Black Iris Read online

  I turned on my phone.

  Before today, I’d had two dozen Facebook friends. Now I had two hundred friend requests.

  My stomach caved in.

  There were messages on my wall. I tried not to read them but words flickered out at me like adder tongues. Fag. Nasty. Hot. Support. Pray for you. Does it taste like. God, just shut up, everyone. I deleted the account. My call log was cluttered with strange numbers. How the hell did they find me? Delete delete delete. One number had texted every hour, on the dot, since three p.m.

  We need to talk

  It’s important

  Answer

  I can help you

  And so on. As I sat there, a new one came in:

  I know you’re there Laney

  I was just freaked-out and angry enough to text back, Who is this?

  Z

  I was still staring at that letter when the phone rang. His number.

  I shifted across the icy leather. Pressed my knuckles to my mouth. Shit. Shit, what should I do?

  ANSWER.

  “What the fuck do you want?”

  “Don’t hang up.” Brandt Zoeller’s voice, deep, smooth, with a touch of molasses and whiskey, a dark sweetness. “Let’s have a conversation.”

  “Give me one good reason.”

  “I got the video taken down.”

  My heart filled the silence, thudding slow and hard.

  “Laney? You still there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll talk. You listen.” His voice shifted farther away. I wondered if he was lying down. “It was up for a few hours. It didn’t go viral outside school. If it had you’d be a celeb. Nothing gets the Internet justice league’s panties in a twist like a fag being bullied.”

  I said nothing.

  “It’s gone. If any copies show up, I’ll take care of them. But they won’t.”

  “Why did you do it?” I said, hating myself for asking.

  Another shift, closer now. “Because you’re weak. Because I could.”

  I hadn’t expected cold honesty. It was weirdly refreshing.

  “Now you understand,” Zoeller said. “I made it happen, and I unmade it.”

  “Why stop? Why not just keep bullying me until the inevitable suicide? That’s your endgame, right?”

  “I don’t have an endgame. I play for fun.”

  “Whatever.” I slumped in the seat, suddenly weary. “What do you want?”

  “I want to get inside that fucked-up head of yours and roll around in the filth, Insaney Laney.”

  I jerked the phone away and hit END CALL.

  Fucking asshole. Troll.

  Idiot me, falling for it.

  Still getting played. Bullied. Not just by him, but by my own damn mother. Because he was right. I was weak.

  I curled up on the truck seat and pulled the blanket over my head. It was a long time before I fell asleep, reciting Eliot. I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you. In the middle of the night I woke with fire knifing up my throat and ran to a bucket to puke, all acid. Amazing that you can hold so much of it inside your body without dissolving. I rinsed my mouth in the laundry sink, laid my cheek on the freezing concrete, passed out. Sometime in the night Mom carried me upstairs. I remember her arms slipping around me and mine helplessly latching onto her neck, her words falling coolly and lightly into my hair like snow. You frighten me, she said, or I dreamed it. You’re the only thing that frightens me. Because you’re just like me, my little black iris. You’re just like me.

  OCTOBER, LAST YEAR

  Chicago flashed across the windshield, all gunmetal and dark glass, a cloud-wreathed kingdom blotting out the stars. Hiyam slept in the backseat. I stared at the streets as Armin drove, my neck stiff. I felt sick, snakebitten. It was the first time I’d been that close to Zoeller in six months, and up until half an hour ago I hadn’t been entirely sure he was real anymore. Sometimes you obsess about someone so much you start to believe you’ve invented them. Zoeller was like that, a secret thorn I’d been nursing in my side, almost tenderly, hiding him in myself. Now it was out. Armin had seen him. He’d have questions. I’d answer. We’d do the whole script—Why are you crying and What did he do to you and I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—and it wearied me, thinking of all that came next. Blythe would never be so predictable. She’d seize the moment by the throat, wrangle it still, take it somewhere no one expected.

  I touched Armin’s hand on the wheel. “I don’t want to go home.”

