CHAPTER TEN ✹
The Killer In Me.

  𝕴t was Cain and Abel, always had been: Alexander Eyre and Rafe Cameron. Their father made sure of it. Envy's always came from favouritism, from flesh and blood. It's jealousy that killed Abel, just as god-headed as Cain. As a kid, whenever Alex slept over at Tannyhill, his mother would made crude, lip-curled jokes about making sure he slept with one eye open.

  Alex brushed it all off, then. Rafe was mean, Rafe was a bully, Rafe was a dog with a bad bone who never liked to share—but his brother wasn't a killer. His mother only wanted to turn her against him, but there was a goodness in his brother that she couldn't see; because of his sun-bleached hair, so much like his golden mother's, and Rafe's the would-be heir. That's how Alex saw it as a boy, anyway. His poor brother, he'd think, ravaged by grief for his insulted mother—how lonely Mrs. Cameron must've felt, how cheated. And when they bury Ward's wife in a hallowed, lonely cemetery in Charleston, Alex forgave Rafe all over again. He's meaner, still. His brother was all rage now, but Alex still saw goodness because, to him, he's still a boy. On his nightstand, his mother's wedding ring—an ornament, really—gathers dust. On the mainland, his mother rots. There's goodness because he grieved. He's human. He's childlike. He's Alex's brother, and Carmen did not understand him how he did, as she wasn't born knowing him.

  Two summers ago, all of that slipped away.

  Alex had always been holding his brother in his hands like he was water. That summer, the last bits of Rafe fell through his fingers. The night before Alex left for Princeton, he sat in the middle of his bare bedroom, surrounded by the tatters of whatever brotherhood they had left, cut up in golden ribbons in his lap. Rafe lost himself to white lines, but Alex could never really stomach the drip of it. After all, his brother's always been the more obsessive of the brothers—he got it from their father. Alex got out. Rafe stayed behind. Carmen said in her weekly phone calls that this was how it was always going to be—Rafe's a killer, Rafe's weaned on poison, Rafe's no heir. Alex knew this now. He'd seen the blown pupils, the crash-outs, a litany of bruises on Tabitha Cross and her ribs against sallowed skin. Still, it left a bad taste in his mouth. Rafe was his brother.

  Surely Abel would've felt the same for Cain, after everything? That kind of brotherly devotion can't be killed as easily as a soft-hearted shepherd.  

  He found his brother at the poolside.

  His mother used to like this spot. It was unfair, that Alex had more memories of Mrs. Cameron than Wheezie did—maybe even Sarah. She haunted Alex the very same way she haunted Tannyhill. A grotesquely warm presence, always so incongruent to this cold, enormous place. She didn't really fit. Never did. Maybe that's why she liked the poolside so much. Alex would be on the wharf, catching jack mackerel and silver-sheened killifish with Ward; his wife's legs, bony, weak things, dangling in chlorine water. The gold in her had gone, by then. She smelt like a dirty ashtray spritzed with Diptyque, and she wasn't not sunkissed, she was sun-bleached, like her son. Like Rafe. Here, he was so much like his mother in the last years. Gaunt, not-belonging—you look at him and think, this was always going to happen.

  "Rafe."

  His brother glared at him down the angled slope of his nose, Ray-Bans perched on the bridge. "What the fuck are you doing here?"

  "Dad here?" Rafe's bite rolled off Alex easily. His skin's toughened to it, now.

  "It's his house, isn't it? Like, as in—not yours?"

  Alex rolled his eyes, tonguing his cheek impatiently. "Got me there. Where is he?"

  "Dunno. Where's your pogue sister?" Rafe returned, leaning back in the sun-lounger. "She held Sarah's boyfriend at gun-point, you hear?"

  "Iris didn't—" Alex wet his lips, on edge now. "Forget it. I'll find him myself."

  He turned on his heel, about to follow the sound of a whirring chain-saw, and the army of handymen their old man hired to clean up his estate. Rafe had other ideas.

  "Have you been to the club, lately?"

  Alex lingered. Alex waited. Alex didn't breathe.

  "She's still there, you know. You've been off—at Princeton. Make Daddy proud. Leaching off him. And your girl's serving me drinks on the weekend." A caustic laugh scraped at the back of Rafe's throat. "Doesn't seem very fair, does it?"

  "Fuck off, Rafe, I mean it," Alex snarled, confronting him with narrowed, twitchy eyes. "Leave her out of it. Just 'cause you fucked with Tabitha's head—"

  Rafe snatched the sunglasses off. He's all pupils. His brother's high at noon. He looked at Alex as if he was his only adversary—brother, a forever antagonist. Alex never really thought about it until now, but Rafe's hatred for him just might be the last constant he had left in his life. There's an honour, there.

  "Has she spoken to you?"

  Faltering, Alex's shoulders loosened. He hadn't really expected him to ask that. "Rafe, I haven't seen her since—"

  "Yeah. All right. Fuck you. And fuck off. Bye."

