All Our Pretty Songs Part 10

"Did you? Or did you just want an excuse to follow where she was already going?"

"Raoul. I love her."

"I know you do, but love can make us do ugly things, too. Sometimes I think you don't really see her; you see the same thing everyone else sees when they look at her. Something ornamental. Underneath, though, she's just as real and hurt as you are."

"But Jack and Aurora have this kind of magic. I'll never have whatever it is that makes them what they are." Raoul opens his mouth to protest, but I cut him off. "It's fine. I don't mind. I mean, I do mind. But it is what it is. I wish sometimes it came that easily for me, too. It's hard not to be jealous."

"I don't think it's easy," he says. "Not for Jack, and certainly not for Aurora."

"How can it not be easy for Aurora? Look at her."

"That's what I mean," he says. "Look at her. Look at both of them. Do you ever think about what a curse it might be, to look like that? To know that no matter what you were made of, no matter what you did with your life, no one would ever see past your face? Your skin?"

"What does that have to do with Jack leaving me for Aurora?"

"Now you're not listening to me, either." For the first time, he's angry. I feel a hot surge of hurt and open my mouth to say something, close it again. "Just think about it," he says. "For me."

"Do you feel like that?"

"All the time," he says simply. "I mean, I write poetry, so there's not much chance I'll have to make a choice like Jack did, but if it ever happens I know what it will be like. Do I see myself as a poet or as a brown poet or as a queer poet, as if all of those things are separate boxes I check depending on what day of the week it is. If I write about my family, people will ask me why I don't write poetry that's relatable, and if I don't write about my family, they'll ask me how I can stand to betray my roots. If I write about nature people will tell me how moving it is that my people are so connected to the earth. If I write about the city people will tell me how brave I am for talking about the realities of the urban experience. And none of those people will actually read the words I write. Everyone lives with it differently. Some people push it down so far inside they think it can't hurt them, and it festers there. Some people talk about it. Some people don't. Jack told you he was making the best decision he knew how to make in the circ.u.mstances he has to deal with. He has something people want, and it's up to him to decide how he gives it to them. How he lets them take it."

"But it was selfish."

"All the best artists are selfish. You can't be good unless you care about the work more than you care about anything else."

"But what about me?" As soon as I say it I want to take it back. This is the most Raoul has ever said to me about anything serious, this is the biggest thing he has ever trusted me with, and all I can do is come out of it sounding like a spoiled child. But with that hanging in the air between us, I see what Raoul has been trying to tell me. What Jack was trying to tell me. "Oh," I say. "It's not about me at all."

"No."

I cover my eyes with my hands. I always thought Aurora could metabolize love the way she can metabolize Dr Pepper and vodka and bad speed, that it pa.s.sed through her without marking her and left only more emptiness in its wake. I have known her as long as I have known myself; there is no story of me without her written in every chapter. But now for the first time I wonder if the flaw isn't hers, but mine. If all along it was me taking without thinking, not her. If what Aurora has given me isn't infinitely more priceless than what I've given her, and if now I'm letting her slide into darkness without a fight because it's easier than bringing my own faults into the light.

"Why are you always right," I mumble into my palms.

"I do a lot of thinking."

"It hurts," I say. "It hurts a lot."

"I know it does. And it doesn't mean Jack doesn't love you. It just means there are bigger things than you. Jack's allowed to love music more than he loves you. I know it's hard to hear, but that doesn't make it any less true. That's what he said, isn't it?"

"Pretty much."

"Then there's not much you can do about it except choose how you're going to deal with it. You can hate him for it, or you can figure out how to let him go."

"I don't want to let him go. I want him back. I want both of them back."

"Indeed," he says. "There's the rub."

SEPTEMBER.

After everything that's happened, it's hard to believe in high school, but that doesn't mean I don't have to go. It's only September, but the summer's ended as swiftly as a doused fire. The first morning of school is so cold the sidewalk outside my building is rimed with frost. I put on a ratty black hoodie over my rattiest shirt and rattiest pair of black jeans, run my fingers through my ratty hair, lace up my ratty combat boots. Ratty fingerless gloves and a ratty wool beanie and a ratty down vest. Jack used to joke he'd pay me to wear a color other than black. I tug the hood of my sweatshirt up over the beanie. Maybe if I turtle down far enough into it I'll disappear altogether.

