Black Iris (24 page)

JULY, LAST YEAR

I
sat in a Barnes & Noble café half the afternoon reading about Arya Stark, girl assassin. My favorite George R. R. Martin character. Small, unassuming-looking, kills more people than most of the men. A girl who does bad things for a good reason. I’d been loitering there all afternoon because Chicago summers are vile. Solid objects become sponge. Every breath comes through a wet towel. The upshot is that geeky college kids will gravitate toward free sources of central air, like bookstores.

Halfway through an assassination, a voice said, “Laney?”

I looked up. Heavyset boy in a polo. Beard and glasses.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” he said. “Your friendly neighborhood neckbeard? From the Pi/Phi party?”

I closed my copy of
A Dance with Dragons
. “Josh?”

The boy who’d seen me naked. The boy I’d nearly fucked.

Nearly
being the operative word. I wouldn’t have, because I knew Josh Winters, junior, age twenty, had broken up with his first serious girlfriend that summer and was desperate for female companionship, even more than for sex. I knew a quote from his favorite author would score major brownie points. I knew my body would linger in his mind all those lonely nights while he jerked off to tasteful soft-core porn of nerdy bookish girls. I knew he’d look for my face around town.

Because this was all in my plan.

He flushed such an enthusiastic pink I almost felt bad. “Yeah. You remembered. How are you?”

“Good.” I rotated the book so he could see the title. “Just reading over lunch.”

“Oh, hey. I love that series. Want some company?”

I tried not to show too many teeth in my smile. “Sure.”

NOVEMBER, LAST YEAR

B
lythe was disturbingly quiet in the cab. Early morning after Halloween night we’d ditched our friends, claiming she was sick, and I watched her run her hands through her hair and down her dress and over the lamb-soft leather seats, rolling hard on ecstasy. Her movements were anxious, erratic. I paid the fare and chased her upstairs but she locked me out. “This is stupid, Blythe,” I said through the door. “I have a key.”

She made me use it to get in.

I tracked her to the bathroom, also locked. Sat on the floor. In the knife slit of light beneath the door I saw a red shadow, her dress.

“Talk to me,” I said.

No immediate answer. Then, in a compressed, angry burst as if we’d been arguing, “I don’t even know you.”

“Come out here.”

“Fuck off.”

“If you want to know me, come out here and I’ll show you everything.”

Rush of water, things slamming. Long pause. Then she flung the door open. She’d changed into pajamas and scrubbed off her makeup, but her cheeks were flushed from the X, lit up the way blood glows when you hold a light behind flesh, her skin blooming from within. I stood slowly.

“You’ve been dosing him,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Just him?”

“Yes.”

She snorted as if she wouldn’t get an honest answer anyway. “You know he’d rather be caught dead than high. Or does he know? Is this some fucked-up thing between you two?”

“Before you say anything else, come with me.”

I led her to my bedroom. Left the lights off. Removed my silly granny dress and wolf hoodie and retrieved the Moleskine from my book bag.

“Blythe,” I said, then realized I’d have to list a million disclaimers and qualifiers and simply handed her the notebook.

She took it to the window to read by streetlight. I watched her face.

First her scowl smoothed away, becoming blankness.

Then blankness became a small frown.

Then the frown became a gape and she paged rapidly, flipping back and forth.

“Oh my fucking god,” she said.

I stood in a neutral position near neither the window nor the door. Kept my hands in plain sight.

“This is us,” she said wonderingly. “Me. Everything. It’s some kind of dossier.”

“Yes. A dossier.”

Her head rose and I couldn’t make out her face in the darkness.

“Why?” she said.

I didn’t answer.

She skimmed through, fingers bookmarking pages. “Fucking Christ. You knew the whole time.”

She meant the photos. Herself and another girl, a redhead, skinny and nerdy, cute. Their faces at oblique angles, never
quite looking at each other. But even in still photos something resonated between them. A shy smile, a longing gaze. Armin was in those pictures, his arms around Blythe, oblivious.

That girl was Elle.

“How did you find her?” Blythe whispered.

“I’ve been looking for you for a long time.”

She dropped the notebook on the windowsill as if it had caught fire.

“You stalked me. Before we met. This is serial killer shit, Laney.”

“Don’t be melodramatic.”

“Who the fuck are you? What is this?”

“We’ve both done bad things, Blythe.”

“I’ve never done something this fucked-up.”