  Rafe shoved the Ray-Bans back on and reached for the old-fashioned next to him on the glass table. He took a swig from it, swilling it around his mouth. Alex didn't miss the twitch in the sinews of his jaw. Rafe didn't like the taste of whiskey. Never had. But it's Ward's favourite, so Rafe stomached it. Again, Rafe didn't fit. Rafe's incongruent. It all rejected him, and if Alex knew his brother at all, his stomach would reject the whiskey later on—achy knees at the altar of his en-suite, in the same way that the organs of Tannyhill didn't want him, the organs of Rafe didn't want his father, to become him. Rafe listened to neither.

  "You still here?" he sneered.

  Pity, that's all it is. That's all Alex felt. Whatever. He left his brother at the poolside, where their father left his mother.

  How lonely Rafe must feel, how cheated.

  "Son!" Ward was performing as a man in touch with reality, today. It's always enlightening to see what act his father would put on next. A pair of safety glasses perched on a nose that's almost identical—right down to the crooked arch—and noise-cancelling headphones slung from around his neck. He was getting his hands dirty. Showing his workers that he was just like them, as if they weren't cleaning up his estate that's built on the backbone of a plantation. Alex's canines reached tongue before he could say anything defiling. "Two days in a row, aren't I lucky? If only your sister put this so much effort into visiting her old man."

  The fruit of Alex's labour, stomaching their dad, his transparent favouritism, and it's about as easy to sink his teeth into as a walnut. It's Iris he wanted to see. It's Sonny.

  "Yeah, ha..."

  Ward just smiled with teeth and ignorance. "What's troubling you, son?"

  "Well, it's Mom who sent me, really. Erm, she got into it this morning with Iris—'wanted me to let you know, in case she came knocking around here for a place to crash..."

  "That's likely," Ward chuckled good-naturedly, setting down his chainsaw next to an uprooted tree.

  Alex blinked. He didn't ask why his mother had got into it with his belligerent sister. It's not Ward's first thought to mull over what his ill-gotten daughter had said this time to upset Carmen, but to make a poorly-disguised attempt at making light of how much he actually wished that she would crash at Tannyhill for a few days. His stomached shrivelled, but he still felt starved for something he might never get the taste of ever again—honestly, he hadn't since Iris was born. All cherubic and Ward in girl-form.

  He readjusted himself, leaning his weight on a different foot, all disproportionate and wrong here, under his father's eyes. "Oh, right, erm—well, it's just that, I don't really think Mom would want her crashing here, if she did. She wants Iris home. She wants her to, you know, apologise—"

  Ward cut him off with a lighthearted, yet mocking, laugh. "Does she know your sister? Iris won't apologise. That's one of the best things about her, she's so unapologetically herself. Nah," he said then, shaking his head and using the back of his gloved hand to smear a bead of sweat from his forehead, "if Sonny comes here, I can't just turn her away, Alex. I'll tell her your mom's been asking about her, though."

  He offered Alex like this as if it was seriously going to grant him any peace of mind at all—like Alex cared one bite about any of this. He was his mother's messenger, nothing more. He's sick of it. He's sick of Iris being this plastic adversary who probably didn't see him as half the rival as he saw her. It's reminiscent of her superfluous, girlhood grudge against Sarah.

  The truth is, Alex's biggest wound was that he couldn't seem to make himself back into the son his father used to so proudly favour. He didn't fit into that skin anymore. It was softer then, he supposed. More malleable. That's all Ward wanted from a son—obedience. It's different with his daughters, for whatever reason. He wanted their loyalty, sure, but he wants more bite. Iris had that. As a girl, Carmen'd tell her that to keep her dad on side, she needed to all sweet-toothed and endear herself to him. It's only when Iris stopped trying to do all those things when Ward decided she was his favourite. She didn't try as hard as the others.

  Alex was coming undone now. He's a nothing-son. A bastard. Rafe will get the company, and Iris will have Ward in the palm of her hand. It's a bit like being blown into a million pieces.

  "Okay. Okay, sure, Dad. I get it, it's only that—"

  His dad slanted him a planting smile, briefly squeezing his shoulder. "One sec, son. Hey, Top—" You've got to be fucking kidding me, "How'd your family come through? Is the house okay?"

  Topper's there, crowding into Alex's space. He was nauseating to look at in a polo-shirt the colour of strawberry guts and salmon-pink shorts, and he reeked of Dior Sauvage.

  "Yeah, we're doing all right, sir. We, uh, you know...—" he nodded along conversationally, acting all sonly and nonchalant, "we had a few leaks, had a tree come close to the house. But, yeah, we're doing all right."

  You should see the Cut, dick.

  Ward nodded congenially. "Glad to hear...—Hey, listen, what's this I hear about a, uh...kid with a gun at the Point? Did that happen?"

  The knife in Alex twisted.

  Startled, he turned to his dad, but Ward wasn't looking at him. His dad was looking at Topper—like it could trust Topper, like Topper's his son. It was as if maggots were digging into Alex's skin.

