Black Iris

by Leah Raeder

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  Advance Praise for

  Black Iris

  “Leah Raeder crafted a darkly delicate yet twistedly honest exploration of self-truth when she penned Black Iris. Each page had me racing toward the end.”

  —Gail McHugh, New York Times bestselling author of the Collide series

  “Fearless, inspiring, and a story that does more than just keep you enthralled. It holds you by the damn throat.”

  —Penelope Douglas, New York Times bestselling author of Bully

  “Erotic, poetic, heartbreaking, captivating, and full of mind-blowing twists and turns; Black Iris is the best book I’ve read this year. Hands down.”

  —Mia Asher, author of Easy Virtue

  “Raeder masterfully weaves a dark, twisted, dangerously sexy quest for revenge with a raw, honest search for kinship and self-acceptance. Black Iris demands your attention, your heart, and an immediate reread.”

  —Dahlia Adler, author of Last Will and Testament

  “Reading Black Iris was like being caught up in a fever dream. The lyrical prose and heavy-hitting imagery stole my breath away. The moment I set it down, I wanted to pick it up and start all over again.”

  —Navessa Allen, author of Scandal

  “A suspense novel that looks at the dark depths of the human mind. . . . Nothing short of intoxicating.”

  —The Book Geek

  Praise for

  UNTEACHABLE

  “With an electrifying fusion of forbidden love and vivid writing, the characters glow in Technicolor. Brace yourselves to be catapulted to dizzying levels with evocative language, panty-blazing sex scenes, and emotions so intense they will linger long after the last page steals your heart.”

  —Pam Godwin, New York Times bestselling author of Beneath the Burn

  “Unteachable is a lyrical masterpiece with a vivid story line that grabbed me from the very first page. The flawless writing and raw characters are pure perfection, putting it in a class all by itself.”

  —Brooke Cumberland, USA Today bestselling author of Spark

  “Leah Raeder’s writing is skillful and stunning. Unteachable is one of the most beautifully powerful stories of forbidden love that I have ever read.”

  —Mia Sheridan, New York Times bestselling author of Archer’s Voice

  “Edgy and passionate, Unteachable shimmers with raw desire. Raeder is a captivating new voice.”

  —Melody Grace, New York Times bestselling author of the Beachwood Bay series

  “A simply stunning portrayal of lies, courage, and unrequited love. Raeder has a gift for taking taboo subjects and seducing us with them in the rawest, most beautiful way.”

  —S.L. Jennings, New York Times bestselling author of Taint

  “Unique and poetic. You can feel every forbidden touch and taste every delicious kiss between these characters, and like them, you hunger for more. Read it and become immersed in Raeder’s brilliant writing. You won’t regret it.”

  —Mia Asher, author of Easy Virtue

  “Lyrical, poetic, and vivid. This story grabbed my attention from the very first line and, by midway through the first chapter, I had goose bumps.”

  —Aestas Book Blog

  “Unteachable set a new benchmark in my eyes. I was blown away by its spectacularly unique writing style, its evocative prose, the immaculate character development, its skillful tackling of a taboo romance that very few authors manage to pull off without alienating the reader, and a story that I still can’t get out of my head.”

  —Natasha is a Book Junkie

  “A gripping, passionate, and raw story that I absolutely recommend.”

  —Totally Booked Blog

  “Raeder’s writing is smart, refreshing, and gritty—she is fearless and this is a story that will push your boundaries. The forbidden passion and chemistry between Evan and Maise is intense and heart wrenching.”

  —The Rock Stars of Romance

  For all the girls I’ve loved

  APRIL, LAST YEAR

  April is the cruelest month, T. S. Eliot said, and that’s because it kills. It’s the month with the highest suicide rate. You’d think December, or even January—the holidays and all that forced cheer and agonized smiling pushing fragile people to the edge—but actually it’s spring, when the world wakes from frost-bound sleep and something cruel and final stirs inside those of us who are broken. Like Eliot said: mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain. In the deepest throes of depression, when sunlight is anguish and the sky throbs like one big raw migraine and you just want to sleep until you or everything else dies, you’re less likely to commit suicide than someone coming out of a depressive episode. Drug companies know this. That’s why antidepressants have to be marked with the warning MAY CAUSE SUICIDAL THOUGHTS.

  Because what brings you back to life also gives you the means to destroy yourself.

  ———

  Flick, flick, flick. The lighter in my hand, the sound of my life grinding into sparks that would never catch, under a salmon-pink dawn in Nowhereville, Illinois. Gravel crunched beneath my shoes, polished like oyster shell from the rain. I stopped at the puddle outside our garage and peered into the oily mirrored water, watching the slow swirl of a gasoline rainbow, the tiny orange tongue of fire licking shadows from my face until they washed back over and over. An unlit cigarette hung from my lip and my mouth had a weird bleach taste I tried not to think about. I tried not to think about anything that had happened last night. I was eighteen and, according to Mom, “completely out of control,” which to anyone else would have meant “a normal teenager.” Mom’s favorite hobby: projecting her own psych issues onto me.

  Very soon I’d be free of her.

