[Analcuck]

Iris Patrick

Chapter One

Iris Patrick was an eleven-year-old girl with reddish-orange hair which came down to her knees but never tangled. Into this long, untangled hair she often put fake flowers and jewels which her mother made and sold at her arts and crafts store. The store was called “Artsy Fartsy” because Iris’s mother, whose name was Ivy, let Iris pick the name, and Iris was a bit of a goofball.

Even though the store had a silly name, her mom took it very seriously and worked hard to make sure it succeeded. Apart from her three children, Ivy had been on her own since her husband had died in Afghanistan several years ago. Iris’s father had been called Nathan Lucas Patrick and died when Iris was very young; worst of all, he hadn’t even gotten to meet his youngest child, Nathan Patrick, Jr. (whom everyone just called “Little Nate”).

Iris kept a picture of Nathan Lucas Patrick in her top, left dresser drawer, and whenever she was feeling especially lonely or frustrated, she would take it out and hug it to her chest. “Daddy,” she’d often say, “If you’re out there somewhere, send me your love.” And most of the time, in fact, nearly every time, Iris felt like he was doing just that.

It takes a lot of money, time, and energy to raise three kids, and it’s very difficult for a single parent to maintain a decent standard of living, especially in a coastal state like New Jersey. Thankfully, Ivy’s oldest daughter, Indigo, had turned 18 recently and left home to join the Army just like her dad. Not that Iris was happy to see her older sister go, but it was one less person for Mom to take care of, and the food spread out a little more evenly with “Indi” as they called her, now gone—well, mostly gone. Whenever she could, Indi would Skype with the family and update them on her career and her travels. They’d even been able to play a couple of simple games together over the internet.

Iris’s lips were bright pink, like the color of that cartoon character, The Pink Panther. Her smile never showed teeth because she’d been inspired by the Mona Lisa when she was in 2nd grade. She was captivated by the famous painting and had asked her teacher what made the painting so special. The teacher smiled and said, “It’s the smile; small and mysterious.” So, Iris, who felt that she also was small and mysterious, never smiled with her teeth again. If a photographer told her to say “cheese”, she would just hum it.

Iris’s eyes were deep green, like the color of shamrocks, but when she was happy they seemed to get a little brighter, more like emeralds. They were very big and round, and if you looked closely you could see golden rings around her pupils and tiny flecks of gold in the irises. She was quite proud of her irises, and she would often point them out to people and say, “My name is Iris…that’s ‘cause I have cool irises. Check ‘em out!” She’d been told that when she was sad or surprised that they would turn blue, but she’d never witnessed this herself. Iris liked her eyes because very few people had green eyes – in fact, she could only recall ever having known one other person who had them: Little Nate. Oh, and one other, but he was lost to her now.

Her ears were small and round. There wasn’t much to say about them except the fact that the only earrings she wore in them were dangling, feathered ones her father had given her before his last deployment. While her mother did make beautiful jewelry, including earrings, at Artsy Fartsy, she was fine with Iris wearing only that pair; it was understandable, and Ivy was an understanding mother.

There was nothing special about Iris’s nose. It wasn’t small, it wasn’t big. It wasn’t ugly, nor was it pretty. Sure, some might call it “cute” because of the freckles, but not everyone thinks freckles are cute Iris would often point out, nor does everyone wish to be thought of as “cute”. And this was certainly true enough, especially for Iris who absolutely hated her freckles; but the only thing she hated more was when people dared to call her “cute”. She made it very clear to those who tried that she would not answer to, nor would she tolerate continued use of the word in reference to her. She’d rather be pretty or ugly than “cute”. Why? Well, Little Nate was cute, for starters, and so were ponies, princesses, and little kitty cats. Barf! No thanks!

Iris was skinny with an average height for her age, but she was wiry and tough from playing outside and in the woods around where she lived. She ran and jumped and climbed and even swam. There was a lake out in her woods – a retention pond really – dug out for some abandoned housing project that had never come to fruition, but she and the other kids called it “Leech Lake”…for obvious reasons.

Iris’s mother hadn’t raised any fools—well, the jury was still out on Little Nate, but time would tell—so, although Iris did occasionally swim in the lake, she always checked herself thoroughly afterwards, to make sure there weren’t any little vampiric stowaways. Only once had she found one, attached to her foot, and she was surprised by how little it had hurt to peel the little bugger off. She didn’t even mind the blood, or the little wound that healed very quickly.