“You have. You and her.” I took a step closer, another. Blythe didn’t back away. “I know what happened between you two. That’s why I trusted you. That’s why I’m showing you everything. Because it proves you couldn’t have been involved.”

“With what?” she said, bewildered.

“What Apollo did to me.”

APRIL, LAST YEAR

P
rescription for Keating.”

I walked out of the pharmacy feeling shady as hell. Zoeller laughed as I got in the car.

“Relax. You look like a narc.”

Back at his place, in the freezing RV—he said the cold helped him focus—I dumped the pills in the trash and set the empty bottle on a table. Zoeller tossed me a Ziploc full of new pills. With nail files we smoothed off all identifying marks. A pile of colored dust formed, baby blue.

“Where’d you get these?” I said, scrutinizing one.
ZOLOFT
.

“I’ve got a hookup.”

“If it’s actually cyanide or something—”

“It’s real. My friend’s a doctor.”

“Right. Your ‘friend’ the doctor. Like your ‘friend’ the night club owner and your ‘friend’ the arms dealer. All these mysterious ‘friends’ who owe you favors. What are you, in some kind of cult?”

“Yes,” Z said.

I rolled my eyes and filed the pill smooth.

———

Dad was on the back deck with a six-pack. Beer in one hand, but it looked forgotten. He stared across the lawn as if it were an ocean, vast and unknowable.

“I picked up Mom’s prescription.” I could feel the bag pulsing on the kitchen counter in nervous sympathy with my heart. “They only had generic.”

“Thanks, sweetheart.”

Instinct told me to leave. The less time you spend near the lie, the less chance you’ll give it away. But his demeanor made me uneasy.

I dropped beside him and grabbed a can of Coors. When I popped it he blinked, then smiled.

For a while we sat silently in the cold. Often it would still be snowing on Mom’s birthday. She used to say it was because she was an ice witch, and if it snowed her powers would be strong that year. It would kill the early flowers, all but the hardiest. When I was little she took me into the garden once and showed me a frozen rose, the petals an opaque red like sculpted cake frosting, furred with a thousand tiny spines of ice. It looked like something out of a fairy tale. She cupped it in her hands and told me to breathe, and for a second as it melted it bloomed bright as blood.

“Dad.”

He took a sip from his flat beer. “Yeah, sweetie?”

“If she doesn’t get better this time, what are we going to do?”

He didn’t answer. He never could. Mom had all the answers, and they were dark, hateful ones.

I drained my can and threw it into the rosebushes. Dad grimaced. When I went inside he’d fetch it in his quiet, fastidious way, careful not to disturb the garden, to anger the demon.

“Why did you marry her?” I said suddenly.

It was more personal than anything I’d asked him in years. Mom was right about that—we hadn’t known each other for a long time.

Maybe he was drunker than I thought, because he actually answered.

“I loved her fire,” he said from far away. “I didn’t know that I would burn.”

JULY, LAST YEAR

A
fter the set Armin was exhausted but wired. I met him as he came down from the DJ booth, handing him a red cup. Umbra was packed, mostly college kids going crazy before fall semester started, thick-necked bros in collared shirts and sorority girls flawless as walking Photoshop pics. Enough fakeness to choke on.

“I thought taking drinks from strangers was bad,” Armin said, smiling that phosphorescent white smile.

“Only when the stranger is a boy.”

“Oh, I see. Selective sexism.” He drank, a rivulet of sweat streaking down his throat. His abs painted faint shadows through a skintight Henley. From certain angles I could not tell the difference between him and a romance novel cover.

“Where’s the midnight pumpkin?” I said.

“Speak of the devil, and she appears.”

Blythe flung an arm around each of us and flashed that Cheshire grin. Tonight she wore a navy dress that made her ink pop, the tats on her arms a living scarf. Her fingernails dug into my bare shoulder. She didn’t seem aware of it.

“What’ve you been up to?” Armin asked her.

“The usual. Drinking, carousing. Rousing the local rabble.”

“Hit anyone yet?”

“No, but the night is young.”

He smiled. “I need to change. I’m going to run to the car. Keep an eye on this troublemaker, Laney?”

As if I could keep a comet like Blythe in check.

“I’ll try,” I said, and they both laughed, making me feel silly.

“Brave girl,” she said.

When we were alone she shot me a sly, meaningful look.

This was a language I understood. I popped the locket on my bracelet and produced two oxy pills. Gave her one and said, “I like your accent.”

“I like your face.”

That face went warm. “What do your tats mean?”

“You’ll have to be more specific.”

