CHAPTER ONE ✹
Where the World Begins (& Ends).

  𝕾UMMER'S a bit like childhood in the way that you never really appreciate it until it's all cut up in golden ribbons and you're sat surrounded by the tatters of it.

  Adulthood arrives with August's impervious end, and you're choking on orange leaves and bitter winds. Your lungs can't really take it 'cause a day ago, you were trying to swallow the sun and now your stomach is full of bubbling warmth, and you definitely started smoking too young. Finally, you're sat in the middle of your bedroom—there's a vinyl playing in the corner, obscured by incense smoke and the crickets chirping in the overgrown lemongrass outside of your window: it was your favourite song once, but now it just makes you dizzy. And the little enormity of it, these four precious walls, make you realise that one day this will room won't mean anything to anyone.

  This was the last summer of Iris Soleil's childhood.

  It begins in her bedroom. With JJ—most things begin and end with him.

  "Must be nice," he was musing, lying on her bed like he belongs there, the soft elephant from when she was a kid in his lap as he puppeteers its arms, "having Alex back."

  "It's fine," she says indifferently.

  She was stood in front of the vintage mirror Ward brought her back from some auction. The bronze frame was wrought and twisted into flowers, and it's one of her favourite things that her dad had ever got her.

  "It's fine," JJ mimicked in a grouchy voice.

  Iris threw a mean look over her shoulder. "I dunno, J. What do you want me to say? I'm over the moon that my trophy brother is home, going on and on at dinner about how hard it is at Princeton, how lucky he is for the opportunity—"

  "I always just thought Alex is better at playing Ward than you are," he interjected with a slight shrug.

  "Yeah, well, it's nothing to be proud of. Alex and Sarah flaunt about his favouritism like it's this—ugh, like holy grail or something. It's not," she admonished. "To be Ward's favourite is to be, I don't know, wrong."

  JJ whistled under his breath. "Whatever you say, sunshine."

  Iris rolled her eyes and resumed pencilling her waterline with eyeliner. She was being negative, and a bit of a belligerent bitch, she knew this. She didn't mean to get all snappy with JJ—even if she tends to fall into this pattern of being short with him at least once a day, but a lot of the time, she couldn't blame herself for that. The obdurate truth was, it wasn't close to being "fine" that her big brother was now back from college, and she didn't want anyone—not even her best friend—poking at that particular tender spot.

  In the whole litany of Iris's bruises, mostly family-born and sore to the bone, Alex was the one that stung the most. Mostly because they weren't always like this. They could talk to each other, once. They used to actually be able to stomach being in the same room without hurling nasty words at each other, or exchanging cruel looks. That's all gone now. Iris could try as she might to blame their parents for it, or even Rafe—but her and Alex both know it; this was one them. And, like their parents, it was tough for Alex and Iris to accept whenever they were in the wrong. So they ignore it. They bury their heads in the sun-scorched sand of the rotten island their live on, and act like nothing's wrong.

  But it's plain for everyone to see, they're like the naked limbs of the old beech tries on their front lawn—intermingling in the sort of embrace that is the only kind that Alex and Iris can now share: like their arms don't belong around each other, but this is the way it must be.

  "You look pretty," JJ sung mockingly.

  "Oh, die."

  JJ laughs, throwing his head back onto her mound of pillows. Ellie the elephant, as she was creatively named, falls onto his abdomen and he continued to marionette her arms.

  "You're going to rip her stitches," Iris bellyaches, walking over and outstretching her hand. "Give her."

  "But she's my friend. Treats me nicer than you. Ain't that right, Smelly?" said JJ, bringing Ellie up to his ear. He gives Iris a grin. "She says you're a bitch."

  Iris groans, kneeling onto her mattress and yanking the elephant from his hand, tossing her aside to the foot of the bed. "You're insufferable. You're never sleeping over again."

  "You say that every time," boasts JJ, "but you literally have a pillow just for me."

  "Because I don't want you getting your dandruff all over my silk pillowcases. They're expensive."

  "I don't have—wow, cheap shot." JJ suddenly yanks her by the wrists until she's toppling over him, yelping as one of her ribs jutted right into his own. His grin was wolfish and infuriating, and Iris jabbed a finger right into his cheekbone, puncturing his dimple. "Why do you even care, anyways? I thought you didn't care about the expensive shit from Ward."