Iris’s woods were only hers in the summertime though. The rest of the year she had to go to school just like every other kid her age. She had many friends at Western Pines Elementary, and she was glad that in her school 6th grade was at the top of the Elementary School food chain because one of her friends had moved to Indiana, where she’d discovered she was at the bottom of the chain in a terrible-sounding place called Middle School. New Jersey didn’t have middle school, it had Junior High, and Iris was just fine with that.

Iris’s 6th grade teacher’s name was Ms. Crackleberry. Some of the students liked to call her Ms. “Cackleberry” because she cackled like a witch at her own jokes. Iris didn’t think that was very nice, but she supposed it was still funny. Iris was bright for her age, so she always excelled at academics but never let it go to her head. Ms. Crackleberry seemed to appreciate this and would often call on her in class and let her read out loud during many of the lessons. Despite this mild favoritism, Iris was well-liked by the majority of her classmates and could even be considered “popular” by most standards.

Her best friend’s name was Lilliana - Lilliana Blankenship, and she had blonde hair, blue eyes, and even more popularity than Iris - your typical Mary Sue. Iris and Lilliana were mostly friends because both of their fathers had died at war, even though they hadn’t known each other. They both died serving their countries and both loved their families, so that was enough for Iris to feel a special kinship with Lilliana and vice versa.

Iris and Lilliana were indeed best friends, the kind you are truly lucky to meet once in a lifetime. They had met each other shortly after Iris’s family had moved to Western Pines, a nice, quiet area surrounded by pine forests on three sides. Iris’s family's property, like that of many of her neighbors, stretched through the woods all the way back to the edge of the retention pond that separated her neighborhood from the abandoned one which was mostly empty, overgrown lots with a couple of badly damaged frames of houses that had never been completed.

Iris was wandering in her new woods when she saw what looked like a shadow monster from the distance; a shadow monster was a scary creature from a place she had seen in a movie called The Dark World. But, as the figure moved closer, Iris realized it was a girl around her age. The girl introduced herself as Lilliana, and when they went to Iris’s house, they were surprised to see Lilliana’s mom (whose name was Rachel) sitting in a chair next to Ivy - she was welcoming Iris’s family to the neighborhood. She’d brought a delicious banana cream pie.

“I see you’ve met Lilliana,” said Rachel to Iris. “What a coincidence!”

“Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. My name’s Iris, ‘cause I have cool irises, look at ‘em!” said Iris. She got up close and showed her eyes to Lilliana, opening them as wide as she could.

“Oh, cool!” said Lilliana, and both their mothers had a little laugh.

“At first, when I saw you in the woods,” Iris recounted, I thought you were a shadow monster.”

“From The Dark World?” asked Lilliana excitedly.

“Yes! How did you know?” cried Iris who’d thought she was the only girl her age who liked that show; and the two immediately bonded over that and many other things they found they had in common.

Upon being shown Iris's bedroom, Lilliana decreed that Iris was the coolest person she'd ever met. Iris had dreamcatchers all over her room from wall to wall and even some hanging from the ceiling. The last gift her dad had ever sent her was a little one with green feathers that she hung over her bed, and her collection had grown exponentially in the years following his passing.

That day, Lilliana and Iris played together until Lilliana had to leave, and they had remained fast friends ever since. They played in the woods all the time together. Lilliana’s family was very rich. Her mother had designed a popular fashion line called “GLAMerican” not long after losing her husband, and it had taken off like a rocket once it caught on, so they lived in a mansion which was about a ten-minute walk from Iris’s small house in Western Pines Estates, the oldest of the three subdivisions that made up Western Pines.

Despite this, Rachel spent a lot of time in the lower-middle-class neighborhood mingling with the people she'd grown up with and, once finding out how much she had in common with Iris's mother, hanging out at her house. Although she never said so out loud, Rachel didn't really seem to like the mansion very much, most likely on account of her husband not being around to share in her good fortune.

She would have Iris's family over occasionally, and they were eventually welcome to drop by whenever they liked, but Rachel preferred the company of Ivy in her friend's humble but cozy ranch with its screened-in porch and smattering of peach trees in the back yard, the fruit of which Ivy used to flavor her tea and make all kinds of desserts that Rachel and both their families loved.

Iris liked to call Lilliana “Lil”. Iris and Lil played hide and seek most of the time because the mansion was huge, and the forest had lots of spots to hide in. You might think that the two girls would want to spend more time in the mansion because it had a bowling alley, a workout room, an indoor and an outdoor pool, a spa, an indoor basketball court, and many other rooms, including Lilliana’s which was the biggest room in the house. But after playing there a few times, Iris and Lil both found themselves drawn to the forest.

