Black Iris (26 page)

“You’re on camera. Help me get her up before a train comes.”

He hesitated. His head turned, the cap pointing toward the exit.

“If you leave her here, they’ll find you. You’ll rot in jail the rest of your life, asshole.”

He climbed down, muttering.

I kept my hood low and face averted as we lifted her onto the platform. Blythe hammed up the drunkenness, cursing, smacking at him. She swung blindly and knocked his cap onto the tracks.

“Shit,” he said, bending over.

Our eyes met.

“Luke,” I said.

He froze, fingers outstretched between the second and third rails, where his hat had fallen. “Holy shit. I thought you looked familiar.”

“I’m one tough cookie.”

And I pushed.

There was no sound. That was the strangest thing. Six hundred volts going through a body should sound like
something
,
but all I heard was the weird stuttering moan he made, the drum of shoes on wood. No flash, nothing to tell what had happened except the silent convulsion tearing through him.

You can’t touch someone on the third rail. Not unless you want to die, too.

But I’d pushed with enough force to carry him backward, and his hand lost contact with the rail after a few seconds. He sprawled motionless between the inbound and outbound tracks, facedown. Wisps of steam rose from his jacket. I heard the faint hiss of heat escaping into the cold.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Blythe said behind me.

It registered that I might be looking at a corpse.

I turned to climb up and she thrust out a hand without another word.

“A man fell on the tracks,” I told the station attendant in a bizarrely calm voice. “I think he was electrocuted.”

In the same way I’d lost time on the morning of Mom’s death, I lost slices of reality here and there. Suddenly we were in a cab and I was staring down at my hands, which held a cap that they turned over, and over, and over.

Killer’s hands.

Earlier I’d spent hours researching third rail deaths. It wasn’t just the voltage but the duration of contact that killed. As when being shocked with defibrillator paddles, touching the third rail could stop a heart. Flatline. Whether that heart started beating again depended on various things.

Like whether the Norths had a family history of heart problems.

Like how fast someone could administer CPR.

I sat in the taxi holding his hat and thought, How poetic.

I literally broke his heart.

———

We stayed up all night watching the news. The story aired at dawn.
Loyola student in serious but stable condition after Green Line fall. Police ask witnesses captured on camera to come forward. Tonight: The Dangers of Underage Drinking.

“And then there were two,” I said.

Blythe’s arms wrapped around me. I kissed the inside of her wrist, felt the fury of her pulse.

“Are you going to kill him?” she said.

“Who?”

She wouldn’t say. But we both knew.

———

I told you what I was when we began. I’m the black iris watered by poison. The wolf that raised its head among sheep and devoured its way, ruthless and bloody, to freedom. I never forgave, never forgot.

I didn’t feel sorry. I felt bad. As in
bad girl
, not guilty. And feeling bad made me feel so fucking good.

“What are we doing?” Blythe said, tugging at the chain around my neck.

“Going over the edge.”

She put her mouth on mine and kissed me as if nothing mattered except this kiss. When I began to lose myself in it she withdrew, her lips wet and wine red, drunk on me.

“I knew you’d love falling,” she said.

I pushed her down to my bed and kissed her temple, cheekbone, throat. Pulled her shirt over her head, pinned her wrists to the mattress and pressed my lips to every inch of that smooth fawn-gold skin. Kissed her breasts and made her body ripple beneath me like a sheet of silk. Her hand snared in my hair, plucked every nerve in my spine. Greedy girl. Nothing was ever enough for either of us. I kissed a trail down the lee of her arm, up the inside of her thigh, across her belly. Felt the
ribbons of muscle furl tighter. Left my saliva all over her, my clear venom.

“ ‘What did my fingers do before they held you?’ ” I murmured, changing Plath’s words slightly. “ ‘What did my heart do, with its love?’ ”

“You’re becoming very good at this.”

“At what?”

“Making me fall for you.”

Her mouth drove me crazy. I kissed it and bit her lip and wished I could gash it open, bleed out that vivid redness. Laced my arms with hers, blank skin against inked. God, she was so pretty.

“Who are you really?” she said.

“You know all my secrets. I’ve shown you everything.”

“Not everything.”

I held her hands down. “You know the darkest parts of me. That’s who I really am.”

“Her little black iris.”

Something unpleasant coiled in my belly.

“Why did she call you that?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You never do.”

“My skin,” I said, staring at the sheets twisted beneath our hands. “The scent reminded her of irises. I don’t know why. I never gardened.”

