Black Iris

by Leah Raeder

  I opened my door and stumbled into the field.

  It was dusk, the sky feathered in phoenix plumage, clouds in flame shades of violet and ocher. World on fire. More like Mars than Earth. For a second I couldn’t find the road. Nothing around us, just the sunset and steam puffing from the tailpipe. We’d missed the semi by mere seconds. The hard bounce over a shallow ditch and into the field had triggered the impact sensors.

  I walked around the car in disbelief. Not a single scratch.

  Zoeller’s door cranked open.

  He took three steps before I tackled him. He’d left the gun in the car but I didn’t care. It wouldn’t have changed anything.

  Despite my being a foot shorter, my momentum knocked him to the ground. I stayed on top, clinging to him with monkeyish nimbleness, fending off his feeble throes. I hit his face with an open palm. The impact tolled through my body and jarred my bones and I hit him again, again.

  “You fucking lunatic,” I screamed. “What the fuck is wrong with you? What the actual fuck?”

  Zoeller took the barrage without flinching. I didn’t stop until I realized the sound gurgling out of him was a laugh.

  I sat back on my haunches, breathless. I was numb all over, my fists raw.

  He levered himself up. His lip was fat, crimson dripping over his chin and staining his shirt. His eyes had a fluorescent glow in the deepening twilight. Traffic swished on the road, far off as a dream.

  “You are actually insane,” I whispered.

  “I’m so hard.”

  I got up, disgusted.

  “Don’t you get it, Laney?” His voice had a throaty nakedness that made me shiver involuntarily. “We are so alive right now.”

  I went back to the driver’s side. By the time Zoeller caught up, I’d restarted the engine. The deflated airbag spilled into my lap, slithering between my legs. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the way it made me aware of myself, of the tightness in my body, the hot arousal tensing my thighs.

  Z got in before I managed to lock the doors.

  “Get the fuck out.”

  “Stop being so conventional.” He pulled his seat belt on. “Let’s go.”

  My eyes rested on the gun at his feet.

  “Think you can get to it first? Think you know how to use it?”

  “I’ll fire it and show you,” I said, echoing him.

  He smiled. “Feisty.”

  “I’ll kill you. First opportunity I get, I will fucking kill you, Brandt.”

  “Good. But that’s the future.” He rolled his neck. “I think I strained something.”

  I relived a moment of bashing his face in with my hands. They throbbed now, the meat loose and spun out like candy floss. Adrenaline drained, I felt acidic and hollow.

  “We’re going to have a good night.” Z beamed at me, red-toothed, the blood scrawling a switchback over his clean jaw, his muscular neck. “Me and you. Now let’s go.”

  ———

  I let Brandt Zoeller into my head. Make no mistake, I let him in.

  I could have called the cops. I could have told someone. I had a thousand chances.

  That night I drove him around the town where I’d grown up, and it was a place I’d never seen before. Everything looked crooked, slightly askew, a painting knocked sideways, revealing something tender and secret beneath. Nothing had changed—the change was in me. We stopped at the Dairy Queen and the halogen bleaching our faces felt like a benediction. I tasted blood and leather in my burger. Every streetlight was a tiger’s eye. I blazed through yellows, one hand on the wheel, just my fingertips, not really steering but feeling it steer itself. I thought of the way Mom drove, choking the wheel like a chicken neck.

  Something was awakening in me. Something powerful.

  I parked downtown near the Riverwalk. Zoeller followed me to the brick path along the bank and for a while we walked in silence save for the rush of our breath. The river was partly frozen, strewn with cracked ice, a mosaic of moonlight painted on glass shards. Against the moon the bare trees looked like nerve fibers, a dark brain spreading across the stars.

  I sat down on the path’s edge. Zoeller joined me and I offered him a smoke. He declined.

  “What are you thinking about?” he said.

  “The Shadow.”

  He studied me.

  “ ‘Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, falls the Shadow.’ ” No recognition on his face. “T. S. Eliot.”

  “I like it,” Z said. “Unknown potential. Dark energy.”