  Topper straightened up, all salient and conscientious. "Oh, erm, yes, Sir—"

  "My God."

  "Naw, well, you know how those pogues are." Alex didn't miss Topper's eyes rake over to him—the quick, complacent lilt of his mouth. But he was turning back to Ward so fast that, if Alex didn't know kids like this so inwardly, he might've thought it was hand-me-down bitterness. "You just gotta watch 'em."

  Ward's eye twitched. "Yeah."

  Alex wanted out. All he could think about was his mom. Carmen. The love of Ward's life—this island's covered in traces of Ward Cameron's devotion for her. And he was going to let Topper Thornton, of all people, talk about her like that? However inadvertent, or underhanded, it's there. Tangible for it to sting Alex. Sure, his mother's pain had always been vicarious to him. It's womb-like and ravaging, he expected it. He embraced it. It's when he was closest to her. But what about Ward? Where's his shame, licking at the spine of the love he swore he still had for Carmen? Where's the bite-marks in his tongue?

  Alex figured that he and Rafe might both be killers, with how angry he felt. How viciously he wanted to tear his father's head from his shoulders. To have his viscera splatter Topper's ridiculous fucking polo-shirt. A blood-trail stain Tannyhill.

  "Hey, sir, Sir." Topper just wouldn't leave. There was desperation in his tone now that wasn't present before—a sycophant then, sure, but more this time. He had that neurotic look Alex noticed back in the beach, when he taunted John B about his old man. "Actually, one of the—I just gotta say, one of these kids you gotta watch out for: he works for you."

  Alex blanched.

  "What are you talking about?" Ward demanded.

  The congeniality's gone from his father's voice, and Alex's stomach was all in knots. Topper Thornton's about to put John B Routledge in the slaughterhouse, and no matter how bad things were right now with Iris, Alex still felt some stab of responsibility to those kids. Feral-eyed, doglike, all mad, and loud, and slovenly—but, for a long time, Alex used to pride himself in being someone they trusted enough to bail them out of the shit. He'd roll his eyes in fondness as they all piled into his car after 'forgetting' one of them needed to be designated driver, reeking of hash and bad booze—still, his chest would warm, because it was him they were asking. He was sure that it was Magda, now, who did the late-night pickups, and buying them drinks from off-licences when their fakes got busted. (That, too, wormed a warmth into his ribs—just in a different way).

  John B's not a bad kid. Alex knew that. He lost his old man; he must be all kinds of mangled. And he needed that job.

  "It's—" Topper sighed, acting like it was really cutting him up to do this, "it's that John B kid."

  "What about...He's not the one that had the gun, is he?" Ward ordered, affronted.

  "Dad, no," Alex interrupted. "John B isn't like that. He's—"

  Topper swept back in, laughing affably. "Yeah, no, Sir. It's just, erm—I heard he likes to, kinda, help himself to gear. So, I'm just..."

  "What gear, Topper?"

  "Dad, just wait—"

  "I'm not talking to you right now, son," said Ward tightly.

  "Look, I don't want to be telling stories, sir," Topper chuckled.

  "Then, don't, maybe," said Alex sorely.

  He ignored him. "It's just, Sir, you got a lot of nice things lying around. I'd just make sure everything's nailed down. Hey, not everyone on the Cut can be a Princeton man, like Alex here. He's living it up. You got real lucky, Sir."

  Ward's jaw was set.

  "Good to see you, Mr Cameron."

  "Yeah," no pretences, not a single drop of earnest. Topper shook it off, if he noticed it all, and stalked over to his Jeep on the driveway.

  "Dad, you can't listen to a word that kid says," Alex pledged, rounding his father. "I know ones like that; the Academy was full of 'em—kooks like him, they'll accuse a pogue of anything because they're an easy target. It's easy for someone like Topper Thornton to point fingers at a kid like John B."

  "Alexander, Alex." Ward's hand was heavy on his eldest son's shoulder. Always has been, always will be, that kind of ouroboros. "I'll talk to John B. Yeah? I'll hear it from him. I won't do anything without talking to him first. I'm fair—you know that." The taste of blood exploded in Alex's mouth. He'd split his tongue again. It might as well as be as forked as a snake's, he might as well start sloughing his skin. "Is that all right, son?"

  Oh, and it sounded so condescending. Alex's pride unravelled further. Iris used to ramble about a ribbon—she reckoned this line, a tendon she made it sound like, ran parallel through the two of them. Alex thought about that ribbon a lot. Did she still feel that? Did he? All he wanted to do right now was be a boy again in the dark of his childhood kitchen, and ransack the cupboards with his little sister, Iris's precious head barely reaching the countertop—they'd throw all the ingredients (in-date, out-of-date, it didn't matter) into a blender, and take it in turns taking repulsive swigs of it.

  His little sister's laughter used to be so contagious then. Now, it was only sickening. It wasn't for him anymore.

  He wanted the ribbon gone.

  "Yeah," Alex breathed; words thready with a boyish need for approval that would probably always be in his teeth, because he's Abel in this story. "Yeah, it's all right, Dad."

