Black Iris

by Leah Raeder

  Christina said I was beautiful.

  “Bullying is especially hard on students who identify as gay, lesbian, bi, or trans. Every year, we hear about teens who take their own lives because they can’t stand the hate anymore. The Rainbow Alliance has pledged that we’re not going to let one of our friends become the next statistic.”

  Christina said words couldn’t bring me down.

  “That’s why we’ve joined forces with student government to make Naperville South a Hate-Free Zone. Starting now, any speech or behavior that discriminates against a student because of sexual orientation or gender identity will be evaluated by an arbitration team. Severe transgressions may count as an academic violation that will go on your transcript.”

  Gasps and murmurs. I sat up.

  “To protect those who need support and safe spaces the most, we’re taking it one step further. We’re inviting all LGBT students to join the Rainbow Alliance. When you register, you’ll get assigned to a special guidance counselor who’ll be available for extracurricular counseling. Any incidences of bullying that you report will be escalated through the arbitration process. Alliance partners like me will be deputized with special monitoring status—so when we see bullying happen on campus, we’ll stop it on the spot. Basically, you won’t have to be afraid of being yourself anymore.” Luke beamed righteously at the crowd. “We’re saying no to the culture of fear here at NSHS. No more hiding. No more shame. But in order to make this work, we need your cooperation, too. It’s time for our queer brothers and sisters to step forward and join the Alliance. Don’t let the bullies keep you in the closet. Don’t hide that rose in your bag anymore. Come out and stand proud.”

  Titters broke through the crowd. Kids side-eyed me.

  “To show your support for this brave new initiative,” Luke said, ominously Huxleyan, “we’ve got some awesome T-shirts and buttons for sale . . .”

  I climbed over legs to get out of the stands. Donnie followed, calling my name. People stared. I saw only Luke. Luke North standing like Jesus Christ in his heavenly ray of yellow gel light, soulful and sincere.

  “Are you serious?” I reached the gym floor, wild with adrenaline. “Are you fucking serious?”

  Heads turned. Mr. Radzen stood up from the guidance table.

  I was already halfway to the mic in the center of the court. “Is this some massive joke, or are you all actually this clueless?”

  The gym hushed. A thousand pairs of eyes on me. The same thousand that had watched “DYKE GET’S SHOT DOWN.” The same kids who had laughed. Ignored. Isolated. Condoned.

  “Does anyone believe a word he just said?” My voice surprised me with its volume. “He’s the guy who made the video. You think he’s going to ‘protect’ people with a registry of gay kids? Is this a George Orwell novel?”

  Brian Sabano, Rainbow Alliance president, joined Luke in the spotlight. “We’ll take questions from the audience after—”

  “Shut the fuck up,” I said, grabbing the mic. Brian Sabano was the darling of the cheerleading squad. The perfect straightwashed gay boy, clean-cut, urbane, witty. A cyborg, as Mom would say. Straight girls loved him because he was cute and they could flirt without threat. No one flirted with the creepy dyke. “You’ve never been discriminated against in your life, Brian. Just shut up.”

  Radzen looked at the VP. The VP looked at Radzen. They seemed confused as to which one should stop me.

  “You fucking hypocrites,” I said, turning to the crowd. My tiny voice coming out of the PA sounded surreal. I didn’t see faces. I didn’t see Donnie at my side, urging me to stop. I saw the blank smear of pale skin, the glassy eyes untroubled by pain. I saw the rest of my life, never relating to people, always outside, apart. Even my supposed allies had sided with the Gender Gestapo. “This doesn’t ‘protect’ anyone. This registry is a hit list. It puts targets on people’s backs. And you idiots made a bully your poster boy.” I laughed but it came out a croak. “You don’t really give a shit when bad stuff happens to people like me. You only care about looking tolerant. Buying a cookie, signing a petition. But all of you watched that video, and all of you would do it again. You pretend to care while you laugh behind my back. While you make my life a fucking nightmare. You’re despicable. All of you. Someone should shoot this school up. You deserve it.”

