Black Iris

by Leah Raeder

  Blythe rose, smoothing her dress.

  “I cannot believe you did this again,” Armin said, approaching.

  “He started it.”

  “You can’t get yourself arrested. You’ll lose your visa. I shouldn’t even need to tell you this.”

  “Welcome to tonight’s program, Armin. I know you’re just tuning in, but perhaps show some fucking concern whether we’re okay.”

  “I’m sorry. I know you can handle yourself. I thought—” He sighed. “Are you okay?”

  “Peachy. How about you, Lane?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Great. Since we’re all unmolested, please continue the lecture.”

  Armin grimaced, suppressing frustration. “I’m not lecturing. I’m reminding you how dangerous it is to act like this.”

  “Like myself?”

  “Blythe.”

  “What, then? Should I have let him shove her around? Maybe feel her up a bit?” Her tone was mocking, but a thread of tension ran along her jaw.

  “You should have called security, not punched him in the face.”

  “You weren’t there.”

  “I don’t need to see you proving your alphaness to know what happened. You can’t take these risks, Blythe.”

  “No, what I can’t do is just watch while some arsehole insults your girlfriend.”

  Her shout echoed down the empty street. Armin stared at her, startled.

  “It’s okay,” I said, moving midway between them. “He won’t press charges. He’s underage. They told him not to come back.”

  Armin’s face tightened. “Don’t get caught up in this, Laney.”

  “Caught up in what?” Blythe said. No answer. “Right. Nothing. Perhaps we should have a frank conversation about this incredibly tense nothing between us.”

  My heart jolted.

  Armin touched her shoulder and she glared at him. Neither spoke, but the look between them conveyed things I couldn’t intuit. His touch was some kind of salve that soothed her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re right. I wasn’t there.”

  “Yeah, well, not like I ever go off half-cocked and make you clean up my messes.”

  He finally smiled. “Because who could put up with that for three years?”

  “Probably someone with undiagnosed psych issues.”

  “If only we knew a competent doctor.”

  “There’s always your dad.”

  “Low blow,” Armin said, laughing.

  Argument over. That easily they were friends again. So knowing, so natural. I felt like I had begun to disappear.

  “Got him good, though,” Blythe said, brandishing her knuckles.

  Armin asked if she wanted to go to the ER, which she took as an insult to her Aussie fortitude. They joked around. I shrank back, wondering if they’d even notice if I left.

  “Come here, you.”

  Blythe stood with a hand outstretched to me. Armin’s head tilted, and though I couldn’t see his face in the dark I sensed his pensiveness.

  “I’ll get the car,” he said.

  Reluctantly I went to her, my limbs wired all weird, jittery. I was too nervous to take her hand, so she put it on my bare arm, which was worse. Her face was full of curiosity, mischief, and something nameless but intent, something between fear and thrill. Exhilaration, maybe. It did crazy things to my heart. I looked away self-consciously and she yanked me into a hug, a shock of unexpected warmth. We’d never hugged before. She was surprisingly slight, sparrow-boned. I’d been thinking of her as half god, someone whose pedestal I could barely brush with my fingertips, but really she was just a girl, like me. Her heart beat too fast and her hair was tangled and when my cheek grazed hers I held it there. My arms coiled tighter.

  Mine, I thought. Mine.

  We pulled apart and fell into step behind Armin without a word. When we passed into a halo of streetlight she took my hand, and she didn’t let go till we reached the car.

  ———

  One August night I sat in the crawl space in my underwear, watching a spider scurry over a map of Chicago. When I couldn’t sleep, which was often, I came here. To see his face. To remind myself why I was alive. To become still.

  There were new pictures now.

  Armin was easy: his family had money, and people with money dropped more bread crumbs. He was twenty-three, born in St. Louis. His parents were liberal, loaded Persian immigrants. Dad was the shrink; Mom, a professional volunteer. They lived on a palatial estate somewhere in southern Illinois and did outreach work for trailer trash. How philanthropic. Apparently the philanthropy didn’t work for Armin’s sister, who had been in rehab twice. Armin was the good apple. Psych major. Swim team. Pi Tau big shot. Honors and scholarships. Tidy, precise, methodical. That type of perfection was usually brittle. Easy to crack.

