7: Iris: A Voice not Heard

It’s one of those rare warm, sunny days in March. Iris sits waiting on her front stoop when I arrive to fetch her and take her back to my house for the interview. She’s wearing faded blue jeans, a tee-shirt, a hoodie, and a dark teal knit beret. She has small gauges in each ear, and her eyes—“a deep moody chestnut, with splashes of yellow and dark green”¹—peer out from under artfully contoured brows. The first of most of these interviews has taken place at the Youth Center, because for several of the young people who’ve spoken with me, the Center is a place where they feel supported; it’s comfortable there. Iris, however, has asked not to be interviewed at the Center, and as we talk, I discover that there are few places and even fewer peers with whom Iris feels truly at home. In what appears at first as irony, Iris’s self-imposed isolation stands in sharp contrast to her extraordinarily keen understanding of the value of social relationships. “I keep pretty much to myself,” she tells me, over and again. Paradoxically, from a distant perch, Iris lays to waste the myth of the rugged individual. She is a rare gift to the sociologist; a wonderful anomaly who sees context and interaction wherever her gaze falls, and can tell her story with uncommon clarity and heartbreak.