Black Iris

by Leah Raeder

  Yes, I have an ironic eighties nickname. No, I was not even alive in the eighties.

  “It’ll be different when college starts,” I said. “I’ll miss you. You’ll miss me. We’ll do drugs to compensate.”

  “We already do.”

  “I’ll miss you,” I said more seriously. “So much. You’re all I have.”

  We were quiet awhile. We were both thinking about her.

  I stood, dragging a dress with my toe.

  “I wish I was like you,” Donnie said.

  “Like what?”

  “Free. You can just let it all go.”

  He may know me better than anyone, but he doesn’t know everything. I never let go.

  Dad was asleep in front of the TV, so we took his truck. Out in the July night I threw my head back and drank a lungful of oxygen so rich with chlorophyll it was like wine. Every lawn was uniform green, layered with sod. This is the suburbs: they tear down nature, then you have to go to Home Depot to buy it back.

  Interstate 88 ran through a prairie sea beneath an ocean of stars. The faint white shadow of the Milky Way lay like a ghostly finger across the night, holding in a secret. I leaned back while Donnie drove, my arm hooked out the window, the wind in my hair, my heart dilating as widely as the sky. Melancholy does that—opens you up to make space for more of itself.

  City lights rose on the horizon, a twinkling zodiac, lifting higher and higher and sprawling to either side until we were in Chicago proper. We sat at red lights with no other cars in sight, just a homeless man curled up beside a shopping cart, two girls smoking below a bar sign that lit them like aquarium fish. They were ghosts, gone when you looked back. Then we were downtown, skyscrapers vaulting around us, and if I let my eyes unfocus it became a forest of chrome and glass, the trunks of massive trees quilted with fireflies. That big-city scent of gasoline and warm asphalt smelled like home.

  The party was in Lincoln Park, on a leaf-canopied street lined with greystones and slick cars. It was one of our favorite haunts—Donnie, budding architect, would photograph houses while I made up stories about the people inside. I’m morbid, so they were bad people. Sex traffickers. Animal pornographers. MFA grads. Now I was going into one of those houses, alone. Donnie fidgeted as I unbuckled my seatbelt.

  “You don’t have to do this, Lane.”

  “It’s my last chance before classes start.”

  He pushed a lock of hair across his forehead one way, then the other.

  “It’ll be fine,” I said. “He’ll never see me.”

  “I could go with—”

  “You’re underage.”

  “Then why don’t we go back home?”

  “Because I can’t live like this.” The words shot out like shrapnel. “I have to get back to normal. Okay?”

  “You are. You’re the most normal person I know.”

  My heart swelled. Donnie doesn’t know everything, but he knows who I want to be. He believes I can still be that person. Even if I don’t.

  We hugged. I slid out of the car.

  “Be careful,” he said.

  “Always.”

  I punched in the code at the gate.

  The house was massive and bearded with ivy, squares of buttery light falling onto the garden below. Smoke rose in lazy spirals from silhouettes on balconies. I walked through the front door into a dull roar that washed over me without sinking in. I’d taken a couple oxycodone on the drive and my skin was pleasantly woolly, every sensation softened.

  A girl wearing a tight smile and an even tighter Phi Upsilon Alpha tee waved me over. “Welcome to the Summer Mixer. I don’t think we’ve met.”

  “I’m rushing this year. Just wanted to check stuff out.”

  “Invitation?”

  “My mom’s an alumna. Caitlin Keating.”

  But now she’s dead.

  “Oh, so you’re family. Fabulous. Drop your keys in the bowl if you drove. It’s mostly sophs on the first floor, upperclassmen upstairs. I’m Mal.”

  “Laney.”

  “Great to meet you, Laney. Stay law-abiding, and have fun.”

  Those are mutually exclusive, I thought.

  I began to move past her and she touched my elbow.

  “You here alone?”

  “Yeah.”

  She scanned me again, sharper. I’m a whopping five-foot-one, ninety pounds soaking wet, wide-eyed as those dolls that blink creepily on their own. Classic Dickensian waif.

  “You look like the girl next door,” she said with a note of pity. “Don’t go upstairs.”

  As soon as her attention shifted, I headed for the staircase.

  The second floor was pure raunch: strip poker, Jell-O wrestling, two girls Frenching messily while the crowd (male) whooped. Flyers littered the halls, advertising a local club. 80S NIGHT WITH DJ APOLLO. I wandered around, listening, watching, absorbing, until a beefy guy cornered me and offered a red cup. I refused. Never take drinks from strangers.

  I could sense him.

  At every blond head my spine went straight and tight as a cracked whip. His presence was in the air, gamy, meaty, an electrochemical clue that made my skin prickle. I eavesdropped on conversations, hearing his name in slurred syllables. I felt the oily slide of his cologne over my skin. I felt his pheromones seeping into me, making every sensitive part of me harden and buzz.