  Blythe was tougher. She was twenty-one, born in Melbourne. She’d come here three years ago on a student visa. Scant online presence under her real name. Social media was her weakness. Once I linked certain usernames to her—archer, artemis, moonhunter, references from her poetry—I found accounts crammed with photos: wild after-hours parties at Umbra, drunken adventures with Armin, even old shots from Australia, the colors eye-wateringly vivid, sun-blasted white sand and heartbreak-blue sky. Her father, burly and ruddy-faced, one leg propped on a sailboat. The two of them grinning into the merciless sun. None of her mom. “Artemis” explained Armin’s stage name: DJ Apollo.

  Artemis and Apollo. The huntress and the healer, twin gods of the moon and sun.

  Some photos were hard to look at. The two of them together. His arms around her waist. Her neck thrown back, one hand on his thigh.

  I hit PRINT. Beneath his too-perfect face I wrote BOYFRIEND in Sharpie and circled it over and over until the paper started to disintegrate. Blythe, again, was tougher. I hesitated with the marker and finally wrote BEST FRIEND. Her current roommate was leaving when fall semester started. She was broke and anxious to find a replacement. What serendipity: an empty room just when I’d need one.

  Right after I canceled my dorm reservation.

  I leaned back, my hair twisting across my face. It was so fucking hot in here. The sweat made me feel stripped down, distilled to my essence.

  I was obsessed with him. I had to be. But now I was becoming obsessed with them, too. I knew their birthdays by heart (mistake to let me hold your purse while you took a piss, Blythe). I knew their college schedules (mistake to let me charge your phone while you deejayed, Armin). I even knew their horoscopes—I was ravenous for any clue to who they were, what motivated them. Armin was a Gemini, quick-witted and silver-tongued. Blythe was a Sagittarius, fiery and brutally blunt.

  If you haven’t already guessed, I’m a Scorpio.

  The spider crawled onto my big toe and perched there. I poked it with a fingertip and it climbed on, and I brought the finger to my face. They’re so weird-looking up close, those miniature clockwork bodies, eyelash legs joined to the onyx carapace, like a piece of living jewelry. And they go about their lives in total silence, spinning sticky glass through the air that you never see until you’re caught in it.

  I opened my mouth and put the finger inside, my lips sealing.

  Swallowing is something you do thousands of times a day and rarely think about until there’s a spider in your mouth. Then you’re intensely aware of the saliva pooling beneath your tongue, the shallow arch of your palate, the jaw that aches to crush and grind. You’re just a weird-looking little clockwork contraption, too. We’re all machines made of skin and bone, breathing and eating and fucking, shitting and bleeding and dying. Machines break every day. There are billions more where they came from.

  I opened my mouth again and withdrew my finger. The spider looked at me impassively.

  I shuddered and set it free.

  ——�
�

  That summer, we were gods.

  Blythe showed me how to control men. No more Ugly Friend. We were sky high and ice cold, pure untouchable sex in fuck-you heels and scarlet lips, our hands all over each other, driving boys crazy. Driving ourselves crazy. I’d never be beautiful like her, but the glamour of her aura transformed me from Wednesday to Morticia and somehow I became darkly alluring, enigmatic. I learned to read her so well she didn’t have to speak. The flick of her eyes, the tightening of her jaw indicated no. Girls like us did not accept the first slobbering puppies who tumbled at our feet. We made them wait. We touched each other and laughed. We called them to us with our eyes. When she put her lips on my ear they noticed, and wanted us. I wanted us. Night after night I watched her go home with different boys, never the same one twice, and that taut wire inside me stretched finer and finer until it felt sharp as a garrote. I wanted to ask her to stay, but I couldn’t loose the words from my throat. I slammed cab doors behind her and that moment right before the car pulled away, when we glanced at each other through the glass, felt sharper, keener, every time.

  I never went home with any of those boys. I was fixated on one.