I could still smell it, rain on petals, and that dark luscious air rising from the earth, a perfume swarthy with secrets and shadows.

“What did she grow in her garden?”

Me.

“Roses. Deep red, with thorns like talons. Things that were beautiful, that could hurt you with their beauty. But her favorite was the black iris. It’s the darkest purple, so dark it’s
black unless the sun hits it just right, and it has these folded, sensuous petals that look like—well, like a girl, you know, the inside, both pretty and obscene, like—”

“Like this.” Her thigh slid between mine.

“God. Yes. Fuck. Do you want to hear this or not?” Blythe laughed, stopped. Wrapped her arms around me. “When I was small she’d brush my hair and say, ‘My little black iris is growing.’ When I got older she’d catch me curled up in a corner in a mood and say I was wilting. And at the end, before she died, she called me that so I’d know she was sorry for making me this way. This dark thing. Fucked-up, innately flawed.”

“You really think she saw you like that?”

“She saw her darkness in me. I think she wanted me to find a way to live with it, the way she never could. My entire life, I’ve felt infected by her. Like she made me into something that can only produce more darkness.”

“That’s not who you are,” Blythe said.

“Who am I?”

“My little wolf.” She traced my jaw, the ridge of my knuckles. “All teeth and claws. Cunning, and fierce, and insatiable.”

My blood warmed.

I leaned in to kiss her and she grasped my head, put her mouth to my ear. Her voice was thick, almost drunk.

“I love you,” she said. “Whoever you are, whatever you are, I love you.”

I kissed her crazily. Her mouth. Her skin. The blade groove between her ribs, the soft stretch of her belly. The sheen of blond down shimmering over her skin. Slid my hands between her legs and spread them apart like a reverse prayer. The gold cross dangled from my neck, a cool brand against the heat of her thighs.

“I want you inside me,” she breathed.

She raked her fingers through my hair, held my head.
When I gave her my tongue she cried at the ceiling. Fucking a girl is heaven. All the lines blur. It’s pure softness, darkness, warmth. Her thighs against my face, her clit between my lips like a cherry stone. Her wetness all over my mouth.
Tell me what I taste like
, she’d said once, and I couldn’t. What word is there for the way summer tastes, that accumulation of sunlight in the air like a head of sweet foam, the snap and fizz of fireworks, heat that never relents?
I’m not a poet
, I’d said.
I don’t have your silver tongue.
She’d laughed and said,
You do when you stop talking with it.
God, it was crazy. Us. This. This girl was mine. She let go of me and grabbed the pillow beneath her head, the bed frame, seeking some anchor to the real world, and I ran my tongue from the hot core of her up to her clit and back again. Hands on her thighs, holding her open. The movement of her body was a second language. I read every semantic shift of muscle, knew when to flutter my tongue, when to slow and suck. When to give it to her hard and when to brush softly, girlishly. When to slip my fingers inside. Her voice above me was a spell. As she got close every thread in her tightened, her legs tensing around me, nails shredding the sheet, and I stayed steady and she arched against my tongue, crying out, her heat filling my mouth. She gave herself to me, completely undone. Nothing else was this beautiful. Nothing.

I would do anything for you, I thought.

Blythe grasped my face and kissed me. Clutched me to her chest, clawed a hand down my back. We were a mess of wild hair and wet mouths and slick skin.

“Fuck,” she said, and began laughing, deep in her throat. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

She threw me to one side of the bed and held me down. She was charged, electric.

“Let’s go get him,” she said. “Right now.”

“Zoeller?”

“Yes.”

“You’re crazy,” I said, gazing up at her with wonder, and slight apprehension. “We have a plan.”

“I am crazy. There’s a demon inside me. I could kill someone tonight.”

My nails framed either side of her face like wolf claws. “Hold on to this. What you feel now.” I scraped them down her skin, lightly. “Zoeller’s easy. But the one after him won’t be.”

Our friend. Our sweet, sensitive boy. The one we’d both fucked.

The one I was still fucking. Pulling him in deeper.

“It drives me mad,” Blythe said, “seeing his hands on you.”

“Good.”

“That’s how you want me, isn’t it?” Her fingers knotted in my hair. “Desperate and jealous. Willing to kill for you.”

I kept quiet.

“How does it feel,” she said, “fucking someone you don’t love?”

“You know how it feels. You fucked him when you loved Elle.”

Her grip eased. “Are you really going to hurt him?”

