Dive Smack, page 16
Chip elbows me. “Looks like your plans for a lobotomy just changed. Good luck with that next round of lead-ups.” He gives Iris an upward nod with a grin and treks to his car.
“What are you doing out here in the snow? You’re not stalking me or anything since the field trip, are you?”
I give her a crooked grin, trying to save face. I haven’t exactly let Iris in on anything that’s been going on with me, even after she saved my life on Monarch Night, because guy-that’s-losing-his-gourd isn’t really the message I want to send this early in the game.
“I’ve never stalked anyone before. I might be. Do you have somewhere you need to be right now? You two were coming in fast and furious for a minute there.”
“I was heading over to my Uncle Phil’s to interview him for the project, but it can wait.”
It’s not a total lie. If it weren’t for the family history project, I probably wouldn’t be remembering so much in the first place.
“I was hoping you and I could go somewhere private and talk.”
My guilt returns. “About the project or why I hauled ass out of the county clerk’s office?”
“Aren’t they the same thing?”
“Yeah. I guess they are. You never miss a trick, do you?”
“Not if I can help it.”
I give the edge of her fur-trimmed hood a tug. “I take it you knew about today’s weather too. Was that in the cards?”
“They’ve been predicting this squall for a week,” Iris says. “Don’t tell me you don’t read the Monarch Monthly?”
“Uh.” The back of my neck starts to get warm. “I should. I mean, plan to. It’s sort of a juggling act just to keep up with homework when we’re in season.”
“Don’t worry. You’re not alone. We’re not alone, actually.” She throws an informative glance over her shoulder and I scan the parking lot.
More than a few gaping looks are being cast our way. This was bound to happen. When Iris and I showed up together at the bonfire on Monarch Night the expressions on everyone’s faces—priceless—like I plucked her straight out of the flooded town beneath the water. Nothing like shocking the shit out of your friends while they’re buzzing. Once the initial shock wore off the rest of the night went great. Iris fit right in. Making Chip right once again. The people gawking today, though, aren’t my friends. I barely know most of them, which makes their fascination more ridiculous.
“They’ve been staring at me the whole time, like I broke a force field to get near your truck.” She blocks her mouth with the side of her cup and leans closer. “I mean, what are those two even doing together? He’s like, a jock. And she’s like a library nerd or a hippie or something.” She grins and eases back against my truck with a shrug. “I like to imagine them struggling to find the right box for me.”
Classic.
Plus bonus points for inflection.
“Weren’t you the one who said people were afraid of disrupting the status quo?”
“Yes. Because it’s true.”
“So what bothers you most, their judgment or the idea of exclusion?”
“Neither. I’m not the captain of anything.”
“Well, I am. And I think you should consider writing an anonymous article about breaking the status quo. From the front lines to the front page.”
Her eyes widen agreeably. “An undercover infiltration piece. Nice I like it.”
I open the passenger door and hand Iris my keys. “You mind starting the engine while I clean off Bumblebee?”
“Who?”
“My truck,” I explain, shaking my head. “Chip named him.”
“After the Transformer?” She laughs. “I can see that.”
“You and the rest of the team. Nicknames and tags are a thing we do. Sully, The Flying Ace, Dumbass for Trey Dumas. Chip just applied the name game to my truck.”
“What do they call you?”
“Big Mack.” Her eyebrows shoot up and I clear my throat. “Because I’m tall for a diver.”
“Uh-huh.” She smirks so hard this time my head gets hot (pun acknowledged, not intended).
“What do you think my nickname would be if I were on the team?” She asks.
“You’re on my team now so I guess I better get to work on that.” I try to think up a few nicknames on the fly. Something that means lifesaver: buoy, lifeguard. Those sound dumb and don’t fit the awesome that is Iris Fiorello.
I dig around in my trunk for my knitted beanie and snow scraper, then clean off my truck as fast as possible, smiling at Iris through breaks in the slushy snow that whoomph onto the ground in big swaths as I sweep them away. I jump into the cabin and crank the heat, holding my hands in front of the blast of warm air.