  The first time I kissed Armin, it was in the DJ booth in front of the entire dance floor. I brought him Red Bull in a cup and laughed at the face he made when he gulped it down. He let me play an eighties set on my own, and even though the beatmatching software did most of the work I felt an animal power, my hands moving over the faders in slow arcs, watching the bodies on the floor respond, their blood white-hot, their breathing heavy. It felt sexual—that touch and response, a warm tension building in my belly and the backs of my legs. Their bodies flowed seamlessly from track to track. Their energy fed me and my heart thickened and trembled, ready to burst. When Armin touched my shoulder and leaned in to say something I leaned in, too, and kissed him. It was spontaneous, quick. I pulled away, wincing with sudden shyness, and he looked at me and reached for my face and that was when we really kissed. I had to stand on tiptoes but felt like I just kept rising, my eyes closed, my body made only of sweat and breath and light. He tasted like bitter citrus and he kissed me the way he did everything, with elegant precision. The crisp winter smell of him filled my skull. I wanted to feel all of his body against mine, rawness and rough stubble and his tongue in my mouth, but he broke away and we stared at each other as the crowd danced on, their hearts beating in wild time with ours.

  Nothing was different after that. It was still the three of us, always.

  At stores Blythe and I modeled clothes for Armin and he flashed his glossy AmEx at the register. He had a sterling silver money clip with two discs embossed on it, like an eclipse. The Umbra logo. Blythe refused his gifts; I didn’t. He loved seeing me in things he’d bought. I loved it, too. I learned to read him just as well, which dresses made his eyes go soft and gauzy. Blythe would always be prettier than me but I had something she never would: vulnerability. When I slipped into girlish frilly things and donned my solemn, wide-eyed pout, Armin looked at me as if nothing else existed. When his back was turned Blythe and I slipped into dressing rooms together and stuffed trinkets beneath our clothes: tubes of gaudy lipstick, garish charm bracelets. The tackier and costlier, the better. We didn’t even want them. In the cab on the way home we’d toss them out the windows, laughing. Armin bought me everything I wanted and Blythe destroyed everything I wanted to destroy.

  The second time I kissed Armin, on the spiral staircase, I had one hand behind my back, my fingers knit with Blythe’s. When I told them my dorm assignment fell through, Armin was the first to suggest I become Blythe’s roommate. Donnie scored some X from my dealer back home and I offered it to my new friends, and Armin refused but Blythe, of course, didn’t. Armin wouldn’t leave our sides that night. He was worried someone would take advantage, not realizing we were the predators. He slow-danced with me up in the Aerie, my cheek against his chest, a disco ball spinning out a field of stars. I breathed in his pine scent and ran a hand over the thick ropes of muscle in his back while Blythe sat in the lounge, watching us. That night I caught them arguing. They thought I was in the bathroom but I was standing behind a tall couple, listening. Blythe’s unmistakable accent cut through the crowd, saying It’s not the same and You can’t punish me forever. Armin’s mellow voice was lost, but when I stepped out I saw her hand on his chest, knotted in his shirt. He backed away from her and they became all smiles. The X smoothed the abrasions over, and later Armin watched me dance with Blythe, her body light against mine, her hand curled softly at the nape of my neck. When we stepped apart I stood in the silhouette of her smell, a sweet girl musk, blackberry and vanilla, and I felt dizzy and buoyant like something in me was rising and rising, endlessly. All I wanted to do was follow it higher.

  Dawn broke as we walked to the beach. I lay in the sand between them, our arms linked.

  “I love you guys,” I said, then felt dumb and cliché, so I added, “I really do.”

  Blythe laughed. “You are fucking high.”

  “Yeah, but I mean it.”

  I rolled my legs, relishing the prickle of sand against my calves, and the hot pink tongue of the sun lolling over the water, and their skin, so different, Blythe’s silky and cool and Armin’s coarse and warm. Everything was so real. As if the life I normally lived was a pale ghost of this one, washed out and numb.

  “Delaney,” Armin said, his hand moving over mine, to my dress, my thigh. “You make me feel so alive. What have you done to me?”

