Part of me was watching the morning unfold the way a person watches a car crash from the inside. Patient terror. I was along for the ride, and when everything stopped moving, I would pick up the pieces, if there were any left to pick up. If I was alive in an hour, I would figure out what to do with the rest of my life.
Why didn’t it want to be seen? What the hell did it want?
I heard Iris’ footsteps again, and after a minute she knocked on my door.
“Hey,” she called, “Up and at them, Fallout Boy. Dylan is making blueberry pancakes.”
My stomach growled again. Ya gotta eat, Greg. If I was dying, I didn’t want to die hungry. Besides, if I wasn’t dying, eventually I would need to find out if I could still pass for human. No time like the present, and all that garbage.
“Morning,” I croaked when I opened the door. I cleared my throat again, but it didn’t help. I was host to some kind of terrible creature from the eldritch depths, and Iris was wearing spandex. Yoga attire. Standard twenty-first-century girl garb. She was tall, about five ten, with thick black hair in tight little curls that fell to just shoulder length. Thin, but very present. Substantial. Lithe. It would be crass of me to talk about her body at any length.
She was really hot.
“It would be rude if I told you that you looked like shit before I said good morning,” Iris said. She handed me a cup of coffee and looked me over, frowning slightly. “Good morning. You look like shit. What the hell happened to you?”
“I slept on my neck wrong,” I said. I saw everything very clearly. Too clearly. I’d only seen this way once or twice before, when I wasn’t sure I was going to survive something awful. The shadows in the hall were thinner, and I could hear Dylan humming tunelessly to himself in the kitchen. My senses hadn’t been this good when I had crashed the Subaru. Then again, I’d been drunk. My memory of the night was fuzzy.
Iris looked at my face and made the tiniest of shrugs. “Well, walk it off,” she said. “Blueberry pancakes wait for no man.”
I followed her down the hall, staring at previously unnoticed details in the woodwork in the walls, pills in the carpet I’d never seen before, an odd smudge in the corner of the picture of Dylan’s childhood dog rolling on a dead raccoon. I was careful not to look at Iris’ butt. A little lechery was fine. Too much, and I’d cross a line. I did let myself sneak a peek, though, because I was half-convinced I was dying. But only half-convinced. In spite of my fears, I felt pretty good. Better than I’d felt in a long time, actually. My body felt clean, light.
Iris spun in place at the top of the stairs and snapped her fingers. I noticed she tilted her coffee cup inward to compensate for the centripetal force on the liquid.
“Sorry, no, I lied,” she said, moving past me with an excited expression on her face, “blueberry pancakes do wait for some things. C’mere, I want to show you this.”
She took my arm, just for a second, and smiled at me with a bright, happy smile that looked like it might have toed a line somewhere between us. Or maybe I was imagining things.
We went into her bedroom. I’d been inside infrequently since move-in day, because a person’s space is sacrosanct and we had a big living room. I was curious what I’d find.
Not everything was in its place, but it was clear that everything had a place. There was a large desk covered in books and papers mostly organized into some arcane system. There was a bed, mostly made, with an antique frame that I remembered as being quite heavy. There was a bookshelf organized by levels into textbooks and novels. There was a black dress half in the hamper, and I found myself wondering about the occasion that had necessitated such a dress. I clamped down on the thought. Iris friend. Friend, Greg. Friend.
The walls were covered in tapestries and Rothko prints, so the aesthetic was somewhat that of a grownup with a young person’s life. Modern professional meets grad student.
Iris picked up a little folio bound in red construction paper and craft detritus. The cover was a mess of glitter and beads and yarn stuck in glue. I was reminded of sabertoothed tigers trapped in tar pit, bugs in amber. Ticks full and stupid on dinosaur blood, suffocating in glass. Above the largest concentration of glitter I could just make out the words ‘the funest joc boc evr.’
“The kids in my class made me a going away present!” Iris was laughing as she spoke. She handed me the book and stood just behind me, looking over my shoulder. She was just a bit shorter than me, so her chin just touched my collar. It was a strangely intimate position. I thought about that.
