by Emma Mills
“I can see you. You’re crying right now.”
“No,” Iris said, even though it was idiotic, and then she riffled through her purse for Kleenex that she didn’t have.
Paige clasped her hands together, biting at her bottom lip for a moment. “Are you mad at me?” she said finally.
“Why would I be mad?”
“You always seem mad at me. You never talk to me.”
“You don’t talk to me either.”
“I try to. Sometimes. I just…” She shrugged. “It got hard after a while.”
“Why?”
“Because.” She took a deep breath. “Because I liked you, and you were always saying that you didn’t like me.” The expression on her face was pained, and it nearly broke Iris’s heart all over again. “Every time someone would say something about us being into each other, you’d get so mad. I thought that you—I thought you would hate it if you found out that they were half right.”
Everything twisted and rearranged itself in Iris’s mind. Settled into something she almost couldn’t believe was real. Something she had never dared to hope for.
Iris shook her head. “I wouldn’t. I … That would be very hypocritical.”
“Why?” Paige said, though Iris suspected she knew why.
“Because I like you, too. If you still … I mean, you said ‘liked’ like past tense but it’s still, I still. Present tense. I mean I know that you”—she gestured in the direction of the house—“have someone now. That’s okay. I just … just so you know. I like you, too. And I’m sorry that I ruined it. I didn’t think you’d ever feel the same way. I thought I was making it easier for both of us.”
Paige looked at her for a long moment, and maybe everything was twisting and rearranging itself in her mind, too. “I don’t have someone now,” she said finally.
“Sorry?”
“I don’t have anyone.” She gestured back to the house, too. “We were just messing around. She doesn’t—she just likes fooling around, like at parties and stuff. So I don’t have anyone. Officially.”
“You could have me,” Iris said. “Officially.” Her heart felt ready to beat out of her chest.
Paige nodded. And then she moved toward Iris, moved close and wrapped her arms around her, rested her face in the crook of Iris’s neck even though Iris was smaller. Iris breathed in, breathed out. Everything smelled like Paige.
“Do you want to be my girlfriend?” Iris whispered.
“Yes.” Paige pulled back a little, still so close that Iris could see the tears clumping her eyelashes together. She nodded. “Yes. Do you want to be mine?”
“I probably wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t,” Iris said, because she couldn’t ever pass up an opportunity to be a smartass.
Paige just smiled, wide and radiant. It was all Iris could see.
* * *
“We were together ever since then,” Iris says. “We didn’t … we didn’t kiss that night. We wanted to do it proper, like go on a date and all that. So we went out the next day, and ever since we were together. Up until Amber’s party.”
“Who said ‘I love you’ first?” I ask, because we’re this far into it anyway; why not go whole hog?
Iris makes a face at me. “Nosy.”
“Her?”
“Me.”
I tilt my head back, looking at the can lights embedded in the ceiling of the media room.
“I’ve never said that to someone else,” I say.
“And I’m the cold one?”
“I mean, like, in a romantic way. Obviously I’ve said it to family. And Zoe.”
“Who’s Zoe?”
“My best friend.”
Iris considers this for a moment.
“How do you know when you love a friend?” she says finally.
I shrug. “How do you know when you love your girlfriend?”
“You just do.”
“Same, I guess. Or not, I don’t know. Seems more straightforward with friends, don’t you think?”
“No,” Iris says, and when I glance over at her, her eyes are closed. “Well, I don’t know. Paige was both, I guess.” A pause. “I think … I don’t know, I think she helped … balance me out.”
“She’s the velvet glove,” I murmur.
“Is that a euphemism or something? Because, I mean, we both have velvet gloves.”
“Oh my God, I meant like that saying. Iron fist, velvet glove? You’re the fist, she’s the glove.”
“Still sounds unseemly.”
“Get your mind out of the gutter.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t focus. I miss her velvet glove.”
“Gahhhh.”
