Black Iris Read Free

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