  "I'll let you know if Iris swings by, okay?"

  Please, fucking don't.

✹

  The last thing on Iris's mind right then was swinging by her dad's place. A lifeless rooster, buried amongst the sinewy roots of a moss-white, was higher on Iris's list of things to think about than Ward Cameron.

  She was sat in the back of the Twinkie with JJ and Pope, squished on the edge of the blonde's seat as her legs sprawled indolently over the latter's lap. Pope dangled the compass in front of his eyes like a hypnotist trying to put an idiot under a trance using a swinging pendulum, as the absent fingers of his other hand tinkered with the seashell charms on Iris's anklet—that's how she could tell that he was stuck in his head, it's like a distraction mechanism of his. The plating of the anklet's wearing off now, from all the saltwater when she surfed, and it was starting to turn her skin green. Iris was pretty sure the only reason she still wore it was because of the way Pope thumbed over the delicate charms of it right now, like it's the only thinking keeping him level-headed and present.

  Up front, Kie's in the passenger seat, nursing a mild frown as John B's denial kept unravelling. Iris could see through the rearview that Kiara's eyes were still a little swollen from the burial she insisted they give the rooster. If John B hadn't been in such a rush to salt the earth and usher them all into the Twinkie, Iris reckoned Kie might've delivered a eulogy.

  "I mean, it's obvious, right?" said John B expectantly, looking at them all with a brutish kind of hope.

  "Oh, sure, Bee, yeah. By the way—can I smoke in here?" asked Iris.

  "Not one of your cancer sticks, you can't." And he went back to rambling.

  "You got it, chief."

  JJ smacked her elbow gingerly. "You've never asked him that before!"

  "Yeah, well, he's scaring me right now," she mumbled to him, leaning over so their best friend couldn't hear. "He's all, I don't know—rabid and shit."

  "Oh, sue me, Iris," John B exclaimed from behind the wheel, "for wanting to protect your lungs, 'cause you're important to me. Go ahead. Die. Not like I care."

  JJ whistled lowly, a snicker rumbling in his chest.

  "See! He's having an episode," grumbled Iris. "Rabid. Rabid dog. Bad dog, John B."

  John B sighed impatiently. "I'm being serious right now, Irie. This has to mean something. Like, a family heirloom—what better place to hide a message? He had to know it was gonna get back to me, right?"

  "Yeah," Kie said slowly, more reluctant now to pander, but maybe too frightened of what might happen if they all stop, "it's possible."

  "It could also be possible that you're concocting wild theories to help, you know, deal with your sad feels," Pope countered dryly.

  God, Iris loved him. They all poked fun, but she swore he had more of backbone than the lot of them together. Maybe it paid off, having more to lose.

  Kie didn't see his bluntness in such a good light. "Pope," she chastised.

  "Bro, you wanna know I process my sad feels?" JJ chimed in.

  Iris shook her head quickly. "Nobody wants to know that, J—"

  "Dank nugs and the stickiest of ickies, that's how I do it."

  "You could literally just say a blunt," she snarked.

  "Do you always gotta criticise me, sunshine? I mean, damn—"

  "I'm not concocting, okay?" John B splintered. The bickering fell short. "My dad's trying to give me a message."

  "If it helps you believe, John B," Kie granted him, soft-spoken and more saccharine than the others. Her heart's better than Iris's, she supposed.

  "Look, I—I don't need a therapy session, okay? I'm not tripping out," he insisted, but there was a wobbliness to his voice that had never really been there before. The kind of thready anguish of a boy who needed this to work out so hopelessly, that Iris dreaded to think about how badly he might undo when this was all over.

  A part of her had slipped into the denial, too. Maybe Big John was alive. But, honestly, if he was, Iris might never forgive him for abandoning his son. If John B's doglike, it was because his dad treated him like a hound first. That torment in her best friend's voice now, that despair, it's the same she might hear at the pound in the whimpered howls of a pet left to starve. And John B's been starving—in all sorts of rib-hollowing ways.

  If Big John was out there, which Iris seriously doubted, he should be ashamed of himself. His son's been preemptively grieving and longing in their tumbledown home for too long.

  She locked eyes with JJ, and it's solemn enough to tell her that he understood what was she was thinking.

  Grave, he sunk his head and said, "It's okay to trip, bro, but—"

  "Look, my dad is missing, okay? Missing." His strangled, forlorn tone left no room for argument. They cared too much to keep twisting knives—it just meant that suturing the wound later on would take them longer. "You don't know what it's like to have the person closest to you vanish... And then have no idea what happened. You just—" John B inhaled feebly, and Iris could only imagine the childlike, lonely ache in his lungs, "wake up every morning, wondering."

  Kiara smiled at him, feeble-hearted now, her head tilted with the kind of delicacy you use to approach a child you have to convey bad news to—like, John B's this small creature, and they're all his claw-marked handlers. It unsettled Iris, almost.

  "It's been almost a year."