I bike to school with my headphones in my ears, even though Ca.s.s always tells me I'll get killed that way, listening to an old Earth alb.u.m cranked up as loud as a headache. Coming down the last hill, I hit a patch of ice and the back wheel skids out from under me before I know what's happening. I land flat on my back, somehow manage not to crack my skull on the ground. I'm starting a trend: the full-on wipeout, by foot or by wheel. Awesome. I lie in the street for a moment, stunned. Maybe another hapless suit will wander past and I can scream my head off at him, too.

I pick myself up, check for damage. There's a hole in my sleeve and my neck hurts. No one saw me, for which I'm grateful. Bike's fine, wheels still true, but I walk it the rest of the way to school anyway, limping as the pain sets in. I'll have hefty war wounds and no one to show them off to.

High school has gotten no less prisonlike over the summer. I'm a senior now, officially at the top of the totem pole, building memories and planning for my future. No one bothered to clean the hallways over summer break. Dark smears of spilled soda and other, more mysterious fluids have dried to a gummy residue that absorbs the lurid fluorescent light and gives the linoleum floors a three-dimensional effect. I slouch from cla.s.s to cla.s.s, sit in the back, keep my head down and speak only when spoken to. Which is, thanks to the halo of menace I radiate, pretty much never. Between cla.s.ses I jam my headphones back into my ears and glare. People look at me, look away quickly, and then glance back. They want to know why Aurora's ray of sunshine isn't around to offset my personal cloud of doom. Want to know why we aren't joined at the hip, cutting cla.s.s to smoke in the parking lot or get stoned with the metalheads behind the gym. Aurora making eyes at everyone, Aurora in her ridiculous clothes, Aurora dancing by herself on the football field, not caring who sees her, not caring that the music is in her head.

At lunch, some girl from my homeroom sidles up to me with a puppy face. "What." I take off my headphones.

"I was just wondering, you know, where Aurora was."

"Not here."

"Is she having a back-to-school party?"

"Do you see anything to celebrate?"

She stares at me, and I put my headphones back on. That's the last time anyone tries to talk to me for a week.

I pull my Bartleby routine like cheer has gone out of style. Even in art cla.s.s I'm sullen. The teacher is new this year, some fresh-out-of-college stoner who can't quite hide his hanker for the choicer meats of the senior cla.s.s. I refuse to partic.i.p.ate in his earnest still lifes, leaving my sketchbook ostentatiously blank and staring out the window, or drawing weird landscapes peopled with stag-headed men moving through the shadows when I'm supposed to be drawing a vase and an apple. On Friday, Ca.s.s pounces as I slink through the door after work. My hours at the market are patches of post-school heaven. Raoul won't let me mope. He tells me jokes, tugs my hair, makes eyes at the fish-stall boys in front of me. I'm almost in a good mood by the time I get home.

"I got a call from the school." Ca.s.s points me to the couch. I collapse in a sulky pile.

"About?"

"What do you think?" She perches on the edge of an armchair we once reupholstered in sc.r.a.ps of tapestry. They're fraying now. Like everything. I chew on my fingers and fidget. She tries to stare me down, but I refuse to meet her eyes.

"Look, baby. I know this is hard, but there's nothing you can do. If they want to come back, they'll come back. If you don't bring up your grades, you won't get into art school."

"We can't afford art school."

"All the more reason not to alienate the person responsible for recommending you for scholarships, don't you think?"

"I really miss them."

"I know you do. I miss Aurora, too. But you're not doing anyone any good by turning into a little gothic nightmare. Your art teacher is terrified of you."

"He's an idiot."

"I'm sure he is, but you're not, and there's no reason to burn a bridge that might lead to a happier place. You really want to spend the rest of your life hustling fruit and shacking up with your hippie mom?"

