Black Iris

Hurt her

Rose

Jordan picked me up in her car.

It was a used car but it was different to the one she had used to use, the one that I had been walking towards in the target carpark all those months before. I didn't even know she had a new car until she told me she was picking me up in it. I knew she had been saving up, and that she had been wanting to get one of her own she got her license, but that was months ago. I guess she finally had saved enough.

"Nice car," I said, as I climbed in. It was a dumb thing to say, but I didn't know what else to.

She nodded. "Thanks. My parents helped me with part of it. Said it was reimbursement for the hours of taxi driving I do picking up and dropping off my siblings."

I smiled. "Oh, yeah I did wonder why the car smelt like PB & J."

"Yeah, that would be Ben. And if you smell sour apple at any point, Lila spilt her juice box on the back seat last week and did a half-assed job at cleaning it."

I grinned, but it was mostly forced. Hearing about her siblings made me miss them. "Sounds like fun."

She must have heard the sadness in my voice because she glanced across and sighed.

"Ol-"

"Sorry, I'm fine," I said quickly. She gave me an incredulous look. "I swear. Sorry. I didn't mean for that to come out so morose."

She shook her head. "It's okay. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have talked about them."

"No," I said. "No, they're your siblings. You should be able to talk about them."

We fell into silence for a few moments. Then, tentatively, I asked, "How are they?"

She glanced across at me briefly before looking back at the road. "Good," she said. "Ben's going to start high school in the fall, could you believe it?"

"Seriously? No way, he only just started middle school," I said, incredulous.

She smiled. "That's what I was saying! But no, apparently it's been three years already. Meanwhile, Lila is turning six next week, and Mon is thirteen going on twenty. It was like, she had her birthday and instantaneously she transformed into a teenager, complete with mood swings and makeup. She asked me to help her with that, by the way, and I was hopeless. I really wish you'd been around for that."

I laughed. "As if I would be any better at teaching her than you. You know that makeup isn't my strong suit."

"Nor is it mine," she said. "But Ma's in the midst of her master, Heather's on a grad trip to Fiji and the boys are all helpless, so the task fell to me. At least if you'd been there, there would have been two of us to forward the onslaught of questions to the nearest Mecca employee."

I smiled. "Why didn't you ask Bek about it?"

Bek, who worked at Sephora, was one of the girls in our friendship group at our school. Or, Jordan's school, I should say. My admission back into the grade in the fall was hinging on my results at Foothill's, and given I was missing the last week of classes and exams because of the trial, my marks were a little up in the air.

Jordan's face fell when I mentioned Bek. "Bek... we aren't super close right now."

"Oh," I said quietly. "Is that because of me?"

She sighed, agitated. "Not everything's because of you, Ol."

"Sorry," I said. "What was it about then?"