Black Iris (2 page)

JULY, LAST YEAR

I
went to parties that summer. Every party within twenty miles. I was supposed to be prepping for college, getting a head start on my reading. Instead I got a head start on getting wasted.

Donnie came with me sometimes, sitting in the car while I went into the bedrooms of boys I barely knew. I took my clothes off and let the low lamplight paint me honey gold, my slender dragonfly limbs and iridescent skin like the body of a stranger, impossibly light, and I let them touch me while I swallowed pills and snorted powders, clogged my veins with chemicals. I don’t know if I was trying to numb myself or to feel something through the numbness. Maybe both. Sometimes you feel things so much, so intensely, it becomes a new kind of numbness, the oblivion of overstimulation. I don’t remember their names. It was easier to remember which ones I hadn’t fucked. They were a blur of lean abs, sweat-rimed skin, the satin smoothness of hard dicks. My mouth was always slick with peppermint gloss. It made them tingle, they said. Funny that a girl like me would be so good at oral. But we are, you know. Good with our mouths. Janelle—my best and last friend senior year—stopped hanging out with me, claiming she wanted to spend time with her boyfriend before college. Really she just didn’t want to be branded a whore by proxy.

Nothing like being slut-shamed by your so-called best friend.

I developed other skills in addition to giving legendary head: shoplifting, arson, vandalism. I got arrested with $437 worth of makeup and perfume stuffed into my underwear and bra. I pushed an old washing machine off an overpass and couldn’t get the sound of that spectacular smash out of my head. My body felt like a heap of cheap plastic and glass, and I wanted to drop it off the highest point I could get to on oxy and X. Split every bad atom inside me. Get this wrongness out. One night I totaled Mom’s car on a median and woke up in the ER with a concussion and my very first DUI. My BAC was under 0.08 percent and my lawyer said the magic words “mother’s death” so I got off easy. Before he took me home, Dad sat at the wheel of the truck, motionless. In the hazy white light he looked as used and spent as me, his skin draping over his bones like a worn-out suit of himself. I thought he was going to cry and my throat thickened, the hot stitch behind my eyes loosening, but then he said, “You’re a walking time bomb.”

He was right. Mom was wrong. I was a precision-engineered explosive, in perfect control of my own self-destruction.

Later that week Dad said he wanted me out when college started. I was a bad influence on Donnie.

Just like my dead bitch of a mother.

———

Donnie slumped on the futon in my room, watching me try on dresses and discard them. There’s nothing between my brother and me, no secrets, no suppressed incestuous subtext. He’s two years younger and we know everything about each other. I’ve seen his dick, and it was like looking at an anatomical drawing. No Lannister shit.

“The black one,” he said.

“I wore that at the funeral.”

Donnie sighed. His eyes had that faraway fog that came with being really sad, or really high. I flopped onto the futon beside him. He’d been playing “The Mother We Share” on repeat for an hour, so I knew he was obsessing again, about her, and about me leaving. Donovan Keating looks like me: rangy and raven-haired, his nose dusted with sandy freckles, his eyes a mercurial mix of aqua and teal like that sea shade that eats away at old pennies. We both have the same coolness, the same ocean calm, but he’s the sweet boy with a chick-magnet Tumblr and I’m the bad girl with a handgun for a heart. He smiles and panties melt. I don’t smile. When I show teeth, it’s to bite.

“I wish we were somewhere else,” I said, laying my skull on his shoulder.

“Where?”

“Somewhere happy.”

His arm curled around me. “I’m happy anywhere you are, Rainbow Brite.”

Yes, I have an ironic eighties nickname. No, I was not even alive in the eighties.

“It’ll be different when college starts,” I said. “I’ll miss you. You’ll miss me. We’ll do drugs to compensate.”

“We already do.”

“I’ll miss you,” I said more seriously. “So much. You’re all I have.”

We were quiet awhile. We were both thinking about her.

I stood, dragging a dress with my toe.

“I wish I was like you,” Donnie said.

“Like what?”

“Free. You can just let it all go.”

He may know me better than anyone, but he doesn’t know everything. I never let go.

Dad was asleep in front of the TV, so we took his truck.
Out in the July night I threw my head back and drank a lungful of oxygen so rich with chlorophyll it was like wine. Every lawn was uniform green, layered with sod. This is the suburbs: they tear down nature, then you have to go to Home Depot to buy it back.