  "Hey," JJ swooped in, sun-blooded, good, and the best friend they could ask for, "he could have been kidnapped!" And, maybe, just a bit tactless. "That's definitely a possibility, right, guys?"

  He was looking to Iris and Pope for support, because Kie's still got her two doe eyes on John B like he's the most fragile thing she's ever seen.

  Iris nodded first, feverish as Pope stuttered gauchely, and she blurted, "Yeah, I mean, he might stranded somewhere. Or—"

  "—or in a Soviet sub', getting interrogated by the KGB somewhere," Pope included, only half-droll.

  "Absolutely. Or...—Atlantis," said JJ.

  Iris glared at him reproachfully. "Atlantis isn't even—oh."

  "JJ," Kie chided. It's brief, as she was returning her attention to John B in the same breath. "Look, what do you think the message is?"

  "Redfield."

  The Twinkie hurtled right by the Redfield Lighthouse signpost, but not quick enough for Iris to not catch the 'Closed: due to hurricane,' plate nailed to it.

  "Redfield Lighthouse," he elaborated, "that's my favourite place."

  "Oh, sure." Kiara smiled encouragingly, but even she must've felt the grimace creeping through it. "But, like, did anyone else see that 'Closed' sign, or—"

  "Girl, Vitaly Yurchenko could be waterboarding his dad right now," interjected Iris dryly, "Agatha can wait."

  Pope startled into almost perfect posture. "Vitaly Yur...—you listened to me? When I told you about that spy?"

  "Well...Yeah, Pius."

  "Oh."

  Iris blinked at him. "Why?"

  "Nothing. It's—nothing."

  He didn't let go of the anklet for the rest of the drive.

  Rotten leaves crunch underfoot as they all jump out of the Twinkie at the foot of a wraparound picket-fence. The lighthouse looked like it hadn't been painted in years, and the dehydrated grass around it could only be strewn with a smattering of wall slivers. For a stretch of time, the five of them stood in the imposing shadow of it without saying a single thing—John B's staring up at it through the cracks in his fingers as he kept his eyes squinted through harsh blades of sunlight.

  "Right, here's what's gonna happen," he said decidedly, rounding on JJ. He patted his shoulder, ambiguously patronising, and told him, "You're gonna post up and look out for bogeys, okay?"

  "Wait." JJ glanced at the others, frowning pinch-like, then John B. "Why me?"

  Iris's nails rake at the back of her neck. "Erm, well, J, thing is—"

  "Because you're not coming," Pope said curtly. Yeah, she loved him.

  "But, why?"

  "Look, J, there are independent and dependent variables—and you're an independent variable," he explained to him, fast-spoken in a manner that suggested to Iris that Pope half-hoped he'd just lose JJ in the headlong pelt of it. "We don't know what you're gonna do—"

  "Shut up, Pope. Shut up, just, shut up—"

  John B almost tore his cap off in indignant. "Listen to me for a second, just listen—both of you. Pope, you stand look-out with JJ. Okay? If we get split up, we meet back at JJ's house."

  JJ's house. A place even more ghostly than Carmen's. The thought of the building made Iris's stomach shrink twice the size.

  "And, Iris," John B pointed his middle and index at his eyes, then hers, "you be mediator. You're good with them."

  "Like we're dogs?" scoffed JJ, insulted.

  "Sure," said Kie, lifting a shoulder, "Iris's."

  "Right, that's not condescending, like, at all," Pope mumbled, kicking the dewy suds of mud at his feet.

  As John B and Kiara trespassed the lighthouse grounds, Iris sagged back over to the Twinkie. The side-door to the back of it was still open, so she perched herself on the ledge of it and lowered the front of herself down until her back was flush against the dirty floor on the inside. She spread her arms, eagle-like and aching, and let her legs swing as far as she could without scratching the Twinkie's tangerine paint-job.

  "...I'm gonna work on my merit scholarship interview, and I'm trying to keep felonies to minimum—"

  "Would you just shut up already?"

  "Iris!"

  "Listen," she called out to both of them, without even lifting her head, "I don't know why John B left me here to play mother, because I can't think of anything worse than intermediating you two talk shit for however long it takes for Kie to slap, kiss, I don't know—knock sense into him."

  The boys went quiet. Almost, Iris thought maybe John B was right; maybe, Iris was good with them.

  Then, JJ, "Ignore her, Pope. That's nic withdrawals, for ya."

  "You fucking—" Iris snatched the nearest thing she could grab and hurled it at him, forcing herself to sit back up. She wished she didn't, because the boys were doubling over as JJ showed Pope her big retaliation—a soft hacky-sack, that JJ was now tossing up in the air and catching it deliberately. "Dick."

  He smacked his lips at her, in an overripe, taunting kiss. "Bitch."

  It was only because of the laughter rolling off them so easy-naturedly, and that she hadn't seen neither so warm since the boneyard, that Iris didn't reach for something harder to hit him with. Instead, she rolled her eyes at him and jabbed her tongue into the inner flesh of her cheek as Pope drawled a snide remark to JJ about her "loving them really." She angled her hips to swipe a pair of chunky, hot-pink sunnies from the backbench and yanked them on so neither of them could spy any more tenderness from her.

