Page 13 of The Fall of Iris Henley
How many of us think of Lynette when she says that? Lynette, who was top girl, highest flyer, who was kicked off the team anyway when her drug test came back positive. Not that it’s remotely the same thing. A few of us drank too much last night, but that’s a far cry from Lynette’s Oxy problem. By the time Gloria was forced to kick her off the team, she’d been missing practices right and left, or showing up high. Still, the threat is obvious. I see a few girls straighten their shoulders self-consciously, trying to look more alert.
Gloria looks at the clock and gives a distasteful shake of the head, like she wouldn’t let us go if she had any other option.
“Cool down. Be back here Monday, rested and ready to go.”
I take an extra-long drink of water before I grab my stuff, trying to watch everyone else without being too obvious. A few people slouch off to the showers right away. Molly and Vanessa bend over and start to stretch. Everyone’s acting normal, grabbing their stuff, twisting their sweaty hair up into buns or unlacing their sneakers. Maybe it was my imagination, earlier, when I thought they were avoiding my eyes.
“Nice practice,” Tammy Bates says, walking past me toward the locker room. I give her a little wave.
“For real,” Sophie says. “Only you could pull off a perfect routine hungover.” She only sounds the tiniest bit jealous, which I appreciate. She does a lot of the same moves I do; both of us are fliers. I’m the top girl—the head of the pyramid, the center of most of the stunts. I just barely beat her out for it. She’s always been stoic about it. She doesn’t like people to see her bothered about anything. But sometimes I can feel it there between us, something hard and unyielding.
In the locker room I get into the hot water for the second time of the day. My scalp aches as I take my hair out of its ponytail. I close my eyes and roll my neck. The thought of Lynette is always slow to leave my mind, but especially so right now, with my own scandal nipping at my heels. It’s almost surreal now, to think of how inseparable we were once upon a time. We’d been friends since second grade, when she socked Jake Ramsey in the stomach for throwing my new pink denim jacket in the mud. All through middle school and the first few years of high school, we were best friends.
But everything changed the fall before junior year.
I hadn’t meant to get her kicked off the team. I’d only meant to get her help. Or at least, that’s what I’d told myself at the time. She had gotten so out of control, and I didn’t know what else to do. Lynette had always been more adventurous than me in all things—first on the playground, but later with boys and alcohol and drugs. She was stealing her parents’ Wild Turkey when she was still in eighth grade, mixing it into a Coke bottle and taking brazen sips on the school bus. For a while that was all it was—a chance for her to show off and build up her reputation as a badass.
But something changed. It’s hard to put my finger on when exactly, because a lot of it was so gradual, but it was aroundChristmas break of our sophomore year when I watched her crush up two pills on a countertop and then snort the powder through a straw. She started to get moody and easily bored. She’d snap at me out of nowhere or leave if a party was too tame.
In July she’d OD’d and it scared the shit out of me. We were at Bella Zseleczky’s lake house, a hundred miles from a decent emergency room and without a single adult present. I’d been outside swimming for hours. Lynette had told me she’d join us, she just had to rest for a little while first—but she never came outside. And I guess I was mad, and kind of hurt, because she was my best friend, and I knew she was inside getting high instead of hanging out with me.
But oh, I was so stupid too. I had no idea what kind of stuff she’d been using.Nowit’s obvious it was some kind of opioid, but at the time that stuff was barely on my radar.Iwas still nervous about getting caught with a lightly spiked cup of orange juice. It didn’t occur to me that she’d gotten involved with something too big for her to deal with.
When I went inside, dripping water from the new bikini I’d picked out with Sophie after Lynette had bailed on yet another trip to the outlet mall, I found her on the floor of one of the closets. She smelled like vomit, and her skin was grayish blue. Later, the others told me they heard my scream over the sound of the Jet Skis.
It’s lucky they did. It’s even luckier that Rodrigo Martinez had Narcan on him. I can still remember him fumbling around in his backpack, his face oddly blank, before pulling out the vial. He shoved it into her nose and sprayed, and she gasped, the fullest breath I’d heard her take in minutes. There was something grief-stricken about that breath, though. Something like she knew exactly what she’d already lost and what she stood to lose next.
I don’t think we ever talked about it. Not directly. I know we spent more time together over the next few weeks, and while it wasn’t exactly normal, it was easy to pretend it was. We went to the movies together, went swimming, hung out. And she went to every single practice for the rest of the summer. Weirdly she was better than ever. Hit all her marks. Jumped higher, landed with utter grace. I don’t know how. She looked like death warmed over, pale and sick and weepy, but when Gloria hit the music she was magical.
It didn’t last, though. School started and we were all busy and she started to vanish from classrooms, from parties, from practice. From my life.
So I sent Gloria an anonymous note, telling her she needed to hit Lynette with a urine test. I thought if it came back positive they’d force her into rehab or give her an ultimatum. But I was wrong. It was school district policy that she had to be removed from the team.
She lost everything because of me. I had tried to talk to her after that—tried to reach out—but she didn’t want it. She didn’t want any of us in her life after that, but she especially didn’t want me.
Sometimes I think of how many ways I have lost her, the person I loved most in the world, and I am overwhelmed by it all.
I don’t know how she could have possibly known I was the one who sent that note, but deep down, I think she did. No one else knows, though, and I’m not sure what they would do at this point if they found out. Would they call me a narc? Or would they understand I’d been trying to save her? Would it even matter?
I wonder what she’d think of everything happening now. The old Lynette—the one before addiction took over—would’ve stood up for me. She would’ve gotten into a flame waron Sekrit defending me. She would’ve dared people to look at me askance.
But the Lynette that wouldn’t meet my eyes in the hallway? The Lynette that messed around with my boyfriend behind my back?
She might be laughing from her grave.
CHAPTER 10
Saturday, October 8, 2:32PM
Varda High
Outside, I meet Hayden and Sophie. They’re perched on the retaining wall that divides the parking lot from the athletic fields. Sophie’s cross-legged, taking a sly puff off her vape pen before turning her head to exhale the other direction. Hayden’s makeup has been carefully reapplied, but her hair is still wet. When it’s down it hangs to her waist and it takes forever to blow-dry, so it’s always slightly damp no matter what time of day it is.
“Dude, check this out,” Sophie says, nodding toward the field.
Someone’s out there running on the track. They’re far enough away that I can’t quite make out who it is, but they’re male, dressed in green sweats. Then I see another figure, this one with a baseball cap, looking down at a watch.
“Bryce and his dad,” Hayden says.