She smiles, but it quickly fades. “I miss everything about her. I thought … I thought maybe it would get easier. Or like, maybe it would get harder and harder every day until I hit a certain point and then it would, like … recede, you know? But it hasn’t yet. Maybe it never will.”
I don’t know what to say. I just give a hum of assent.
She looks over at me, clutching the TION pillow to her chest, and her eyes shine. “I miss her when she’s sitting three rows behind me in class. I miss her when I see her talking to Sudha at lunch. I miss her in the play.” She shakes her head. “That fucking play. Pretending I’m a fairy and she’s the queen and I, like, serve her or whatever. Follow her. Adore her.” She shakes her head. “It’s not hard to pretend to love her. It’s the rest of the time, having to pretend like I don’t.”
“Iris—”
“You know, I always knew that she was better than me. And I knew that her friends knew, too. I knew when she told them about us, they said ‘we don’t care that you like girls. But do you have to like that girl?’ And I was always so scared that she’d figure it out. That she’d see what everyone else saw.”
Iris loosens her grip on the pillow and looks down at the boys’ faces, fixed into smiles with varying degrees of sincerity.
She thumbs at Kenji’s cheek and then presses a kiss to it absently before holding the pillow tightly again.
“When we broke up, and she said … she said that thing, about wanting me to be better?” She glances up at me. I nod wordlessly.
“I know she was right. I should be better. But I don’t know how. I don’t know how to not be selfish, you know? How to not fuck things up. How to … talk to people about … feelings and stuff.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah, I’m serious.”
“You’re literally doing it right now.”
She looks at me for a moment, face scrunched up in thought. “This doesn’t count,” she says finally.
“Why not?”
“Because. I don’t know. It doesn’t.” A pause. “You’re not people. You’re … Claudia.”
“What does that even mean?”
“I don’t know. It means what it means.”
“Great contribution, Iris.”
She throws the pillow at me, suppressing a smile.
twenty-eight
Zoe comes over for dinner the next evening, and we sit around the table doing homework after we’ve cleared the dishes away. My parents have the TV on in the living room, some home renovation show, and my dad is snoring lightly on the couch, my mom in her chair, working on a baby hat. It’s the fourth she’s knitted for Julia’s baby so far. My first grandbaby, she’s always eager to say.
“Is it weird,” Zoe asked once, “that she’s going to be a grandma but she’s also still your mom?”
“I think a lot of grandmas are also still moms?” I replied.
“You know what I mean. Like she’s still actively mom-ing you.”
“I don’t know. I never really thought about it.”
“What if she loves the new grandbaby more than you?” Zoe said with a grin.
“Oh, she definitely will. I’ve accepted that.”
I know that’s not the truth, but it’s funny all the same. In terms of the excitement hierarchy, my mom’s anticipation of the baby nearly rivals Mark’s
.
Zoe’s an only child, so her mom becoming a grandma depends solely on Zoe. When we were younger, my mom preferred we hang out at our house, because Zoe’s parents work a lot and she didn’t like us being at their place alone. Nowadays we do it mostly by habit, and because Alex is here, too, and then we can all hang out, if Alex is in the mood.
This evening, Zoe looks up at me after a while, tapping her pencil against a page of half-finished calc problems. “So what’d you do at Iris’s yesterday?”
I don’t think Zoe will understand about Will You Stay: Live from São Paulo. So I just shrug. “Not much. Watched a movie.”
“So you’re like, actually hanging out with her now. No homework pretenses or anything.”
“Yeah.” A pause. “Is that weird?”
“Weird that you want to hang out with Iris who you hated, or weird that you have a friend that’s not me?”
“Both, I guess? More the second one.”
“No.” She clicks her mechanical pencil until the lead is long, then holds down the top and presses the tip against the page, pushing the lead back in. “Of course not. You should hang out with lots of people. You should have a lot of friends.”
“We have friends besides each other.”
