Page 8 of The Fall of Iris Henley
I grin at him. Max is cute, in his shaggy-haired, gangly-limbed way, but he’s more like a brother to me than anything else. We’ve lived next door to each other since elementary school—we used to run around blasting each other with Super Soakers all summer, building forts and zipping around the neighborhood on our bikes. We’ve grown apart as we’ve gotten older—not because anything happened to drive us apart, but just because we stopped being able to bond by swapping Pokémon cards and eating too much candy—but we’re still friends. Still, I’ve never thought of him romantically.
“Can you blame her?” I say. “I get to live right next door to you. Every day you hit me with that charisma…”
“Shut up,” he says, but he’s grinning too.
“… and I just can’t help myself. It’s just nonstop sex appeal,” I say.
“Something Katy seems sadly immune to,” he says.
“Aw, poor Max. Cockblocked by the college admissions process.”
I don’t say it, but Katy and Max have always felt like a mismatch to me. They’re both smart and driven—Max is aiming for MIT himself—but he’s quiet and cuttingly funny, and she’s so straitlaced it hurts. But who am I to judge? My love life ended up with two dead last spring.
I suddenly realize he’s watching me.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing. You just looked upset when you got out ofHayden’s car.” He puts his hands in his hoodie pockets and shrugs. “Everything okay?”
“Oh. Well, since you ask… no. Everything is not okay.” I drag the toe of my sneaker over the mulch and look down. “Have you been on Sekrit?”
“Not tonight. Why?” He’s already getting his phone out, though, so I don’t answer. I catch a glimpse of his wallpaper—a picture of his cat, Starla, with her tongue sticking out of her mouth—before he opens up the app. The Sekrit logo fills the screen, sea green with an icon of a woman putting her finger to her lips.
Including tonight’s hot topic.
I can pinpoint the moment he sees the post, his pupils flaring wide. “Oh, shit.”
“Yeah.” I shift my weight a little, studying his expression as he scrolls through comments.
“God. People are really… just the stupidest,” he says. Then he grimaces. “Also, apparently half our class doesn’t know how to spell the word ‘whore.’”
“What?” I grab for the phone, but he holds it out of my reach.
“No, look, you have to ignore this.” He turns off the phone and shoves it down in his pocket. “They’re trolling you.”
“That’s what Hayden and Sophie said, but…”
“For once, Hayden and Sophie are right.” He puts an arm around my shoulder and squeezes. “Honestly, Henley, it’s just a lot of noise. If you freak out about it, it’ll just make things worse.”
“So I’m just supposed to pretend it’s not happening?” I lean against his side. His body heat is familiar and comforting. Last summer, while I was still working through what happened, he was one of the few people I could stand to see. Maybe that was just because he was one of the few people who acted like it wasnormal to be sad. He’d come over and sit with me and listen to music. He didn’t try to ask me questions or fix problems. If I cried, he hugged me and let me cry. Everyone else—even Hayden and Sophie, sometimes—seemed to want me to hurry up and get over it all.
“Well, what other option do you have?” he asks.
Fair point. It’s either “ignore it” or “react to it,” and the latter is definitely giving people fuel for the fire. But something about the post sticks in my throat like a splintering bone.
Maybe it’s just that Rockytruther, whoever they are, sounds so very confident.
“Hey, do you… do you remember that… night?” I ask, looking up at him.
“The night Rocky killed Lynette?” he says. The words are both shocking and relieving; almost no one else would say it that bluntly, even six months on, but hearing him say it without a hint of doubt in his voice makes me more certain than ever that Max isn’t buying into the Sekrit post.
“Yeah,” Max says. “I remember. I was in here playing video games all night. I certainly wasn’t watching a bunch of hot girls in pajama shorts tumble around in your backyard. And if Iwerewatching something like that, it would be respectfully. With respect.”
“Okay, sure,” I say, nudging him in the ribs. “But since you were watching so respectfully… did you notice anything over there? Like, did… did anyone leave early, or…”
“Not that I saw,” he says with a shrug. “You guys were outside until around one. Then my mom put her head out and yelled that she was going to call the cops, so you all went inside. That was about when I put my headphones back on and got back toElden Ring. I wasn’t really paying attention after that, so I don’t know what might have happened.”
“Yeah, okay,” I say. “Thanks.”