I touched her shoulder, the pink flower that looked like a lily but hauntingly human, mouthlike. Her skin was softer than I expected. “This one.”

Blythe didn’t glance down. Her eyes remained on me. “That’s a secret I couldn’t tell.”

“What secret?”

“It’s called a secret for a reason.” She ran a finger under my chin and I shivered. In one slick motion, she raised that hand to her mouth and swallowed the pill.

“Armin says you can’t fall in love,” I said. “Is it true?”

“Armin says that because I can’t fall in love with Armin.”

“Who can you fall in love with?”

“Someone with whom I can share my secrets.”

“Good grammar,” I said appreciatively.

“It’s one of my secrets.”

“One down, then.” My heart beat hard. “I’m already ahead of him.”

Blythe switched on that electric smile. “You are fucking adorable. Do you want to dance?”

Our chemistry was crazy. I’d never met someone who got under my skin like this, made me feel I was about to touch a
live wire. Kelsey didn’t come close. A song I liked came on, that Digitalism/Youngblood track “Wolves,” the kick drumming in my pulse, and I wanted to seize this moment, grab the wire in both hands and light my body up, but you stick to the plan. You stick to the plan.

“I should wait for Armin,” I said.

Disappointment dimmed her smile. “Right.”

Her midnight dress slipped into the crowd, and I thought, longingly,
There will be time to wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?” Time to turn back and descend the stair.

Armin returned in a button-up, smelling like green bark and winter sky. “She give you any trouble?”

I shook my head. I could still feel her fingertip running beneath my chin.

I said I needed a smoke and we went up to a private balcony off the Aerie. Summer heat dampened the air, soaking up city lights and transforming them into hazy bokeh, shimmering amber and violet dots.

I’d tried to get him a beer earlier but he declined. He only accepted a Red Bull after I nagged about hydration. There was nothing in it yet. Not until I had proof.

But for now, I could condition him to trust me.

“So you’re a DJ who doesn’t even drink,” I said.

He breathed fresh air away from my smoke. “It’s not for me.”

“Have you ever tried anything?”

“I don’t need to try poison to know I won’t like it.”

I shook my head. “Brainwashed.”

“Trust me, I deal with enough mind-altering substances on any given day. I’m not missing out on anything in the illicit drug domain.”

“That’s hypocritical.” I pointed at him with my cigarette. “You’re fine with putting stuff in people’s heads and screwing up their neurochemistry when half the time you don’t even
know the mechanism of action. How’s that any better than weed or ecstasy? We know more about how those work than psych meds.”

“People have died on ecstasy.”

“People have died on Zoloft.”

“We use them for a clinical purpose—”

“So do I.”

Armin frowned.

“And some of your stuff is worse than mine.” I exhaled into the night. “Some of it actually makes people sicker. You know how many depressed people end up killing themselves on antidepressants?”

“I’ve seen the studies.”

“Doesn’t it bother you that someone might die because of something you said would make them better?”

“You can never know that.”

“But what if you did? How would you feel?”

He put a warm hand on my shoulder. “Laney, this seems very personal to you.”

I stubbed my cigarette in an ash can. “Sorry. I’ve been watching too much news lately.”

His hand fell and he rolled his shoulders, as if shaking off a troubling thought.

It was quiet for a while.

“Blythe is strange,” I said.

“She can be eccentric.”

“I think she was flirting with me.”

He looked at me sharply. “Why do you say that?”

Because I was flirting back.

“I don’t know, just a vibe. Is she, like . . .”

“Who knows what she is.” He sighed, leaning against the railing. “I’ve asked myself that so many times. I wish she’d just decide.”

You’re still in love with her, I realized. It all made sense. The brotherly way he acted toward me, how he wouldn’t kiss me, wouldn’t respond to my frank advances. He still wanted her. And she didn’t want him.

She wanted me.

“She’s really pretty,” I said vaguely.

“What about you?”

“Am I pretty?” I said, laughing.

“You’re beautiful.” His voice was sincere, but it didn’t move me. “But I mean, are you into girls?”

“You asked me that before, remember? The first night I met you.”

“You didn’t answer.”

“Is it that important?”

“Yeah, actually, it is.” His face clouded. “I’ve been hurt before by someone who wasn’t honest. So I need to know where things stand. Where you stand.”

The lie came easily, like a boy.

“I’m straight, Armin.”

It didn’t assuage him.

“Be careful around Blythe,” he said.

“Why?”

“She’s ruthless.”

And I thought, Perfect.