  From the alley I could see the backyard, the grass jeweled with dew. Mom’s garden lined the walk to the porch, hyacinths with their cones of curled blue stars, rosebuds crumpled like flakes of dried blood, everything glazed in clear lacquer and the air musky with the cologne of rain. At six fifteen she’d wake and find my bed empty. But that wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was that in about three minutes, something terrible was going to happen. The thing you’ll hate me for. The thing that will make me an Unsympathetic Protagonist.

  Since the fourth wall is down, let’s get one thing straight:

  I am not the heroine of this story.

  And I’m not trying to be cute. It’s the truth. I’m diagnosed borderline and seriously fucked-up. I hold grudges. I bottle my hate until it ferments into poison, and then I get high off the fumes. I’m completely dysfunctional and that’s the way I like it, so don’t expect a character arc where I finally find Redemption, Growth, and Change, or learn How to Forgive Myself and Others.

  Fuck forgiveness.

  Oh, and I’m a writer. Which is worse than all the rest put together.

  Open sesame, I texted my brother.

  I don’t know how I didn’t hear it. It was quiet, the crickets creaking like a rusty seesaw, but that other sound must have been there, scratching softly at my brain. I crept into the backyard through the maze of Mom’s thorns.

  The house was dark, Donnie’s curtains closed. Wake up fuckface, I texted, punctuating with a smiley. Six twelve a.m. Three minutes until Medusa’s alarm went off. Donnie always sle
pt with his phone under his pillow, which was probably slowly giving him cancer. He should’ve been up by now. Mom’s gonna kill me, I wrote. Do you want to be an only child?

  Six thirteen.

  Dammit. I had to beat that alarm.

  I bolted across the lawn, kicking pearls of dew loose from the grass. A thorn snagged my ankle but I wouldn’t notice the blood till much later, in the hospital. My socks instantly went damp. It wasn’t until I’d reached the porch that I saw the other tracks, paralleling mine.

  A chill swept up my back. I touched the kitchen doorknob.

  Unlocked.

  I didn’t open it. That coldness wove around my spine, thickening, binding. Someone was awake. Someone had come downstairs, crossed the yard before me.

  I turned.

  She was in the garage, at the window. I knew my mother’s silhouette from long years of it slipping into doorways, catching us horsing around when we should’ve been asleep, catching me when I snuck in alone after midnight, my body weary and ancient with all that had been done to it. I knew the high set of those shoulders, that neck rigid with contempt. The closed mouth carved tight into her elegant Gorgon skull. She’d stand there without saying a word. Her silence was the kind that compelled you to fill it with all your wrongs. I could never see her eyes but I knew they burned ice-wraith blue, and now I felt them through the dusty window pane, felt the stare that could turn me to stone.

  I removed the lighter slowly from my pocket. Flicked it once with exaggerated languor. Lit up. Took a long, luxuriously filthy drag, meeting her stare. The inside of my body felt carbon-coated, black and grimy. Not the soft pink vulnerable thing I really was.

  Okay, bitch. Your move.

  She just stood there.

  Those moments counted. Those moments when I faced her, eating fire and breathing smoke, telling myself I was hard, that I could crush her and this whole world in my hands. Telling myself she couldn’t hurt me. No one could hurt me anymore.

  Those moments could have saved us.

  By the time I reached the end of the cigarette the sun had torn a red gash at the horizon, and I saw that Mom was unsteady on her feet, swaying. And finally I realized what that rhythmic sound was beneath the crickets. I knew it from climbing up into the garage rafters with my brother to smoke a J, the beams creaking with our weight. Wood, under strain.

  I dropped my cigarette in the grass.

  In some deep part of me, I already knew. I crossed the lawn, noticing the white square taped to the side door only when I touched the knob. A name scrawled across the paper in her bold, slashing handwriting.

  Delaney.

  How had she known it would be me?

  I ignored the note. I was trying to turn the doorknob and failing. Locked.

  “Mom,” I said, and rattled the door, then again, louder, “Mom.”

  She swayed dreamily.

  A light flipped on inside the house, a yellow frame falling over me. I braced both hands on the knob and kicked. Everything stretched away like the reflection in a car mirror. My mind floated above my head, looking down at my body: Laney Keating, her hair matted, a black wash of mascara running down her cheeks, her mouth still bitter from the blowjob, throttling the garage door and screaming her mother’s name. I watched her from a faraway place. She gave up kicking and punched straight through the window in a brilliant starburst of glass. I felt the heat shoot up my arm like a drug, saw the redness streaking over my skin, but didn’t quite connect it to me, to the girl crawling in over those jagged glass teeth, tumbling to the floor, scrambling up and screaming as she grabbed her mother’s legs and uselessly lifted the limp, hanging body. My mind was still outside, staring at my name on the suicide note. All I could think was, How did she know I’d find her? How did she know it would be me?

  ———

  I don’t remember much else because I blacked out thirty seconds later. Dad had seen me from the house and dragged me onto the lawn, then Mom, laying us side by side. I was unconscious but somehow I can picture it. Grass curling over bone-white skin, tracing horsetails of dew, tiny clear beads that reflect an entire world full of stars and flowers and our pale bodies, everything she’d left behind. My blood mixed with the dew and turned pink. The glass would leave scars on my right hand like the ghost of a cobweb, which is what scars are: a haunting of the skin.

