“Still new,” I say. “I’m going to start slow. He seems like he can get skittish on me.”
“Given any thought to how you’re going to do it?” She moves around the kitchen, inspecting the cabinets and drawers. The condo came furnished, and it hasn’t been updated since the 1980s.
“No,” I say. A lie. Iris crouches down to rummage through the mostly empty cabinet where we’ve stashed canned goods, muttering about honey for her tea.
“Jade is going to the store,” she says. By the way she says it, I know she means she’s going to be the one to go.
“I’ll go,” I say. “Get me a list. See if Moody wants—”
“I need to get out of this fucking apartment, Sis.” She whirls to face me, and I see the irritation written all across her face.
We’re identical right down to the way we shape our eyebrows, but even the other kids in the group homes always knew which one of uswas Iris. There’s an intensity about her, like she’s just stopped in to escape something she’s running from. Back then, she always wore long sleeves, even in the summer, and hid a box cutter at her wrist.
“Anything special I need to know about Jade?” she asks.
I don’t want Iris to be Jade, I realize. Jade is mine. Jade is the one who holds on to the only smartphone we bought, and after Edison is dead, the phone will be purged and then destroyed. But for now, the phone and Edison are both alive and well and filled with his thoughts. After he fell asleep last night, I read his texts over again, pretending they were new. I committed them to memory as best as I could, because in six short months I’ll have to delete them. Edison will only be alive in my head.
“Iris.” I try to match her determination and fail. “I’ll go to the store. This is my thing.”
She stares at me for a long time. I gulp down the last of the smoothie but don’t take my eyes off her.
“Okay, Sissy, I wasn’t going to say this.” She reaches across the counter and puts her hand over mine. We’re both wearing maroon nail polish. “You should have been able to make that kill Saturday night. With that man on the hiking trail.”
This wounds me, and I guard myself before she can see the betrayal in my eyes. “You told Moody she was wrong to put us into that position.”
“She was wrong,” Iris says. “It was a stupid, hasty move and I laid into her about it. But it doesn’t change the fact that it was your turn.”
“He wasn’t my kill,” I say.
“That’s what you said about the last one too.” She squeezes my hand. “You panicked.”
She should be directing this lecture at Moody, not me. As though Moody has never flubbed a murder before. When it was her first time,in Montana three years ago, she cried. She was sobbing and blotchy when I showed up, and she threw her blood-smeared arms around me. I had to pry her off so that I could get to work. It didn’t help that she’d tried something ambitious—lacing his coffee with his prescription Ambien and then slitting his wrists in the bathtub. A suicide would make cleanup someone else’s problem. She thought this made her a genius.
Instead, her lover vomited everything up in the tub and fought her off, managing to slice her hand with the kitchen knife she’d used on his wrists. He was determined to live, and they struggled around the bathroom like it was a WWE rink, blood smeared all in the tile grout and the towels. Eventually he lost enough blood that he collapsed. I spent all night crawling on the floor with a bottle of peroxide and a toothbrush, getting rid of every last drop.
And Iris wants to talk about who panicked. If it weren’t for me, we’d all be serving life in a women’s correctional facility.
The phone blips and my heart responds with a rapid flutter. Iris grabs it before I can see what the message says. She grins.
“Iris.”
“I can be Jade,” Iris says, and presses her hand to her chest like a heartsick war widow. She starts to type and I hear the click of each letter she presses. “Dearest Edison, last night I thought of you as I touched myself—”
I scramble around the counter and she holds the phone over her head, cackling. She tries to run for it, and I hook my arms around her waist. She’s still typing as she staggers for the doorway.
“Iris!”
“It’s just the grocery store, Sissy. Don’t be a baby.”
I kick at the backs of her knees, and she buckles. The phone flies into the living room, mostly empty aside for a hideous floral couchand a flat-screen TV that murmurs softly. I go down with Iris when she falls, and in a whirl she flips me onto my back. Her eyes are dark, jaw clenched. Her fists close around my fingers, crushing the bones, and I cry out.
We don’t say anything. We only stare.
I draw my knee up and thrust it into Iris’s stomach. Her eyes flash as I knock the wind out of her. She grapples at my shirt. I grab my phone from the carpet and scramble to my feet. I’m barely upright before Iris bull-rushes me onto the couch. I fall facedown onto the cushions, and she pins my hands behind my back, crushing me with her weight until I don’t even have the air to tell her that I can’t breathe.
Panic flares up and I struggle, all my other instincts gone. A feeble croak comes out of me and my vision tunnels.
Iris leans down. She’s calm and collected now that she’s gained the upper hand. “What are you going to do, little sister?” she says. “If your boyfriend fights back and I’m not there to save you, how will you get out of it?”
