I Am Iris

Chapter Four: Behind the Egg Yolk Yellow Bricks

I sat across from Moth, and Moth across from me. Her shiny, golden napkin was folded across her lap and her posture was perfect. My napkin was wiping tomato sauce off of my cheek as I slumped over in my chair, my elbows on the table. It was an awkward dinner, just like all the others. We were total opposites, and neither one of us were open to change.

"No, no! Iris! You'll stain your napkin! Those were expensive!" Moth quickly blurted, leaning over the table and snatching the napkin from my hand.

"It's a napkin! Besides, I'm more concerned with the staining of my face, which is priceless," I said all smugly. Moth didn't even crack a smile. Gees, didn't she ever have fun?

I rearranged all the skinny, floppy noodles on my plate with my fork, humming a song that didn't exist.

"Iris, how was tutoring the other day?" Moth asked, finally forcing a question out of the jungle of her mind and out into the silence.

She's asked me that two times already, I thought annoyed. Oh well, at least I'll have an excuse to babble on about what I was thinking about all day again in case she decided to listen this time.

"It was wonderful. Well, not wonderful. There's a thousand things in the world I'd rather be doing," I explained, the words rushing from my mouth without my mind even thinking them through. "Well, maybe about a million," I corrected myself. "Anyways, it was just fine. Mediocre... Well, not quite that bad. But my tutor, I don't know his name, so I just call him Robot Boy, well he lives in this same apartment building. And he reads in elevators, too. Weird, huh? And he spent the whole hour trying to teach me about math or something, and I actually learned something!" I squealed. The last part was a lie.

Moth looked up from her plate quickly, a noodle painted in sauce dripping from her mouth. She quickly slurped it up, her eyes real wide, just like a dog in headlights. That's how it goes, right? Yes, I think so.

"What?" Moth asked, lost.

"My tutor taught me something," I told her simply.

"Well, of course, that's how it works, Iris," she explained slowly. "So, what did you learn?" Darn.

"I learned about how you can find the lengths of a right  triangle with only two angle measures. Isn't that just dandy?" I told her, eagerly. Maybe now she wouldn't think I was an air head with no brain, which by the way is such nonsense. If I didn't have a brain and my head was filled with nothing but air, I'd probably be dead... Or a balloon, perhaps.

"Uh huh. So, how do you do that?" Moth asked with absolutely no interest as her eyes roamed the room.

"Huh?"

"What you're talking about, that triangle junk. How do you that?"

"Oh," I breathed. "I dunno. I just learned it was possible" I shrugged.

Moth groaned and threw her plate to her fork, and a clang bounced off the walls of the otherwise silent room. Small specks of red spotted the table.

"It's hopeless! It's all hopeless, everything is. You'll never learn! All you ever do is prance around without a care in the world about anything, ask if nothing could ever go wrong." She shot the words at me through clenched, pale yellow teeth. Her forehead was wrinkled, her back arched like a cat, her gold hair hanging loosely, and her hands shaking with anger. "You'll never be normal. I'll never get my job back. I'll never get him back. We're never moving out of this crappy apartment and I'll never live the life I could and should have."

Then, without another word, Moth slowly got up from her chair, and dragged her feet to her bedroom. She didn't push her chair in. She always pushes her chair in.