  At the funeral Dad said he thought she’d killed us both. He’d been a heartbeat from getting his semiautomatic and joining us when he realized I had a pulse.

  This might sound fucked-up, but the part that really upset me wasn’t the suicide. That had been a long time coming. What disturbed me was that she knew I’d find her first.

  I am my mother’s daughter.

  I know what it feels like to plan something that will destroy you, to be so fucking sure you want it that you arrange everything perfectly, prune the roses while you debate the merits of hanging yourself with nylon rope versus an appliance cord, serve your children baked ziti while your suicide note lies in a desk drawer like a cruel bird of prey waiting to unfold its wings until, one morning when the world is diamond-strung with rain and your daughter is coming home from another night of ruining herself (because you were never there for her, you were never there), you get up before everyone else and calmly step into the garage, and that noose, and eternity.

  She’d planned it for years. Knew it was coming and kept tending that garden. Those roses she would never see bloom, the irises and peonies, the daughter and son, all of us left behind to flower, somehow, without her.

  Well, I did. I bloomed into the dark thing she made me.

  I am a creature with a vast capacity for patience, and for violence. For watching. For waiting. For taking the moment only when it is perfect and sure. I’m a hunter like my mother, patient and watchful and still, my fangs full of black venom. There is a terrible thing tucked inside me raring to lunge forth into the light. And I’m just waiting for that perfect moment. Just waiting. Just waiting.

  JULY, LAST YEAR

  I went to parties that summer. Every party within twenty miles. I was supposed to be prepping for college, getting a head start on my reading. Instead I got a head start on getting wasted.

  Donnie came with me sometimes, sitting in the car while I went into the bedrooms of boys I barely knew. I took my clothes off and let the low lamplight paint me honey gold, my slender dragonfly limbs and iridescent skin like the body of a stranger, impossibly light, and I let them touch me while I swallowed pills and snorted powders, clogged my veins with chemicals. I don’t know if I was trying to numb myself or to feel something through the numbness. Maybe both. Sometimes you feel things so much, so intensely, it becomes a new kind of numbness, the oblivion of overstimulation. I don’t remember their names. It was easier to remember which ones I hadn’t fucked. They were a blur of lean abs, sweat-rimed skin, the satin smoothness of hard dicks. My mouth was always slick with peppermint gloss. It made them tingle, they said. Funny that a girl like me would be so good at oral. But we are, you know. Good with our mouths. Janelle—my best and last friend senior year—stopped hanging out with me, claiming she wanted to spend time with her boyfriend before college. Really she just didn’t want to be branded a whore by proxy.

  Nothing like being slut-shamed by your so-called best friend.

  I developed other skills in addition to giving legendary head: shoplifting, arson, vandalism. I got arrested with $437 worth of makeup and perfume stuffed into my underwear and bra. I pushed an old washing machine off an overpass and couldn’t get the sound of that spectacular smash out of my head. My body felt like a heap of cheap plastic and glass, and I wanted to drop it off the highest point I could get to on oxy and X. Split every bad atom inside me. Get this wrongness out. One night I totaled Mom’s car on a median and woke up in the ER with a concussion and my very first DUI. My BAC was under 0.08 percent and my lawyer said the magic words “mother�
�s death” so I got off easy. Before he took me home, Dad sat at the wheel of the truck, motionless. In the hazy white light he looked as used and spent as me, his skin draping over his bones like a worn-out suit of himself. I thought he was going to cry and my throat thickened, the hot stitch behind my eyes loosening, but then he said, “You’re a walking time bomb.”

  He was right. Mom was wrong. I was a precision-engineered explosive, in perfect control of my own self-destruction.

  Later that week Dad said he wanted me out when college started. I was a bad influence on Donnie.

  Just like my dead bitch of a mother.

  ———

  Donnie slumped on the futon in my room, watching me try on dresses and discard them. There’s nothing between my brother and me, no secrets, no suppressed incestuous subtext. He’s two years younger and we know everything about each other. I’ve seen his dick, and it was like looking at an anatomical drawing. No Lannister shit.

  “The black one,” he said.

  “I wore that at the funeral.”

  Donnie sighed. His eyes had that faraway fog that came with being really sad, or really high. I flopped onto the futon beside him. He’d been playing “The Mother We Share” on repeat for an hour, so I knew he was obsessing again, about her, and about me leaving. Donovan Keating looks like me: rangy and raven-haired, his nose dusted with sandy freckles, his eyes a mercurial mix of aqua and teal like that sea shade that eats away at old pennies. We both have the same coolness, the same ocean calm, but he’s the sweet boy with a chick-magnet Tumblr and I’m the bad girl with a handgun for a heart. He smiles and panties melt. I don’t smile. When I show teeth, it’s to bite.

  “I wish we were somewhere else,” I said, laying my skull on his shoulder.

  “Where?”

  “Somewhere happy.”

  His arm curled around me. “I’m happy anywhere you are, Rainbow Brite.”