The forest actually had a lot more and better hiding places. Iris’s favorite spot was this cool cave she’d discovered. The entrance was hard to find because it was a small pocket of land - basically, a hill with a hole in it. She and Lil originally called it, "The Secret Base", but after they saw the Woof-Man movie, they called it "Woof-Man HQ". Kiren (Lilliana’s brother) loved Woof-Man, which meant that Iris and Lil loved Woof-Man, because the comic made him happy.

Iris loved hiding in places like that. After she showed it to Lil and Kiren, it was a long time before she found another one just as cool. In fact, it was better than cool…it was indescribably amazing! No, really. It was the sort of thing you couldn’t even make up. She’d found it right at the edge of her family’s property; it had been obscured by leaves and brambles which Iris cleared away with a big, Y-shaped stick that she sometimes pretended was a divining rod.

The first time she went in, she couldn’t see anything; the cave was creepy and dark as a black hole. She was about to scramble back out when suddenly she spotted what she thought were small eyes twinkling at her from within the darkness, so she hurried out and called over Kiren and Lil. Lil got out her phone, turned on her flashlight, and the beam revealed…REAL JEWELS! They found rubies, they found lapis, emeralds, and even some gold. The two girls and Kiren looked at each other with their mouths hanging open and their eyes wide.

“Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh!” said Lilliana, holding her cell phone as steady as she could (but not doing a very good job on account of the excitement and jumping for joy). “We’re going to be rich!”

“You already are rich!” joked Iris. “But now I’m gonna be rich, too!” They both laughed and hugged each other.

“This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen!” exclaimed Kiren who showed his excitement by bobbing his head as if he were perpetually agreeing with something. Then the three of them spent the next several minutes just examining and touching the jewels and gold, hardly able to believe what they were seeing.

“We have to go tell my mom,” said Iris. “This is on our property, so she’s going to want to see this and figure out what to do next. I don’t know how to mine for jewels, do you?”

“Of course not, silly! But I know how to wear them,” Lil said in a mock movie star accent.

“This has to be the most interesting, exciting thing ever to happen in this town!” said Kiren. “It’s almost like…like the time Woof-Man stumbled onto that cave of bones, remember?” Kiren kept bobbing and crawling around trying to pry the gems out of the walls of the cave, the ceiling of which was just tall enough for Iris and Lil to walk under if they hunched, but not Kiren who was a good foot taller than the two of them. He had no luck but did manage to break off the tip of his little Swiss Army knife. “Aw man!” he lamented. “My dad gave me that knife!”

“Let’s go!” shouted Iris. So, they had one last look at their treasure trove and headed back through the woods to Iris’s house, but first Lil took a perfect picture for proof (because she was a perfect kind of kid who thought of things others didn’t).

When they got home, they told Ivy and Rachel and showed them the photo, and Ivy said, “Well kill me and send me to heaven!”

For the next several days, newspaper reporters, camera crews, and geologists gathered all around Iris’s house. She was so happy and ecstatic to see herself on TV and in the papers, along with Lil and Kiren, who were honest with the reporters about how Iris had been the one who discovered the cave.

Then one day, not long after her amazing find, something terrible happened. Iris went to check on her cave (which had now been fitted with battery-powered lights), and all the jewels were gone - all of them. Someone had sneaked onto her property in the middle of the night and had extracted all the gems from the rock walls of the cave. Even the gold had been chiseled out.

Iris couldn’t believe her pretty, green eyes, which welled up with tears. She just stood there in utter despair and dismay, shaking and crying…who would do such a terrible thing? Didn’t they know her mom had been struggling to pay the bills and make ends meet (despite her closeness with Rachel, Ivy would never ask her friend for money)? Good luck had finally come their way, and some wicked, selfish, horrible person had taken it all away.

The police had been called, the reporters and cameras made one more trip out to her home, and even one of the geologists came back, breaking off some of the rock walls with his various tools and instruments to look for more gems or gold, but alas, nothing was found but a single, bright green emerald, too little to break any records, but large enough to be pretty and quite valuable by normal standards. The kind geologist, whose name was Charlie Habbins, gave it to her and gave her a hug, saying how sorry he was that someone had stolen her impressive find.