  "I don't," Iris mumbles, yanking at an awry strand of his dirty-blonde hair, "they're good for my hair, s'all."

  JJ's grin grew even more insufferable as he wound one of her curls around his finger and gave it a teasing tug. "Ah, yes. Your sacred hair."

  "You don't even know what sacred means," she remarks.

  With a long sigh, Iris leaned back so was straddling his abdomen, and poked him unforgivingly in the spleen.

  "C'mon, get up. John B will be here soon, and I'm hungry."

  "Dick!" JJ swears, roughly shoving her off him onto the other side of the mattress. "That was my heart."

  Iris swung her legs over the side of the bed and rolled her eyes at him. "Not even close, buddy."

  "Well, it hurt my heart. You're abused me, abuser. Might as well as have stayed home last night." When Iris threw a mortified, unhappy expression over her shoulder, JJ cringed at his poor joke and lifted his shoulder apologetically. "Sorry. Bad timing."

  "Bad joke. Not funny."

  "It's a bit funny."

  "I'm not laughing."

  "That's because you've got a stick up your ass," JJ comments as he followed Iris out of her room and onto the landing. "Want me to get it out?"

  Iris spun around to smack his arm. "I'll push you down these stairs, Maybank—"

  "JJ!"

  Everyone's saving grace, Phoebe, the living body of sunshine, came bounding out of her bedroom, pigtails bouncing on her shoulders and the brightest smile on her face. One of her canines fell out last week, and Iris replaced the tooth under her pillow with the tips she earned at the café that very shift. Admittedly, it was a kick to the gut to not get to put that money in her savings—Iris had her eyes on a new pair of converse, as her current pair were fraying at the seams, and she was surely one puddle away from total ruin. But Phoebe's smile the next morning was worth it, showcasing to their mom the 'tooth fairy's' latest donation; Iris's hard-earned cash rattling about in her sister's ceramic piggy-bank.

  JJ lifted Phoebe up like she was nothing, and if Iris had been in a better mood, it might've softened her heart. Instead, her mouth curls at the sides with a bitterness as she's reminded of how easy it had been for Alex to sweep their sister off her feet too—how fondly he once held her, too. Alex had smeared this big, loving kiss to the crown of their baby sister's head and told her how tall she had gotten since Christmas. He barely looked at Iris at all.

  "When did you get here?" Phoebe asks JJ happily when he set her feet back onto the carpet.

  "Erm," JJ glances at Iris for help, which she doesn't offer, "last night. Irie and I had a sleepover."

  "You two always have sleepovers!" she complains, stomping a foot in tantrum. "Mom never lets Lacy over."

  "Maybe it's 'cause you're a handful enough as it is, Little Mariano," JJ chides affectionately.

  "Am not."

  "Are too," chimes Iris, reaching over for Phoebe's shoulder and leading her to the stairs. "C'mon, breakfast time."

  Phoebe digs her heels obstinately into the carpet, holding onto the bannister. "Don't agree with him, Irie. M'not a handful."

  "All right, Pheebs. You're a pinchful. Pocket-sized. Our little angel. Let's eat, huh?"

  After her bedroom, Iris's world also begun at the kitchen table—not the dining room of Tannyhill, where a haze of Cuban cigar smoke hung in the air like battle fumes over a scattering of Ward's business papers, rather the rustic, narrow farmhouse table in her mother's kitchen. It's nothing like the plantation her father crudely calls his estate, where the rooms were all unfathomably big and light stretches obscenely into every corner; this, regardless of how kitsch Rose Cameron saw it, was a home.

  Home was an important thing to Iris's motherless mother: a very long time ago, she lost hers to a house-fire, and Iris was pretty sure that Carmen Mariano had spent the last twenty years trying to put it out. It was therefore very important to Carmen that her kids—who straddled two worlds: that of Tannyhill, and that of their home here with their mom in the Cut—grew up somewhere that they'd miss if it ever burned down. That's why a lot of the furniture was vintage and second-hand: even if the love Carmen had left to give to her three feral-eyed kids was not enough, the rustic, careworn nature of their kitchen table already had generations of love in it. So many families before them had sat at it, breaking bread, drinking tea, languaging new ways to expression hunger and affection.

  Could Ward Cameron say that?