  I was hunting.

  Gold flashed in the corner of my eye and flickered out of sight. I’d seen it before. I tracked it through sweaty skin and clouds of perfume to a closing bathroom door. There was an empty room opposite and I leaned in the dark doorway. My heart pumped liquid nitrogen, chilling me to the core.

  I held my phone at eye level.

  Breathe. Wait.

  The bathroom door opened.

  Now.

  I tapped CAPTURE when a girl stepped out and her head snapped straight to me.

  Our eyes locked. Blue, but not like mine. Bleached-out blue. Strapless black dress, bare skin and tattoos. Totally unlike the sorority sisters. She wore an oddly chagrined expression, as if I’d caught her doing something wrong. Neither of us moved. One beat, two, three.

  She turned and left.

  I sank to the floor, cradling my phone. My limbs were watery and weak. Not him. Not him.

  “You look lost.”

  It was the beefy guy who’d tried to give me beer. He stood a few feet away, sipping.

  “ ‘Not all those who wander are lost,’ ” I muttered.

  “Tolkien.”

  I’d already dismissed him, seeing only a fleshy traffic cone to veer around, but now I looked again. Husky guy in a polo. Light beard, bland bologna-pink face. Standard-issue bro.

  “Have you read the books?” he said.

  “No, I just memorize quotes to impress neckbeards.”

  He blinked.

  “Bye,” I said, standing.

  “Who’s your favorite author?”

  Nope.

  “I’m Josh.”

  Almost to the stairs.

  “Josh Winters. I’m a junior.”

  First step.

  “Comp sci major. I read epic fantasy and I play MMOs and I don’t know why I’m telling you this. But I’ve never met a girl who quotes Tolkien and I just want to know your name.”

  “Laney,” I blurted in exasperation.

  “Can I get you a drink?”

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry if I offended you. You’re just—you’re beautiful,” he said, and it became excruciatingly obvious how desperate he was. I don’t have illusions about my looks. I’m only slightly pretty in a decaying, feral way, my hair a little ragged, my makeup a little sloppy, my gaze a little too piercing and direct. What guys are attracted to is the sluttiness—the give-no-fuck way I carry myself, the mouth that knows how to su
ck a dick.

  “Want to go outside?” he said. “It’s quieter.”

  “No.”

  “Okay. We can talk here. Or wherever you want.”

  I stared at him silently.

  “What are you into?” he said.

  “Revenge.”

  “Is that a TV show?”

  I said nothing.

  “How about books? Music? What do you do for fun?”

  “I don’t have fun.”

  “Then what do you do at parties?”

  “Get high enough to fuck.”

  He started to smile, hesitantly. “Is that a joke?”

  Back to the stairs.

  “You’re better than me,” he called, and dammit, I paused. “You don’t care about climbing the social ladder. About playing the game. That takes guts. I wish I could be that way. I wish I didn’t care so much what people think of me.”

  Great. One of those guys who spill all their insecurities to any girl who doesn’t reject them firmly enough.

  “Sometimes I think I’m just not cut out for this,” he went on. “I don’t memorize pickup lines. I don’t know how to talk about anything except books and games, and then I don’t know how to stop talking.”

  “Maybe that’s your pickup line.”

  “It’s a pretty bad one.”

  “It got me to stop.”

  He smiled, a tremulous, sincere smile. He was really trying.

  “Look, you seem nice, Josh, but you don’t want to know me.”

  “Give yourself some credit. You’re smart, and you read, and you don’t care what anyone thinks. I would love to know you.”

  It was his voice that did it, I think. Patient, kind. One of the good-natured sheep.

  “Okay,” I said. “So, do you want to fuck?”

  His face was priceless.

  Josh didn’t move until I went up and took his big sweaty hand. Then he looked at mine with incredulity and enfolded it gently, as if afraid he might crush me, or that I’d disappear.

  Next floor up. His room. Bookshelves filled end-to-end, titles I’d have loved to browse. Rumpled bed. A kite of violet moonlight slanting across the floor. My heart skittered.

  You’re in control, I told myself.

  He led me in shyly, pawing at my dress and hair for a while until I took his face in my hands and kissed him. I willed myself to get aroused but couldn’t focus. My gaze drifted to the window, to the city lights scattered like stardust across the sky, and I imagined myself as a constellation of cells, each light-years apart. What happened to my flesh took eons to reach my brain. However solid I seemed, inside I was vast spaces of dark energy and vacuum. Josh pressed me to the wall and thrust his beery tongue into my mouth and I thought, Just get to the point. I guided him to the hem of my dress, feeling nothing. Raised my arms and let it fall like a chrysalis, and my arms kept wanting to rise, like wings.

  “You are so beautiful, Laney.”

  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 conn
ection 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?”