Black Iris (15 page)

DECEMBER, LAST YEAR

W
e moved fast, the bat light in my left hand. Somewhere behind me Armin’s shoes whispered over the ice. We were shadows slipping through the alley, leaving ghost trails of breath. Despite the cold and our skimpy hoodies—we needed unrestricted movement—I didn’t shiver. There was a fire in me colder than the winter blazing around us.

We reached the spot I’d scouted on Google Maps: a blind nestled between garages, blocked from the alley by a low brick wall. Armin vaulted over it fluidly, hoisted me up. I slung my bat and bag to the pavement and removed supplies: tubes of greasepaint, mini flashlights, gloves. As I unscrewed a cap he seized my arm.

“What?”

He just stared, his eyes glistening darkly.

“We don’t have time for this.” I pulled free and squeezed the tube.

Him first. I slathered thick paint onto his face: white base, silver streaks around his mouth, black teardrops over his eyes. The Snow Wolf. Kenosha Tech’s mascot. Our rival school.

I showed Armin his face in my phone viewfinder. No expression.

When my turn came he hesitated. I bit the inside of my lip, sucked the thin thread of sweetness. The best way to control
people is to not let on that you’re controlling them. Set up the situation like dominoes, tip the first one, and lean back. Wait for it. Trust gravity.

Click clack crash.

He ran a fingertip down my cheek, as if drawing a tear.

When he finished painting I checked myself in the phone cam. I was actually cute, those big blue eyes wide and blank, empty of the evil inside me.

“How do I look?” I said.

“Like a stranger.”

“Good.”

I stashed everything in the bag and began to rise, but Armin had hold of my hand.

“You don’t have to do this,” he said, predictably.

“I do, though.”

“The statute of limitations hasn’t run out. You still have time. You can—”

I dragged the bat across the rough asphalt, a grinding metallic sound to match the churn in my gut. “Out of the question. We’ve discussed this.”

“Tell me, Laney.” His hand on mine was soft but enveloping. “Will this fix it? Will it really make you feel better, in the long run?”

“It’ll make me feel better right now.”

“That doesn’t sound like you. That sounds like Blythe.”

Our breath misted around us. I withdrew my hand.

“I’ll do anything for you,” Armin said, his voice rising and tightening like a note moving up a violin string. “You know that. But if you want to do this right, you have to tell. Violence won’t solve anything, and it won’t satisfy you.”

Nothing satisfies me, I thought. My fingers flexed on the grip tape. I was a little high, warm white milk spreading through my veins, a steady-state buzz. Just for nerves.

“You know what telling means?” I said. “It means another Steubenville. No one cares. No one believes.”

“What about the others?”

“Who?”

“Others it might happen to. Other girls.”

I hefted the bat, spun it, smacked it into my palm. “I don’t have the luxury of feeling sorry for others. I’m still trying to staunch my own bleeding.”

Armin stared up at me, his face bathed in moonlight, on his knees like a saint. From the start he’d fought me on this. The good doctor, the man of compassion and morality. When he spoke he sounded far away.

“ ‘He who fights monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster.’ ”

“Get up, Nietzsche.”

He stood. I gave him the bat.

“Better?”

He didn’t look appeased. “Are you angry?”

“Do I seem angry?”

“You seem perfectly calm. That’s what frightens me.”

I looked him in the eyes, in our ridiculous painted wolf faces, and slung my bag over my shoulder. “Let’s go.”

Once, on a science blog, I read about the life cycle of a star.

When most stars die, they don’t supernova. They aren’t heavy enough. Instead they collapse, gas and metal condensing into a tight ball that burns ultrapure and ultrabright, a white dwarf. The rest of their body shivers off in clouds of luminous stardust and becomes a nebula, an echoing veil of grandeur. But the core is pure. The core burns superhot. And over billions and billions of years it cools off, the heaviest elements sinking into the center, condensing, hardening. Becoming diamond.

That’s the fate of most stars. They burn away all their delicate parts and boil themselves down into diamonds.

Anger is like that. Runs on its own fumes, devours itself voraciously, explosively, until one day there is no fire left. Only pure, cold, unbreakable hardness.

Like the diamond core in me.

And the cold, hard object tucked against my spine.

FEBRUARY, LAST YEAR

N
ice car,” Zoeller said.

I had no idea if he was being sarcastic. I never did.

Despite the fact that he was richer than hell, Z didn’t have a ride. His parents gave him a BMW for his sixteenth and he sold it to buy the RV parked permanently in his backyard. He didn’t need to go anywhere. He was magnetic. Everything—and everyone—he wanted came to him.

Like me.

One foggy winter afternoon I picked him up after school in Mom’s car.

He slid in, his crisp aftershave peppering the close air. That alcoholish smell, borderline formaldehyde, but a hint of smut in it, dirty sex. I fixed my eyes dead ahead, one hand on the gearshift.

“Where are we going?” I said.

“Hello.”

I exhaled through my nose. Refused to look at him.

He fiddled with the glove box, the radio, the storage compartments. Finally I turned, teeth gritted. Dull sun slicked his brown leather jacket.

“What are you doing?”

“Music?”

