

Blythe looked at the cup in my hand.

“Guess we’re sharing,” I said.

“Guess so.”

She drank and then I did. Hiyam peered at us over the top of her sunglasses. “Wait, when did this happen?”

“When did what?” I said.

“You skanks were fighting over who gets to fuck my brother.” Her eyes widened at the cup. “Oh my god. Is that a metaphor?”

“No,” I said, at the same moment Blythe said, “Yes. It’s a love triangle.”

I glared at her. “It is not a love triangle.”

“Except when it’s a love triangle.”

Hiyam’s eyes darted between us, intrigued.

“Seriously, Hiyam,” I said. “We worked it out. Our friendship is worth more than some guy. No offense to your brother.”

“Besides, who could stay mad at this face?” Blythe said, pinching my cheek.

I could’ve bitten her.

“Armin-
joon
,” Hiyam sang, sliding off the crate with his drink. “Your harem is getting along. It’s boring.”

I started to follow, but Blythe’s hand dropped to my shoulder.

“Stay awhile,” she said.

That hand was a magnet, the iron in my blood and marrow snapping to it. I settled back and watched Hiyam curling around her brother, serpentine.

“Nice lampshading,” I said to Blythe.

“If it’s right there, you’ve got to say something.”

“Apparently you’ve got to say everything.”

“That’s the beauty of it. Tell them all your secrets, and they’ll never believe you. They’ll think you’re hiding the truth.”

“Yeah, well, warn me before your supervillain reveal speech.”

Her hand grazed my thigh, just past the hem of my shorts. My teeth clicked together.

“It looks good on you,” she said.

“What?”

“My shirt.”

Hiyam was messing with Armin’s phone. Reading our texts, probably. He’d tell me he couldn’t sleep and was walking along the beach, thinking about me, thrusting his fingers into the sand and letting it slip away, over and over. I’d tell him I couldn’t sleep and was jacking off, thrusting my fingers into—

Blythe nudged my knee.“Where are you?”

Wind lashed our hair across our faces. Her hoodie was unzipped, a long blond lock twisting across her collarbone, this way and then that, like something alive, touching her.

“I’m right here,” I said.

“A thousand light-years away.”

Something soft unfurled inside me, a small tenderness. It was agony sometimes, being near her.

“You’re shivering.” She shrugged off her hoodie and laid it in my lap, got up to go.

I caught her wrist. Couldn’t help myself. “Want me out of your shirt?”

Blythe laughed, low in her throat. Then she was gone, jumping down into the crowd. I slipped into her hoodie and pressed the sleeve to my cheek. Still warm.

Something caught my eye. Hiyam taking a cup from Armin, raising it to her mouth.

I moved without thinking. Launched myself forward, my shoulder connecting with her back. An arc of bright wetness sliced through the air, a liquid pinwheel of light. Then it was all over Hiyam, and Hiyam was screaming, and Armin was push
ing the two of us apart, saying, “There’s a sweater in my car, go to my car.” Hiyam’s soaked shirt painted her breasts in a clear glaze, her nipples hard.

We walked to his car without speaking. Her silence was volcanic.

When we passed the frat boy gauntlet the second time, she wasn’t so cocky. She hugged her arms to her chest.

“Show us your tits,” a frat boy yelled.

“Show us yours,” she muttered.

They kept yelling. I reluctantly offered her Blythe’s hoodie, but she refused.

“I’m sorry,” I ventured. “I’m such a klutz.”

“Just don’t talk.”

While she rummaged in Armin’s Range Rover I wrapped my arms around myself. If I breathed deeply, I could still smell blackberries.

“I don’t get it.” Hiyam had frozen with her ass in the air like some porn pose, but for once, I think, she was oblivious of her sexuality. “What the fuck does he see in you?”

“Look, I know you’re mad—”

She wheeled on me. “You don’t know shit. You’re just another junkie he thinks he can save. Did he give you the ‘only you can save yourself’ speech yet? Because it’s bullshit. He says that and then rescues strays anyway. Why do you think he’s still obsessed with Blythe?”

My throat went tight. “Obsessed?”

“Wake the fuck up, Keating. My brother likes you broken. That’s the only thing you do better than her.”

I stared at her for a long time, not blinking. In the raw wind my eyes went glassy, which gave the intended effect.

“God.” She slammed the car door. “Forget it.”

But I didn’t. I never forget.

We passed Blythe on the way back. She sat on the hood
of someone’s car like a pin-up, bare legs crossed. Two bros in polos and boat shoes hovered near. Meaty, sweaty, crude. Beneath her. Beneath
me
. They couldn’t quote poetry, couldn’t read the nuance in the subtlest flicker of her expression. They were just big, and dumb, and hard.

I looked away, grinding my teeth.

The afternoon whirled through my head. Turquoise sky, clouds shifting across it like the silver powder in an Etch A Sketch, drawing and erasing itself over and over. Touchdown. The lot erupted into a frenzy. Armin took a break and spent it kissing me in his car. I closed my eyes and imagined Blythe walking by, seeing us. After his set we sat on the rocks at the edge of the lake and I made him drink a beer, laughing when that handsome face contorted at the taste. In retaliation he made me kiss him. He kept touching me everywhere, held me down on a flat stone and kissed my throat and said, “I just want to feel you,” as if I were some strange new thing that befuddled and amazed him. The colors of the day deepened like a bruise. I avoided the football game, the name that made my blood blacken, until people tossed their hats up against the pale vapor of the stadium lights, shook bottles of beer and sprayed foam into the air. We won. For a moment we were all alive and invincible, immortal. We won.

Our victory song was “The Baddest Man Alive” by the Black Keys and I almost choked. Irony, you bitch.

We broke the stage down under the moonrise, our shadows long and sharp like storybook monsters. Hiyam fell asleep in Armin’s backseat. Blythe left with a look that wrecked my heart a little. Don’t go, I thought, letting her go. I sat on an amp and watched the sea of red taillights leaving the lot.

Armin came over and nestled between my knees. “Hi.”

“Hi.”

“Hi,” he said again.

I tried not to smile. “What?”

His hands brushed the small of my back. “You.”

A sound tech loaded equipment into a van. We were alone onstage, spotlit in a hot white disc. I imagined a dark circle eclipsing it.

“There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.” His eyes shone with all the colors of autumn, rich oxblood seeping into the deep russet of October soil. “But I could never find the right time. Or the right words.”

“Please don’t say some cheesy romance-novel shit, Armin.”

He grinned. I touched his face.

“Seriously. Let’s not say things. Let’s just be.”

“I can’t help it.” He let me trace his stubbled jaw and the bed of his lips as he spoke. “When I’m around you, I feel like a different person. More electric, more alive. Like I’m high.”

“I thought you never got high before.”

“I don’t need to. I have you.”

“What did I just say about cheesy romance-novel shit?”

“Deal with it, Miss Novelist.”

He put his face to my neck and inhaled, rubbed his stubble over my skin like a big cat. Then he looked at me spacily, pupils dilated.

“
Are
you high?” I said, laughing.

“You smell like her.”

Lightning strike to the heart.

“Like her,” I repeated.

He frowned, hearing it.

“Like her. God, Armin. Is there something going on with you and Blythe?”