  Dashboard lights glimmered over his eyelashes. My Midas. My golden boy.

  “Take me to the beach.”

  He seemed like he’d argue, then he flicked the turn signal.

  Hiyam didn’t wake when we parked. I left Armin at the car and ran for the sand, tore my shoes off, flung them into the night. I was wild, raw. Animal. All these things I had hidden away inside me in neat, sealed, hateful boxes—I was almost ready to open them. Like Pandora.

  I went straight for the water.

  “Laney,” Armin called.

  The first step was a razor of cold sliding up my legs. I kept going, wading deeper. Armin’s running feet touched down in puffs of sand. The moon slashed a million fine slits in the black silk of the lake. Keep going. Farther. My shorts were soaked when he reached me, grabbed me around the waist, and I cried, “Let me go, let me go.”

  “I will never let you go.”

  He pulled me back to the shore, our feet kicking up waves of sand that stuck to my legs and glittered like diamond dust. I dragged him to the ground with me. He propped himself on one palm, panting.

  “Talk to me.” He cradled my cheek. “What is happening? Why are you crying?”

  Right on cue.

  I took his hand and moved it to my chest, to Blythe’s hoodie, to my breast.

  “Don’t do this,” he said. “Don’t shut me out right now.”

  “I’m not shutting you out. I want to fuck you, Armin.”

  “That’s how you shut me out. You make it physical instead of emotional.”

  “You still don’t get it.”

  “Then help me understand.”

  For the craziest moment, I wanted to. I wanted to tell him everything. All I’d done and all I meant to do. But then he said:

  “Did you know that guy in the parking lot?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You never do.” Armin sounded almost angry, for once. “I know you have trust issues, but you trust Blythe. And she’ll hurt you more than I ever will.”

  I turned my face, crushing it into the sand. “Do we have to talk about her every fucking time we talk?”

  “Do we? You tell me.”

  I rolled away from him and scrambled upright. My calves were spangled with silicon stars, my wet feet caked. Sand clung to my cheek where tears had spiderwebbed over my jaw. Armin stood, a shadow sketched in wisps of moonlight.

  “Come home with me,” he said.

  Finally.

  We walked back to the car, silent. It started to rain, crystal streaks flashing like a hidden hand clawing the air, tearing something we couldn’t see. We didn’t look at each other but the space between us was dense and charged and every time he moved, I felt it. Something in him sizzled and snapped like a live wire. That electricity would find a way out. Find its way into me.

  Armin’s apartment was on the tenth floor of a high-rise near the lake. We half carried Hiyam through a lobby decked with art deco lamps and slab marble that looked like the cover of an Ayn Rand novel. I walked barefoot, tracking sand over rugs as if I’d just emerged from the sea. I watched Armin put his sister to bed on the couch. She spoke in Persian, whispery and ragged, the words tangling deep in her throat and then unfurling, flowing in startling cadences. He kissed her forehead.

  “What did she say?�
�� I asked him in the kitchen.

  “ ‘I was a good girl today. I will be a better sister for you, brother dear.’ ”

  “I want to hear you speak it. Will you say something in Persian?”

  He leaned on the counter. I smelled the storm on him. There’s a word for that scent, the breathy fragrance that’s released when rain soaks soil and floods your sinuses like a drug: petrichor. Petros, stone. Ichor, the blood of gods. There was a disturbing loveliness in that image, gods opening their wrists to slake the earth with their quicksilver blood.

  Armin cleared his throat.

  He spoke softly and rhythmically, reciting. Persian sounds like a harsher French, spilling over the tongue in spools of rustling gossamer until it hits a sudden snag, tears into pretty tatters. I stared at his mouth, his throat, the way it seemed to come from his entire body, not just the head, like English. When he finished he glanced at me, almost shy.

  “What does it mean?”

  “It’s poetry.” I must have gaped, because he laughed. “Don’t believe everything Blythe says about me.”

  “You mock us when we nerd out over poetry.”

  “You mock my major.”