Iris tried to give the emerald to Ivy, but her mother refused to take it, telling Iris that she deserved it and that they were going to be just fine, jewels or no jewels. Iris put the little emerald in the middle of her favorite dreamcatcher and watched it sparkle every night in its new home over her bed. She consoled herself by imagining that her cave had been a magic one in which all the treasure was cursed (except for her little emerald), and it would all bring bad luck to whoever had stolen it and turn into something awful, maybe poop, if they tried to sell it. That made her feel a little better.

Her dreams started to take on that theme, playing out scenes of poetic justice and retribution in which stereotypical thieves in black masks and prison escape outfits stole her jewels only to find themselves trapped in swamps of poop where emeralds would rain down upon their wicked heads as Iris, on a flying carpet above, shook her dreamcatcher over them, emerald after emerald emerging from the center like a mystic flood. And that was the summer. Soon school arrived, and the adventure, with all its joy and sorrow, became just another faded memory.

Iris’s school was like a school on a TV show: A lot of nondescript kids, a Mary Sue, a smart kid, a shy kid, and a group of bullies. This group of bullies was particularly…large. And trust me: they did not just pull pranks. They had been especially cruel of late to another one of Iris’s friends named Audreanna Pope, who liked to be called Audrie.

See, Audrie Pope was very shy, with mousy brown hair and sad little blue eyes that had dark circles under them which gave her a look of haunted wisdom. She was skinny - very skinny, almost anorexic looking. Although she was in 6th grade, she was often confused for a younger child and had been pegged as a 2nd grader more than once. Her family was very poor, and they didn’t get much food.

That’s why she received free school lunches, which is also why bullies always targeted her, and being so small she took their threats very seriously, so she was afraid to tell anyone. You will see later that Audreanna Pope was, despite her meekness and small size, the biggest person of all. But for now, let’s continue to look at the life and surroundings of Iris, for this is Iris’s story after all.

The bus driver was a very happy go lucky kind of guy, you know, like all positive energy and compliments. He isn’t important right now, nor will he ever be to this particular story, but he is worth mentioning because he was a part of Iris’s world, and she was very fond of him. He was the oldest person she knew and one of the kindest, always offering her a smile and a hello and often telling her how bright her eyes were today or how cool her outfit looked.

And of course, most girls had a big crush on a boy at her age; Iris was no exception. You may recall Kiren, Lilliana’s big brother and Woof-Man fanatic. Lilliana really cared about her big brother and trusted Iris, but she didn’t trust her enough to let her be her older brother’s girlfriend.

By the way, in case you didn’t notice, I’m narrating this and thought you might want to know who I am…I call myself The Dreamcatcher, and I’ve been with Iris for a long time; thought you might want to know…I can’t talk to you any more, I can only tell you the story now…it’s against Narrating Law.


 

Chapter Two

It was the middle of the night. Iris was wide awake and couldn’t sleep. It was raining outside, loudly and steadily.

“Why must that dumb butt Little Nate keep me up all night with his stupid crying?” she groaned, “As if all this rain isn’t loud enough pounding on our roof! I picked the attic as my room for a reason - attics should be quiet!” At the exact same time she’d finished her thought, Little Nate started crying even louder than before, as if answering her.

Little Nate looked a lot like Nathan Senior, but his hair was a dark jet black like his mother’s. He was probably the cutest baby brother alive! But his crying was starting to annoy Iris, and that’s when she remembered, “Mama’s on vacation with Aunt Rachel!” Iris ran down the hall, through the living room right past Gramma Gonnie who was dead to the world in the recliner, down the other hall, and into Little Nate’s room.

Little Nate was just lying in bed crying and shifting around in the middle of an apparent nightmare. “No, no, no, no, no, what’s wrong? Talk!” she touched him…and the strangest thing she’d ever experienced happened; stranger than Dad's magic tricks, stranger even than her cave of jewels: a round vortex appeared, dark green with a lighter shade of green swirling around within, a couple of inches taller than Kiren—odd, she thought, that she was thinking of the Blankenship kids…and Audrie.

The area inside the vortex was huge, big enough to fit about 100 people, then the green changed, transforming into a thin stream that became merely one of hundreds, perhaps thousands of colors, even strange ones for which no crayon had ever been made—bright neon blue, burnt orange with pink flakes around it, poop brown, and the brightest white you could possibly imagine—yet she sensed underneath it all, a blackness, a void in which no color, no shape, in fact nothing at all existed, and it terrified her. “Help!” she screamed, but a voice in her head (it was me, The Dreamcatcher!), told her that she could not be heard.

