CHAPTER FIVE ✹
Nihilist Romanticisations.

  "𝕰VERY morning?"

  "Yeah, just kind of shows up," said JJ. "Like you ordered it online."

  Pope nodded solemnly. "You should see trying to pee."

  "You can hit the ceiling," chimed John B, tying a fishing fly at the starboard.

  "You have to bend over and shit," Maybank supplied crudely.

  Kiara leaned her weight on an elbow and squinted at the three boys. "Are you guys messing with me?"

  "I wish," Pope mumbled. 

  "I'm so glad we're girls," said Iris under her breath.

  The orange sun was warm on the bare planes of her abdomen. Tomorrow, they'll be thin tan-lines on Iris's shoulders, where the rays couldn't reach through the skimpy fabric of her bikini straps. Around her was honeysuckle breeze and her sun-filled friends—she was a moth to all of them, an arm slung over her eyes and Kie catching the rays next to her.

  "Girls get pregnant," countered Pope.

  "Not this girl," said Kie happily. She reached into her backpack, a circular tab of pills rattling out. "My mom saw this and asked which of you derelicts I was sleeping with."

  JJ barked a laugh at that. "What'd you say?"

  Indifferently, Kie lifted a single shoulder and slipped the birth control back into her bag. "I said, 'Why does it have to be just one?'"

  They all laughed at that.

  "And what did Anne have to say about that?" Iris teased drolly.

  "She asked, 'What about Iris?'"

  "And?"

  "I said, 'Her, too'," Kie giggled.

  At their sides, Iris blindly felt around until she grabbed Kiara's hand, intertwining their fingers as they laughed. One of Kie's rings—a dainty, pearlescent thing from Charleston—nicked at Iris's knuckle. She pressed harder, let it sting.

  Meanwhile, John B was sizing up a kook on the shore. The man was scowling at them in a lightweight, hand-woven Madras shirt with a checkered pattern as he dried down his yacht. A yacht that had scarcely sustained any damage from Agatha at all. It made something primal and envious swell in the pit of John B's stomach, and his eyes narrowed contentiously on the kook's NO WAKE sign in the channel, mouth curling into something vicious.

  Pope must've noticed him, too, now at the helm. "Salty codger, two o'clock."

  "Gun it, Pope," John B sneered.

  Pope went on idling.

  "Show him what we think of his No Wake sign," Routledge said bitterly.

  At that, Pope gunned it.

  "Born here, kook!" JJ yelled, raising his beer jeeringly.

  Frowning, Iris sat back onto her elbows and looked back at Mr. Madras gesturing at them angrily. For a moment, it's the old retiree against the young, delinquent locals, and then they're past, cruising again. Pope cut a sharp turn into a wider chasm of the estuary. The boys were all laughing over the kook; his yacht splashed with dirty water, deck no doubt swamped. Iris called for a pinch of guilt to humanise her, but nothing answered. If it was a pogue, she would've felt something, she rationalised.

  "Boys," mumbled Kiara distastefully.

  "A beer, ladies?" John B offered in mock-kook, all chivalrous and gentlemanly as he bowed to them with two Coronas in-hand.

  Iris took one, the sticky condensation right away beading down her wrist. "Why, thank you."

  "What a kind young man," Kiara mused.

  "...You think that's good?" JJ was challenging Pope at the helm. "I'll show you—a party trick."

  "Here we go," Routledge sung.

  "Terrifying," quipped Kie, lifting herself up to sit on the gunwale.  

  JJ stepped up to the edge of the prow, motioning a hand to Pope. "Hey, Pope. Go faster."

  "I'm movin'."

  The HMS started to accelerate, and JJ turned to face the marina, white-knuckling his bottle like it was precious to him. He motioned as if was going to pour the beer in front, and Iris already knew what was going to happen before it did.

  "Fuck's sake," she mumbled sourly, standing up, "here we go again."

  Kiara, laughing nervously, glanced back at her. "Has he done this before?"

  "Doesn't work," John B told her blatantly, sitting back, "we've tried this, like, 6,000 times." 

  "I got this! It's gonna work!" Maybank insisted, daring even closer to the boat's edge. "Faster, Chief."

