Black Iris (6 page)

“Want to know the truth?” I said. “I’ve been dying to show you my book. But I’m terrified, too, because then you’ll really know me.” I looked at my hands, my fingers ticking nervously. “I hide myself in my words. There’s a cipher, and one half is in my writing and the other half is in me, and if you have them both then you’ll understand everything. Strangers think it’s just a story, but you’ll know what’s real. You’ll know who I really am.”

She gave me a sidelong glance.

“Does that sound crazy?” I said.

“It sounds exactly like me. I have a confession, too. Armin hasn’t read my new stuff. Only you have.”

“How come?”

“He wouldn’t understand.”

“He’s actually pretty insightful.”

“Then maybe I don’t want him to understand.”

I swallowed. Why? I thought, but I already knew.

Blythe dug into her purse for a tissue. Dabbed her bloody knuckles, wiped her mouth ineffectually.

“You’re just making it worse.” I touched her wrist. “Here.”

I got it all except one stubborn spot. She smiled faintly and I decided, Fuck it. Licked my thumb and swabbed the blood from the corner of her mouth, pulling her lower lip open. My hand shook.

She stared me straight in the eyes. I couldn’t meet that stare.

“You’re falling for him, aren’t you?” she said.

“Who?”

“Armin.”

I almost fell over. “Are you crazy?”

“You’ve been twitchy all week. Whenever I bring it up, you dodge the question.”

“I’ve actually been happy all week.”

“Then why do you look electrocuted when anyone touches you?”

Not anyone.

“Don’t lie to me, Laney. If my best friends are falling for each other, I have a right to know.”

“Can we stop talking about—” I began, then blinked. “Wait, what?”

Blythe sighed at the sky. “Christ. My life is a young adult novel.”

“Did you just say I’m one of your best friends?”

“You
are
my best friend, you twit.”

The planet tilted. Gravity shift. My limbs went ridiculously light, my body made of papier-mâché.

“Don’t look so shocked,” Blythe said. “It’s no big—”

I grasped her hand. “You’re my best friend, too.”

I thought she’d brush it off the way she usually did when things got serious, but she squeezed back, hard. It felt so good. So right. The whole summer was inside of us.

“Ever get déjà vu about people?” she said. “Like you’ve met them before, somewhere. Maybe in another life.”

“Yes.”

“It’s fucking weird.”

“It’s not. I feel like I’ve always known you, Blythe.”

That trademark smirk slanted over her mouth. “Maybe we were literary giants once. Grandiose and tragic, snuffed out before our time.”

“Like Scott and Zelda.”

“The Fitzgeralds. Bloody brilliant. Though if I end up in a sanatorium, it’s your fault.”

“What if I’m the crazy one?”

She gave me a droll, knowing look.

“I’ll never be as good as F. Scott anyway,” I said.

“Rubbish. You’re halfway there. You’re a self-loathing alcoholic. Now you just need money and talent.”

I shoved her away. “I’m never showing you anything,” I said, laughing.

Blythe threw an arm around my neck. “You will. Someday you’ll show me everything.”

Her face was closer than I realized, her breath warm on my ear. Her expression was gleefully devious but as I looked at her it cleared, steadied, and she returned my gaze a moment too long. My breathing felt strangely pronounced, as if it filled my whole body rather than my lungs.

I broke eye contact.

“Hey.” She touched my knee, her voice lower now. “No matter what happens between you and Armin, I’m your friend. You don’t have to hide anything from me.”

God, how did she not see it?

“Nothing’s going on with me and him.”

“Right. That’s why you tell me to fuck off whenever I mention some bloke.”

“Maybe I don’t want some bloke,” I said impulsively. “Maybe I just want you.”

It was like I’d fired a gun. She suddenly looked at me. Really looked.

Everything went off balance again. Lights veered one way, sounds the other. My heart spun in my chest like a toy top. Her eyes danced back and forth, searching mine, her eyelashes glimmering and her mouth so red and soft-looking and sweet and without thinking I leaned in and she did, too, all the blood in me flooding my skull, ringing, roaring, leaving my hands tingling and hollow. Her face tilted toward mine. I mirrored it, started to close my eyes.

“Blythe?”

Armin’s voice.

We both whirled around. A silhouette stood against the streetlight.

Blythe rose, smoothing her dress.

“I cannot believe you did this again,” Armin said, approaching.

“He started it.”

“You can’t get yourself arrested. You’ll lose your visa. I shouldn’t even need to tell you this.”

