TYRAN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

— IRIS —

She came back from her eight o'clock seminar at ten-fifteen.

She had a coffee she had bought at the campus café, and she had a question that she had been forming with precision during the ninety minutes of the seminar, the way she formed all important questions — working out the wording, testing it against the available responses, deciding exactly where to begin and what she needed to hear. She had been planning to ask it the way she planned every difficult conversation: directly, standing, in the light, in language that left no interpretive room.

The apartment door was unlocked.

She knew before she opened the door. Not from sound or sight or smell — but the way you know when a room has been emptied. Presence has weight. She felt its absence.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

She opened the door.

The apartment was the still of evacuation.

The hook was bare. His laptop, gone. She went straight to the shelves — his books were the most indelible thing — and found only gaps. The library had been reduced.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

She looked at the windowsill.

The photograph was gone.

The coastline with the specific blue-green water she had never seen anywhere. The place he was going to take her someday, if she let him. Gone from the sill, which had a faint pale rectangle where the frame had sat, where the sunlight had not reached the sill's surface, smaller than the surrounding square of dust and light.

She sat down on the couch.

She sat there for forty minutes.

She did not cry. She was not ready to cry yet — she was in the stage that precedes crying, the stage in which the mind is still running its verification processes, still returning not-yet, not-yet, not-yet to the question of whether what it is perceiving is real. She was aware of this stage. She had been through it before, smaller versions of it, at smaller losses. She understood that the not-yet was temporary and that the verification would eventually return a different answer and that she needed to wait for that.

Her coffee went cold. She held it anyway. She had her coat on still. She did not take it off.

Her phone was in her pocket. She took it out and she opened his contact — Marcel, just the first name, saved the night of the restaurant — and she looked at his number and she did not call it.

She had known — had been watching below consciousness since that first Wednesday. She’d refused to name it, believing, superstitiously, that naming would make it real.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

It was real without her naming it. That was what superstitions did not actually prevent.

---

She left the apartment. She walked back across campus. It was April and warm and the campus was doing the particular April thing it always did — the stone glowing in the midmorning light, the trees coming in, the specific quality of air that belonged to the end of a long winter and the beginning of something else. She had loved this campus the way you love the place where you became yourself, with the complicated gratitude of someone who knows it gave them something they could not have gotten anywhere else.

She hated it this morning. She hated the light and the warmth and the beauty of it, the indifference of its continuing to be itself while she walked through it carrying something that had not yet fully arrived.

She went to the dormitory. She climbed the stairs to the third floor. The room was empty — Demi had a nine o'clock class and a ten o'clock tutorial and would not be back until afternoon.

She sat on the floor. Not the bed. The floor, which felt more honest in a way she could not articulate except to say that the bed was a place of ordinary life and ordinary life felt misrepresentative right now. The floor was simply the floor, and she was simply Iris, and the apartment was empty, and there was a gap on a windowsill, and this was what was true.

The crying came later, in waves, and she let it come because she had the room to herself and she was not going to manage this. She had been managing things her whole life — managing the limits, managing the hunger, managing the particular ongoing vigilance of someone who had never had the luxury of putting things down. She was not going to manage this. She was going to feel it the full way and then she was going to convert it into something useful and she was going to be extraordinary and the conversion was going to cost her, and she was going to pay it. But first she was going to feel it. On the floor. Without an audience.

Demi came back at two in the afternoon and sat on the floor with her without asking any questions.

They sat there for an hour.

Iris did not speak. Demi did not speak. Outside the window the April campus continued its ordinary April business and in the dormitory room on the third floor two young women sat on the floor and waited for the not-yet to become yes.

---

At some point — she could not have said when, the afternoon had gone strange and un-timed — Iris picked up her phone. She opened his contact. She looked at the name she had saved it under. Just Marcel. She had never saved last names for anyone she loved.

She looked at the name for a long time.

Then she pressed edit.

She typed, with hands that were not quite steady: TYRANT.

She hit save.

She looked at the contact.

Tyran.