  Pope gunned it further. Salt grass and trees blurred by, and JJ finally tilted the beer and let the wind carry it. As expected by everyone but him, it went everywhere but his mouth. Kiara screamed in dismay as it splashed in her hair, and Iris turned her back on the spray of it. It was rather refreshing against her back, honestly, but she still shrilled a protest when she thought about the sticky residue it would inevitably leave her with for the rest of the afternoon. The rest of them exclaimed for JJ to pack it in, but he was stubborn, tongue desperately trying to reach for at least a drop of it. But, like most of JJ's endeavours, it was in vain.

  Right before he was finally about to concede, the Pogue lurched to a sudden, violent stop. JJ cartwheeled over the railing, and Iris didn't even have to chance to see where he landed. Kiara went slamming right into her, knocking the two girls on the deck in a tangle of warm, bruised limbs. Her knee hit roughly against the port, but the ache's subsided as the dull throb of whiplash in her neck took precedence. Groaning, she massaged at it and shakily returned to her feet with the help of John B's extended hand.

  The engine sputtered underfoot as the pogues all stuporously got back up, bellyaching over aching legs.

  "Are you ok, JJ?" John B called to JJ in the marina.

  Fawnlike, Iris stumbled over to the prow. JJ was on his back in the water, floating weightlessly with a pained, foggy expression on his drenched face.

  "I think my heels touched the back of my head," he whined.

  "Kie, you good?" one of the boys asked behind her.

  "M'okay..."

  "What the fuck did you do, Francis?" said Iris sternly, turning around to look at him.

  Pope was looking off the stern, by the outboard. He grimaced shamefully over his shoulder at Iris, lifting it all doleful and apologetic. "Sandbar. The channel's changed."

  "No shit," rasped JJ. He swam the length back to the boat, a little ruddy-cheeked. "Gimme a hand, sunshine."

  Iris helped him back up onto the boat, but she was pretty he did most of the heavy-lifting anyway. A bit like a wet dog, he shook his head and let the droplets fleck all over her face.

  "I'll shove you back in," Iris threatened, smearing the water off her with the back of her hand.

  Sunshine and salt-water kissing the back of her legs, Iris turned her back on him to go over and help Pope with the wrenched outboard, only to find him looming over the ledge with that thoughtful fascination he only got caught up in when he was talking about rigor mortis or the embalming process. She mumbled some pope name or other to him, and walked over to the prow, settling a light hand on his shoulder as to not startle him into the marina. There was a sudden lurch of morbid excitement in him as he finally made out the shape he was outlining through the rippled water, and Pope ended up being the one who startled her as he jolted back to beckon everyone else over.

  "Guys...I think there's a boat down there!"

  John B wavered, still a little disoriented, then said, "Shut up."

  "No, no, I'm serious—there's a boat down there! Iris, do you see it?" He turned to her enthusiastically, grabbing her shoulders.

  "No, Linus, I don't..." Iris squinted. A white, amorphous mass at the bottom of the marina suddenly caught a ray of sunlight—it had the singular, unusual outline that only a sunken boat could have. "Shit, guys, he's right! There's a boat, look—"

  They all grouped at the prow, peering over to get a look for themselves.

  "Let's go," said Kie urgently, peeling off her shirt and tossing it to the deck. 

  John B's throwing his own somewhere else, and Iris was already diving into the water. It's a brief shock to her system, and she shivered against the cold of it. But the freshwater marsh was in Iris's blood, so she plunged into a headfirst dive toward the soft-mud sediment at the foot of the estuary.

  The boat, apart from being inert on the seabed, was in a healthy condition. In fact, it looked brand-shining-fucking-new; a deep-sea sportfisher with a cabin. Iris swam along the length of it, lungs screaming at her the tightness of being starved of air, but a strangely calming pressure covering her skin in a cool mycelium. Her fingers ghosted the white enamel of the boat's shell before she kicked off the marsh floor and back up to the surface, sparingly aware of her friends swimming around her, contorted into all sorts of strange shapes through the water.

   Iris's lungs thanked her for resurfacing with a sudden head rush of thrill and warm-blood. 

  "You guys see that?" JJ broke to the surface right next to her, grinning neurotically.

  "Yeah, I did," said Kie, laughing brightly. 