"The horror." I let a smile through. Throw her a bone.

"So we'll put our game face on, shall we?" I shrug. Her hand whips forward and seizes my chin. "I said, shall we?"

"Yes," I mutter, and her grip tightens. "Yes!" I yelp. "Jesus." She releases me and I flee for the safety of my room. After that, I draw the vases and the apples and Ca.s.s leaves me alone.

It's hard to believe I didn't imagine the entire summer. Every morning I put on gloves and a beanie and two hoodies before I ride to school. The cheerleaders make a show of displaying their tans in short shorts and cropped jackets, but even they give up the fight after one too many days cl.u.s.tered together in the hallway like a gaggle of plucked chickens, p.r.i.c.kling with gooseb.u.mps.

Fall is usually my favorite season. I love the sharp clear days, the smell of fallen leaves, even the lurking menace of winter with its endless rains around the corner. I love spending long afternoons with Aurora, drinking coffee until our fingers twitch and watching the sky grow dark a little earlier each day, borrowing her cashmere sweaters and biker jackets, stomping around in my tallest boots. I love that feeling of coc.o.o.ning inward. Aurora hates any weather in which she cannot be constantly naked, but she's always gone along with my enthusiasm, trying to knit scarves or make soup or take up weaving or some other project she's const.i.tutionally unsuited for. She never fails to leave off in the middle, with predictably disastrous results. She nearly set her house on fire the night she tried to make me minestrone. It was supposed to be a surprise, and then she forgot about it, and the soup burned down to a puck of coal while we watched Fast Times at Ridgemont High in her bed, and it wasn't until we smelled smoke that she yelled "s.h.i.t! s.h.i.t!" and catapulted downstairs to a blackened, toxic mess. She threw it, pot and all, in the yard, where it stayed for weeks.

But now she's gone, and so is Jack, and with them my dreams of piling up together in Jack's house, the three of us watching rain fall against the windows and drinking tea and reading books out loud to each other. Later, Jack and I falling asleep under a pile of blankets, safe from the storm thundering overhead, skin to skin. Him writing me songs and me painting him pictures. This hazy fantasy does not include such trivial details as school, or work, or the fact that I still live with my mother. Ca.s.s has her quirks, but worrying about s.e.x and nights away from home isn't one of them. I could probably have worked around her as long as I came home for dinner sometimes. But none of that is going to happen now. I scuff through the fallen leaves on my own.

I go to shows without Aurora, feeling like half of me is missing. I hand over my fake ID and watch as the guys working the door look around me, waiting for her. I slam-dance at the front of the pit, throwing myself up against sweaty shirtless boys who punch me back when I punch them. Afterward I let them shove me up against the wall in the alley or the bathroom and kiss me, push their hands up under my clothes. When I kiss them back I bite down until I draw blood. Less like s.e.x and more like a fistfight, dirty and mean. It feels good. In those moments I forget about Jack and Aurora at last, forget about everything except my body's need for harder, faster, louder, bigger, bigger, more. I wear scarves to school, never let Ca.s.s see my bruise-colored skin, go to all my cla.s.ses and keep my eyes open and then do it all over again. When the music stops the hole inside me is so huge I think I might die from it.

Without Aurora to watch over, I'm free to get as drunk as I want, to f.u.c.k up and f.u.c.k up again. Free to say yes to anything, to all the bad ideas. Free to slam so hard in the pit my teeth hurt, to let anyone in. One night I meet a boy I've never seen before. Brown doe eyes in a hard face. I can't tell which is the true part, whether the gentleness in his eyes is real or a mask. He asks me my name. "Aurora," I say.

"That's pretty." He buys me a drink, and then another one. Is this what it feels like to be beautiful? Is this what it feels like to know everyone is watching you, everyone wants what's under your skin? I can't ask her because she's not here. But if she were here, no one would look at me first. Later, I let the boy kiss me in the back of his van, yank my jeans down, shove his way inside. He licks my ear and it's supposed to be s.e.xy. His breath smells like beer and unbrushed teeth. I close my eyes. If I concentrate hard enough I can be back at the park, that very first night. The night I met Jack and everything started to fall apart. "Aurora," he grunts in my ear. "Aurora, Aurora." I think for a minute he is saying her name because she is here, in the front seat, smoking, rolling her eyes. Come on, babycakes, let's go. But when I open my eyes the night is real and his van smells like cigarettes and old takeout and my legs are cold despite the press of his body, and I am all the way alone.