“Welcome to tonight’s program, Armin. I know you’re just tuning in, but perhaps show some fucking concern whether we’re okay.”

“I’m sorry. I know you can handle yourself. I thought—” He sighed. “Are you okay?”

“Peachy. How about you, Lane?”

“I’m fine.”

“Great. Since we’re all unmolested, please continue the lecture.”

Armin grimaced, suppressing frustration. “I’m not lecturing. I’m reminding you how dangerous it is to act like this.”

“Like myself?”

“Blythe.”

“What, then? Should I have let him shove her around? Maybe feel her up a bit?” Her tone was mocking, but a thread of tension ran along her jaw.

“You should have called security, not punched him in the face.”

“You weren’t there.”

“I don’t need to see you proving your alphaness to know what happened. You can’t take these risks, Blythe.”

“No, what I can’t do is just watch while some arsehole insults your girlfriend.”

Her shout echoed down the empty street. Armin stared at her, startled.

“It’s okay,” I said, moving midway between them. “He won’t press charges. He’s underage. They told him not to come back.”

Armin’s face tightened. “Don’t get caught up in this, Laney.”

“Caught up in what?” Blythe said. No answer. “Right. Nothing. Perhaps we should have a frank conversation about this incredibly tense nothing between us.”

My heart jolted.

Armin touched her shoulder and she glared at him. Neither spoke, but the look between them conveyed things I couldn’t intuit. His touch was some kind of salve that soothed her.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re right. I wasn’t there.”

“Yeah, well, not like I ever go off half-cocked and make you clean up my messes.”

He finally smiled. “Because who could put up with that for three years?”

“Probably someone with undiagnosed psych issues.”

“If only we knew a competent doctor.”

“There’s always your dad.”

“Low blow,” Armin said, laughing.

Argument over. That easily they were friends again. So knowing, so natural. I felt like I had begun to disappear.

“Got him good, though,” Blythe said, brandishing her knuckles.

Armin asked if she wanted to go to the ER, which she took as an insult to her Aussie fortitude. They joked around. I shrank back, wondering if they’d even notice if I left.

“Come here, you.”

Blythe stood with a hand outstretched to me. Armin’s head tilted, and though I couldn’t see his face in the dark I sensed his pensiveness.

“I’ll get the car,” he said.

Reluctantly I went to her, my limbs wired all weird, jittery.
I was too nervous to take her hand, so she put it on my bare arm, which was worse. Her face was full of curiosity, mischief, and something nameless but intent, something between fear and thrill. Exhilaration, maybe. It did crazy things to my heart. I looked away self-consciously and she yanked me into a hug, a shock of unexpected warmth. We’d never hugged before. She was surprisingly slight, sparrow-boned. I’d been thinking of her as half god, someone whose pedestal I could barely brush with my fingertips, but really she was just a girl, like me. Her heart beat too fast and her hair was tangled and when my cheek grazed hers I held it there. My arms coiled tighter.

Mine, I thought. Mine.

We pulled apart and fell into step behind Armin without a word. When we passed into a halo of streetlight she took my hand, and she didn’t let go till we reached the car.

———

One August night I sat in the crawl space in my underwear, watching a spider scurry over a map of Chicago. When I couldn’t sleep, which was often, I came here. To see his face. To remind myself why I was alive. To become still.

There were new pictures now.

Armin was easy: his family had money, and people with money dropped more bread crumbs. He was twenty-three, born in St. Louis. His parents were liberal, loaded Persian immigrants. Dad was the shrink; Mom, a professional volunteer. They lived on a palatial estate somewhere in southern Illinois and did outreach work for trailer trash. How philanthropic. Apparently the philanthropy didn’t work for Armin’s sister, who had been in rehab twice. Armin was the good apple. Psych major. Swim team. Pi Tau big shot. Honors and scholarships. Tidy, precise, methodical. That type of perfection was usually brittle. Easy to crack.

Blythe was tougher. She was twenty-one, born in Melbourne. She’d come here three years ago on a student visa. Scant online presence under her real name. Social media was her weakness. Once I linked certain usernames to her—
archer, artemis, moonhunter
, references from her poetry—I found accounts crammed with photos: wild after-hours parties at Umbra, drunken adventures with Armin, even old shots from Australia, the colors eye-wateringly vivid, sun-blasted white sand and heartbreak-blue sky. Her father, burly and ruddy-faced, one leg propped on a sailboat. The two of them grinning into the merciless sun. None of her mom. “Artemis” explained Armin’s stage name: DJ Apollo.