“That dark hat brings out the moles on your cheek.” She uses her peace fingers to touch one mole at the outer corner of my eye, and the other at the top of my cheekbone.
I’m not sure my moles are quite the panty-dropper Sully has with his lip, but I’ll take it. I’ll take all the normal I can get for the moment.
I’m thinking about kissing her when Chip rolls up and sounds his mutant duck horn. I lower my window and lean out.
“I see you two are keeping the latest E.H.H.S. gossip afloat?”
Iris leans across my lap to get closer to my window. “That’s right, loud muffler. It’s a good thing you stopped or my nerdy, newspaper-loving rep may have been destroyed.”
I run through a bunch of dive combinations in my head, struggling to ignore how much of Iris is touching me. There’s definitely boob on my arm. Breathe in, breathe out.
Chip cuts me a look. “Good thing for you, maybe. I can’t say the same for Theo. But I like the way you roll, French Fry.”
“French Fry?” Iris scoffs.
“Who doesn’t love a Big Mack and fries?”
I look at Iris and shrug. “He beat me to it. It’s done.”
“Go easy on him, Iris,” Chip says. “My boy’s had a shit day. The last thing he needs piled on is a case of blue balls.”
Jeezus.
“Thanks for the tip,” Iris says. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
Chip gets a shit-eating grin, like he wants to riff off her usage of tip, and I think he would if I wasn’t giving him a death glare.
“All right, you two.” Chip shifts his Dart into drive with a thunk. “I’ve got a tip of my own that needs minding. I’ll catch you later.” He rumbles away through the parking lot.
As usual, I thought-spoke on his perverted behalf too soon.
“Don’t mind him,” I tell Iris. “He doesn’t have a filter.”
“Filters are overrated. Not having one makes Chip easy to read than most.”
I lower the temperature in the truck to compensate for another round of guilty heat rising to my cheeks. I don’t have a filter so much as a shield.
“So where to, French Fry?”
“Can I drive? There’s something I’d like to show you.”
“My truck?” I feel my eyes pop. “I’ve never let anyone drive Bumblebee. Not even Chip. Plus, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you behind the wheel of a car before.”
“That’s because it got totaled.” Her hands shoot up in surrender when my eyes widen more. “I wasn’t the one driving it at the time. I swear.”
She crosses her arms, nearly hugging herself, and I know there’s more to her story. I take a deep breath in through my nose. Trusting the person that saved your life should probably be a given. Which is why I drop my guard and surrender control of the driver’s seat to Iris for a little while.
TWENTY-ONE
Fade: To fall slightly off the board backward.
UNLIKE CHIP, Iris is a great driver. Even in snow, which is falling more like rain now, making a mess of the roads. I show her how to disengage the four-wheel drive and she snakes along Route 12 and onto Wampanoag Road. The late-afternoon sun is glinting off every reflective surface it touches, blinding me. I avert my eyes and listen to the rush of water being expelled by my tires because I’m worried the flashes might cause another one of my level-fifty freak-outs.
When Iris turns onto Mount Pleasant Road, I realize she’s heading to the cemetery. Not my favorite place, but I have to admit it’s sort of beautiful right now. The blitz of salt trucks and traffic is absent, leaving the isolated sound of my tires laying fresh tracks in the untouched snow.
I look at Iris and she smiles like she’s aware of my eyes.
“Do we have unfinished business here?”
“More like new business.” Iris cuts me a quick glance before turning onto a new road. “I couldn’t stop thinking about the county clerk’s office. Your face when that lady said she couldn’t find anything about your mom; I get it. I really do. You’re not the only one having a hard time with this project. So in a way, I guess I lied to you too.”
Iris parks my truck in front of an engraved monument. A life-sized marble angel is weeping over the slab of granite; the tips of her unfurled wings swoop to the base, taut and primed.
