Page 74 of The Fall of Iris Henley
“Okay. Well. Yeah. I was… I was the Sekrit poster. Rockytruther. Both times, the time after the game and the time at the dance.”
“But I was dancing with you. How…”
“I had it prescheduled. Sekrit lets you do that.” His voice is quiet and even. “I wanted it to go off at the dance, and I made sure I was dancing with you when it did, so you wouldn’t suspect me.”
“All this time, you’ve been pretending tohelpme,” I say. “You pretended to be Jonah. You pretended to like me.”
“Actually, no. No on a few counts. That’s the weird thing. I wasn’t the catfisher.”
For a second I don’t quite get what he’s saying. I frown.
“I don’t believe you.”
“I understand. But truly, Iris, I wasn’t the catfisher. The Not-Jonah, or whatever. I swear to God. The two Sekrit posts were all I did.”
“That doesn’t make sense. He was the one who mined me for all that information…”
“I didn’t need to mine you for anything. I live right next door to you. I’ve overheard stuff. Through the fence, through your open window. Plus Lynette told me stuff about all of you.” He shifts his weight, and in the dark I can make out his shrug, his open hands. “I’ve got no clue who was catfishing you.”
I let that statement settle around me without answering. Wispy clouds, stained violet by Austin’s far-off lights, have drifted over the moon. My ankle throbs urgently, but I try to ignore it.
“You and Lynette,” I say softly.
He doesn’t answer for a minute. When he does, his voice is rougher than usual.
“We were in English together last year. It started out as a… like, as a debt I owed her. She was the only one who was nice to me back when no one would talk to me. So I asked if she wanted to hang out. I didn’t even expect her to say yes. She was… well, she was pretty self-destructive for a while. I figured I was too tame for someone who was bent on fucking themselves up. But we started to hang out. And things just kind of happened from there.” He goes quiet for a moment. “I was crazy about her.”
“Must have been a blow when you found out she was hooking up with Rocky, then,” I say. It feels good to get a hit in.
He doesn’t answer.
“So then you hear they’re set to meet at the ranch, and you decide to drive out there and confront him,” I say. “Confront them both, actually, because she needs to learn her lesson too. And when you get there, you see Rocky’s truck, and you know there’s a gun in there, because it’s fucking Texas. So you grab the gun…”
“Wrong, Iris. I already told you. I didn’t kill them,” he says. “I didn’t even know about the cabin. I didn’t know they were hooking up until after they were… were dead.”
“Sure,” I say. “Sure, you’ve been so trustworthy so far.”
“My mom’s got a Ring camera,” he says. “I’ve had the footage saved for months. Just in case, you know.”
That surprises me. “You guys have a camera? Does it get any of our street?”
“Yeah. Yeah, it shows that you didn’t leave the house either.”
I want to scream. All this time, he’s being sitting on proof that I didn’t go the cabin. But then again, all this time he’s been spreading lies. Ruining my life. Pretending to help me. Pretending to be my friend. Pretending to…
I brush the memory of his lips off of mine with the back of my hand.
“Okay. You didn’t kill them. You just tortured me. Why? Why did you do it?”
“At first it was just because I… I was pissed, Iris. She lost everything. And then she died. She knew you were the one who told Gloria about the drugs. She told me not to tell anyone. But she was so sad, and so alone, and then she was dead. And I kept seeing you at the top of that fucking pyramid…”
“It felt unfair.”
“Yeah,” he says. “It felt really unfair. I guess I wanted you to get a taste of what she’d been through. I was going to stop there but your friends, they all stood behind you.”
“So that’s why you smeared them? Just to fuck with me.” I make a face. “That’s psycho shit, Max.”
“Yeah, I guess.” I can’t read his face in the dark, but his voice is strange and flat.