  "That's a Grady White," the blonde told them all as they broke off into forward-strokes back to the HMS, "a new one of those is, like, 500 Gs, easy."

  Iris was back on deck first, snatching up the floral towel Kiara had been sunbathing ring the saltwater out of her hair, the sun drying the parts of her that she couldn't reach. The others pull themselves up around her, prattling feverishly about the marooned boat. All Iris could think about was that one of the last afternoons she spent with her father, he was perusing a marine dealer's for a new sportfisher. 

  "...that's a primo rig," JJ was saying, stealing the towel from Iris to sling over his shoulders.

  "That's the boat I saw when I surfed the surge," realised John B, mostly mumbling to himself. He threw his leg over the ledge of the boat, standing at the hull. "It must have hit the jetty."

  Kiara's smile waned. "You surfed the surge?"

  "That's my boy," said JJ proudly, shaking his hand—some complicated, intimate thing, "Pogue style."

  Kiara wasn't as impressed. "What the fuck? Irie, did you know about this?"

  "I mean, he might've mentioned," she mumbled, scratching at the damp nape of her neck.

  "Do you know whose boat it is?" Pope asked, all jittery with excited nerves.

  "Nope," replied John B, opening up the lazarette and pilfering through, "but we're about to find out."

  JJ, leaning over the ledge again, tongued the inside of his cheek and shook his head. "Dude, it's too deep."

  "Oh, for the weak and feeble, JJ."

  "Weak and—ya hear that?" Maybank scoffed, glancing at Iris in the hopes of collusion. 

  He didn't receive it.

  "You're joking, right?" said Iris, when John B eventually lifted his boat's anchor from the compartment. He wavered, frowning at the severity in her tone—not exactly used to "Iris" and "maturity" intermingling. But, right now, she had this baffled kind of expression on her face that reminded him a bit too much of Kiara that he couldn't help but wonder about what was so different this summer that Iris was acting so apprehensive all the time. "You're gonna go to Davy Jones's locker if you stay down there for too long."

  JJ, less motherly but still earnest, weighed in with an uneasy, "Yeah, no way are we resuscitating you. Just want to make that clear upfront. And if Pope gives you the kiss of life, Iris might get jealous and drown you herself."

  "What?" choked out Pope.

  "Ignore him," muttered Iris, glaring at JJ.

  John B, steadfast, ignored them all and moved to the Pogue's prow with the anchor white-knuckled in his fists.

  "John B," Kiara called deplorably.

  Iris looked at her; she's all earnest and solemn, tilting her head at John B, who hesitated at the edge, laughing nervously at the softness in her voice. They were all a bit confused, really. Kiara had been worrying over John B for months now, speaking him to with this gentle-parenting voice of tender concern and light reprimands. More motherly than Iris, maybe because she actually had one of her own—Anna Carrera far less of a haunting than Carmen was to her own children. 

  Whatever Kiara was going to say to him, she never had the chance. All sentimentality dies when Pope knocked two fingers off his temple in a mock-salute, bidding, "Diver down, fool."

  John B bowed his head gravely. "Diver down."

  "Yeah, he is," laughed JJ. 

  Then, his hands were flush against John B's chest, and he was shoving him into the marsh. They all rush to the edge of the boat to watch as his silhouette was swallowed by the water, faint and ghostly beneath the surface.

  "He's gonna drown," Iris lamented, kneeling into the deck.

  JJ raised a hand. "I call dibs on his room back at the Chateau."

  "So insensitive," muttered Kiara reproachfully.

  Troubled, a quiet Pope consulted with the scratched wristwatch he considered a prized possession—a gift from Magda, cut from her first ever paycheque at the club—and shook his head gravely. "This isn't looking good."

  Shuddering, Iris tried her best not fall into the gnarliest parts of her head—but it's often there she returned to for immolation, inadvertently each time. Suddenly, she's imagining her best friend in the murky bed of the marsh, taken by the same haunted house as his father. A bloated, slimy corpse with an anchor embedded into his chest. It's another tragedy she might have to romanticise a few years from now, that John B got to return to the very thing he believed he was one with: the sea. 

