Page 21 of The Fall of Iris Henley
MURDERER.
All over the door, inside and out.MURDERER. IRIS KILLED ROCKY. #JUSTICEFORROCKY.
People are standing around taking pictures of it, laughing, pointing.
Standing alone just a little bit back from the crowd, I catch a glimpse of pale blue hair, cut short. Kendra. Rocky’s sister. She watches with an unreadable expression. Our eyes meet and I feel a shiver cut through my spine.
“Iris!”
Sophie pushes through the crowd, grabbing ahold of my wrist. “There you are! I’ve been texting you all morning!”
Hayden’s just behind her, eyes round with horror. “They destroyed your locker!” she says, with her usual gift for understatement.
Sophie grabs me by my elbow. “Come on,” she says.
“Soph, wait, I’ve gotta—”
“Forget it,” she says shortly. “They’d love to get some pictures of you crouched down, picking up your shit. That’s worth another week of drama. No, we’re out of here.”
Hayden looks pale and stricken, but she nods. She grabs my left hand, and Sophie grabs my right, and together they get me out the door.
CHAPTER 14
MONDAY, OCTOBER 10, 9:13AM
Texas Hill Country
“It’ssick,” Sophie says, for about the hundredth time in the last hour. “Someone at our school is really fuckingsick.”
We’re in Hayden’s Jeep, driving aimlessly alongside the river. I’ve been crying intermittently for the past hour and a half. Hayden’s glitzy dance pop comes incongruously out of the speakers, every beat a blow to my head, but I don’t have the wherewithal to ask her to turn it off. Instead I just stare out the window, hiccupping with the occasional sob.
“It’s so fucked up,” Sophie says again. “Why would someone do something like this? Everyone saw how devastated you were in the spring. Everyone saw how hard you worked to put yourself back together. So how could they think you had anything to do with it? You were a victim. It’s sick for them to treat you like this.”
I cut my eyes over to the rearview mirror. Sophie is practically giving off sparks, her small round face hard with rage. “I’m not a victim,” I say softly.
She shakes her head, like it’s all just semantics. “Your partnerwas violent. Not to you, maybe, but what he did…” She trails off, not because it’s too hard but because she’s too mad to give voice to it. She’s never tolerated boys, or men, that hurt women. Her favorite aunt helps run a women’s shelter in San Antonio and she’s had to listen to too many messed-up stories over the years. It’s one of the things that makes her edgy about Carter.
“You notice no one wrote ‘justice for Lynette’ on your locker? It’s all just Rocky, Rocky, Rocky,” she says. “The one person responsible.”
“To be fair, by the time Lynette died she’d pissed off a lot of people,” Hayden says.
“Oh, so that means she deserved it?” Sophie snaps.
“That’s not what I—” Hayden starts, but I interrupt them both.
“Can you guys not do this right now? I can’t deal with it.” I rub my palms roughly across my cheeks. “You’re right, Soph, it’s fucked up, okay? And Hayden, can you please turn this off? I am losing my mind.”
Hayden snaps off the audio, and we drive in silence for a few minutes. The landscape outside my window is gold and red, dead brush and hard clay on either side of the wide and lazy river. I rest my forehead against the window.
After a while we pull off to a place where the river runs shallow across big slabs of granite. We park at the side of the road and walk to a spot where we can sit and dangle our feet.
“I’m starting to understand how Lynette must have felt,” I say. “After she got kicked off the team, I mean.”
Hayden and Sophie both visibly recoil. It makes me realize, not for the first time, how rarely we talk about her.
“It’s not even remotely the same thing,” Hayden says. “I mean,obviouslyshe didn’t deserve what Rocky did to her. But getting kicked off the team was her fault. She was the one who fucked that up.”
That’s only half true, I think, but I have no interest in coming clean that I was the one who ratted Lynette out.