Artemis and Apollo. The huntress and the healer, twin gods of the moon and sun.

Some photos were hard to look at. The two of them together. His arms around her waist. Her neck thrown back, one hand on his thigh.

I hit
PRINT
. Beneath his too-perfect face I wrote
BOYFRIEND
in Sharpie and circled it over and over until the paper started to disintegrate. Blythe, again, was tougher. I hesitated with the marker and finally wrote
BEST FRIEND
. Her current roommate was leaving when fall semester started. She was broke and anxious to find a replacement. What serendipity: an empty room just when I’d need one.

Right after I canceled my dorm reservation.

I leaned back, my hair twisting across my face. It was so fucking hot in here. The sweat made me feel stripped down, distilled to my essence.

I was obsessed with
him
. I had to be. But now I was becoming obsessed with
them
, too. I knew their birthdays by heart (mistake to let me hold your purse while you took a piss, Blythe). I knew their college schedules (mistake to let me charge your phone while you deejayed, Armin). I even
knew their horoscopes—I was ravenous for any clue to who they were, what motivated them. Armin was a Gemini, quick-witted and silver-tongued. Blythe was a Sagittarius, fiery and brutally blunt.

If you haven’t already guessed, I’m a Scorpio.

The spider crawled onto my big toe and perched there. I poked it with a fingertip and it climbed on, and I brought the finger to my face. They’re so weird-looking up close, those miniature clockwork bodies, eyelash legs joined to the onyx carapace, like a piece of living jewelry. And they go about their lives in total silence, spinning sticky glass through the air that you never see until you’re caught in it.

I opened my mouth and put the finger inside, my lips sealing.

Swallowing is something you do thousands of times a day and rarely think about until there’s a spider in your mouth. Then you’re intensely aware of the saliva pooling beneath your tongue, the shallow arch of your palate, the jaw that aches to crush and grind. You’re just a weird-looking little clockwork contraption, too. We’re all machines made of skin and bone, breathing and eating and fucking, shitting and bleeding and dying. Machines break every day. There are billions more where they came from.

I opened my mouth again and withdrew my finger. The spider looked at me impassively.

I shuddered and set it free.

———

That summer, we were gods.

Blythe showed me how to control men. No more Ugly Friend. We were sky high and ice cold, pure untouchable sex in fuck-you heels and scarlet lips, our hands all over each other, driving boys crazy. Driving ourselves crazy. I’d never be beauti
ful like her, but the glamour of her aura transformed me from Wednesday to Morticia and somehow I became darkly alluring, enigmatic. I learned to read her so well she didn’t have to speak. The flick of her eyes, the tightening of her jaw indicated
no
. Girls like us did not accept the first slobbering puppies who tumbled at our feet. We made them wait. We touched each other and laughed. We called them to us with our eyes. When she put her lips on my ear they noticed, and wanted us. I wanted us. Night after night I watched her go home with different boys, never the same one twice, and that taut wire inside me stretched finer and finer until it felt sharp as a garrote. I wanted to ask her to stay, but I couldn’t loose the words from my throat. I slammed cab doors behind her and that moment right before the car pulled away, when we glanced at each other through the glass, felt sharper, keener, every time.

I never went home with any of those boys. I was fixated on one.

The first time I kissed Armin, it was in the DJ booth in front of the entire dance floor. I brought him Red Bull in a cup and laughed at the face he made when he gulped it down. He let me play an eighties set on my own, and even though the beatmatching software did most of the work I felt an animal power, my hands moving over the faders in slow arcs, watching the bodies on the floor respond, their blood white-hot, their breathing heavy. It felt sexual—that touch and response, a warm tension building in my belly and the backs of my legs. Their bodies flowed seamlessly from track to track. Their energy fed me and my heart thickened and trembled, ready to burst. When Armin touched my shoulder and leaned in to say something I leaned in, too, and kissed him. It was spontaneous, quick. I pulled away, wincing with sudden shyness, and he looked at me and reached for my face and that was when we really kissed. I had to stand on tiptoes but felt like I just kept
rising, my eyes closed, my body made only of sweat and breath and light. He tasted like bitter citrus and he kissed me the way he did everything, with elegant precision. The crisp winter smell of him filled my skull. I wanted to feel all of his body against mine, rawness and rough stubble and his tongue in my mouth, but he broke away and we stared at each other as the crowd danced on, their hearts beating in wild time with ours.