  The sky was the most incredible of blues, tender and balmy, and the sun felt so inviting along the planes of her skin. She figured that sunbathing long enough, listening to the faint found of JJ and Pope laughing and bickering as they played catch, might let the day's nastiness ooze out of her pores in rivulets. The sun had a singular way of cleansing her—making Iris Mariano holy and fresh. But all that left her was dewy sweat and the twitchiness of chased prey, and there was only so much she could blame the nerves on 'nic withdrawals.'

  A prolonged groan ripped through her, and Iris flung herself back up again, arms supporting her chest, head rolling back between her shoulders as she tried to ease out the soreness there.

  "I'm bored," she bellyached.

  Bored, twitchy, mildly fearful for their lives...

  "Hear that, Pope? Our girl's bored," JJ teased, bouncing the hacky-sack back to him with his shoulder.

  Pope laughed at him, rolling his head over to Iris to gift her a dimpled, honeyed smile that did more for her than the sun did; it's pearl-bone and him, and he had the kind of grins that made her twinge uncomfortably. "C'mere, Irie, take your mind off it. Or we can spitball ideas for my interview—"

  "Oh, as fun as that sounds..."

  "Don't bruise his ego, sunshine. I think you're the only person who'll still talk to him about it," the blonde jeered, slanting a toothy grin at Pope, who stuck out his tongue in boyish retaliation and launched the soft ball at JJ's spleen.

  "We should be proud of him!" Iris protested adamantly. "This is a big thing—our Pope did well to get it."

  "I am proud of him! Hell, I'm the proudest—offered him my best weed when he got it. He just..." JJ grinned mischievously as he dug the tattered toes of his trainers into the dirt, acting meek and pensive, "talks about it...way too fucking much."

  "No too much of a good thing, Maybank."

  A sly grin, and he stopped his return mid-throw. "Is that a promise, Mariano?"

  "I'll climb right to the top of that lighthouse and throw myself off it," threatened Pope, like he meant it. "Like, right in front of Big John's decomposing corpse—"

  "Not before jerking off at seeing a dead body, you won't," snorted JJ.

  "Too far," cut in Iris, grimacing, "and too disgusting. That's necrophilia. And our best friend's missing-slash-dead-slash-lost-at-sea dad."

  JJ placed his hand solemnly on his chest. "We all grieve differently, sunshine. This...This is my only way of—"

  "That's not even where your heart is, jackass!" Pope
exclaimed in despair, practically catapulting the ball this time as if his overarm was a trebuchet.

  "Oh, but you would know," he drawled. "Bet you wanna cut mine and Iris's right out, keep 'em in a creepy little box like that whack-job from English—"

  "You mean, Mary Shelley?"

  "Right. Total freak."

  Iris massaged her temple in slow, anguished circles. "I should just start acting all over John B—maybe next time, I won't be babysitter."

  "Do you think they're fucking right now?" JJ blurts without thinking.

  "J!"

  "Dude!"

  "What? It's only a question." He lifted his shoulders innocently, in that typical JJ Maybank air of aloofness, the one he put on whenever he was trying to act like he didn't care about something, when it was worming its way under his skin. Iris's teeth gnawed at her tongue, and the taste of JJ's weed lingered in her mouth as a quiet sort of jealousy soaked his. "She's obviously into him lately. Like, am I the only one who's not blind 'round here—"

  "JJ, will you just let this go?" Iris didn't mean for it come out so mean and short. She blamed it on the nerves, but JJ's eyes drag over her to with the pinched hurt of a boy she had just upset, so it was a little harder to swallow down the guilt when it was such a physical thing. "I mean, so what if Kie's into John B? Drop it."

  He looked a bit like a wounded animal that had been cut open and left bare on a doorstep that once felt warm, but now he was outside on the cold stone of it, trembling and chained. JJ didn't let her enjoy the satisfaction for long. Starved, hurt dogs get angry after so many kicks. Iris expected the brutish brunt of it—the teeth-gnashing; JJ's crooked canines, dripping with fatherly unkindness: he's loyal in the worst ways. He'll turn on her, turn cruel. He didn't like it when Iris got cross with him; it confused him. Left him all out of sorts. It put this yawning emptiness in him that he could only satisfy with the taste of blood.

  "What happened to no pogue-on-pogue macking, huh?" JJ sneered, vicious, sickly-sweet. "Am I only the one who ain't forgot about that rule?"

  Pope nonchalantly raised a hand, using the other scratch at his jawbone. "Uh, weren't you guys the reason that rule even exists in the first place? 'Cause John B was all paranoid that—"

  "And we've honoured it! Now, Kie and John B are up there macking in a fucking lighthouse—"

  Iris darkened her stare at him, and scoffs. Like he's stupid. Like she hates him. "Oh my god, JJ. They are not macking."