  Not quite. Eliot was talking about hopelessness, a vast despair gathering and teeming in that moment between dream and doing. The futility of everything, the inevitable horror and sadness when anything was realized. How pointless it all was. How empty. Even when we got what we wanted, it was empty.

  But I couldn’t put any of that into words. I exhaled smoke into the winter night. In some symbolic way, it was closer to my thoughts than anything I could have said.

  “Are you a dyke?” Zoeller said.

  After the insanity of this day, nothing fazed me.

  “It’s complicated,” I said wearily.

  “You like girls more than guys.”

  Nod.

  “When did you know?”

  The last person on earth I wanted to talk to about this was Brandt fucking Zoeller.

  Which was exactly the reason I did.

  He meant nothing to me. He wasn’t even human. I didn’t give two shits about him, and in some strange way that made him safe. He already knew my worst secret, and I was already the most pathetic girl at school. Nothing to lose.

  “My first and only boyfriend was Harlan Flynn. You know, that stoner kid with really long hair. Pretty obvious what attracted me to him.”

  Z snorted.

  “I knew for years, I guess. I always had bizarrely intense friendships with girls. It felt weird when we touched. My heart would race and my skin would get tingly and if we stopped hanging out, it was like a breakup. I thought it was the same for everyone, but when I was twelve, my best friend—she was really touchy-feely, always hugging me, kissing my cheek. Saying how much she loved me. Girls are like that. It’s confusing as hell. One night at a sleepover, we were telling secrets and she said she’d never kissed anyone, and what if she died before she did, and all this stuff, and she looked so sad and pretty that I just did it. I kissed her. On the mouth. It felt the same as when she’d kiss my cheek, but she freaked out and told her mom, and that was it. No more sleepovers. No more best friend.”

  I drank a lungful of smoke to smother the humiliation. You think those wounds are closed, but when you expose them to the air you learn otherwise.

  “That was my first kiss. Sometimes I wished I was a boy so there’d be no ambiguity. When a boy kisses a boy, it’s either stop or go. If he starts beating the shit out of you that’s a pretty clear stop sign. But girls are a fucking mystery. Green light one second, red the next. And you have no idea how weirdly intimate it gets between us. Seriously. Spooning is a thing between besties. Like what the actual fuck. I spent so many nights agonizing over every gesture, every hug, every time our hands touched, every stupid thing that meant nothing to her and the world to me. I fucked up so many friendships by falling in love. I never knew where the line was. I still don’t.”

  And I never will, I thought. I’d set my own heart up to be broken again, and again, and again.

  “Anyway, I thought there was something wrong with me. I mean, emotionally. Like if I just stopped being such a freak and obsessing over girls, it’d happen. I’d fall for a boy.”

  “Was it Harlan Flynn?”

  “No. But I was really horny, and really tired of being a virgin.”

  Zoeller laughed. He often looked at me like some strange new specimen on a microscope slide. “We are so much alike, Laney. I
t’s incredible.”

  I flicked my cig into the river. The water snuffed it with a tiny hiss.

  “We are nothing alike. You’re a monster.”

  “So are you.”

  In the car, he talked. He knew it was my mother’s car, he said, because it was too cold, too clean. He knew I was terrified of her. He pulled out a silver money clip and peeled off half a dozen C-notes to pay for the airbags. I immediately threw them back in his lap. This made him laugh. “You’re overcompensating,” he said, and when I scoffed he snatched the keys from my hand and stabbed one into the plump leather seat. I stifled a shriek. “My mom’s going to kill me, you idiot,” I said, and he countered, “Do you see what I mean?”

  I closed my mouth.

  I did see.

  “Stop living in fear,” he said. “You’re free.”

  On the way back Zoeller gave me “homework.” This week I was going to start taking control of my life, beginning with her. When I dropped him off I seriously considered driving onto the lawn and running him over. This psycho had pulled a gun on me. He could’ve killed us both. For all I knew, he was planning to chop me into little pieces in that creeptastic RV.

  You’re a monster.