“Are you?” I raised an eyebrow. “Remember what you said? ‘If someone hurts her, then we hurt him.’ ”

“We have a history, Lane. I can’t. But I won’t stop you.”

“Watch the video.”

“I don’t want to see it. I’m already fucked-up about this.”

“So you’re taking it all on faith.” I tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “Faith is dangerous.”

“I’ve been known to live dangerously. Impulsively. Recklessly.” She shackled my wrists with her hands. “That’s what you love about me.”

I love everything about you, I thought. My beautiful mad girl.

“What would you do for me?” I said.

“Anything but that.”

“Show me.”

Blythe held me down, her bare legs tangling with mine, hair obscuring her face. All I saw was that blood-bright mouth.

She smiled.

MARCH, THIS YEAR

W
e stayed in the Chinese restaurant till closing, drinking cup after cup of green tea. The walls rippled with red silk, spotlights flaring along the pleats like lit-up muscle. I forced down a few spoonfuls of egg drop soup. My body was too wired with adrenaline and heartache to eat more. In the warm glow Blythe’s face looked angelic, fallen. Had it always been so thin, ligaments moving beneath the skin when she gave a weak smile, like puppet strings?

I tipped our server a twenty and he left us alone with a polite nod.

Blythe eyed the crisp bill. Her voice was sad. “Armin taking good care of you?”

“Of us both.”

Looking at her was unbearable. I tore my napkin into small squares, then smaller, smaller.

At first she’d been the usual blast of TNT, freaking out in the bathroom, vowing seven types of revenge,
I’ll find whoever it is, I’ll bloody kill them
, etc., until I grabbed her and made her calm down. My touch always focused her, honed her scattershot energy into a laser. Before things got too intense we sat at the table to talk.

“You know who it is,” I said. “It has to be Hiyam. She’s behind this.”

“Why would she blackmail again?”

“People never change.” I dug the tines of my fork into my thumb. “We commit the same sins over and over.”

Like you with Armin, I didn’t say. Breaking his heart twice. Once with another girl, once with me.

“What about the blokes we hurt?”

“Klein wouldn’t. Not after hitting me. Radzen is clueless. And Luke’s brain is too fried. He’s lucky he’s still got any short-term memory.”

“Zoeller.”

“I saw him last month. It’s not him.”

“His mates?”

“He doesn’t have any real friends.”

Bluntly, she said, “Your brother.”

“Donnie has no motive. He adores me, and you, and even Hiyam. He doesn’t have a bad bone in his body.” I shook my head. “It’s her. She’s had a raging girl crush on you since forever. She always resented me for taking her place.”

“You didn’t take her place,” Blythe said, and our eyes struck for a second, explosively.

I took no one’s place. There was only me, in the cavern I’d hewn with my bare hands, in the deepest reach of her heart.

“She saw us,” I said. “When I moved in, and on Homecoming, and Halloween. She’s known the whole time. She might even know about the X.”

“We weren’t exactly covert.”

“I couldn’t be.” Ten inches between our fingertips on the tabletop. I felt each one. “I couldn’t control myself with you.”

Blythe bared her teeth. It was not a smile. “You could’ve just texted, you know. Found some other way to tell me.”

“I had to see you. To see that you’re okay.”

She laughed, still showing teeth. “Do I look okay?”

Neither of us did. I counted the bones through my skin,
heard my own voice like an echo of someone else’s. I couldn’t sleep without a head full of oxy and even then I couldn’t sleep, drifting in and out of daydreams. Her hands. Her half smile. Sometimes I woke in Armin’s embrace, panicking, for a moment smelling blackberries until he stroked my hair and it went away, and I was alone. The tighter he held me, the more alone. My body was a thin sheet of paper I could crumple and tear from my bones.

Blythe wasn’t herself, either. She clutched her teacup with scarecrow hands. Her eyes were bruised with shadow, the irises pale platinum, all color washed out. The furor and glee that once animated her face were gone. Armin said she hadn’t written in months, turned in a poem for class that simply read,
Fuck this
, said something awful to Hiyam that actually made Hiyam cry but which he wouldn’t repeat. One morning he found Blythe drunk in her backyard in a blanket and she chased him to his car, screaming. Her depression was the angry, destructive kind. The Mom kind.

The downstroke of the bipolar pendulum.

I never wanted this. I wanted to keep her safe, but not like this.

The restaurant lights dimmed. An anxious face peered at us from the kitchen door.