"Get off me."

"What?"

"Get the f.u.c.k off me." I shove him over, wriggle out from under him, zip up my jeans. Try not to think about the blanket underneath me or where it's been.

"That's not what you were saying a minute ago." In that moment I have never hated another human being so much in my life. If I stay here I'll put out his eyes with my thumbs.

"I have to go."

"Will I see you again?"

"You better hope not." I open the door of his van and stumble out into the night.

There is no one to look out for me except Raoul. If I call him, if I need him, he'll come for me, but I like feeling as though I am falling into darkness so wide no one will be able to see when I hit the bottom. I'll be out of sight before they even know where to look. Going, going, gone.

I ride past Jack's house on my way home from work a few nights later. I stop my bike in the street outside, half-hoping to see lights inside, maybe even him sitting on the front porch playing guitar in the cold. But the jungle of vines in his front yard has withered into desiccated husks that snag at my clothes as I push my bike down the walkway. His flowers are reduced to rank brown piles that give off a sour smell of rot. His spare key is still in its spot under a loose brick. I hold it for a moment, thinking, and then I let myself in.

The bed is unmade and there are dirty dishes in the sink, dregs in a coffee cup furred over with mold. Clothes on the floor, a pair of his boots leaning against each other in the corner. The emptiness in the room is so thick I can taste it. The house is cold. A draft stirs against my cheek. The window is open. I'm already inside; might as well keep going. I cross the room and shut the window against the night air. Run my finger across the card table. My fingertip comes back grey with dust. One corner of the Rousseau poster has come loose from the wall and dangles forlornly. If there is a magic trick that will bring Jack back to me, its instructions are not here.

I pick up a shirt off the floor. Worn flannel with a hole in one elbow. I remember him in it. It's the shirt he was wearing the night I read his cards. I slip my arms into the sleeves, wrap it around me. The cuffs dangle past my knuckles. If this were the kind of story I want to be in, he'd have left something for me. A note under the pillow, a charm under a loose floorboard. A box of talismans, a salve for sore losers. If this were the kind of story I want to be in, I'd have a trail of breadcrumbs to follow, a message written in invisible ink that I only needed to shine a light on to make the words real. Better yet, the quest would end here and he'd be waiting for me, sitting on his bed, wondering where I'd been. He'd tell me he was sorry, that what mattered most was not the music, not the outside world, not what he had come here to seek out, but what he had found in me. That we could spend the rest of our lives here in this room, learning all each other's stories, learning the patterns of our bodies, the rhythms of our breath. If this were the kind of story I want to be in, I'd flip back to the pages where all the words made sense and the ending wasn't written yet.

His bed still smells like him, honey and sweat. I crawl between the covers, put my head on the dirty pillow. His shirt, his bed, his house. His absence is so strong it has a texture. You a.s.shole, I think. You weren't supposed to leave me behind. But in my head Aurora's face overlaps his, the edges blurring, until I can't tell which one of them is standing in front of me, waiting for me to follow. I am at the edge of the river again, the bone trees all around me. I see the flash of her white hair on the far bank, hear the pa.s.sing music of a single chord, and then nothing. I am standing, barefoot and b.l.o.o.d.y, knowing Aurora and Jack are ahead of me somewhere in the dark. They have gone on together and I am lost on this, the opposite side.

I wake up a few hours later with a start, not sure where I am for long moments. I don't remember crying, but my face is tracked with salt. The room has the spare, washed-thin feel of very early morning. Outside, a misty rain is falling. I take Jack's shirt and leave everything else as it is. Dirty dishes, books with cracked spines, unmade bed, silence. I ride home in the damp night, in and out of the pooled light of streetlamps.