  “I put a spell on you,” I whispered.

  He leaned in. My breathing was out of control, but not for the reason you think. Because while he was focused on me, Blythe had brought my hand to her mouth, her lips brushing my palm, her breath tracing the saliva she left there, and I felt an insane thing surging in me, an upward twisting, all of myself winding with an awful torque that needed immediate release. I kissed Armin, hard, my teeth catching on his lower lip. He kissed me back and pushed me down into the sand. Gold dust rained out of his clothes. The long, hard thigh sliding between mine made me gasp, and he kissed my throat, the delicate swoop of my collarbones, while Blythe’s breath beat like a slow, airy heart against my palm.

  That summer it was the three of us. Always, always, always.

  Things feel eternal and timeless on X. Seconds or centuries later we lay sprawled in the sand, my legs tangled with his, my arms around her waist, my eyes closed and the sun gilding my body and the whole world golden, bright, and warm.

  MARCH, THIS YEAR

  I’m a middle-aged man with an unhealthy attraction to prepubescent girls,” Professor Frawley said.

  That got everyone’s attention. Everyone’s but mine.

  I let my eyes wander to the windows. Top floor, ten stories above the city, with a view of frozen blue curving along the electric spine of Lake Shore Drive. The sun was falling, making flame-colored creases on the ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire, I thought, I hold with those who favor fire. From up here the tiny headlights looked like nerve impulses, a million neurons firing into the darkness.

  Advanced Fiction Writing was a semester-long advertisement for Ian Frawley’s shitty novel. Apparently a lot of failed novelists became writing teachers, or writing teachers failed at becoming novelists. Chicken or the egg. We mostly discussed the themes of Frawley’s book—white middle-class academic suffers midlife crisis, has affairs with younger women (which Blythe would’ve undoubtedly called “Updike-wannabe sexist crap”)—then, occasionally, our own work. I was writing a novel called Black Iris, about a woman who kills herself and leaves a note for her teenage daughter, and how the daughter carries the note around without ever having read it.

  “Why doesn’t she read it?” Frawley had asked, intrigued.

  I could only shake my head.

  “Work on motivation,” he said. “Behavior is deterministic. There’s always a cause.”

  Prick, I’d thought.
But he was right.

  Now Frawley leaned against his desk, his trim, svelte frame clad in an Italian suit. Early forties, married, but with a foxish Petyr Baelish smile that said he slept with his students, the younger the better.

  “I’ve got a plan,” he continued. “I’ve rented a room from a widow and her twelve-year-old daughter. The mother is interested in me, but it’s the girl I want. I live with them for months. I insinuate myself into their lives, earn their trust, their adoration. They both fall in love with me. But I’m only in love with one of them. When the opportunity arises, I remove the mother from the picture. Now it’s just me and the girl. What is age but a number? I take her on a road trip, a tour of the finest roadside diners and motels America has to offer. I buy her anything her heart desires. We make love. We’re crazy about each other, and it doesn’t matter that I’m three times her age. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks.”

  The class watched him nervously, some of them evidently finding Lolita more true crime than fiction.

  “She initiated sex the first time. She wasn’t a virgin. She enjoys making love, though maybe not as much as comic books and candy. If I have to trade her toys for sex, well, it’s no different from most marriages.” Uneasy titters from the class. “And if she calls me a brute and an ape, well, I’m tall, dark, and handsome, though unfortunately rather hirsute. Sometimes she cries herself to sleep because she misses her dead mother. It’s not that I’m afraid she’ll run away. Why would she run? We’re in love. It’s just that she’s a young girl, and young girls play games. She teases me and says she’ll tell the police what I’ve done, so I tease back and threaten to dump her in a home for wayward children. No more toys or candy. How would you like that, Dolly? Isn’t it better to be with me, to see this beautiful country together? Why must we fight when we love each other so?”

  Frawley laced his hands behind his head, raising his eyebrows.

  “What do you think, class?” he said. “Are my young paramour and I in love?”

  An instant chorus of no, sicko, pedophile, etc. Frawley smiled, patronizing.