3. Iris Two Things
Iris Two Things
Starting school three days after your dad was plastered all over the news as Juniper Shores’ most wanted was, um, not the greatest. It was like all the girls’ moms had specifically told them not to mention it, so they walked around like, “Oh, hey, Iris,” in these really squeaky, high-pitched voices and then ran off to their corners to be awkward. I mean, whatever. I can handle it. My only real friend in first-period Honors English was Ben, anyway. I loved my girls, but they were in English 1. Plus, if I had to choose one friend for right now, it would be Ben.
“Hey, girl,” he said in a faux high-pitched voice, sauntering over to me in his Peter Millar khakis and matching collared shirt, our school uniform, the uniform that I was wearing for the fourth year, which seemed hard to believe. Ben was cute. Like, really cute. He was taller than most of the boys in our class and had soft brown hair that got blondish and surfer-like in the summer. He had to cut it during the year because boys’ hair can’t touch their collars here at this prison they call school that basically serves to completely subvert our individuality. Subvert was one of our summer vocab words, and I was super into it.
Anyway, Ben was cool. And I know how that sounds, but I didn’t like him. Not like that. Or maybe sometimes I thought I did? But I’d seen enough movies to know that making out with your best friend meant he wasn’t your best friend anymore. I mean, sure, on TV it’s because he was destined to be your great love who had been there all along and you lived happily ever after. But we were in ninth grade, so happily ever after seemed unlikely.
“Hey,” I said to Ben, dropping my shiny, happy, everything-is-great-even-though-we-lost-all-our-money-and-my-dad’s-in-prison act. He hugged me. He smelled like the ocean and the woods and something a little spicy. If I thought about it, he was obviously wearing cologne. But I liked it better when that was just the smell of Ben.
“I’ll pay for your cookie in the lunchroom from now on,” he said, grinning at me. “Because I know that was your primary concern.”
We both laughed. I was surprised I could think something was funny, but I really did. I think because I knew Ben loved me no matter what.
“For real. You okay?”
I shrugged. “I have no idea.” I looked around. Everyone was sneaking glances at us but pretending to be super caught up in their own conversations. I was the giraffe at the zoo today. It was kind of like my first day after we moved here from New York. I reminded myself how quickly that had passed, how quickly I had made best friends and felt like this had been home all along. “I mean, this is bad. And it’s my dad, you know? I love him. And he’s such a good dad. And, Ben, I know he didn’t do this.”
Ben nodded at me in a sympathetic, oh you poor thing, you think he’s innocent way that irritated me. I crossed my arms.
“Okay,” he said, putting his hands up. “He didn’t do it.”
Then I let my scariest thought sink in. “What if he did do it?” I whispered. “I mean, I guess that changes things.”
“Two things can be true at once,” Ben said importantly.
This was why I loved him. He was so wise .
“Yes. Right. So, worst case, he can be a good dad and a criminal.” That made me feel better. Maybe my life wasn’t a lie after all. “But to be clear. He didn’t do it.”
“Noted,” Ben said. I thought about my mom. Poor Mom. She obviously had quit her job and her whole life to stay home with me, which had to suck. I mean, can you imagine if Taylor Swift had to cancel the Eras Tour because she was home with a preschooler? Shiver. And the reality was that, while I was sad and confused and kind of scared, I really wasn’t all that scared because my mom would take care of me. Full stop.
Her first attempt at that, our three days with my grandparents in Chapel Hill, had been interesting . My grandparents were very cool for a day at holidays, but more than that was a lot. Plus, I missed my friends, and I hadn’t really believed that Mom would pull off getting us back here before school started, so that kind of compounded things. But she had.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Mr. Friedman’s voice boomed. “Let’s take our seats please.”
Ben winked at me and, for just a second, I forgot that my entire life was up in flames; I forgot that everything was falling apart. My friend Chloe texted me and our other best friend, Dabney. Have you seen Juniper Shores Socialite today?