  "Wait," Pope interjected, "do you guys hear that?"

  JJ and Iris both turn to him, spitting, "Shut up, Pope."

  "No, like, I'm being serious. Can't you—" Sirens.

  A quick, stinging blow tingled the base of Iris's neck as her head snapped over to the thoroughfare up to the lighthouse's lot. Blue lights split through the foliages, and a deputy's car tore round a narrow corner.

  "Shit, let's go," JJ hissed, splitting right for the Twinkie.

  As the boys charged over, Iris unsteadily stood up in the back of the van, glancing up at the lighthouse. "Where are they?"

  Pope scrambled into the driver's seat, grappling to jam the keys into the ignition. "Should we wait?"

  "Hell, no, Pope! The cops are here now," JJ exclaimed, craning his neck to watch as the cruiser peeled closer. "Gun it. Now!"

  "But what about no pogue left behind—"

  "This ain't Vietnam, Pope," Iris called over to him as she jerked the back-door shut. "Let's go. John B and Kie'll meet up with us at J's."

  They tore out of the allotment, leaving the cops in the dust. With Pope's foot on the gas, Redfield was swallowed through the gnarled limbs of the thoroughfare's trees. A hollowness settled in Iris as a stab of guilt ate away at her, malnourishing and sea-like. Knelt on the dirty floor, white-knuckling the leather of JJ and Pope's seats, Iris could only hope that John B and Kiara would meet up with them at JJ's.

  "This is probably a bad time, but..." Pope moderately let his foot up off the gas, and grimaced at them both through the rearview, "I kinda promised my old man that I'd—"

  "Nope. No way, Pope!" JJ protested stridently. "So not the time to be helping deliver groceries, bro."

  "JJ, if I don't do this, my dad will kill me!"

  "If you do it, I'll kill you."

  Iris couldn't put her finger on it, but her patience for JJ was sorely lacking that afternoon. Maybe how good he had been to her that morning left a sour feeling in her belly. Maybe Carmen using him against Iris made JJ feel like a sin. He scared her, sometimes. It was one of those instances where Iris had felt so close to JJ that she had ended up on the other side of him—where her ugly mouth kept running, and the wrath outlived the longing. Whatever it was, she felt it bone-deep. (So did he—and it was never really Carmen's soft spot he relied on in that house, not really. She's just an extension, another limb).

  "JJ, leave him alone," she gritted. "Pope," softening, "it's okay. We'll regroup later. Yeah?"

  "Yeah. Yeah, thanks, Iris," said Pope shakily.

  At Heyward's, Iris hopped out to take over driving. In the golden jaws of the sunlight on the boardwalk, she swept Pope into her arms, and she's not really sure who it's for—him, her, or JJ in the passenger's seat, an ache in his ribs that all three of them knew, but it blackens in neglect and they don't ever speak on it. Pope smiled at her, fragile, tired, and sweet, then went to face the music of his father's reproach.

  Iris climbed back into the Twinkie. Pope took the warmth with him, so she thrusted the keys back into the ignition without a single glance at JJ. She hated herself for the way she got with him. It was senseless, she knew that. It's not his fault that she wasn't as good at stomaching everything as he was. Or worse, JJ didn't feel as though he had to stomach anything—maybe, it wasn't there for him. Maybe it was all in Iris's head. She's hungry, and malicious, and cruel to him, for things she that imagined—for an uncertainty she's folded under her spine over nothing at all.

  She had him in the passenger seat, right next to him, and she was taking him back to the worst place he had ever known—delivering him, with shaky hands, to a haunted house. Cruelly, Iris wondered if JJ felt haunted by her too. If Luke used her as a knife to make him bleed, as Carmen did with his son.

  Really, all Iris could think about was, why did it matter if Kie and John B were macking? Why did he care? She wanted to dig her finger in his underjaw, make JJ look at her, and answer all the primal questions she had. Too little, too much, never enough—which one was she? And why were they different from the others? Why's she homesick whenever he wasn't around?

  Being there, JJ's house, snuffed out all her rage. She couldn't feel angry for him here, not when that's all he's ever felt in this walls. It's a wound in itself to him, and for a prolonged moment, neither of them could say anything. JJ's staring at it—the shell of a boy that he'd long outgrown, skin he's sloughed and left here, a graveyard of split lips, bruised ribs, lighter-burns, upper hooks to the jaw, belted, swollen knuckles—and Iris couldn't find it in herself to care that he might be jealous over Kiara. It's fine. It's whatever. It's JJ, and he hated this place. She wanted to force her hands into the middle of her, pry her ribcage open down the middle until there was enough room to fit him inside. Luke would never find him there. No one would. The rest of the world keep telling JJ that he belonged in a twin-cell with his old man: Iris knew differently. He wasn't theirs to keep taking from. Next to her, JJ was as quiet as a corpse.

  Ghostly, and pale, and why did she have to be so mean sometimes? To him, of all people.

