“Okay,” Iris says. She looks up at Marcelina, then makes a dismayed sound. “Oh, Marcelina, oh no. I ripped your dress.”
“I could probably try to fix it,” Roya says halfheartedly. “Later, when I’ve got a little more to give.” The muscle under her eye is twitching the longer she keeps her hands on Iris, though, and I can’t imagine that she’ll have anything left by the end of the night.
Marcelina waves the apology away. “It’s fine,” she says, but her chin wobbles a little in that trying-not-to-cry way. We all know it’s not fine—she worked evening shifts at the Crispy Chicken for four months to save up for that dress. She cried when she finally bought it—she said it was the nicest thing she’d ever owned. It’s black, like all of Marcelina’s clothes, but it has little silver stars stitched into it. There’s a huge rip in the bodice now. It’s definitely ruined. “We’ve got more important things to worry about,” she says.
It’s true. It’s not right, but it’s true.
We help Iris stand up. Her legs are trembling. Her freckles are stark—something she’d love if she was doing it on purpose. Her freckles are her favorite part of herself, her best-beloved feature. She’s told me that they’re the thing that make her feel most beautiful. But right now, she just looks sick. She keeps muttering, “I don’t know what happened.” Roya keeps a hand on Iris’s shoulder, pouring that pink glow into her. We stand there, our arms around each other, staring at the body parts on the bed.
“I have an idea,” Paulie says. She unthreads her arm from around my waist and goes to Josh’s closet.
“Wait,” I say, “what are you doing?”
“Trust me,” she calls back, rummaging. Downstairs at the party someone’s turned the music up, and the bass vibrates through the floor. Paulie emerges from the closet clutching a pile of bags.
“Duffels,” she says, dropping them on the floor next to the bed.
“Duffels?” Marcelina repeats blankly.
“Knew he’d have a buttload of ’em,” Paulie says. “Lacrosse dudes love duffel bags.”
I nod as if that’s a truth universally acknowledged. “Sure,” I say. “But what are we … ?” Paulie folds her arms and waits for the penny to drop. And then it does. “No. No way.”
“Yeah,” Paulie says, looking uneasily at the bed. “We gotta get him out of here.”
Roya is the first one to make a move. She gives Iris a squeeze, then steps toward the bed. Iris makes a small noise in the back of her throat and looks a little gray, but she stays standing under her own strength. Roya grabs a duffel and moves to the bed. In one brisk motion, she grabs an arm and a leg and stuffs them into the bag. She zips it up and takes two fast steps backward. Her lips are pressed together and her nostrils are white. She nods, staring straight ahead without seeming to see anything.
“Right,” Marcelina says. “Sure.” She picks up a duffel and scoops the hands and feet into it. She looks at the floor and bobs the bag up and down, like she’s testing its weight.
Paulie takes the arm and leg that Roya didn’t grab. She doesn’t say anything, and after she’s zipped up her duffel, she sits down on the floor, cradling it in her lap.
“Okay,” Iris whispers over and over again. “Okay, okay, okay, okay.” She grabs a drawstring backpack and yanks the top open, then rests it on the bed and starts to load the vertebrae into it one at a time. It takes a while. Her hands are shaking. “Thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three,” she mutters. She shakes the bag a little to settle the bones in the bottom of it, then peers inside at the amount of room that’s left. After a moment of deliberation, she picks up the liver and jams it into the bag. She cinches the backpack shut and swings it onto her back, wincing at the rattle of the bones inside.
Marcelina looks up, something dawning across her face. “Oh shit, actually. Iris?”
“Yeah?”
“Can I trade you?” She holds out her duffel, with the hands and feet inside. Iris stares at her and she shrugs. “I need the spine for something.”
Iris shakes her head. “I don’t want to know.” She holds out her bag of bones and Marcelina takes it.
“Thanks.” Marcelina passes over her bag of extremities and beams at Iris, who can’t help smiling back. Nobody can help smiling back when Marcelina turns up the wattage like that. Her cheeks go all round and dimply and everything feels brighter. It’s not magic, but it’s close.
Once the exchange is done, they both turn and look at me. I look around the room. They’re all watching me. Waiting.
“My turn, right?” I say. My voice seems too loud. Downstairs, the party is chanting something, and the chants dissolve into a general all-purpose party-yell.
“Your turn,” Roya says. I look up at her, and she gives me an encouraging little smile. I feel some of the tension slip off my shoulders. Maybe she’s not mad at me after all.
“My turn,” I repeat. I grab the last bag—a beat-up backpack with Josh’s name scrawled on it in Sharpie. It was probably his schoolbag last year. I look inside: a highlighter with no cap on it rolls around in the bottom, next to a crumpled Skittles wrapper and a few curly edges from torn-out notebook pages. I turn the bag over and let the trash fall to the floor. It doesn’t feel right to leave it in there.
I step up to the bed feeling like a spotlight is on me. Gingerly, I pick up his head. The eyes are closed, and he would look like he was sleeping if it wasn’t for the blue tint of his lips and the deathly pallor of his skin. His head is lighter than I would have anticipated. I wonder if his brain is still inside.
I hold the head in both of my hands. His hair is soft under my palm. There had been some sort of gel in it before, when we were making out, but now it’s just clean. I bite my lip and put his head into the backpack as gently as I can manage. Then, before I have time to hesitate, I grab his heart.
I gasp without meaning to. “It’s wrong.”
“What do you mean?” Iris asks.
I shake my head. “Feel.” I hold the heart out to her, and she pokes it with a tentative fingertip.
“Oh, fuck,” she whispers. “It’s … it’s so cold?”
No one else wants to touch the heart, and I can’t blame them. It feels awful. It’s like glass, hard and smooth and cold and much too heavy. Warmth seeps out of my hand and into the heart by the second. I stare at it. It’s almost translucent, but not quite, and I feel sure that if I just moved into better light, I could see all the way to the center of it. I can feel something in me moving toward it—something stirring deep inside me, being pulled toward the thing at the core of the heart, the thing I can’t quite see—
Roya grabs the heart out of my hands and drops it into my backpack. She zips it up without looking at where the heart has landed.
“Maybe don’t hold that thing in your hands for too long, huh?” she says, dipping her head low to look into my eyes.
“Yeah,” I say, shaking myself. “Thanks. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“Wait,” Roya says. “How are we doing this?”
“We each get rid of our pieces,” Iris replies in her bossy-voice.