“Let me walk you to the train,” I said.

It was still raining, misty, the sky sighing a cool breath over us. We’d nearly killed a boy on the Green Line when we were cold and hard as diamonds, but it was a lifetime ago. All I felt when I took her to the turnstile was every hairline crack in my body.

“Come with me,” she said. “We’ll leave all this behind.”

“I can’t.”

The rising roar of the L in the distance.

“You can. Just take my hand.”

“I can’t, Blythe. I’ve worked so hard for this. I have to see it through.”

“I read your manuscript.” Her eyes were bright now, but glassy. “You left it behind when you moved. I wanted to chuck it but I read it instead, a little bit every day, like a psalm. As long as I read, I could still hear your voice. And in my mind you still felt the things you wrote.”

“I still feel them now.”

Did I actually say that? She didn’t seem to hear.

“You left it unfinished. That’s the agony. I have to know, how does it end?”

I took a step closer, my hands outstretched. “I don’t know.”

“Is this a love story or a hate story? Is it about me, or your bloody revenge?”

“I don’t know.” I crashed to my knees, clutching at her wrists, her fingers.

“Answer me, goddamn you.”

Rewind.

I hadn’t moved, hadn’t spoken. I stood paralyzed and silent several feet away. My mind had gone off to a fantasy world, the line between real and not-real blurring with fuzzy eraser strokes of oxy.

“That’s your answer, then,” Blythe said. “Revenge is what makes you happy.”

“It’s not about happiness. It’s about getting the poison out.”

I’ll never forget the way she looked that moment in the fluorescent light, her face haunted with shadows, the arriving train stirring eddies of cold air that lifted her hair and curled it around her throat. Never more beautiful, or more alone.

“Do you still love me, Laney?”

With all my bitter heart.

But if I said it this would end here. If I said it she’d make
me stop before I hurt him. Before I put the last drop of poison into his veins. So I stood there, wordless, watching something fracture in her face, watching her push through the turnstile and run up the steps without me.

I am the hollow girl.

Down on the street I slumped against a concrete pillar beneath the L and lit a cig. A cab idled at the curb. My eyes met the driver’s, both of us blowing smoke dragons into the rain.

“Where to?” he said when I got in.

In the romance-novel version of our lives, I go to her apartment. Throw myself on her doorstep, tell her I’ve realized the folly of my vengeful ways, we are meant to be, let’s run away tonight, I love you, I love you, I love you.

In real life I went home and crushed four random pills into a lowball of Stoli.

I drank it leaning on the wet balcony railing. The tumbler slipped from my fingers, a glass bullet firing down at the ground. I heard it smash a windshield, the whoop of a car alarm. Armin would pay for it. Armin would take care of everything. Armin would make sure Blythe was okay, because money, not love, is what saves.

My phone buzzed.

I pulled it out with tingling fingers, relieved. Her. Unable to let go. I’d call another cab. I’d be there in mere—

Unknown number.

The photo was of us at the Red Line station as we parted, her hand half-raised. Both faces clear. Skeleton girls. Emaciated and raw, shorn down to bones.

The message was the same as the first.

I SAW YOU.

But this time it kept coming. Or maybe I was hallucinating, my head heavy, tipping woozily over the rail.

I SAW YOU.

I SAW YOU.

I SAW YOU.

I SAW YOU.

My phone buzzed endlessly, demonically, until I ripped the battery out.

———

This is what addiction looks like.

Alone in a suicide forest, trees with screaming faces, rain that burns like salt. So high I don’t even feel high anymore. I feel detached, totally outside my body. Depersonalized. Like I always wanted.

No feeling. No body. Nobody.

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

If you finesse it you can ride the edge. Vomit the initial badness out, then take some Dramamine and chase it with more oxycodone. Wash it down with a shot of Patrón. Up you go again, back to the beautiful numb plateau. Consciousness without feeling.

I know what you were searching for, Mom. The same thing I want.

To live without pain.

But the only way to live without pain is to live without feeling. Or to not live.

I don’t know why they call it a downward spiral when you’re rising up, up, up.

This was everything I’d dreamed of for so long. Get to him. Get inside him. Dig my fingernails into his soul and rip him inside out. And I was in there now, my claws wet with heart pulp, my fangs sunk gum-deep into hot meat. The wolf midfeed, drenched in gore. As soon as I whipped my neck he’d tear in half. I had him. I was ready for the kill.

