The Girls I've Been(33)

I try to see the scars through first-time eyes, but I know him and them too well. My heart has a piece of Wes wrapped around it like a bandage. My skin will hold the memory of him as permanent, because you don’t forget the first person to touch you with love after life’s taught you all touch is fear and pain.

I say her name, trying to break her of the spell of Oh, God, what happened? When she whips toward me, whatever anger there was before has flipped to concern.

“Are you okay?” I ask her. “Do you want some water or . . .”

She shakes her head, staring at the ground as she puzzles it out. Her eyebrows are drawn together so hard, I wonder if the V between them will scrunch there permanently.

“Why didn’t you just say something?” she asks finally.

“He’s my best friend,” I say, like a broken record.

She just nods at this. A quick, decisive bob. “So he stays with you and Lee so he doesn’t have to be at home.”

“That’s part of it,” I say. I could just let her think that’s all of it, but I can’t let her think Wes is some sort of charity case. I don’t want her to think it’s like that. But I also don’t want her to think it’s like that. The idea that she’s been looking over her shoulder, wondering when I’d drop her hand for his makes me sick to my stomach. That’s not something I want or Wes wants, considering he’s spent half of last semester staring after Amanda like her dimples hold the answers to the universe. They might; as we have covered, Amanda and her dimples are really great.

“And the other part? Parts?”

I sit down next to her, tilting my legs and body toward her. I fight the urge to reach out and grab her hand. I don’t know if she wants me to touch her right now. I don’t know anything. Is this it? I don’t want it to be.

“Wes and I broke up because of me,” I say. “I fucked up. We can talk about all of it someday, but it’s not the kind of conversation you have after dating for a month, Iris. I’m sorry, but it’s not. I’m not—”

I stare hard out at the pool. Wes has gotten hold of the unicorn floatie raft that Lee brought home one day in a rare fit of whimsy. He’s sprawled across it, his eyes half closed.

“He’s my family,” I say finally. “I’m not going to say that he’s like my brother, because that’s gross. But until him, I had one person to trust. And being in love, that was just one small part of it. When that part ended—and that part has way, way ended—the other parts didn’t.”

“The Franken-friends,” she says.

“He told you about that?”

“He tells me about a lot of things. Or, I guess, I thought he did.” She almost smiles as she watches him hugging the unicorn floatie’s neck, humming to himself, but then it flickers out. It’ll come in waves, the realization of all the secrets he and I keep; she doesn’t even know the half of it. I’m not sure she ever will. “God,” Iris says, almost to herself. “Is everyone’s dad just evil?”

That gets my attention. “What do you mean?” Had I let something slip? I’m tracing our conversations in flashes, trying to think.

“Nothing,” she says. And then she follows it up with a shake of her head and another “nothing.” She probably would’ve caught herself if she wasn’t so rattled, but I can’t help but notice.

I haven’t let something slip. She has.

“I’m not sure I’ve heard you mention your dad,” I say carefully, even though I am sure. I have a catalogue of knowledge about her in the back of my head, like a little Library of Iris I keep adding shelves to.

“There’s nothing to say,” she says, in such a clipped way that I know there’s actually a wealth of shit to say, but she’s not going to. “My parents are getting a divorce,” she continues. “I don’t see him. How long has this been going on?”

She gestures to the pool.

“It’s not my story,” I say. “He’s gonna be embarrassed when the cookies fade and he realizes you saw.”

She nods. “Right. I’ll figure that out. Is he still getting hurt?”

The questions keep coming out of her like a compulsion.

“Staying out of the house works most of the time,” I say carefully. “It’s been a while since . . .” I pause, lick my lips. “It’s been a few years.”

“So he stopped,” Iris says.

“Men like that don’t stop,” I say, and she stares me down, all questions she’s not going to ask and silent answers that I don’t know well enough to hear yet.

“No, they don’t,” she agrees quietly.

Is everyone’s dad just evil? Her question circles in my head, because evil is a good word for the mayor, but it makes me wonder what her dad did to earn that moniker. She makes me wonder if I need to do something about it, like I did with the mayor. It clamors inside me, that wild horse of an urge that gallops out when I remember Wes’s shoulders before they scarred and after; that day out in the woods, where I forced a dangerous change that could break at any moment, just to ruin us for good.

“So you and Lee and Terry know,” she says.

“And you.”

“And me,” she agrees.