  Radzen yanked the mic from my hand.

  Time to run.

  I crashed through the gym doors as a riot erupted behind me.

  The hall was empty and dim, my footsteps slapping like someone beating at a face. I’d almost made it to the exit when hands caught me. I spun, crazed, clawing, and slashed Donnie’s arm before I realized.

  “Laney,” he said in that soft, boyish voice.

  I burst into tears.

  He pulled me to his chest. “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”

  It was not going to be okay. My bullies had infiltrated the power structure. They were institutionalizing their terror.

  “I love you,” Donnie murmured into my hair. “And I’ve got your back, Rainbow Brite. No matter what.”

  I wrenched away from him. My hands made fists and my fists trembled, clutching air, wanting to warp it, twist it inside out. “This is all about me. Luke did this to get to me. Zoeller stopped them but they found another way.”

  “What?”

  “I’m a fucking fag, okay? I fucked Kelsey.”

  Donnie’s eyes widened.

  “I fucked her and she doesn’t want anything to do with me. She only did it because we were high. I’m so messed up, Donnie. I was lonely and so was she and now the entire school knows I’m a freak and I just want to know why she—”

  “Lane, stop talking.”

  “No. I’m sick of pretending. I don’t care what they—”

  Donnie turned me around.

  In the hall behind us stood Luke and company, Zoeller, and Kelsey. Of course. Because high school actually is the CW, and six of your closest enemies will appear spontaneously when you blurt out life-wrecking confessions in a seemingly empty hallway.

  This video never got posted to YouTube. Zoeller prevented that. But Nolan managed to capture “I’m a fucking fag” onward, including everyone’s reaction—Luke slapping a hand over his cap as if the hilarity would blow it off, and Kelsey covering her mouth, horrified, or sickened, turning away, and Zoeller watching it all with his vacant sociopath stare.

  Then the camera turned back to me, and the last thing you can see is my small fist flying at the lens.

  ———

  Takeout for dinner = emergency family meeting.

  Fried chicken. Finger food. Mom didn’t want me handling sharp implements.

  Dad nibbled on a drumstick, worriedly watching Mom. Donnie rearranged his potato wedges, worriedly watching me. The Keatings: sweet nervous boys and cold crazy girls.

  I didn’t eat. I wanted an empty stomach to take oxy on. Mom, however, tore into a breast and let the grease run down her chin. She was an uptight elitist bitch who considered fast food unworthy of being fed to dogs, but when she did something she did it wholeheartedly, with perverse gusto, as if to show she was so far beyond irony she’d circled back to authenticity.

  Before her illness progressed, she’d been executive chef at a glitzy restaurant downtown. Her mania worked to her advantage, then—she ran the kitchen tirelessly, flogging the lesser mortals who toiled under her. The Sun-Times food critic called her “a mad maestra,” which pleased her. Sometimes she wouldn’t come home for days, sleeping in hotels, living out of her car. While she was off cooking four-star dishes for foreign diplomats, we were scraping burned mac-’n’-cheese from a pot at home. She had affairs that Dad accepted in his quiet, resigned way as “the Illness.” As if it excused everything. The Illness made her unable to resist impulses. The Illness was the bitch, not Caitlin.

  Mania inevitably cycled to depression
, and the depressions lasted longer and longer, and she lost her job. Now she was a lowly part-time sous chef at a “suburban feeding trough,” as she called it. And she’d decided that if she was suffering, we were all going to suffer with her.

  “How was school?” she said.

  They’d made me sit in Guidance till she picked me up. Two-week suspension. They also barred me from joining any extracurricular clubs, including the Rainbow Alliance. I could no longer register to be “protected” by Luke North from . . . Luke North.

  Mom knew, of course. She just wanted to make me say it.

  “May I be excused?” I said.

  “You may not.” She ripped a strip of meat with her teeth. Her face had the pallor and tautness of skin pressed by a thumb, the blood squeezed to the margins. As if there was something too intense inside her, something that pushed everything in her to the edge.

  Dad gave me a sympathetic, ineffectual look.