  So are you.

  Maybe I was trying to prove him wrong. Or maybe I wanted to be a monster on my own terms. If the world was going to constantly knock me down, I could at least choose the way I fell. Controlled descent.

  Mom never mentioned the car. A couple days later, everything was good as new.

  One morning I dallied in the driveway, my key jutting from my fist like a claw, and dragged it slowly, deliciously across her flawless paint.

  Still nothing.

  But later that week when I woke and groped for my phone, the screen was hard to read. I sat up, blinking. A deep scratch ran across it, identical to the one on her car door.

  So I began my homework.

  NOVEMBER, LAST YEAR

  The apartment was empty when I got home. Nothing moved inside but tree shadows, skeletal fingers crawling up the walls. I hadn’t been home in days and the scent of blackberry perfume hit me like a drug. I dropped my bag, pressed my hands to my mouth. Tried not to breathe too much of it at once. Sweet summer musk mingling with warm vanilla. I ran through the shadows to her room. Stumbled into a nightstand, knocked something to the floor. Messy as always, her whirlwind presence everywhere, clothes crammed into the bookcase, books on the bed, crushed white stars littering the floor. Crumpled paper. A new poem taking shape. I ran my fingers down the groove carved in her pillow.

  Still warm.

  I found her on the roof. She sat on the ledge, earbuds in, legs dangling. Not yet full dark, the parfait sky banded with lemon, seafoam, cerulean. Her hair shone like one final sunburst against the twilight.

  “Blythe,” I said, standing behind her.

  She couldn’t hear me.

  Something ineffably sad rose in my chest, a drowning feeling, as if my lungs were filling with water from the inside. My hand raised but not touching. My voice unheard. I’d spent all my life in moments like this.

  “It’s you.” The breeze lifted a golden strand and spun it around my forefinger. “It’ll always be you.”

  I untangled my hand and left, unnoticed.

  Later that night I was in the kitchen, washing dishes, when she came down. Our gazes slid around each other.

  “Armin’s coming tonight,” I said. “Will you be here?”

  “Got plans.”

  “Stay anyway?”

  She smiled unpleasantly at the table. “Heterosexual mating rituals bore me.”

  “We had an understanding.”

  “My understanding is you’re a selfish cunt.”

  I dropped a fork, the jagged clang close to the feeling in my gut. Dried my hands, shored myself up to face her. She wore a challenging look halfway between smirk and sulk.

  “Blythe, we talked about this.”

  “Talking about torture doesn’t make it hurt less.”

  “It’s temporary,” I said, moving nearer, touching her forearm. “It won’t be like this forever. Look at me.”

  “It hurts to look at your fucking face.”

  “Don’t be like this.”

  “I hate it,” she whispered. “And I hate you a little for making me feel this way.”

  She shouldered me aside and stalked out of the kitchen.

  “Stay tonight,” I called after her. “Please.”

  All I got was a cold, crystal laugh.

  Mom used to say that if you listen, people will tell you exactly how to hurt them. Because part of us wants to be hurt. We want to know how strong we really are.

  Blythe answered when Armin rang the bell. He carried a paper bag fragrant with chilies and peanut sauce. She slung an arm around his shoulders, walked him to me as if presenting a gift. Kissed his cheek before letting go. Armin looked baffled but amused.

  Don’t fall for it, I thought. She’s toying with her prey.

  I didn’t kiss him hello. Not with her eyes on us. He brushed my cheek, let his hand drop too soon. The air crackled like gunpowder right before the spark.

  “This’ll be a fun night,” Blythe said.

  Half a bottle of tequila later, it nearly was.

  We ravaged the Thai noodles and lit candles and sprawled on the hardwood with the bottle between us, flames dancing through the glass, trembling over our faces in slow marmalade waves. We sat in a perfect triangle. A St. Vincent song played in the background, a rabid crank and snarl of guitars.

  It’s inevitable that three drunk friends with unresolved sexual tension will play truth or dare.

  “Armin,” Blythe said, “you know the drill.”