I let myself into the apartment as quietly as I can. Ca.s.s's door is closed. No bar of light seeps out the bottom, but there's a plate of m.u.f.fins in the kitchen that still carry a trace of the oven's heat. I eat one standing over the sink, tearing it apart with my fingers into smaller and smaller pieces, soft chunks of apple tangy-sweet in my mouth. If I keep doing nothing I will lose my mind. In my room I take off all my clothes, shivering, and then put Jack's flannel on again. The fabric is soft against my skin, the smell of him somehow stronger. I put my hand between my legs. No matter how hard I try I cannot quite picture his face.

OCTOBER.

It's the week before Halloween when I see the poster. I bike a roundabout way to school that morning, wanting to put off the inevitable as long as possible despite the gentle, half-hearted rain that mists down in a chilly cloud. I'm listening to the same Earth alb.u.m I've been playing for weeks, the sludgy wall of guitar soothing me as I pedal, like a metalhead version of those tapes of whale songs and crashing waves that are supposed to help you fall asleep. I smoke a joint in the morning now, on the days I go to school, and another one at lunch, until I'm so stoned I'm moving around in my own impermeable bubble, my thoughts stilled into silence.

Aurora and I love Halloween best of all the holidays. I always pretend to be lazy and disinclined to find a costume, and she makes a great fuss about it and berates me for my indifference; but of course secretly I love the ritual of her convincing me every year, and she knows it. Aurora's a magnificent scavenger, a holy terror in thrift stores and secondhand shops, with a magpie's eye for glitter and an unerring instinct for hidden treasure buried among the detritus of molting down jackets and dog-eared paperbacks. What I lack in thrifting skills I make up for in the kind of single-minded, tenacious patience that allowed me to sew hundreds of white feathers to a set of leotards the year Aurora decided we should be owls, or stud a pair of denim jackets with so many fake gemstones they were as heavy as armor the year we went as Jem and a singular Hologram. Aurora smokes out my window while I work, drinking coffee and nattering at me and pretending to help. She throws glorious parties every year, legendary parties-ice sculptures of monsters dotting the yard, the whole house done up like a haunted mansion with cobwebs and people leaping at you out of darkened hallways, dressed as mummies or vampires or corpses with their flesh peeling away. This year, without her, it's like the color has gone out of the world, and the growing tribe of jack-o'-lanterns grinning from front porches and windows only serves to remind me of what I've lost.

I'm waiting at an intersection when I see the poster out of the corner of my eye. I swing a leg off my bike and walk it over. The paper is faded and stained, one corner missing, but there's no mistaking Jack's name, or the name of the club, or the date. Halloween. Four days away.

I stand there for a long time, as the light changes and then changes again. A man leans out his car window. "Hey kid, you okay? You got a flat?" I turn, and he sees my face. "You okay?" he says again.

"I'm fine." Forever pestered by earnest middle-aged men longing to help and destined to be spurned. He's driving a minivan; he's probably used to it. The car behind him honks, and he shrugs and drives away. I tear the poster off the telephone pole, fold it into smaller and smaller squares. Stuff it in my pocket. I have three days to decide what I'm going to do about it.

That night, Ca.s.s makes us curry. I chop vegetables while she sautes tofu, puts a pot of brown rice on the stove to simmer. "I saw a poster for a show Jack's playing," I say. Casual. No big deal.

"Where?"

"Los Angeles. I'm going to find a way to go. I'm sure Aurora is there."

She raises an eyebrow at me, incredulous. "Oh you are, are you? This event taking place over my dead body?"

"What do you care?" I'm traveling fast from pouty to fully porcupined, the hot fire of rage taking me by surprise. Get on this roller coaster, see where it flies off the track.

"What do I care? I'm your mother."

"That's never stopped you from letting me do whatever I wanted before."

"We're not having this conversation now."

"Oh yeah? Were we going to have this conversation, like, ever? I'm not like you." I'm shouting now, the words coming out of the ragged hole in my chest I've been filling with strangers and too many drinks, but now that I'm reaching into the mess there's no stopping me. "I'm not like you," I snarl again. "I'm not going to write Aurora off. Everyone else in her f.u.c.king life has abandoned her. She's down there on her own and she needs me and I'm going to get her."