  “It’s not your passion. Not like ours.”

  “Fair enough.” He drummed his fingers on the counter. “English is my first language. I didn’t learn Persian till junior high, and I’m barely conversational. Never applied myself. So it’s still sort of mystical to me. In English, poetry is words. It’s packed with so much meaning, so much dimension—I process it semantically. But in Persian poetry is more like music. My understanding is so limited and childish that I hear it with wonder. I hear it with my heart instead of my mind.”

  Something was unraveling inside me, and he wasn’t even aware of it. He had no idea how he was tearing me apart.

  “What was the poem?” I said.

  Armin took my hand. “Rumi dreams that love is a garden, like Eden. A dangerous paradise. In the garden he feels pure, dizzying bliss. Intoxication. But he wakes up alone and hungover, and cries out in anguish. A girl answers. She tells him he is not alone. That she will be his garden. The silver moonlight that falls on flowers, the clear water. She’ll be his ecstasy. She says, ‘I will bring you roses. I, too, have been covered with thorns.’ ”

  In that moment I realized something. My heart was large. There was more love in it than I ever knew.

  I stood on tiptoe and he leaned down and we met there in a space dappled with the neon confetti of city lights. We kissed like people resisting the gravity between them, trying to gracefully slow a fall. He brushed his mouth over mine. Our tongues coiled together, holding. Smoke and citrus. He combed a hand through my hair and drew my face closer, my body to his. My bones were gel and my muscle was hard as stone, everything reversed. I wasn’t even high. This was all him. Getting to me. Breaking through. I didn’t know where or how to touch him. This wasn’t the usual rough, heedless rush with a boy—I wanted to make him feel what I was feeling, this undoing. This slow coming apart.

  Leather creaked. Hiyam turning over on the couch.

  We pulled back, not breaking eye contact. Armin lifted me under the legs and I wrapped myself around him and he carried me toward the bedroom. In his arms I was featherlight, fine and fragile, the girl I never let myself be. He stopped in the hall and hefted me against the brick wall, his hands sliding inside my shorts. Every touch infused me with fire. Our kiss now was hungry, mouths opening wide, teeth clicking, his stubble grinding over my skin. I felt so fucking small. A doll in the hands of this beautiful boy. His hips rolled against me and my head banged on the brick. I let my eyes close, let his mouth move down my neck in a slow slide of lava, let his fingers move beneath my panties, over smooth skin to the edge that made my hands claw, and he stopped there, tracing, making me crazy.

  “Tell me again,” I said, my voice breaking.

  “Tell you what?”

  “That I smell like her.”

  He yanked down the zipper of my hoodie and peeled it off.

  I was totally lucid. Every moment. Each step into the bedroom, each tug at his fly rang in my body clear as a bell. The door closed. He laid me down and took off his shirt and removed my shorts and underwear and that was as far as we undressed. Then his lips were on mine again as he reached for the nightstand. He tore a condom wrapper, took his hard dick in his hand. God, this was actually happening. After all his resistance, all my careful, subtle work, here it was. That shock of dawn breaking on a garden you’ve planted and tended and suddenly it’s all in bloom, bursting with colors you’d only seen in your head.

  Armin swept a hand through my hair, tilting my face upward. “I’m in love with you.”

  “No you’re not.”

  “I am, Laney. I have been since that first night.”

  For a second reality broke into two halves: now, and then. Now was the gentle boy whose brains I wanted to fuck out; then was the monster who’d ground me into nothing, into ash and dried blood. Be here, I told myself. Now. In this moment. “Don’t say it. Just fuck me.”

  “I want to know how you feel.”

  “I feel like being fucked.”

  He lowered himself, his weight against my belly, his hardness between my thighs. “Is this all I am to you? A body?”

  “That’s not fair,” I said, breathless. “You’re holding back from me, too.”

  “You know why I am.”

  I wished I still had the hoodie. Just to hold. I felt naked, but not in a physical way. “Why?”

