Page 67 of The Fall of Iris Henley
My eyes fly open. Noelle is there, gaping at me.
I’m breathless and sweaty, but I just grin at her.
She arches an eyebrow. “Who even are you right now? Are you okay?”
“Like you care.” I scoff and collect my stuff. The sunset is almost fading from the sky. Cheer practice would have ended hours ago, and I should have been home shortly after that. “How’d you find me here?”
Noelle looks down at her phone with a frown. “Mom sent me to get you. She turned on Find My Phone when you didn’t come home.”
“Great. Well I guess you can tell them all about this then, and maybe you’ll get to be the good one for a while.” I march past her toward the lot.
“Hey!” she shouts after me and hurries to catch up. “You left your AirPod in the dirt,” she says and slaps it into my hand.
I frown back toward Lynette’s gravesite.
Noelle pauses at our cars. “And for the record, I do care. You just make it really hard sometimes, you know?” She makes a frustrated sound when I don’t answer and gets into Mom’s car to head home.
I pause at my car. Everyone else is gone now, the giggling girls, the older woman. Crickets are starting their nightly song.
But I can still feel the rhythm of the music against my chest. I can still feel Lynette, dancing with me.
DAY THIRTEEN
CHAPTER 36
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 19, 9:45AM
HENLEY HOUSE
The next day I stay in bed long after my alarm. Mom comes in and tries to bully me into going to school, but I wait her out.
“You can’t just give up, Iris,” she says, her tone icy and hard.
I pop my head out of the covers to squint at her. “I’m off the cheerleading team and no one is talking to me. I don’t have a functional locker. I haven’t done homework in a week. What is the point of dragging myself through another school day?”
“The point?” She lifts her chin high. “The point is to let them see you walk through that hall like butter doesn’t melt!”
It’s easy to imagine her at fifteen, gliding through the halls in the designer jeans she paid for herself and ignoring whatever mean girls the mid-nineties had to offer. The stories she tells are always about her triumphs: the time she made homecoming court in spite of the odds, the time she won the school talent show with a number from some ancient stage musical. But underneath those stories there are echoes of the times she didn’t triumph, maybe, or of the things she needed to triumph over. I don’t know those stories, but I can see the anger they lefther with. I can see that she doesn’t take off her armor anymore because of them.
“The point, Iris,” she says now, “is to make sure they know they cannot touch you.”
The thought flits through my mind that it must be very lonely to be my mother sometimes.
“Just leave me alone” is what I say out loud.
She tries a few other arguments but finally seems to realize that unless she wants to physically remove me from my bed, it’s an exercise in futility.
I stay in bed until I hear Mom’s car pull out of the garage. Then I don’t know what to do with myself. I try to watch a movie but I can’t focus. I flip idly through one of my textbooks. I scroll through Insta. That just makes me realize that a bunch of my former friends have blocked me. I check in on Sekrit a few times, but there’s not much new content. I’ve become more or less a joke to most of them, a meme. A character from last week’s drama.
At lunchtime, I go downstairs to see what’s in the fridge: last night’s unseasoned chicken and a Tupperware of broccoli. No thank you. I find an old box of macaroni and cheese in the pantry and start boiling water.
I hear the garage door open and close and wonder if Mom’s come home early for some reason. But it’s Noelle, her curls damp from her bike helmet. She throws her backpack on the ground and sits at the kitchen island as if I’ve been expecting her.
“No fair you getting to stay home from school just because you’re wanted for murder,” she says, propping her chin on her hands. “I didn’t get to play hooky when Ethan Whatley tried to convince everyone I had an abortion.”
“What’re you doing home?” I ask. “Aren’t you supposed to be in French right now?”
She shrugs. “Yeah, but everyone’s asking me a bunch of dumb questions about you. I got tired of it.”