  It's midmorning and the sunlight coming through the kitchen window—a narrow, slip of a thing just over the sink—was pale and yellow. Iris found her mom sat right in the beams of it, drinking a black coffee and eating from a bowl.

  "Breakfast's on the side, girls—oh, JJ, you're still here," Carmen deadpans drolly.

  Phoebe's already waltzed right into the room, grabbing one of the three other bowls from the granite countertop and plonking herself at the table. Iris, however, lingers in the doorway with JJ, who blanched there with an awkward, grimacing sort of a smile. He raised his hand in a brief, rigid wave.

  "Hi, Miss Mariano, sorry I didn't ask if I could—"

  "I figured you might anyway," she says wryly. "I cut you some up too. Sit. Eat."

  He rushes out a string of apologies and thank yous before taking a bowl and sitting next to Phoebe, who smiles at him with a strawberry still in her mouth. The red guts of it stain her teeth like rubies, and Carmen drawled out a comment about table manners.

  Iris sits down too with the final bowl, looking at the absent chair at the table that belongs to her brother. "No Alex?"

  "Your dad picked him up early this morning," Carmen mutters. "They've gone to the club."

  "Of course they have."

  Carmen shakes her head. "Don't do this, Iris. Alex has been gone for months. Your dad's missed him, that's all."

  "Okay," Iris nods, "fine. Whatever."

  She glared at the breakfast in front of her: tangerines, grapes, pomegranates, all the best fruit to share with someone you love. On the windowsill, the transportable radio was playing a Patti Smith song, tinged by old static.

  "Sorry it's not much, kids," Carmen says then. "I only realised this morning we're fresh out of eggs, so. I had to make do."

  "Aw no, this is great, Miss Mariano. Can't remember the last time I had fresh fruit that I didn't steal from the—" JJ went a blistery kind of red when he remembered that he had Phoebe on his left, the flush deepening when she started to mischievously giggle at the mention of stealing. "Crap. Sorry. Don't steal, Little Mariano. It's, uh, bad."

  Carmen's forehead creases with her frown. "He's only joking, Pheebs."

  "So stealing's not bad?" she says cheekily.

  "Thanks, Maybank," the mother taunts.

  JJ looked like he could crawl in a hole. "My bad, Miss Mariano. Really. Uh, Pheebs—"

  "What time are they coming back?" Iris asks curiously, popping a pomegranate seed into her mouth. "Dad and Alex?"

  "Why?" Carmen asks sharply. "Are you sick of me already?"

  Iris blinks at her severe expression. "No," she says pedantically, "I was only asking."

  "Well, I don't know. Depends on whether or not they play golf after. Anyway, you know your dad. He likes to just show up."

  Her tone was contemptuous, but Iris knew better; everyone at this table knew better, even Phoebe—their mother likes when Ward just "shows up." He'd emerge from his newest flashy car, dust himself off from a long day at the office, and saunter in as if he owned the place—which, technically, he did. Sometimes they'd fight belligerently, usually about their kids, and act like they hate each other. They were rather fond of this malicious game they play of trying to one-up the other on the parenting, constantly squabbling over who treated the kids the best—Iris used to enjoy it: the attention, the favouritism, being so lavishly spoiled. Now she's older, she realised it's not for her benefit at all. Something about her mother and father's relationship demanded challenge and antagonism: they coexisted in this perdition of resentment and hunger in which they knew touch was forbidden—frowned upon, immoral, unholy even—so they found other ways to reach bone: violence, petty competitions, arguments over who reals owns this house.

  It got old for Alex and Iris real quick, but they always seemed to find new and exciting ways to turn the knife into each other, even if it left the kids bleeding too.

  "M'sorry," says Carmen shortly, dropping the kiwi slice she was holding. "I'm being negative again. Aren't I?"

  "It's fine, Mom," Phoebe says innocently.

  "It isn't. We've talked about this, my complaining." Sighing, Carmen rubbed at her eyes; Iris only now notices how sunken they are, how bloodshot and swollen they look in this light. "I promised I'd stop doing it and I can't help myself."

  "We know he bothers you," mumbles Iris, picking off the pith from her tangerine.

  "He doesn't..." Rattled, their mom shakes her head, "your dad doesn't bother me, Iris. It's not like we're schoolchildren still. He isn't some bully. Your dad and I—what we have—it's very complicated."