Interstate 88 ran through a prairie sea beneath an ocean of stars. The faint white shadow of the Milky Way lay like a ghostly finger across the night, holding in a secret. I leaned back while Donnie drove, my arm hooked out the window, the wind in my hair, my heart dilating as widely as the sky. Melancholy does that—opens you up to make space for more of itself.

City lights rose on the horizon, a twinkling zodiac, lifting higher and higher and sprawling to either side until we were in Chicago proper. We sat at red lights with no other cars in sight, just a homeless man curled up beside a shopping cart, two girls smoking below a bar sign that lit them like aquarium fish. They were ghosts, gone when you looked back. Then we were downtown, skyscrapers vaulting around us, and if I let my eyes unfocus it became a forest of chrome and glass, the trunks of massive trees quilted with fireflies. That big-city scent of gasoline and warm asphalt smelled like home.

The party was in Lincoln Park, on a leaf-canopied street lined with greystones and slick cars. It was one of our favorite haunts—Donnie, budding architect, would photograph houses while I made up stories about the people inside. I’m morbid, so they were bad people. Sex traffickers. Animal pornographers. MFA grads. Now I was going into one of those houses, alone. Donnie fidgeted as I unbuckled my seatbelt.

“You don’t have to do this, Lane.”

“It’s my last chance before classes start.”

He pushed a lock of hair across his forehead one way, then the other.

“It’ll be fine,” I said. “He’ll never see me.”

“I could go with—”

“You’re underage.”

“Then why don’t we go back home?”

“Because I can’t live like this.” The words shot out like shrapnel. “I have to get back to normal. Okay?”

“You are. You’re the most normal person I know.”

My heart swelled. Donnie doesn’t know everything, but he knows who I want to be. He believes I can still be that person. Even if I don’t.

We hugged. I slid out of the car.

“Be careful,” he said.

“Always.”

I punched in the code at the gate.

The house was massive and bearded with ivy, squares of buttery light falling onto the garden below. Smoke rose in lazy spirals from silhouettes on balconies. I walked through the front door into a dull roar that washed over me without sinking in. I’d taken a couple oxycodone on the drive and my skin was pleasantly woolly, every sensation softened.

A girl wearing a tight smile and an even tighter Phi Upsilon Alpha tee waved me over. “Welcome to the Summer Mixer. I don’t think we’ve met.”

“I’m rushing this year. Just wanted to check stuff out.”

“Invitation?”

“My mom’s an alumna. Caitlin Keating.”

But now she’s dead.

“Oh, so you’re family. Fabulous. Drop your keys in the bowl if you drove. It’s mostly sophs on the first floor, upperclassmen upstairs. I’m Mal.”

“Laney.”

“Great to meet you, Laney. Stay law-abiding, and have fun.”

Those are mutually exclusive, I thought.

I began to move past her and she touched my elbow.

“You here alone?”

“Yeah.”

She scanned me again, sharper. I’m a whopping five-foot-one, ninety pounds soaking wet, wide-eyed as those dolls that blink creepily on their own. Classic Dickensian waif.

“You look like the girl next door,” she said with a note of pity. “Don’t go upstairs.”

As soon as her attention shifted, I headed for the staircase.

The second floor was pure raunch: strip poker, Jell-O wrestling, two girls Frenching messily while the crowd (male) whooped. Flyers littered the halls, advertising a local club.
8
0
S NIGHT WITH DJ APOLLO
. I wandered around, listening, watching, absorbing, until a beefy guy cornered me and offered a red cup. I refused. Never take drinks from strangers.

I could sense
him
.

At every blond head my spine went straight and tight as a cracked whip. His presence was in the air, gamy, meaty, an electrochemical clue that made my skin prickle. I eavesdropped on conversations, hearing his name in slurred syllables. I felt the oily slide of his cologne over my skin. I felt his pheromones seeping into me, making every sensitive part of me harden and buzz.

I was hunting.

Gold flashed in the corner of my eye and flickered out of sight. I’d seen it before. I tracked it through sweaty skin and clouds of perfume to a closing bathroom door. There was an empty room opposite and I leaned in the dark doorway. My heart pumped liquid nitrogen, chilling me to the core.