  Sometimes, Iris thought her friends forgot about the true awfulness of the sea. She guessed all of them took their fallibility for granted, living on a currency of bargaining and naïvety.

  Pope was just suggesting that one of them went down there to get him when John B finally broke the surface, gasping in lungfuls of air.

  "Thank God!" Kiara praised, reeling. "That took forever."

  "Any dead bodies?"

  "Looting potential?"

  "No," said John B hoarsely, sorely making his way back to the boat, "but I found a motel key."

  Sure enough, a scratched motel key dangled from his index: their prize.

  "A key," echoed Pope dully.

  "Yes, a key, Pope."

  Begrudgingly helping John B with the weight of the anchor, JJ bitterly shook his head and scoffed, "Great, we salvaged a motel key."

  "About right," was all Iris had to say, before making her way over to the helm to start back up the engine. Honestly, she didn't have the stomach, nor the patience, to linger around this disappointment of a Grady White for any longer.

  Then, ever the voice of moral reason, Kie chimed with a shrewdness, "Guys, we should report the wreck to the coast guard. Maybe we'll get a finder's fee."

  "Yeah, and not work all summer," agreed JJ, only half-serious. He draped an arm over Iris's shoulder, and if noticed the tension in her muscles, he didn't show it. "Thanks, Agatha—ya batch."

  John B warmed to this quickly. "Cha-ching! I could fly Uncle T back and not be taken hostage by inland weirdos."

  "What you got against weirdos?" said Pope, insulted.

  "Not you. Other weirdos."

  Nihilistically, Iris wished they stayed home.

✹

  𝕿ANNYHILL was this enormous, robber-barren estate, the grounds of which were smothered with the serpentine roots of matured cypresses and a manicured lawn that sloped down to tamed marshland. It was his old man's place, sure, but the grotesque enormity of it always rubbed Alex in the wrong way.

  Especially on days like this, the rest of the island ravaged by hurricane, tight-knit communities back on the Cut grouping together to manoeuvre trees out of roads and board up shattered windows, but Tannyhill was scattered with workers raking up wreckage, taking boards off windows, a few of them hauling a generator. Alex even saw a few guys fishing one of his stepmother's antique collectables out of the outdoor pool when he was parking up his shitty, secondhand car. The whole thing made him sick to his stomach.

  "Alex," aforementioned stepmother greeted him at the door with all the warmth of an embalmed corpse, "you're here."

  The foyer was a great room with hunting trophies, a taxidermied staghead that Alex helped his father kill himself, and artwork. Rose, trophy wife, was not so polished.

  "Yeah," he said drolly, "in the flesh. Mom sent me to get Phoebe. She here?"

  "Outside," she replied disinterestedly, keeping it short. (She always did). 

  There was a glass of an old-fashioned, on the rocks, in her delicate hand—all the perfumes in Arabia couldn't sweeten it, that kind of thing. Soft, probably hadn't seen a day's work in her life. But it white-knuckled the whiskey like it could very much be her lifeblood, and it made Alex remember his dad's first wife—she would drink a lot, too.

  "Right," he muttered. "I'll just—"

  "Son!" Great. "Lana, this right here is my pride. Alexander, Lana Grubbs—she's looking for her husband."

  Alex, feeling like there was a bullet between his teeth, turned to face his dad and a distraught, blue-collar woman with smeared mascara and trembling hands. "Hi, Dad. Miss Lana, a pleasure."

  "Ain't he something?" chuckled Ward amiably, wrapping an arm around his son's shoulder, and patting his rigid chest with the free hand. "Have you seen your sister?"

  Wry, "Which one?"

  Ward only laughed, and looked at Rose, who was already halfway up the spiral staircase, "Where's the princess?"

  Ah, he meant Sarah.

  "She's out back," his wife said absently.

  Then, the churning of a generator outside, and all of the lights sputtered to life. Alex swore that if he clenched his jaw any harder, all of his teeth might crack and cut up the inside of his mouth into fleshy ribbons. 

  "Let there be generators," said Ward jocularly.

  Rose scoffed abrasively. "Thank God. It's like living in Nicaragua."