  Iris knew this. She's heard it a million times over—in different rooms of this house, at Tannyhill; from the mouth of her mother, her father, Alex, from even Rose Cameron herself, in all sorts of wretched and furious tones. But it never exactly hit the bruise they were aiming for. It never made Iris feel bad for anybody other than her and her siblings (all of them). Sure, once, she might've sympathised her stepmother—but she couldn't pity Rose in the same way she pitied her dad's first wife. Rose chose to marry Ward knowing the kind of man he was. Perhaps, call it intuition, Rose knew the fate that would befall Carmen and her ungrateful children if she went forward with her marriage—that, if she married Ward despite all appearances, despite him still loving another woman, Carmen would live a life of being condemned, of being the other woman.

  It was an ouroboros of punishment for all involved. What her parents had was complicated, yes. Iris knows this. But it went beyond simple feelings now, between a grieving girl from the Cut and a boy who dreamed of getting out of it. This was a family in rot, all so a dead woman could punish Carmen Mariano for the sin of temptation. The bible is built on the rib and marrow of a woman's sin, so maybe Iris Soleil's world begins there, in Eden, and not in this kitchen or her bedroom at all.

  "We know that, Mom."

  Iris was now becoming increasingly more conscious of her best friend still sat at the table, JJ swallowing down fruit at an alarming rate to bloat himself with discomfort at something else other than this very intimate conversation he wants no part in. He had enough family troubles of his own, bruises of his own—far more real than Iris's, who counts herself lucky in that regard that her father's never close enough to hurt her with his fists.

  "I know you do. You're our perfect girl. The three of you—you're the best thing that ever came out of our—" Affair. Say it. Call it by its name. Carmen's lips twist maliciously around the unspoken word. "You three mean everything," she settles on, "to your dad and me."

  She reaches over to tap under Phoebe's chin, and smiled tiredly at Iris.

  "More than you'll ever know."

  Iris tried for a smile but it must've looked all mangled and grimaced, so she looks back down at her breakfast instead. The butchered pomegranate stares back up at her; like calls to like.

  Suddenly, a leg underneath the table reaches out and kicks her own. It's got that odd feel of both ache and lovingness that it could only be JJ, and she looked up to meet his eyes with a curious frown, and he's cocking his head at the door with a desperate smile.

  "Erm, Mom," Iris says, "JJ and I have gotta head out. We're meeting—"

  "Yeah, yeah, you kids have fun. I don't wanna know what kind of trouble you're getting yourselves into. Just be safe. I love you. JJ, take—"

  "Always, ma'am." He salutes at her, and he means it.

  They leave the front door and Iris can finally breathe. Her lungs stutter at the fresh air, it's balmy, but easier to inhale than the smell of her mother's overwhelming perfume, and the fruits' fresh viscera.

  The sun was so bright that Iris pulls down the sunglasses—novelty things: red and framed like love hearts—from her head down to her eyes to protect them. It's so sweltering that they straight away kept slide down the bridge of her nose thanks to all the sweat. She's learned to embrace it though; Iris Soleil is of the sun.

  Around her on the street, life swells and crests. This, Iris finds more tricky to embrace. Life. The actual organic life that surrounds her every day—people, the things they enjoy, how much they feel. The gritty biology of it that she can't romanticise like she can with the warm weather. Summertime's easier to feel fondest for, because the seasons can't help it when they ruin things. The sun makes her nose dewy with sweat and dusts her cheekbones with starry freckles and kisses her skin just enough for her to feel alive—humans don't treat Iris Soleil so kindly. They smash things and mean to do so.

  "Better?" asks JJ, grinning.

  "She bothers me," Iris tells him as they walk off from the house and down the street. "She shouldn't. She's my mom. But she does. She bothers me, J."

  "What else are parents for?"

  More, Iris wants to say, surely, they're meant for more.

  "Lighten up, sunshine. The summer's ours, not theirs. Forget about them, yeah?" says JJ, optimistic, and bright, the same fresh air in her lungs that saves her from how suffocating the house feels nowadays. She breathes it, and him, in with a smile. He bloated her with the same idealism that a good movie did, or the taste of sweet ice-cream. He's like swallowing sunshine, and yet that's what he calls her.

  Iris loved her friends more than anything.

  That's where her world begins and ends, with JJ, with the pogues. The last summer of her childhood, but at least it belongs to them—in a way that not much else does at all.

a/n: lol, so about the ending of season 4...