“I know.” Zoe certainly does. Most of her friends were my friends, too, at one point—the group of girls we hung out with in junior high. But I can’t help but think of what Lena said to Iris at her party—what you had were people who put up with you so they could hang out with Paige. Maybe it was a little like that? But maybe that’s not fair. I’m not there with them every day the same way Zoe is.
“I just mean, like. Ones you make on your own,” she says. “Without me.”
I don’t point out that I did make one friend all on my own—Will Sorenson. Because look how that turned out.
Zoe was the one sitting with me on the couch, running her hands through my hair while I cried an embarrassing amount because I would never wear the dress I bought for Will’s junior prom, and he would never kiss me again, and I thought, I thought, I just thought that he really …
It’s quiet now, for a moment, until Zoe taps her pencil against her notebook page once more. “Have you guys done differentials yet?” she says, and we talk math for a good while after that.
twenty-nine
I get a text in the middle of the night a few days later.
I grope for my phone through the darkness and see the notification. It’s from Iris.
SDFJKEFLEWFDKNJ is all it says.
Iris? I reply.
The texts begin appearing in rapid succession.
NWEW SDINGEL DROPESD
NEWW SINGLEW
KENJI
KENJISS VERRSE
IM DYIGN
IM DEADD
FEJKGGKJGREKJG
AWSWOPEFWJKLFSNVFKLEW
I call her, and she picks up on the first ring.
“Are you okay? What’s happening right now?”
“New single just dropped! A new single! From the new album! It’s the best thing I’ve ever heard! You have to listen to it!”
“Okay, I—”
“Right now!” Iris says, and before I can say another word the opening chords of what can only be the brand-new TION single are playing over the phone.
It has a great hook. Catchy and upbeat but with a little edge to it. A slightly more grown-up sound, maybe, than the singles from their last album. Kenji’s verse is a thing of beauty—he hits this falsetto on I want to start a scandal, baby and then drops back down on I do, I do, just say that you do, too, ripping out a giant note on the last word leading into the chorus.
When it’s done, Iris tells me it’s called “Scandal Season” and is the first single from TION’s still as of now untitled fourth album. We listen to it again, and then talk about it more, and then listen again twice more for good measure, not counting all the times that Iris replays Kenji’s verse. By the end we’re singing along: I do, I do, just say that you do, too.
Eventually, I burrow further under the covers, the phone still pressed to my ear, sleepiness settling in again.
Iris, too, sounds quieter, silences extending between comments about the song.
“I wonder what Paige thinks,” she says eventually. “I wonder if she knows it’s out.” A beat. “Maybe you could ask her.”
“I can’t call Paige at one in the morning.”
“Obviously I don’t mean right now, geez.”
I pause. “You know, just because you broke up doesn’t mean you can never speak to her again.”
She doesn’t reply.
“You there?”
“Yeah,” she says, and then it’s quiet again.
“I’ll ask her,” I say.
“See if she thinks it’s better than ‘Without You.’”
“I will.” I shut my eyes. “I should sleep soon, I think.”
“Can we listen one more time?”
I smile. “Yeah, okay.”
thirty
Gideon’s eighteenth birthday party happens.
His house is sizable. It’s not an Iris-style mansiony-mansion, but it definitely speaks to the Prewitts being well-off, at least according to the Sam McKellar scale of personal wealth.
Gideon answers the door, face splitting into a smile when he sees me.
“You’re here! You came!”
We haven’t really hung out outside of rehearsals since Triple F. I shift back and forth on the front steps. “I am. I did.”
He opens the door wider to let me in. I imagine there isn’t going to be a table for gifts, so I hand him the card I brought as I step inside.
“Can I open it now?” he says, shutting the door behind me.
“If you want. It’s nothing special—”
His eyes gleam as he opens the envelope. “Is it a gift card to Outback Steakhouse?” And then he flips open the card, which has a cartoon dog on the front. (I deliberated over it for way too long.) “It is!” he says with delight.