She was right over the shell. I half turned and stepped around, so we were close together, looking at the book with our foreheads almost touching. A somewhat more intimate position, but at least I was between her and my back. If anyone was going to get eaten, it was me. I swallowed hard. Iris opened the book and showed me the first page.
“They all signed it,” she said. “As best they could.”
“They’ve got a good sense of the letter sounds, anyway,” I said. Most of the names were spelled phonetically correctly, if not linguistically correctly.
“That’s the first step.”
I turned the page. “They’re still not very good at telling jokes,” I said after a second. Iris laughed.
“Oh yeah, they’re horrible.” She grinned. “A window into the mind of a child. Turns out they’re all nuts. Look at this one, ‘Why did the lion cross the road? Because roar!’”
“Oof.” I turned the page. “Wait a minute, I know this one. ‘A man and a woman go to the carnival and ride the rides, and then he asks her what she wants to do and she wants to get weighed and they get weighed at the guess your weight and–’” I turned the page. The handwriting was quite large. “‘–they ride the rides and then she wants to get weighed and he gets mad and takes her home and she says the date was wousy.”
“Yeah, that’s Yvette,” Iris snorted. “Her parents are a little out there.” She turned the page and pointed out a kid with great spelling. His handwriting wasn’t that good, but then, neither was mine, and I had a BA. Iris moved closer to me as she read. We went through the whole book.
“I’m gonna miss them,” she said. “But there are a few positions opening up next year in the district I’m gonna apply for.”
“Good,” I said. “I hope you get one.”
Iris nodded. Her hair brushed my arm. “Me too.” She closed the book and looked up at me, smiling wide. My chest felt both constricted and perfect, and even the duality of the sensations was disconcerting. I was conscious of the point at which the conduit entered my spine. If it did something, suddenly, would I be able to run? Would I be able to save my friends, even if I couldn’t save myself? Christ, what a question to have to ask myself before I’d even had a cup of coffee.
“Are you ok?” Iris asked. She had a small vertical line between her eyebrows as she looked at me.
“I don’t know,” I said.
She put the book on her desk and stepped in front of me.
“What’s going on?” She held her left wrist with her right hand and cocked her weight to one side. Jesus, I might have been dying and still I was staring at her.
“I don’t know,” I said. I slipped into hiding so easily. I think back on it and tell myself that there was no way to tell her the truth, given that I didn’t know the truth, myself, but the thought rings hollow. I’d just had a lot of practice at hiding myself. I didn’t want to hide from her. But it was simple. And I didn’t know what else to do.
Iris’ mouth flattened and she nodded. Then she gave me a hug. After a second I unpinned my arms and hugged her back.
“It’s gonna be ok,” she said. “You’ll figure it out. Whatever it is.”
She looked up at me and suddenly I thought, how friendly is this hug?
“You know you can like, talk to me about things,” she said, as if it were a simple matter of fact. I nodded, and she hugged me again, and then as she was pulling away she kissed me, once, on the side
of the mouth. Both of us stopped moving. There was some direct eye contact, and after a moment Iris leaned forward and kissed me once, deliberately, without closing her eyes, as if she were testing something.
She moved her head back and looked down at my face, and rubbed her lips together, then looked me in the eye again.
“That may be a problem,” she said.
I nodded, and we let go of each other at the same time. She stepped back, and looked around the room.
“Pancakes?” She said.
“Blueberry pancakes,” I said.
She looked at me and held her elbow with her opposite hand and blew air out of her mouth. “And…” she said.
“And we don’t need to figure it out right now,” I said. She looked me in the eye. “Ok?”
She inhaled and held it and said, “Ok. Sorry. I’m sorry.”
“I’m not.” I shrugged. The shell shifted on my back and my stomach tightened.
Iris grinned slyly. “Me neither. Come on, I’ll buy you breakfast.”
I put on a grin and a nod and followed her out of the room.
There is a space between thoughts that feels similar to shock, when a person is being pulled in too many different directions, and there’s no way to know what to think, let alone what to do. I wanted to run screaming from something that was stuck to me, and I wanted to grab Iris and kiss her and run my hands through her hair, and I wanted to tell her to fuck off because we were supposed to be friends and I