  I smacked a palm on the table. “Let’s get it over with, then.”

  Emergency family meeting = emergency Laney meeting.

  “Delaney disrupted a school assembly,” Mom told Dad.

  “What happened, sweetheart?”

  “Your daughter has taken a stance against sexual fascism,” she said.

  I gritted my teeth. “That’s not what happened.”

  “That factory farm”—Mom always referred to school in terms of mass production—“has instituted some sort of sex offender registry for students who don’t fit the heteronormative template.”

  “What?” Dad said.

  “They want kids who aren’t straight to register with the Rainbow Alliance,” Donnie said. “For their own ‘protection.’ ”

  “It’s supposed to stop bullying,” I said, “by painting a huge target on someone’s back.”

  Dad wore a small frown that made my insides curl. “Honey, what does that have to do with you?”

  Everyone looked at me. I looked down at my plate.

  “It’s just wrong,” Donnie piped up. “No one should have to. And the guys behind it are the biggest jerks at school. They’re taking over.”

  “Not if I can help it.” Mom dabbed languidly at her mouth with the linen. “I haven’t been to a PTA meeting in years. What fun it’ll be to see the breeding stock who produced these enfants terribles.”

  A strange flare of warmth lit my chest. She was actually taking my side.

  Dad’s gaze never left my face. Troubling things were happening in it, things that looked like realizations. Not his little girl anymore, etc.

  “Laney,” he said in the voice that used to soothe me to sleep, “sweetheart, are you . . .”

  I couldn’t look at him.

  “It’s okay, Lane,” Donnie said encouragingly.

  I looked at my brother but he went blurry, a bunch of bokeh circles overlapping. So much for coldness. A tear rolled over my lip, salting my mouth.

  “For Christ’s sake,” Mom said. “Our daughter is a lesbian.”

  “No I’m not,” I blurted.

  “Oh, honestly. As if I haven’t known for years. Were you under the illusion this would come as a shock?”

  “You don’t know anything about me.”

  Her eyes burned. “I know everything about you. I made you.”

  I stood.

  “Sit down,” Mom said.

  “Go to hell.”

  “Sit down or I’ll call Dr. Patel.”

  She never raised her voice. I sat, cowed. Hateful.

  “So.” She ran a fingertip along the rim of her glass. “We have a daughter who denies her sexual identity crisis, a clueless father who is stunned, blindsided, et cetera, and a son who conspired to hide his sister’s drug addiction.”

  Donnie’s eyes bugged. Dad looked at my brother, then me, as if he’d never seen us before.

  “What is going on, kids?”

  “Mom,” Donnie said, pleading, “it’s not like that, I swear. They were my pills and they sucked. We’ll never do it again. I’m sorry.”

  My baby brother, taking the blame.

  Mom couldn’t face him without softening, so she focused on me. “When you move out, you can self-medicate all you want. You can self-medicate yourself straight into oblivion if that’s what you truly desire. Trust me, I understand the urge. But as long as you live under my roof, you will not abuse yourself this way. Do I make myself clear? This nonsense ends now.”

  My bones felt full of something black and awful, an ache that twisted deep into the marrow. I wanted an oxy so badly my teeth ground.

  “Answer me, Delaney.”

  “Or what?” I couldn’t meet her stare, so I spoke to the table. “You won’t ship me off to Dr. Patel. You’re scared she’ll put me on something that’ll mess my head up even more. I should do it. I should go become a robot.”

  Dad shoved his chair back, rattling the glass and silverware. We all looked at him, startled.

  “You hear that, Caitlin? That’s your bullshit coming out of her mouth. You’ve brainwashed her into thinking getting help will make her worse.”

  Wonder flitted across Mom’s expression. “Are you finally growing a spine?”

  “I raised them. I’m the one who took care of them while you were off wining and dining. While you were enjoying the fun parts of your illness. And I’m putting my foot down now. It’s time for you to take a step back. She needs help that you can’t give her.”

  Donnie and I exchanged shocked glances. Dad never talked like this.

