parents had warned me that I’d get funny teeth if I didn’t stop. They told me in no uncertain terms to keep my fingers out of my mouth.
The girl came while I stood at the window. That’s what I called Iris before I knew her name—just the girl. She became secret number two. I didn’t have to see her to know she was there; I felt her.
Sometimes I thought I did see her, though. I’d turn around and we’d be standing toe-to-toe. The girl sucked her thumb like me and mimicked my movements.
Of course, now I know I was only seeing my shadow, not Iris. I can only sense Iris. I hear her thoughts in my head. I hear her music, too; the haunting melodies she hums. And I feel her restlessness.
“Happy birthday, Lily,” she whispers to me now, her words sweeping through my mind just before my dog Cookie’s cold nose nudges my arm. I rub my eyes and pull my iPod earbuds out, silencing Paramore, which was playing on low.
My parents and I live in a cabin my dad built in the Rocky Mountains of southern Colorado. My bedroom is in the upstairs loft. As I roll to face the window beside my bed, the first things I see are the two peaks in the distance, their frosty heads twinkling beneath a hazy wash of moonlight. My parents and I call them the twin peaks, and they’re so close together that I used to imagine that they held hands. The west peak changes colors with each season, but the east peak remains black and gray, somber and dark. It’s slightly taller than the west peak and stands a step behind, as if to watch over the smaller one. “Good morning,” I whisper to them both. And to Iris, whose presence fills me.
At the sound of my voice, Cookie snuggles closer. He turned fourteen a couple of months ago and his joints ache when it’s cold outside. He doesn’t want me to get up, because that means he’ll have to get up, too. The stairs are tricky for him these days, so I don’t leave him up here alone.
I hear Mom downstairs in the kitchen making coffee and Dad adding logs to the fire. I’m not ready to go down yet. I’m homeschooled, and I’ve been getting up before the sun every weekday morning since I was six to do my chores and lessons so I could keep my afternoons free for hiking, or for skating in the winter. But I have today off since it’s my seventeenth birthday, and I want to savor the extra time in bed.
I can’t be lazy for too long, though. On the day I turned twelve, Dad and I rode four-wheelers up the mountain to watch the sun rise, and we’ve done it on my birthday every year since. This morning when we’re up there, I plan to tell him about my college plans. I’m nervous, but if I can convince him that it’s a good idea for me to go to the University of Oklahoma in the fall, maybe he can help me persuade Mom.
I lie very still, listening to the comforting sounds of my parents below, wondering if Iris will go into hiding if I move. That’s become her way over the past few years. Dad always jokes that when I became a teenager, I started needing my “space,” and I guess Iris does, too. She hovers at the edge of my mind in the quiet hours—early in the morning and before I fall asleep at night. But as my day gets started, Iris dives deeper, goes farther inward. Sometimes I forget that she’s with me. Sometimes I convince myself that she’s only a dream. Or that I’m crazy. But then for no reason, I become aware of her company again, or I hear her murmuring in my head, and her voice is as real as my mother’s or my father’s or mine. That’s when I remember that she’s been there all along, as constant as my heartbeat.
Pulling the quilts snugly around me, I burrow deeper into the bed. If I have something to say to Iris, all I have to do is think it. She can hear my thoughts, just as I hear hers.
Stay close when we ride up to the lookout, I say to her now. I’m going to talk to Dad about college and I need your support.
Her sigh tickles my eardrum as Iris says, I’m always close.