  Wanting to feel holy again, like his favourite, Iris went to reach over the dash, but her hand hesitated midair and she didn't even think he noticed. "J, do you—"

  "Wait here," he muttered offhandedly, unbuckling himself, "I'm gonna check if he's here. Wait."

  "But, I can—"

  "Nah. You can't."

  And he left her in the Twinkie.

  Iris watched as the home swallowed him in its jaw for not the first time. It's such a greedy place. Hadn't it taken enough?

  She wasn't sure how long she waited—the silence like a clothesline, tendon-taut, and she weakened in it, yearned. All she wants is the feeling of a million little suns showering over her, JJ emerging from that vile place to tell her that Luke Maybank had miraculously disappeared—never to return. He'd look so daisy-fresh and happy, and Iris could look at his smile long enough without being reminded that the quiet chip on his left tooth was taken by his father's fist.

  He appeared in the doorway, grave, but with the hollow dip of his chin to tell her that it was okay.

  Iris went inside, too.

  Luke was there. Just not present—he never really was. He was half-dead on the couch, surrounded by loose pills and crushed aluminium. On him, a sonlike mycelium of JJ's kindness that he didn't deserve, was a blanket that Luke would never have thought to cover himself in. He knew nothing of warmth. Not like his son.

  Iris found JJ's hand as he walked in front of her, and he didn't make her let go. He wouldn't. Not here. His thumb absently moved over the knots of her knuckles as they moved over the eggshells scattered over this cemetery-house, and he shut the door behind them so gingerly that it was imperceptible. Iris took the lead now, walking JJ back to his bed until the crook of his knees hit the edge of his mattress softly, and he was falling back with the catatonic look of an anaesthesia patient.

  "I'm sorry for being mean," she murmured.

  "You wasn't."

  "I was."

  "I know mean, sunshine," drawled JJ, all cocky and never fooling her, "it ain't you."

  Yeah, he knew mean.

  He knew mean in every corner of this place.

  He's been trying to carve his way out of it with his teeth every since they went from milk to things for his father to chip away at—like other parts of him; bone, flesh, innocence. Iris remembered sticking her own fingers down JJ's throat to get him to empty his stomach after Luke shoved a pill on his tongue. She was so scared that she'd have to take JJ to the hospital—that they'd pump his stomach, drain him, and take him away from her.

  She wasted so much time being mad at him for things that he couldn't really control or fix, that she forgot about the real ghosts that follow him around. It made Iris feel uniquely cruel to ever hurt a boy like him. She's the doglike one, really—John B got it all wrong. She's full of this smothering love, with a rough tongue, and she kept trying to nurse her friends' with it, and spat with rejection when it didn't work. She's not a suture, she's a girl. And JJ wasn't this image she had in her head of a life filled with sunshine and never growing up—she couldn't expect him to always be there, if what she really wanted was to get the hell out of Kildare.

  JJ shimmied his way up to the head of his bed, stretching out all cat-like in the slant of sunlight oozing through his drapes. Then, he outstretched his arms and made grabby-hands at her. Iris crawled along the length of him, sighing. She curled into the side of him embryonically, and both of his arms wrap around her. A smattering of kisses fell onto her head like rain, and she hated him for it all over again—she couldn't help it. Still, Iris Mariano couldn't keep pining like a dog and expect to not get punished like one. It's a prophecy that's been preordained ever since her mother tasted fruit that didn't belong to her. Her eyes shut sensibly against the lull of JJ's heart, right under her left ear.

  "What do you think this all is, huh?" he asked.

  Iris went rigid, fingers flexing around the cotton of his tee. "Huh?"

  "With Bree's old man. I mean...do you really think...?"

  A sigh travelled along the shaky line in her, slipping right through clenched teeth. "I dunno, J. Maybe. I don't like it though. Those square groupers—they mean serious business. And we still don't know how Scooter got the compass—or a Grady White like that. I just don't think this is something we should poke our noses into."

  "Maybe 'cause we wouldn't. For our dads," JJ added for clarity. His hand smoothed along the bare skin of her upper-arms, maybe to emulate some idea of sunshine. It only drove Iris's molars into the flesh of her mouth. "Big John was different, he...—He was all right."

  "I guess."

  "Iris, if—"

  "Can I sleep?"

  JJ went still. Silent. His hands stopped moving along her skin. "Are you tired?"

  "So fucking tired."

  "Why didn't you...—"

  "Bit of an action-packed day." She squeezed her eyes even tighter shut. "Just...wake me up when you hear from one of them. Yeah?"

  JJ inhaled threadily. "Yeah. Yeah, okay, sunshine. I'll just...lie here—on the look out from, shit, cops and square groupers and...—" She was out like a light. Her head was featherlight on his chest, cheek smushed against his sternum, and one hand flush against his ribs, twitching to grab at the material of his t-shirt again. JJ's eyes narrowed at her. She's on him and he felt holy because of it. He hated her, too. She was mean. She could get worse, too. It burned sun-hot, and she knew that. Still, it's Iris—if anything's gonna burn him, he wanted it to be her.

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