“That’s my mom’s grave,” Iris says without looking my way.
“I … I’m sorry,” I say, my tact rivaling a donkey’s. Rejecting all the sympathy handed to me taught me nothing about how to behave when the situation is reversed.
“I appreciate that, especially coming from you. It’s been a year now, so it’s getting a little easier to talk about.” She looks down and picks at one of her thumbnails. “She was driving my car when she got in the accident. That’s how it got totaled.”
“Oh,” I say. Then Oh. Shit. She means that’s how she died.
“I don’t want you to think she was a kook or anything but before the accident I heard her telling my dad she felt like someone was following her, watching her. Maybe I’m just being paranoid, but I get that feeling, too, sometimes, like I’m being watched.” Iris shakes her head. “I don’t know. She was intuitive, always reading her friends’ fortunes from the deck I use now, but so much more accurate than me. The last time she read my cards, she told me an unexpected peril in the near future would change my life. And unfortunately, she was right. That dang Cat card was prominent in my reading too. Just like yours. I laughed it off. Which was pretty stupid of me, in retrospect.”
“It’s not stupid,” I say. “I wasn’t sure about the card reading until you showed up at Monarch Night and saved my life. But that’s because I was raised by a shrink who fed me science and skeptic’s milk even though my mom had phenomenal intuition. She once told me not to ride my new skateboard on my eighth birthday, because she had a hunch. I figured she was just being a worrywart so I didn’t listen. Broke my arm in two places at Sully’s house three hours later.”
“Actually,” she says, “that kind of intuition is part of the reason I wanted to talk to you today.”
“Um, okay. We can do that.” I guess. I swallow hard wondering if there was something in my cards she didn’t tell me. “I’m glad you brought me here, Iris. Your friendship means a lot to me.”
She chuckles. “That’s what my name means. Almost verbatim. Your friendship means so much to me.”
“No, it doesn’t. You’re making that up.”
“Look it up sometime. All the women in my family were named after flowers. My mom’s name, Ioana, means violet. Even Fiorello means little flower in Italian.”
That explains the pens.
Iris grins but it’s short-lived. “I’ve never told anyone this, but on the day of the accident my mom was on her way to pick me up at school because I was being a jerk about taking the bus. She was late getting out of a doctor’s appointment, rushing. She called my cell to say she would be there in twenty minutes, but she never made it. A truck hit my crappy, old Pinto from behind and my mom crashed into the ravine. The car caught fire, they say, in minutes.”
I know the ravine she means. It’s at the intersection of Cutter’s Cross, one of the scariest roads in town because there are breaks in the guardrail and nothing but drop on the other side.
“I knew about your mom’s accident because my dad died around the same time, I just…” I look at my lap, regret sinking me lower. “When I saw how much it hurt you to be at school last year, I didn’t know what to say.”
“It’s okay, Theo. It’s not like you didn’t have your own bag of grief to carry around.”
True enough.
She leans against the door, twisting a silver spoon ring around her right thumb. “I think I need to explain why my dad had such a strong reaction to you at the carnival. We got into an argument about it when I got home from Monarch Night and he saw you and Chip driving away.”
“Shit. Sorry about that, Iris. I didn’t mean to cause problems for you at home. If you can’t hang out, just tell me. It’s okay.” I try to hide my disappointment but my mouth twists to the side involuntarily.
“It’s not you, Theo. It’s your uncle. Apparently, my mom’s appointment on the day of her accident was with Dr. Maddox. I knew she was having scary dreams and paranoia. I didn’t know she was seeing a psychiatrist. But somehow my dad has himself convinced your uncle was negligent in letting her drive away from his office that day. It seemed like there was other stuff tangled up in what happened, but he got all aggravated and wouldn’t answer any of my questions.” Iris against the door. “Anyway, I thought you should probably know.”
“Dr. Maddox isn’t really my uncle, if that helps. He was my dad’s best friend. Their relationship was sort of complicated.”