  Often, Ward and Alex look down on the people around them together. They exchange meaningful glances when they miss a point. They agree that everyone else aren't as bright as they are—even Alex's own mother. Of course, this collusion did not save Alexander Eyre from the rest of the family's fate. He himself was aware of this, and pinched his thigh through the denim of his pocket when he shared a derisive look with his father.

  He thought about Midsummers last year, and his father laughing haughtily with a sneering Rafe when Alex used the wrong spoon for the entrées.

  Stomaching his rotten pride, Alex followed his father and Lana Grubbs out to the grounds of the sprawling estate. The same workers Alex spied earlier were now waist-deep in the pool, struggling with Rose's ornate sculpture. Ward was talking at Lana about all the damage Tannyhill suffered at the vicious hands of Agatha, as if to humanise the Cameron family—but the woman's trembling like a leaf, wracking her hands together over her abdomen as though the least thing she wanted to be hearing right now was the gauche bellyaching of her missing husband's aureate boss. 

  Feeling not too dissimilar, Alex tried drowning out his dad's voice and raked his eyes over the backyard. He found the wrong sister first.

  "Dad, the Wi-Fi's not working. I can't post anything!" Louisa, 'Wheezie,' stropped.

  Wheezie—nicknamed after her weak lungs in the early days after her premature birth (the very thing that killed her mother)—was fourteen going on twenty-one, and the only one of Ward's legitimate children to actually resemble him. Sarah and Rafe were both the golden-haired visions of their beloved mother. 

  "Wheezie," said Ward patiently, "there was a hurricane, sweetheart."

  Reaching his ears like the human embodiment of a silver lining, Alex heard his little sister's laugh from across the lawn and he instantly stalked over. A girlish, sunny, bright-sounding giggle, and the dark outlines of his languishing morning softened out into a hazy blur. Phoebe was with Sarah near the marsh, excitedly chasing after her as the older of the two used a tennis-racket to ward off circling hawks and other primal raptors. Alex didn't miss the brand-new shoes on Phoebe's feet—dolly shoes, laced up by vibrant ribbons; familiar to an old pair of Iris's that now gathered dust in the back of her wardrobe, along with everything else their father had ever given her. Resentment curdled in the basement of his belly like sour milk, and he forced a smile back onto his face.

  "Having fun?"

  "Alex!" 

  She jumped up into his arms, and like a good big brother, he caught her without a flinch. He gave her a big squish, breathing her in like the freshest lungful of air he had all day, and set her back down on her new shoes. Mud splattered the front of them from running around the field in Sarah, and Alex would be lying if he said that didn't satisfy some envious, ugly part of him.

  "Sarah," he heard Ward chide gently behind them, "what are you doing?"

  "The burrows filled with water from the surge!" Sarah yelled over her shoulder. "The birds are having a field day!"

  "The birds have to eat, too, Sarah!"

  "It's a mouse genocide out here," she remarked, batting a crawdad down into a thicket of bluegrass.

  Alex knelt down into the dewy lawn, tucking a thumb under Phoebe's chin. "Were you helping Sarah save the mice, Pheebs?"

  "Yep!" she said happily. "And look," she enthused, thrusting out her arm to him, and showcasing a shiny bracelet on her willowy wrist to him—a dainty, opulent thing, that caught the sun in a way that only real gold could, "Sarah gave me a bracelet!"

  He pursed his lips. "Did she now?"

  Phoebe's head nodded so aggressively he worried that she might give herself whiplash.

  "...It's the cycle of life, honey," Ward tried to coax Sarah.

  "I can't be a part of it. Firs they came for the mice, Daddy—"

  "Well, I have an actual person here that needs your help," he laughed uneasily.

  "Oh, my...—" Sarah let the tennis-racket fall softly back into the grass, and Phoebe ran off from Alex's side to grab it and carry on the job, "I'm Sarah. I'm so sorry, I—"

  "This is Lana," Ward cut in, tentatively resting a hand on the distraught woman's shoulder, "Scooter's wife. Now, you were storm-prepping with him, right?"

  Sarah wavered, looking back at the Druthers, docked in all glory at the end of Tannyhill's wharf. "Yeah. He helped me latch the cabin on the Druthers."

  "Last night?"

  "Yeah..."

  "And did he go out after that?"

  Sarah glanced over their dad's shoulder to Alex, who remained stoic. "From here? No, are you crazy? There was a hurricane."