  He swept a hand through his hair. His cashmere sweater looked soft enough to melt in the candlelight. “Truth.”

  She smiled at him, not kindly, and I read her mind. So predictable.

  “How do you feel about Hiyam being here?”

  I’d expected nastiness. Something like, Have you figured out how to make Laney come? But somehow she still surprised me.

  “I’m glad she’s where I can keep an eye on her,” Armin said. “But I’m disappointed, too.”

  “Why?”

  He tilted his head back, flame playing over his neck. “Because I’ve made sacrifices for her, put my life on hold, and it wasn’t enough. She threw it all away.”

  “You can’t fix her. Just be there for her.”

  “I can’t watch her fall apart.”

  “She wants a friend, not a bloody savior.”

  My eyes shifted between them. “Since when do you believe in saving people, anyway?”

  “I answered the question.” Armin faced Blythe. “Truth or dare?”

  “Like you have to ask.”

  In her own way, Blythe was predictable because she always picked dare. I never lie, so save your truths, she said. Dares tell you more about a person. The challenge lay in trying to embarrass her. She stood on the back deck and belted out “The Star-Spangled Banner,” deliberately butchering the lyrics while Armin and I collapsed against each other, laughing. She read us her worst poem, which described love and sex through over-the-top astronomy metaphors that made me bury my face in a pillow. She drank more than both of us combined yet seemed more sober, almost eerily lucid. Blythe was at her most charismatic tonight—witty, charged, burning bright.

  When she went to the bathroom Armin said, “Did you notice the shadows around her eyes?”

  I had, but I shrugged.

  “Does she stay up all night?”

  “We both do. We pull all-nighters to write papers.”

  “Does her behavior seem more grandiose than usual?”

  I knew what he was getting at, and it disturbed me. “ ‘More than usual’ is her modus operandi.”

 
“What about sex? Has she been indiscriminate?”

  My throat did not want to release words. “What?”

  “Has she been sleeping around lately?”

  “I’m not going to report her sex life to you.” My hands were in fists. “And she’s not indiscriminate. That was just a phase.”

  “It’s a phase that repeats. Be careful, Laney. She makes poor decisions when she’s like this.”

  “Poor decisions like what?”

  “Like crossing the line with friends.”

  I lit a cigarette but immediately stubbed it out. “I don’t like what you’re implying.”

  “It’s happened before.” His brow furrowed. “If she starts acting strange with you, let me know.”

  “Want me to call if she gets a little gay when she’s manic?”

  “It’s not a joke.”

  I should’ve shut up, but I couldn’t help it. “What really bothers you? That she’s bipolar, or that she’s bisexual?”

  “If I knew which one made her a cheater, I could answer that.”

  My mouth dropped but Blythe returned then, her expression blasé.

  “Still here? Figured you two would’ve run off to the bedroom by now.”

  There was something nasty in her tone. She slammed a shot of tequila and banged the glass on the floor, shooting Armin a challenging stare.

  I grabbed the bottle. “Here’s to poor decisions,” I said, and drank.

  Things changed then. The liquor dilated our veins and our inhibitions and we got more personal. Dare you to take your shirt off. Truth you to tell me the hardest you ever came. We lounged half-dressed, gilded with sweat and candlelight, spilling confessions. Nerves loosened and we laughed and grew conspiratorial. Armin asked the best truths. Not too prying, but somehow I always ended up saying more than I’d intended. I told them about the night I jumped in Janelle’s pool after a cocktail of vodka and codeine, half wanting to fall asleep forever, and how Donnie carried me home in his arms like a wet kitten. The time Mom had a breakdown at the pharmacy and screamed that she wasn’t sick, she just had moods, the way other people got headaches or heartburn. Blythe dared Armin to undress and I stared at the feline svelteness of his limbs, the chevron of muscle dipping below his belt. He stripped to jeans. Then boxer-briefs. I dared Blythe in retaliation and she shrugged off her dress as if relieved to be rid of it. She stared at me defiantly, that eternal half smile slinking across her mouth.