We were allowed to have our phones at school; we just weren’t allowed to text in class, a rule I was 100 percent breaking right now. I rolled my eyes because that lady hadn’t been particularly kind to my family. Although, to be fair, she was great at spreading all the gossip, so the conversation definitely wasn’t only on my dad anymore.
Yessssssss! Dabney texted back. Principal Windsor and Callie’s mom?? Wasn’t she, like, a for real model?
I winced and tried to think: If Principal Windsor wasn’t my principal was he any kind of hot, even in an old-man way? Nope. Nope. Couldn’t see it. Ewwww, I texted back. What is she thinking?
I didn’t follow Juniper Shores Socialite quite as closely as Dabney and Chloe because I was always a little afraid of seeing more bad stuff about my dad. But what I couldn’t figure out was how she knew all the high school drama and all the adult drama. And what was really crazy was that adults were, like, scandalous. I just figured that you got married and had kids and that was that. Nope. Not the case, apparently. I found adults infinitely more interesting now.
Sleepover at my house this weekend? Chloe texted.
I felt like my heart had just grown three sizes. I texted back Yesssss!!!
They weren’t ostracizing me, like I had feared so deep down that I hadn’t admitted it to myself yet. Everything was going to be okay.
At least, that’s what I thought—until the end of the day. Mom had prepared me that she wouldn’t be picking me up since, well, she didn’t have a car. What a shitshow. So I was looking around the carpool line when I saw her hang her head out of this newish-looking small Lexus SUV. For just a second, I had the best thought: this was all some misunderstanding and Dad had bought Mom a new car today and was out of jail. They had proven that he was innocent!
But as I walked over, I realized some other lady was driving. “Hi, honey,” Mom said in her mom-tone, with the mom-eyes that meant, You behave yourself, young lady, or there will be hell to pay.
I reminded myself that whatever was going on here, no matter how bad it was, I could always try to get a scholarship to boarding school next semester.
I opened the back door and tried to gently launch my overstuffed backpack into the seat. Juniper Shores Prep was all about the homework. Which was okay because I always had straight As, and I was fast at homework, hence my confidence I could get the scholarship to boarding school if I wanted to go off. “Um, hi,” I said. For just a second, I wondered if this was some long-lost family member of Mom’s. It certainly wasn’t Grammy, with whom, seriously four hours into our stay, I had been so annoyed that I suggested to Mom that perhaps camping under the overpass wouldn’t be that bad.
“Iris, this is Alice,” Mom said. “She owns a beautiful bed-and-breakfast on the beach, and she’s going to let us stay there for a while until we get this mess cleared up.”
I could tell by the way Mom glanced at Alice that she was lying. Or, at least, doing that mom-lie thing that isn’t a full-on lie, but also isn’t totally true. Butterflies flipped around my stomach. Was this place gross? Dirty? In a bad neighborhood? But wait. Juniper Shores didn’t have bad neighborhoods, right?
We were taking the beach road—our road—so, I mean, come on. How bad could it be?
But when we pulled up in front of the massive beach house, my heart stopped. My blood turned to ice water. “Here it is,” Alice said in this calm tone that I suddenly found creepy instead of soothing.
“Great,” I said, trying to keep the panic out of my voice. As we all got out of the car, Mom smiling like we had won the lottery, I grabbed her elbow, the way she used to do to me when I was little and in trouble. “Mom, can I speak with you a moment?”
Alice smiled that angelic smile at me again and pointed. “I’ll just go ahead up and let you two have a second.”
As soon as she was out of earshot, I whisper-hissed: “Are you insane ? You moved us into the mommune ?”
Mom laughed. “Wait. You’ve heard of the mommune?”
“Does this seem like I’m making a cute joke, Mom? We cannot live here. These people are creepy.”
“Alice is the nicest person I’ve ever met. She is offering us a place to live for free while I get us back on our feet. It’s beautiful, sweetheart. You’ll see.”
I looked around, then whispered, “Alice murdered three of her husbands, Mom. Not one, not two, three .”