The T was missing from the end. Her thumb had slipped in the last character, had failed to reach the final letter, and she had saved it before she saw. She stared at the missing T. She could press edit again. She could add the letter. She could also delete him entirely, which was what she should do — what the logical, disciplined, strategic part of her was saying she should do.

She put the phone down.

She did not fix it.

She did not delete it.

She left the missing T where it was, because it was the most honest thing she had done all day. Because the word she had meant to type was a verdict on him and the word she had actually typed was something else — a word that was almost complete and not quite, that had a gap at the end where one more letter would have closed it, that looked like something left unfinished.

A door she wasn't ready to close.

---

The weeks that followed were a study in survival.

She got up. She went to class. She took notes. She answered questions when called upon. She did the reading. She handed in assignments on time. From the outside, to anyone who was not paying extremely close attention, she was exactly who she had always been: the first-year student with the highest grades, the one who was always prepared, the one who seemed to have been built for this work.

Demi paid extremely close attention.

"You're not eating," Demi said on the third day.

"I'm eating."

"You had half a bagel this morning. It's eight at night."

"I'm not hungry."

"That's not the same as having eaten."

Iris looked at her. Demi's face was concerned in the way of someone who loved her and did not know how to help. There was nothing to help with. There was only the ongoing fact of the empty apartment and the missing photograph and the gap on the windowsill and the question she had not gotten to ask.

"I'm fine," Iris said.

"You're not fine."

"I'm functioning. That's the same thing for now."

Demi opened her mouth to argue, then closed it. She knew Iris well enough to know when argument would not work.

She stopped going to the library.

This was the first visible change. The library had been her territory, her refuge, the place where she had built herself into who she was. She had been first to arrive and last to leave since September. Now she studied in her room, at her desk, with the door closed. She told herself it was more efficient, fewer distractions. Demi did not argue, but Demi watched.

She stopped walking past his building.

This was a deliberate choice, a map she redrew in her mind. The route from the dormitory to the law school had previously passed within two blocks of his apartment. She found another way — longer, less convenient, requiring a detour past the science buildings and around the quad. It added twelve minutes to her walk. She took them without complaint. She did not want to see the building. She did not want to know if the lights were on. She did not want to know if someone else was living in that space now, or if it sat empty, or if the gap on the windowsill had been filled with something new.

She did not want to know.

She did not cry in front of people.

This was not a choice she articulated. It was simply what she did: the crying happened in the shower, or at three in the morning with her face pressed into her pillow, or on the rare occasions when she had the room to herself and could let it out without an audience. She was not performing strength. She was protecting something — the part of her that needed to keep moving, to keep functioning, to keep being the person who had come here to become extraordinary.

Demi knew anyway. Demi always knew.

"You don't have to be okay," Demi said one night, sitting on the edge of Iris's bed. "You know that, right? You're allowed to not be okay."

"I know."

"You're not acting like you know."

Iris looked at her. "What would acting like I know look like?"

"Maybe crying in front of me sometime. Maybe letting me sit with you without you pretending to read. Maybe admitting that this is destroying you instead of just — powering through."

"It's not destroying me."

"It's destroying you," Demi said quietly. "I'm watching it happen. You're still moving, but you're hollow. I can see it."

Iris opened her mouth to argue. Then she closed it. Because Demi was right, and she knew Demi was right, and the truth of it sat in her chest like a stone.

"I don't know how to do this," Iris said. Her voice came out smaller than she intended. "I don't know how to be destroyed and still be who I need to be. I've never —" She stopped. Swallowed. "I've never let myself need something this much. I've never let myself have something this much. And now it's gone and I don't know how to be the person I was before I had it."

Demi moved closer, put her arm around Iris's shoulders. Iris did not pull away. That was its own kind of victory.

"You don't have to be the person you were before," Demi said. "You just have to be the person you are now. And that person is allowed to be broken for a while."

"What if I don't know how to be broken?"

"Then you learn. Same way you learn everything. You pay attention. You let yourself feel it. Let people help you."

Iris leaned into her, just slightly. "I don't know how to let people help me either."

"I know." Demi's arm tightened. "I'm going to teach you."