Ca.s.s is staring at me like I've hit her. "I love Aurora. You know that."

"Not enough to pay attention! Not enough to stop her from practically killing herself! You left her in that house with Maia, you never even tried to take her with us-"

Ca.s.s cuts me off. Her voice is deadly. "I left that house because if I stayed there I knew I would be a junkie for the rest of my G.o.dd.a.m.n life. I left that house for you. To be a parent. To be the closest thing to a parent I knew how to be. I have always done everything I could for Aurora, but you were the first person I had to take care of. You. It's bad enough that you're out every night now, that I have no idea where you are half the time, that you spent this summer running around with a grown man on my watch. You are a child, do you understand? No matter what you think you are, you are still a child. You are not going to Los Angeles, and that's final."

"You're supposed to be the adult here! You're supposed to help her!"

"Listen. I was nineteen when I gave birth to you, and I knew I would have to look my own child in the face someday and tell her I wasn't strong enough to stay sober while I was pregnant, that I couldn't tell her who her father was because I didn't even know. I am doing the best I G.o.dd.a.m.n can, all right? And I might have made some mistakes with you, and G.o.d knows I made some mistakes with Maia, but if you think I am going to let you relearn every basic lesson I already have committed to memory you have got another think coming. You are not going to Los Angeles, you are not going after some musician" -she says musician like it's a bad word- "and you are not going to follow Aurora into whatever drugged-out h.e.l.l she's headed for. You can't save her, baby. You can't. It's not your job." The muscles in her cheeks twitch. There's something she's not telling me. I think of what Maia said when I saw her after Aurora's party. You tell Ca.s.s I said she can go to h.e.l.l.

"Why did we really leave Maia's?"

"I just told you."

"You didn't tell me the whole story. Why did you leave Aurora there? Why haven't you ever gone back? Why don't you and Maia talk?"

Ca.s.s actually flinches. "What did Maia tell you?"

"Nothing. She didn't tell me anything, because no one tells me a f.u.c.king thing. You're both supposed to be adults, and you act like f.u.c.king teenagers. You threw Aurora to the wolves and you won't even tell me why."

She looks out the window. Fat raindrops spatter against the gla.s.s. The sky is a dull, sullen grey. "I almost killed you," she says quietly. Her eyes have a bright shimmer of unshed tears. "I almost killed you both. It was after Aurora's dad died. Things were ... bad. I was loaded all the time. There were always people around with more drugs. This scary old guy."

"Minos."

She shakes her head. "I don't remember his name. He was always telling us things. We would see a world we didn't even know existed. We would be rich. We would be famous. He was right. Aurora's dad did get famous. And then everything went to s.h.i.t. I can't explain to you what it was like. We were so sad, and it was impossible to say no to something that felt that good. You and Aurora didn't always-we didn't always-" She's crying for real now. "We didn't always take care of you. I don't know how much you remember. There was one day when I wanted to give the two of you a bath. You know how big that bathtub is in Aurora's room. Maia came in when I was-I was out. Pa.s.sed out. You were both in the water. Aurora was under-" She makes a low, awful noise and stops, her shoulders heaving. I wait. "She would have drowned if Maia hadn't found us. Maia said a lot of things to me that I deserved. That no matter how f.u.c.ked up she got she would never put either of you in danger. That she always made sure someone was around who could take care of you. It was true back then. You had a nanny. Aurora's dad's bandmates. There were a few people who were sober most of the time." She laughs, bitter. "I mean, there was a f.u.c.king bodyguard for a while. It was crazy. We were kids. It was so much money. We had no idea what we were doing. Maia told me to get out of her house before I killed her daughter, so I took you and I left. I knew I had to get sober. It took everything I had. By the time I was clean and realized how bad things had gotten over there, it was too late."

"What do you mean, it was too late? Why didn't you do something?"

"I told Aurora she could come live with us. She said she didn't want to."

"When was this?"