Mom put her hands on her hips. “That woman did not murder her husbands.”
Okay. So maybe it did seem like kind of a stretch that the chic goddess up there in the house was a cold-blooded killer. But everyone at school said that. Everyone. I felt my eyes widen, trying to make my point. “How do you think she got this big house on the ocean?” I asked. “Life insurance, that’s how.”
“This is just like when you and Kelsey were seven and got the idea that the lady we used to see in the elevator from the floor above us was a witch because she had that long black index fingernail.”
Kelsey was my best friend in New York. “Well, that made sense, Mom. Admit it.”
She laughed. “When really she had dropped a pan on her finger, and it grew out just fine.”
I wanted to argue, but maybe it was a little like that. I couldn’t imagine the rumors flying around about my family right now. Well, I could imagine some, thanks to Juniper Shores Socialite. But I would hate it if people believed something false was true. Although the truth seemed pretty bad.…
Mom sighed, and I realized how tired she looked. “Honey, I always want to protect you—”
“By moving me in with a murderer and a bunch of creepy ladies who will make me call them ‘Mom’? Yeah. I feel really safe.”
She cut her eyes at me, and I knew I was taking it too far.
“As I was saying, I always want to protect you, but you need to know that things are precarious right now. I don’t know how long our accounts are going to be frozen, and I’m not the number one draft pick in the finance world.”
I could feel anger rising in me. “Well, that’s not fair. You didn’t have anything to do with Dad’s stuff!”
I knew Mom would never steal from someone. We’d sleep on the sidewalk first.
“I know, honey, but you and I both know that’s how the world works.”
“Well, that’s just sucky. I am so tired of living in a world where a woman is judged by a man’s actions. A man that she has no real control over, by the way. It’s not fair. Eff the patriarchy.”
I had to say eff because the last time I said the real sentence, Mom had grounded me for a week, specifically from all my music accounts until I could be mature enough to learn which Taylor lyrics I was allowed to quote.
Mom sighed. “Honey, please?”
I crossed my arms. “Fine.”
“Fine, you’ll stay here?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Sweetheart, look, I’m sure we’ll be back in our house soon. But for now, we don’t have a lot of great choices.”
That was a harsh, scary reality, and I decided right then and there that I would shut my mouth and go with the flow. Things were hard enough for my mom. I didn’t need to make them worse.
“I’ll do it on one condition,” I said.
She raised her mom-eyebrow.
“You let me go see Dad.”
She sighed and nodded.
I smiled. Gosh, I missed him so much. “When?”
“I’ll go see him tomorrow and put in your paperwork. You can go as soon as it gets approved.”
I nodded, realizing how absurd this was, how much my life had changed.
“So can we go up?” she asked.
Mom put her arm around me. I leaned my head on her shoulder and turned my head up to kiss her cheek. “Fine. This will be a really great chapter of my memoir one day.”
She laughed. And as we paused just a moment to stare at the ocean, I felt fortified by its presence. By her presence. “We’re Lorelai and Rory Gilmore now,” I said.
“The Sitterly Girls,” Mom solidified.
“Mom, we don’t have to, like, wear long skirts and keep our hair in buns now, do we?”
“Well, you pretty much always wear your hair in a bun anyway, so I don’t know that much will change for you.”
“Mom!”
“It’s just a place to stay, Iris. We’ll be out of here in no time.”
As I stepped over the threshold and into the open-floor-plan kitchen, dining room, and living room that looked over the pool and then to the ocean, I had to admit I was kind of impressed.
“Wow. It’s so pretty,” I said.
“Oh, honey,” said Alice, who I hadn’t even noticed coming down the steps, “that’s so nice.”
I studied her. Three dead husbands, I remembered. She seemed nice enough. But I reminded myself not to get too close. If my dad debacle—and Juniper Shores Socialite—had taught me anything, it was that adults had secret lives.
For now, I would play a part. I would help my mom. But let’s get one thing straight: I’d be sleeping with one eye open.