“It’s eighteen dollars for your eighteenth birthday. I had to go there and everything because they don’t normally make gift cards for eighteen dollars.” He looks up at me with his lips pressed together, amusement in his eyes. “Most people probably would’ve just rounded up to twenty,” I say. “But, you know. I wanted to be consistent.”
“I love it, thank you,” he says. “Maybe you could go with me and we could share a Bloomin’ Onion. Throwing up in the parking lot afterward would be super optional.”
I can take only one more moment of the Gideon Prewitt stare. I focus on the wall behind him. “Yeah, no, you should take Noah. Relive that magical evening.”
There’s a pause. When I glance back at him, his expression is unreadable. But it quickly clears.
“Well, come on in. There’s food. My mom made meatballs.”
I follow him through the foyer and into the massive living room, which gives way to the massive kitchen. Noah is sitting on the couch with Paige, Sudha, and Alicia. Caris and Robbie are sitting on the love seat catty-corner to them, and a few guys from the play are sitting on the floor in front.
A woman stands in the kitchen, stirring a big pot. She turns when we approach.
“Mom, this is Claudia,” Gideon says.
“Oh.” Her expression brightens. She lowers the flame on the stove and sets the spoon down. “This is Claudia,” she says with a smile.
Gideon leans against the counter. “Mom. Please.”
“It’s so nice to meet you, Claudia, I’ve heard a lot about you.”
I glance at Gideon. “Really? Because of the Bloomin’ Onion incident?”
“What is the Bloomin’ Onion incident?” Dr. Prewitt looks between us, her smile widening.
“You should try the meatballs,” Gideon says. “They’re really good. Prewitt family specialty.”
“Yeah, that would be great.”
Dr. Prewitt fixes a plate for me, asking about school and the play as she does, and then ushers us off to join the
others.
“No Iris?” Gideon says as we move into the living room. I take a seat on a plush armchair. It’s big enough that it could fit both of us, but he settles on the ground next to it.
“She wasn’t feeling well,” I say. That’s the official story Iris told me anyway, but really I think she didn’t want to go to a party with Paige there, especially one that Gideon had described to us as “small, just close friends, very intimate”—he waggled his eyebrows a few times and then grimaced—“was that creepy? Sorry if that was creepy.”
Paige looks my way from her spot on the couch. I give her a little wave, and she smiles.
Suddenly two girls dash in and plop down on the floor next to Gideon. They’re both younger—eleven or twelve, maybe—and the one nearest to Gideon resembles him.
“Is this your girlfriend?” she says, leaning into him but looking my way.
“This is my friend, Claudia, who is a girl,” he says, wrapping one arm around her. “Claudia, this is my little sister, Victoria, and this”—he gestures to the other girl—“is her best friend in the whole wide world, Casey.”
“Stacy!” the girl squawks. Gideon claps a hand to his forehead.
“Yes, of course. This is Tracy.”
“Gideon, geez,” Victoria grumbles, ducking out from under his arm. She turns to me. “Are you in the play, too?”
“I’m working on the costumes.”
“Oh. You know, Gideon said the costumes are really good.”
I nod. “Yeah, the girl who designed them is super talented. I’m just doing the sewing.”
She considers this for a moment and then, “He said they’re sewn very well.” Next to her, Gideon buries his face in his hands.
“Hey, Vic, how about you and Macy go get some punch, okay?” he says, muffled.
Victoria grins and gets up, pulls Stacy to her feet. “We’ll be back!”
Noah settles in next to Gideon. “Was Vic trying to wingman you?” I hear him say. I look down at my plate of meatballs, feeling a little flush of embarrassment like at Lena’s party when the drunk guy asked whether there was “magic happening.”
* * *
We all talk and play games and eat Prewitt family meatballs, and in general it’s … nice. And absolutely nothing like Gideon’s giant birthday bash of freshman year.