For a second I can’t help but wonder whether I made that delineation for her or me, like corroborating something about their longtime friendship might make the cheating easier to take.
“It’s okay, Theo,” Iris says. “Dr. Maddox was her shrink, not her babysitter.”
I chew the inside of my cheek to keep from telling Iris about the affair since I haven’t fully processed it myself. I know it would feel like shit if she and Chip hooked up. I’d hate it. But would I hate him? I don’t know for sure, but I’m positive I have to tamp my anger down to a simmer before Uncle Phil and I talk. He’s never been one to react in the face of strong emotions, so I’ll need to be smart about my approach.
Iris touches my knee, snapping me out of my headspace. “You want to hear something kind of cool?”
“Definitely. Tell me something cool.”
“After the funeral, my dad pulled me aside and told me that my mom named me Iris because of her love for the flower. But my dad went along with it because in mythology Iris was the personification of the rainbow, a psychopomp who escorted the newly deceased into the afterlife. He liked that, being a cemetery sexton and all. And I know this might sound crazy, but I hope, in some way, that means I was with my mom when she crossed over.”
A lump lodges in the hollow of my throat. Her reaction to me bringing up rainbows makes more sense now.
“It doesn’t sound crazy at all.”
“Good. Because doing readings with my mom’s fortune-telling cards makes me feel close to her, even when it makes me sad.”
“I understand that completely. It’s the same for me with diving.”
The ring she’s been non-stop twisting around her thumb drops onto the floor mat, and our conversation stalls while she bends beneath my steering wheel to retrieve it. I make a move to help her, but freeze fast when I spy the inky lines of a tattoo, peeking between the space where her shirt and jacket meet her jeans.
“Got it,” she says, slipping the ring back on her right thumb as she leans back into the seat. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“You have a tattoo?”
She nods, pulling her shirt down in the back even though she’s up against the seat. “Don’t ask me about it.”
“Can I at least see it?” I ask. Because there’s only one other cliff-jumping girl with dark hair and body tattoos that’s ever left an impression on me, and right now the similarities are too real.
Iris closes one eye, lips pursed. “How about we answer one-for-one questions, since we’re supposed to be working on our projects, and we’ll see if we get to the tattoo? I’ll go first. Tell me something that bothers you about your everyday life.”
Easy.
“My grandfather started drinking after my dad died and being around him is like babysitting a grizzly bear. Can I see your tattoo?”
“It’s sort of intense. Tell me something nobody knows about your mom?”
She’s cheating, but I take a deep breath and let a bigger truth rip. “When I was thirteen our house burned down and my mom got trapped inside. My parents were fighting a lot before that happened, and afterward, my dad, shut everyone out. He stopped talking to my Uncle Phil, for the most part, and to me about anything important.”
“I didn’t know your mom died in a fire,” she says.
“It’s not something I like to talk about. Can I see your tattoo now?”
Iris narrows her eyes.
“It’s important. Just for a second.”
She sighs deeply, conceding, then turns and lifts the back of her shirt.
“Holy crap.”
Iris glances over her shoulder to read my face. “It told you. It’s intense.”
“It’s not that, Iris. It’s you. You’re, um…”
“Not what you expected?”
“More than I expected, actually.”
Because what if she’s her? The girl with the dark hair and body tattoos who made me believe it was okay to jump when I was ten years old. She was too far away for me to see any detail. But that’s impossible. It was three years before I saw Iris jump from the same spot wearing a yellow one-piece, her torso fully covered. It has to be a coincidence. They can’t be the same person. Iris was ten years old at that time, same as me. The girl I saw was a teenager even if nobody saw her but me. Not even Mom. Unless it was a dream state, way back then and I just didn’t know.
But did Mom? I remember her looking around nervously.
“You’re so much more like me than I ever imagined,” she said, “and that makes me incredibly happy. But you have to be careful what you say to anyone but me. Don’t blurt out everything you see, okay? Not everyone will understand.”