My upper lip peaked. “Will you just tell me where we’re going?”

“Don’t be boorish.” He flashed a smile. His hair was immaculately coiffed, gleaming. What light there was poured over him adoringly, as if it loved lavishing itself on him.

I shoved my phone into his hands, mostly so I wouldn’t have to suffer his infuriating handsomeness a second longer.

Zoeller put on the Black Keys.

“That’s better,” he said.

Driving was a welcome distraction. His eyes slid over me the whole time like cold oil, but when he guided me onto the highway everything dissolved till it was just me and the smooth asphalt beneath my tires, my foot biting into the gas, the bluesy swagger of the music.

The address Zoeller gave me didn’t exist.

I drove past the spot where it should’ve been twice. Had to make a U-ie in heavy traffic, cars zipping past, honking.

“You sure it’s here?” I said.

Zoeller gave me a smugly amused look. Later I’d think of it as his liar’s face. He always wore it.

I pulled into a parking lot and killed the engine.

“If you’re seriously trolling me—” I began.

“Get back on the road.”

I didn’t move. He waited, patient.

“Get out of my car,” I said.

Z laughed.

“Not kidding.”

“I had to make sure you’d listen,” he said. “Get on the road.”

It was less of a hassle to do what he said than eject him from the vehicle. Dealing with Zoeller was a constant test of my threshold for violence. The only reason I’d even shown up was because Kelsey asked me personally, promising he just wanted to talk. When she gave me that lopsided smile, now a little know
ing, a little teasing, that sullen teenage girl sexuality that ripped my heart up and dropped the shreds into my gut, I couldn’t help myself. I wanted her. I’d do it for her. Didn’t matter how fake this was—if fakeness was all I could have, I’d take it.

We drove west into the snowdrop sun. Z guided me out of Naperville, through rigidly perfect subdivisions into rough country. Lawns broadened into fields and fields turned fallow, the soil black and frozen. We were on a ragged highway slicing through farmland. When we hadn’t passed another car for nearly a minute, he spoke.

“Let go of the wheel.”

I looked over at him.

“Let go.”

I laughed in his face and turned back to the road.

“Final warning,” Zoeller said.

Strange word to use,
warning
. I understood why when I glanced at him again.

There was a very real-looking gun in his hand.

I jerked reflexively, swerving into the oncoming lane. A car a few hundred feet away laid on its horn. I straightened out.

“Are you fucking nuts?” I said.

“Take your hands off the wheel.”

“What the hell is that, an air gun?”

“I’ll fire it and show you.”

My hands clenched desperately. I darted glances at the gun, his face, the road. “You’re fucking insane. You’ll kill us both.”

Zoeller reached over and pressed the cruise control button, locking us to 50 mph.

“Let go of the wheel, Laney.”

I lifted my palms, hovering an inch above it.

“Sit on your hands.”

It was the same tone he’d used to tell Kelsey to take her clothes off and touch herself. Flat, clinical.

“Do you seriously want to do this?” I forced myself to match his calm. “We will die, Brandt. Me and you. Right here, right now.”

He touched my ribs with the gun muzzle.

I held his gaze as I slid my hands beneath my thighs. It didn’t matter if I looked at the road now. I was shaking hard, but felt detached from the shaking, from the body in my seat. Depersonalized.

Zoeller smiled with boyish glee and faced forward, relaxing into the heated leather.

My plan didn’t work. I’d angled the wheel away from oncoming traffic, but some grade in the road thwarted me and we drifted left. I’d seen headlights a mile or so down. Less than half a minute before the ugliness.

I’d always envisioned my death as a small, self-inflicted thing. All I could think of now was Donnie, the sweetest boy I’d ever known, with the softest heart—a heart that poured unconditional love. God, he’d cry. He’d be so alone in this world without me. I should’ve been there more for him, should’ve protected him from Mom.

From myself.

In my peripheral vision, I saw the semi coming. Heard the surreal Klaxon howl of its horn.

“Do you feel it?” Zoeller said reverently. I’d never heard such emotion in his voice.

“Feel what?”

“How free we are.”

Then we were airborne.

A car crash is a flickering film reel of too-fast and too-slow moments, almost like when you come, simultaneously suspended in eternity and torn from it with terrifying speed. One second my arms and legs floated, weightless, tethered only by my seat belt, my hair hanging perfectly still in zero
g
. Even the
down on my arms and the back of my neck rose, everything defying gravity. In that moment I was eternal and cut free from the heaviness of this life. Then my jaw slammed closed, a sweet burst of heat injecting my mouth, my skull snapping against the headrest and filling instantly with fog and rebounding just in time to meet the airbag punching me in the face. Then nothing.

It was a while before I realized the hands I was staring at were mine. The tiny puppet beneath me was my body. Alive. Sore but seemingly whole. The dashboard dinged politely, reminding us over and over:
AIRBAG DEPLOYED, AIRBAG DEPLOYED.

I looked at the passenger seat.

Zoeller stared straight ahead, so still I feared—hoped, a little—he was dead. But he blinked, started to laugh in a weird high voice. Giddiness transfigured him, made him disturbingly childlike.

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.”