I held my phone at eye level.

Breathe. Wait.

The bathroom door opened.

Now.

I tapped
CAPTURE
when a girl stepped out and her head snapped straight to me.

Our eyes locked. Blue, but not like mine. Bleached-out blue. Strapless black dress, bare skin and tattoos. Totally unlike the sorority sisters. She wore an oddly chagrined expression, as if I’d caught
her
doing something wrong. Neither of us moved. One beat, two, three.

She turned and left.

I sank to the floor, cradling my phone. My limbs were watery and weak. Not him. Not him.

“You look lost.”

It was the beefy guy who’d tried to give me beer. He stood a few feet away, sipping.

“ ‘Not all those who wander are lost,’ ” I muttered.

“Tolkien.”

I’d already dismissed him, seeing only a fleshy traffic cone to veer around, but now I looked again. Husky guy in a polo. Light beard, bland bologna-pink face. Standard-issue bro.

“Have you read the books?” he said.

“No, I just memorize quotes to impress neckbeards.”

He blinked.

“Bye,” I said, standing.

“Who’s your favorite author?”

Nope.

“I’m Josh.”

Almost to the stairs.

“Josh Winters. I’m a junior.”

First step.

“Comp sci major. I read epic fantasy and I play MMOs and I don’t know why I’m telling you this. But I’ve never met a girl who quotes Tolkien and I just want to know your name.”

“Laney,” I blurted in exasperation.

“Can I get you a drink?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry if I offended you. You’re just—you’re beautiful,” he said, and it became excruciatingly obvious how desperate he was. I don’t have illusions about my looks. I’m only slightly pretty in a decaying, feral way, my hair a little ragged, my makeup a little sloppy, my gaze a little too piercing and direct. What guys are attracted to is the sluttiness—the give-no-fuck way I carry myself, the mouth that knows how to suck a dick.

“Want to go outside?” he said. “It’s quieter.”

“No.”

“Okay. We can talk here. Or wherever you want.”

I stared at him silently.

“What are you into?” he said.

“Revenge.”

“Is that a TV show?”

I said nothing.

“How about books? Music? What do you do for fun?”

“I don’t have fun.”

“Then what do you do at parties?”

“Get high enough to fuck.”

He started to smile, hesitantly. “Is that a joke?”

Back to the stairs.

“You’re better than me,” he called, and dammit, I paused. “You don’t care about climbing the social ladder. About playing the game. That takes guts. I wish I could be that way. I wish I didn’t care so much what people think of me.”

Great. One of those guys who spill all their insecurities to any girl who doesn’t reject them firmly enough.

“Sometimes I think I’m just not cut out for this,” he went on. “I don’t memorize pickup lines. I don’t know how to talk about anything except books and games, and then I don’t know how to stop talking.”

“Maybe that’s your pickup line.”

“It’s a pretty bad one.”

“It got me to stop.”

He smiled, a tremulous, sincere smile. He was really trying.

“Look, you seem nice, Josh, but you don’t want to know me.”

“Give yourself some credit. You’re smart, and you read, and you don’t care what anyone thinks. I would love to know you.”

It was his voice that did it, I think. Patient, kind. One of the good-natured sheep.

“Okay,” I said. “So, do you want to fuck?”

His face was priceless.

Josh didn’t move until I went up and took his big sweaty hand. Then he looked at mine with incredulity and enfolded it gently, as if afraid he might crush me, or that I’d disappear.

Next floor up. His room. Bookshelves filled end-to-end, titles I’d have loved to browse. Rumpled bed. A kite of violet moonlight slanting across the floor. My heart skittered.

You’re in control, I told myself.

He led me in shyly, pawing at my dress and hair for a while until I took his face in my hands and kissed him. I willed myself to get aroused but couldn’t focus. My gaze drifted to the window, to the city lights scattered like stardust across the sky, and I imagined myself as a constellation of cells, each light-years apart. What happened to my flesh took eons to reach my brain. However solid I seemed, inside I was vast spaces of dark energy and vacuum. Josh pressed me to the wall and thrust his beery tongue into my mouth and I thought, Just get to the point. I guided him to the hem of my dress, feeling nothing. Raised my arms and let it fall like a chrysalis, and my arms kept wanting to rise, like wings.

“You are so beautiful, Laney.”