  “You didn’t raise them,” Mom said, snorting. “The Internet raised them. You don’t know anything about them.”

  “I know my little girl is in pain, and needs help.”

  A weird hiccup went through me. Don’t cry.

  “Your little girl had her heart broken by another girl. It’s teenage melodrama. It’ll pass.”

  Wait. There was no way she could know about that, unless—

  “Did you read my stuff?” I said.

  Mom looked at me sedately. Took a sip of wine.

  “I can’t believe you.” I grabbed the table’s edge. “You snooped through my private journals.”

  “I paid for those journals. I paid for the therapy. I even pay for the drugs you’re trying to kill yourself with. Nothing of yours is private to me.”

  My nails gouged wood. I imagined it as her face.

  “What did you expect, Delaney? You refuse to tell me what’s going on. I have to learn about it somehow, and I’d rather it not be in your suicide note.”

  “You don’t deserve to know what’s going on.” The words came out screechier than I’d hoped, but I couldn’t stop. “You’re never here when I need you. You spend all your good days with other people. You only spend the bad ones with us.”

  She peered into her wine.

  “Did you ever realize that not taking your meds is selfish, Mom? That they’re not just for you, but for us? So you can act halfway human when you decide to actually grace us with your company?”

  Dad stood up. “Sweetheart. Kids. Let’s take a break, let’s cool down—”

  “And don’t even talk about melodrama,” I cut in. “You’re the biggest drama whore in this house. You never let anyone else feel bad. It’s always you, you, you.”

  This piqued her at last. “Oh, is that it? Angry that mommy dearest is hogging the spotlight? Did you think sticking your face between a girl’s legs was going to shock and awe me?”

  “I’m not doing this for attention. I hate what I am.”

  “Lesbianism.” She imbued the word with the same disdain she’d used to order a twelve-piece bucket of extra crispy. “How passé. If you wanted to impress me with your bourgeois depravity, why not fuck your brother?”

  “Caitlin,” Dad said.

  “Benjamin,” she said, “for God’s s
ake, shut up. People are speaking honestly for once.”

  Dad’s face drained.

  “It’s not about you,” I spat. “You are so egotistical, Mom. I don’t care what you think about anything. I have my own problems. Everyone at school hates me. Luke hates me, Kelsey hates me. I hate me. I’m a total freak and they all know.”

  “And I suppose you blame me for that, too? You know, your great-aunt Rebecca is a lesbian. Perhaps I passed the gay gene along to you.”

  “Stop saying that. I’m not—that.” God, I still could not fucking say it. It had been easier to call myself a fag than to say the inoffensive word. Easier to hate myself for it than to accept it.

  “Or perhaps my cells conspired against you,” she went on. “Perhaps they poisoned you with too much androgen while you were in utero. Now you’ll never fit in with the popular crowd. How tragic. Whatever it comes down to, you can always blame Mommy.”

  You’ll feel it, the moment you snap. It’s like working out a kink in your neck but deeper, its roots snaking down not just your spine but your whole life, every humiliation, every indignity, every lunch spent crying in a bathroom stall, every clenched fist, every granule of ground-up tooth enamel. Every Zoeller, Luke, and Kelsey. Every night you desperately jacked off to her and loathed yourself for it. Every fantasy of bringing the gun to school. It goes through everything and finally reaches the core of you.

  I rose. Barely five feet but rage made me a titan, limbs like Roman columns, teeth like guillotine blades. Mom stood too but somehow I was looking down on her.

  “It is your fault. You made me this way. You’re ruining our family.”

  “Yes, I’m certainly the biggest drama whore in this house,” she said dryly.

  I played into it, uncaring. “I wish I wasn’t your daughter.”

  “Isn’t that sad? I’ll be your mother as long as I live.”

  “As long as you live.”

  The silverware jingled. She’d grabbed the corkscrew. “You could be motherless right now. Shall I?”

  Then Dad’s hands were on me, ushering me from the room. Donnie was crying. My eyes were wet, too, but it was from fury, not pain.