“Get out!” Jessica screamed, flailing against him. “Get out!”
She repeated those two words over and over again at the top of her lungs. The words stopped being words and became shrieks. Jessica stared straight into John’s bruised eyes and continued to scream. For the first time, she wanted the whole neighborhood to be her witness.
Iridian
(early Monday, June 17th)
Given that her name meant “relating to the eye,” it was ironic how selective Iridian’s vision was. The things she wanted to see mostly lived in her head or in the worlds she created on paper. She could picture a character’s skin in such vivid detail, she knew how it tasted. She knew so clearly—in her mind—the difference between eyes that sparkled with tears and those that sparkled with joy and those that sparkled with pride. The things she didn’t want to see, she avoided. Instead of burying her head in the sand, she buried herself between book pages or under bedsheets or, now, into couch cushions. Rosa knew her sister well, so she’d known the solution to Ana’s writing on the wall was to cover it up. She’d also known that the solution to Ana’s destroying Iridian’s books and notebooks was to simply pick everything up and put it back into the closet.
Iridian’s new notebook was snug against her side, and the television was still on soap operas, still on mute. She wished she lived there—in the screen, in the beautiful houses on the screen where people spoke but you couldn’t hear their muted words. At some point, Iridian fell asleep to that beauty. She woke when a lamp clicked on—more like, she jerked awake. Her long legs bucked against the tangle of her blanket. Iridian blinked and saw her father at the far end of the couch. With a dried crust of spittle at the edge of his mouth, he was the opposite of the beauty on the screen.
“What?” Iridian asked.
Rafe said nothing. A little knowing twitch played at the corner of his mouth, right next to the spit.
Iridian looked down and, there, clutched in her father’s hand, was her notebook, the new one with the yellow cover. She exhaled hard and fast, and before she could even really think about it, Iridian launched off the couch. She collided with Rafe, and her notebook flipped open, its ink-covered pages fanning out. Iridian’s nails dug into the skin of Rafe’s wrist and the backs of his hands. Her attack worked—sort of. Rafe pulled away, but all Iridian was left with was a tiny scrap of paper with the word ravage written on it.
“This is what you think about?” Rafe demanded. “What kind of girl are you?”
“It’s nothing,” Iridian lied, because it was, of course, everything.
“It’s filth! It’s trash!”
Rafe waited for his daughter to respond, maybe to apologize, and Iridian waited for Rafe to do what he always did: say something terrible and then try to twist things to make it seem as if Iridian had been the one to force him into saying something terrible.
Rafe took a step forward, and, out of the corner of her eye, Iridian saw Rosa creep down the stairs. Iridian steeled her nerves, took a breath, and remembered how diligently she had practiced for this sort of thing. It was rare he could hurl an insult at her that she hadn’t hurled at herself already.
“I know why you do this,” Rafe said. “You’re trying to make up for the fact that you aren’t beautiful like Ana, talented like Jessica, or kind like Rosa. You are just . . .” He paused, trying to find the right words. “You are a nothing person. Not beautiful. Not talented. Not kind. I thought I raised you better, but I guess I was wrong.”
Before, when this had happened at school, when her secrets had been plucked away and shared by and to her awful classmates, Iridian had been so humiliated she hadn’t been able to move. She’d heard the jeers and laughter, but only over the white-noise roar in her head.
For a long, long time, Iridian had wanted to be completely inconspicuous, homebound, so introverted she was practically invisible. But nothing? Iridian didn’t want to be nothing, and when she heard her father say that to her, she exploded like a star.
With a sharp cry, she lunged for the notebook again, but Rafe held it above his head, toward the overhead light and out of his daughter’s reach. Iridian tried to claw her way up his arm, but Rafe pushed her hard—right in the center of her chest—and she fell back against the couch and then bounced onto the floor. Rafe started to flip through the pages, just like Evalin had done, like he was going to read from them. She couldn’t bear the thought of her words coming out of his mouth, so she screamed. Still on the floor, she folded herself into the tiniest ball possible, closed her eyes, covered her ears with her hands, and screamed.
Rafe started reading. Iridian couldn’t hear everything, but the worst/best phrases seemed to rise over her screams: suck, smack, salty. She screamed louder. Eventually, Rafe grabbed her by the arm and tried to pull her up, but Iridian was dead weight, a shrieking heap. Rafe was dragging her across the carpet. Her shoulder twisted, threatening to wrench out of joint, but Iridian kept screaming. She vaguely heard Rosa telling Rafe to let go, but Rafe wasn’t listening. He bent over Iridian and told her—shouted—into her ear, “If only your mother—God rest her precious soul—could see this.”
“Stop!” Rosa yelled.
Iridian was able to turn her head and see that her sister had pulled a nearby lamp from its electrical socket. She held that lamp in both her hands, wielding it like a baseball bat. Its cord dangled to the ground.
Outside, someone honked the horn of their car.
Then, Iridian felt something unmistakable: wind.
It was warm, and it was so strong that it blew back the loose strands of her hair. Iridian had to tilt her face away to protect it from the grit she felt flying into her eyes, but there was nothing she could do to avoid the smell of oranges that the wind carried with it.
In the next instant, the television blinked off. A high, whining sound came from its screen, and Iridian watched as the glass shattered on its own, radiant, as if a fist had been slammed in the center of it.
“Leave, Iridian,” Rosa commanded, tightening her grip on the lamp. She was focused on Rafe. “Go outside. I’ll take care of this.”
Once outside, Iridian heard Jessica shrieking from her car. Through the open passenger-side window, she saw her sister thrashing against her seat, and John was trying to keep her pinned down. A different kind of wind blew through—rain was coming—but a piece of Iridian’s hair got stuck in her mouth, and she could taste the dry dust. She thought of Rosa, always swooping in to save her, as she’d just done seconds ago with Rafe. She could still hear the both of them, behind her, yelling at each other in the house. Rafe was yelling, “This is my house!” but Iridian knew that wasn’t true anymore. Her father had no control over what was happening in those walls.
Iridian ran toward Jessica’s car—toward Jessica’s shrieking. She was determined to be the hero for once. She was fed up with men trying to leave their bruises all over her and her sisters.