  “It’s been between us this whole time.” He was looking through me. “I told myself I wouldn’t fall for you. Not when I had to share you like this.”

  “What?”

  “Your heart doesn’t belong to me.”

  That heart punched hard. “Who does it belong to?”

  “Your pills. That’s what really makes you happy.”

  Relief flooded through me so powerfully I shuddered. “No, that’s what makes me normal.”

  “Are you high right now?”

  “God, Armin.”

  “Are you with me, or somewhere else?”

  I raised both hands to his face. “With you. Don’t you understand? You’re my away from here.”

  “You’re going to break my heart, Laney.”

  “I know,” I said, pulling his face closer. “But I need this. Make me feel normal.”

  I saw it happen in his eyes, that moment when he let go.

  Armin pressed himself to the point where all the ache and need in me converged, and our eyes locked as he pushed inside, so slow, so maddeningly controlled I could’ve screamed. I’d imagined fucking him a hundred times and nothing had prepared me. When I fucked guys I didn’t have this patience. This care. I did it fast and hard before the nausea had time to settle, shrugged off their touches and kisses. It was business, unsentimental and impersonal. Dirty. Smutty. Crude. I didn’t know any other way. So I let him fuck me like that for a while, eyes shut, head empty, just feeling. My foot curling in the silk sheet. The long, tigerlike sinews of his body gathering and rippling beneath that burnished bronze skin when he stretched, when he breathed. The rough grain of his skin dragging over mine. He fucked like he kissed, wholly, with all of himself, pushed all the way inside and held there, made me feel how full I was. Made me just feel. No room for thought, for that white space between brain and skull where I hovered with my secrets. I wrapped my hands in the milky coolness of the sheet. Every time he pulled out I wanted him back, wanted that fullness that drove me to the edge of annihilation, but the longer it went on the less intense it felt, the white space widening, pulling me out of my skin. I opened my eyes. Looked at the neon sprinkles on the ceiling, the polka dot patterns of rain. Felt Blythe’s shirt rustling against my breasts, my head full of the black wine sweetness of her. I thought of Armin fucking her and slammed my hips against his. He took my
jaw in one hand, kissed my mouth and my forehead, watched my face as I rode but never quite slipped over the edge. I clawed at his back, clutched his ass. “Harder,” I said. “Fuck me harder.” I bit his earlobe. Blythe’s move. When he screwed his eyes shut and thrust deeper, my body jolting with the power of it, I knew he was fucking her in his head, giving it to me rougher as he tried to push her out, and when I thought about her and her soft mouth and her face between my legs it pushed me over, the tension in me snapping into a million little lashes, a whip cracking in every nerve. Armin felt me come and clenched me so hard I thought he’d break my collarbone. He fucked me deeply, too deeply, making my teeth grit until that final monstrous snap went through his body, too.

  Still. Empty. A beautiful purged high. Everything was so small from up here, thirty thousand feet above myself. How strange that this world could cause me so much pain when it was just a tiny sapphire, a speck of blue dust revolving in the sun.

  “Did I hurt you?” Armin said in that voice like cinders crumbling.

  I shook my head.

  He kissed me and I kissed back, my lips swollen, numb. His hands moved over me, spanning the thin flute of my neck, the bird bones of my fingers, marveling at my delicacy. I looked away.

  “Are you okay?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  I felt him pull out. Fought the urge to curl into myself, cover up.

  “Laney.”

  His face was soft with bliss, his eyes almost bashful, boyish. It gave me a twist of faint anguish in my chest.

  “Are you really okay?”

  I kissed him again. He was so warm, his body exuding heat like a furnace, and I wrapped myself around him, shivering.

  “Cold?”

  “I always am, after.”

  Armin pulled the sheets over us and we took the rest of our clothes off, pausing to touch each other. First time we were completely naked and it was after we’d fucked. My skin against his looked like moonlight on sand. I shivered again but there was a hot glow inside me now, a core of power. I had gained something by doing this, not lost. I had not been diminished.