Black Iris

by Leah Raeder

  “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.

  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 a
nd 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 Oh 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 electricity 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

  Seventeen 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—”