But I already knew it wouldn’t be enough.

I became addicted to everything I tried. Drugs, girls, violence.

For a while, hurting them helped. Klein’s fat face spitting blood. Luke’s surprise as he fell backward onto a lightning bolt. Zoeller’s bones breaking into a thousand pieces inside that pretty skin.

Temporary fixes. Nothing satisfied me.

And it wasn’t really the hurting that I loved. It was after. The audacious realization that
we got away with it
. We took revenge. We walked away unscathed. Me and her.

All I’d really loved was her.

And all I had now was drugs that were making me sort of crazy.

There was a shadow in the apartment. It followed me from room to room, folded into corners, slithered into tile cracks. Orion would sit and gaze at it sometimes, untroubled. It wouldn’t hurt him. It was there for me.

I saw things. Things that were there, but not as they really were. A pile of clothes on a chair was a crouching human shape. The hat on the counter was a head peering at me. I got so jumpy that Orion left the room when I came in. Going out didn’t help. On the train, in class, I saw faces in the corner of my eye, twisted and snarling, gnashing teeth. When I turned it was just a girl scrolling her phone, a man reading a book.

I couldn’t look at anything.

“This building is filthy,” I told Armin when he came to see me. “It’s full of bugs.”

Spiders in every shadowy nook. Sometimes a centipede, horrifying, huge, running across a blank wall.

“I can’t live here.”

“I’ll take care of it,” he said, combing his fingers through my hair.

Orion and I stayed in a hotel while they fumigated. Unbe
lievably, the hotel was full of bugs, too. A wolf spider crawled onto the sheet when I let a careless hand sprawl. I didn’t sleep.

It was a relief to go back to the condo.

“Laney,” Armin said as we carried suitcases back in, “what exactly did you see?”

“Things with too many fucking legs.”

He paused, backlit by the hall light, face obscured. “They didn’t spray. They couldn’t find anything.”

In the corner of my eye, a black squiggle skittered up the wall.

Don’t look. It’s not really there, you fucking psycho.

“Laney,” Armin said again, more carefully, “what are you on right now?”

“Can you stay here tonight?” My voice sounded small. “Please?”

He scooped me up in his arms and carried me to bed.

We lay with the lamps on, me atop him. Made out for a while with a doomed urgency, a sense of things accelerating toward an end, leaving marks with teeth and stubble, but when he took my shirt off I started shivering and the shivering became crying and he just held me, which was what I’d wanted to begin with.

Why didn’t this feel good anymore? I used to love it with a nasty satisfaction. I used to feel so powerful, knowing what was in my hands. That I could crush it anytime I wanted.

Come with me. We’ll leave all this behind.

Armin stayed the night. As I dozed, my head filled with silly memories, things that used to make me happy. The time the three of us were walking to the beach and stumbled into an alley with amazing acoustics, and Armin sang backup while Blythe and I belted our lungs out to “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” Or that drunken night I told her, “Talk Australian to me,” and she rattled off every clichéd phrase she could think
of from
fair dinkum
to
no worries, mate
while I feigned a swoon and Armin caught me in his arms, laughing. Or when he taught me how to greet someone in Persian, ever patient, and I tripped over my tongue and Blythe fell on the couch in hysterics and Hiyam listened appraisingly, giving unexpected encouragement.

Fake. All fucking fake.

We were never happy together. We were liars, all of us.

Why couldn’t I get high enough to block it out? You can only go so high before cardiac arrest.

On lonely nights I sat on the beach by myself, the sand cold as ice dust. No hands to hold me. Alone with my incipient victory. Alone with my hate and my hollow white-shelled pill of a heart.

Forgiveness is weakness
, Mom said.
The weak forgive because they have no power to do anything else.

Don’t be weak, Laney. Don’t be a fag. Pussy. Coward. Don’t be what you really are. Look what happened before when you opened your heart. When you loved.

I was hard and brittle when Armin texted.

They sent me one
, he said.

Sent what?

You know. Her too.

Blythe. Those two, talking. Discussing this without me.

Paranoia swelled. How would I know if you’re both lying to me? What if she told you what’s coming, what I’m going to do?

Would she?

We all need to meet
, he wrote.
You know where.

The three of us back at Umbra. Where everything began.

When?

Tonight.

I stood, a cloak of pale sand falling from my legs like snow. Shook my shoulders, felt the sharp kiss of winter on my skin.
A ghost-eye moon stared down at me, unblinking. I raised my head.