  "Well, did he say where he was going?" Lana interjected desperately. "Get a phone call, or...Or mention anything?"

  "He didn't say anything to me. I'm so sorry," she added hastily, all apologetic and sweet. "Is he okay?"

  "He's absolutely okay," Ward reassured good-naturedly, wrapping an arm around Lana's shoulders. "He's hunkered down somewhere—we'll find him." He started to lead the jittery woman back up to the house, and patted Alex's back as they went by. "Stay for dinner, son. We're having Phoebe's favourite."

  Alex doubted that his dad knew Phoebe's favourite meal, but he nodded firmly anyway. Ward smiled, glad, and walked off with Lana Grubbs trembling under his wing.

  Sarah, lingering still, kept her eyes on Alex. "I didn't even know you got back from Princeton."

  "Last week, yeah," he said nonchalantly. 

  To appear apathetic, his gaze stayed on Phoebe, who narrowly ducked to avoid a hawk sweeping past her head. If Sarah was anything like Iris, she saw right through it. Alex had always been transparent, when it came to his sisters.

  "Oh," was all Sarah said, her nod small and hollow.

  "Thanks," he then bit, as if poisoned him to say, "for giving Phoebe the bracelet. That was, uh, real nice of you."

  She frowned dolefully, almost in grief. "Yeah, she's my sister too, Alex."

  "I..." He hesitated. "I know that." 

  Silently, Alex wondered if Sarah would still be such a half-sibling if it was a mother they shared, rather than Ward. He read in a book once that evidence of the eldest child stayed in every other embryo to be housed in that womb—his mother's a haunted place itself; Alex, Iris and Phoebe, all born ghostly, tired, and angry. In Iris and Phoebe's veins, Alex's borrowed blood, a testament to him being the first son. Microchimerism, it was called. He was born their protector in a way he never really was for Rafe, or Sarah, even Louisa.

  "Speaking of," said Sarah, running a hand through her hair, "how's Iris?"

  Alex was getting pretty sick of people asking him about Iris.

   "You'll have to ask John B," he said, indifference no longer so easier to mimic.

  "They'll get her in trouble, one day," she swore. "I don't trust them. I don't think they're good her."

  "I don't think Iris knows what is good for her at all."

  This was something they could both agree on.

  Still, after everything, it hurt a visceral part of Alex to complain about Iris when she wasn't around. She's in the very marrow of him, blood under his fingernails—she was his little sister, and it felt like betrayal to say all this to Sarah. When they were younger, Sarah was Iris's greatest antagonist. Not because of any unkindness from her, Sarah was always kind, saccharinely so (this was from her mother; clement, forgiving, saintly—so unlike his own). Iris was just born with this knife in her that twisted every time their father called Sarah, 'the princess,' and Alex used to comfort her about it. Now, he's talking with Sarah in that malicious tone he always used nowadays to discuss Iris, insulting her friends, feeling the very same bite of envy. 

  It's an awful thing to feel second-best, an afterthought. Sarah was the wretched mirror that Iris existed on the other side of—hers: floral-framed and bronze, a gift from Ward, hung crooked in her bedroom on the Cut. Alex was sure that Sarah's own vanity was less ostentatious, and that rubbed more salt in the wound. But, Alex was made to feel like second-best to John B, to JJ Maybank, to Magda's quick-witted brother. Soon enough, he wasn't her brother at all. The knife's in him, too, he supposed: an heirloom of generational spite and greed and backbiting. It'll leave a matching crimson scar, and Iris had always been Alex's twin, years and a sea apart.

  He'll romanticise it. At least all of this, all this hunger, burying of pride, and judgement, wrote one hell of a personal statement. It got him into Princeton. He owed a lot to that knife. (Same as Iris owed a lot to Alex—he just had to accept that she'd probably never thank him for any of it).

a/n: missing!!! magda heyward, hasn't been seen in 2 chapters!!! bring her home to me. but fr tho, i dislike this chap, right from the bottom of my heart. i just can't deal with haven't to write that boat scene again (rip every other obx draft before this one!!!!!!) hope it wasn't as painful to read as it was to write. another alex pov for u all tho - aint he a freaky little dude.