“Calm down. You’ll be okay; just save Little Nate, and you’ll be out in no time,” I told her. “You have a choice to make: You can walk away and go to your room and back to sleep; if you make this decision you will never hear from me again, or…you could go through the vortex and save your brother from his nightmare.” She went through without hesitation, and that was one of the smartest decisions of her life.

* * *

She went through…“Little Nate!?” she screamed. She saw a dark, inky, gooey looking abyss, something like what she had sensed behind the colors, but not quite the same; then she heard a very familiar sounding voice…but it was female, so it couldn’t be Little Nate. But who? She looked down into the abyss and saw a weird, brown and white, fist-looking thing. She saw something that looked human. As the thing came closer, she saw that it was actually a human girl with a giant fist.

“Please, don’t be afraid,” said the girl, “It’s me. It’s your best friend.”

* * *

“My best friend is Lilliana Blanksenship, and you are NOT Lilliana Blankenship. You are a strange-looking little girl with a giant fist and a weird costume, and I’ve never seen you before in my life!”

“Well, maybe I’m not your BEST friend…but I could be your SECOND best friend, right?” The strange-looking little girl did have a point—she did look very familiar somehow, Iris just couldn’t quite figure out why. “Look closely,” said the strange girl.

So, Iris did just that. This strange girl had the saddest looking blue eyes Iris had ever seen, and…dark circles under them! “Audrie! It IS you! But…but, how? What? I’m so confused…”

“Hey, I just found out too,” said Giant-Fist-Audrie. “I was just going to bed, and I finally got to sleep even though all three of my brothers and both of my sisters were snoring like elephants, and I started dreaming, when all these leech things started coming after me just like the ones in Leech Lake, but bigger. I had a choice: I could either run like a chicken, or I could fight back. And the second I decided to fight, my fist grew a hundred times bigger, and I started smashing those leeches with my giant new hand! Look!” Iris squinted a little and looked at the abyss below them and saw hundreds of squish-squashed leeches.

“Ewww!!” said Iris, but she was smiling. “That’s so gross! But how were you able to grow a giant fist and smash them all? And for that matter, how are we able to walk on this darkness like it’s a floor?” And then she saw something. A small figure, a human being with jet black hair like her mom in the distance. It was still, so she started to move towards it, with Giant-Fist-Audrie following behind her, and as she got closer, she realized the figure was Little Nate!

“Hey,” said Giant-Fist-Audrie, “Isn’t that your baby brother?”

“Yeah”, said Iris, “but you didn’t answer my question!”

“I told you,” said Audrie, “This is all new for me too, but if I had to guess, I’d say the ground is just some kind of platform that’s the same color of the rest of this dark mess!”

“Well,” Iris replied, “It’s freakin’ me out! And how come you get a costume, and how come it looks like Woof-Man as a girl?”

“It just showed up on me as soon as I started smashing all those leeches,” Giant-Fist-Audrie explained, “And I guess it looks like it does because Woof-Man is the only super hero I really like.”

Just then, something very strange happened. On Giant-Fist-Audrie’s chest, there appeared a giant fist logo with the letters GFA inside. “What in the world?!? Look at your shirt!” exclaimed Iris.

Giant-Fist-Audrie looked down and saw what Iris was seeing. “I don’t get it,” she said. “What does GFA stand for?”

“Well,” said Iris, “I was just thinking about a super hero name for you, and all I could think of was “Giant-Fist-Audrie”, so that must be what GFA stands for!”

They both giggled, then Audrie got serious and asked, “Why is your little brother here?”

“Oh, that’s an easy one,” said Iris, “A voice told me that this is Little Nate’s dream.”

“YES, WHAT I TOLD YOU WAS TRUE,” my booming voice said in their heads.

“Please tell me you heard that,” Audrie and Iris said to each other at the same time.

“OF COURSE YOU BOTH HEARD ME - YOU’RE BOTH IN THIS DREAM!”

“Wait a sec,” Iris said, “You’re the one who spoke to me on my way into this bizarro world!”

“Yeah!” said Audrie, “And you’re the one who said, ‘Nice outfit,’ and giggled when my costume first appeared.”

“YES AND YES. AND NOW, YOU BOTH HAVE HEARD ME TOGETHER. SO NOW, I NEED YOU TO LISTEN TO ME TOGETHER IF YOU WANT TO SAVE LITTLE NATE...”