Black Iris

by Leah Raeder

  “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

  On 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 pushing 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?”

  “Is there something going on with you and Blythe?”