All Our Pretty Songs Part 2

"You smell like boy." She squirrels down next to me and I tuck my chin against her shoulder. "Tell me everything," she says, and I tell her.

"You like him."

"I like him."

"Don't go away from me," she whispers. "Everybody goes away from me."

"I'm not going anywhere." The curtains move although there is no wind. Everything else has gone still. I close my eyes and all I can see is him: his face, his eyes, his hands with the knife, cutting into the peach. His hands on my skin. "I'm not going anywhere," I say again, this time less certain. I put my arm around Aurora, curl up against the curve of her back, and wait for dawn.

In the morning the world seems ordinary again. I leave Aurora asleep and pad into the kitchen, where Ca.s.s is at our scarred wooden table with a tarot spread in front of her and her hands around her favorite chipped blue mug. The kitchen is so familiar, so shabby and un-mysterious. This is our apartment, the ancient green stove whose left burners only work when they have a mind to, the tangle of houseplants in their net hammocks dangling from the ceiling, trailing leafy streamers down the cheery yellow walls. There are the wooden shelves lined with mason jars full of Ca.s.s's herbs and roots and flowers. If I opened the cupboards I would find plates that did not match, jam jars doing double duty as water gla.s.ses, mugs from the Salvation Army that say things like WORLD'S #1 TEACHER and FORTY AND LOVING IT! I can smell bread baking. Nothing sinister could possibly happen in this kitchen. I pour myself a cup of coffee, the one vice Ca.s.s allows, and sit at the table, tucking my feet up underneath me. Ca.s.s looks tired, the lines around her grey eyes more p.r.o.nounced. She stares at the cards, chewing on her lip.

"You look like Fate is not on your side this morning," I say.

"I was asking about Maia. It never changes much." She sweeps the cards into a pile, shuffles them, puts them away in their carved wooden box, and shakes herself. "Let's talk about happier things." I can't stop the smile that spreads across my face.

"I met a boy." Boy is the wrong word. She laces her long fingers together.

"A boy," she echoes.

"At Aurora's party. He was playing music in the garden. It wasI'd never" I falter. I can't describe what happened that night when Jack played. "It was better than anything I had ever heard. And then he talked to me, and yesterday we went to the ocean after I got off work, and we had a picnic." Describing it in our homely kitchen makes it seem as though what's happening to me is ordinary, too. I am a girl, it is summer. I like a boy. In the fall I will start school again. There is no room for skeleton men in this kitchen, no place for songs that are like spells. For a moment I can stop thinking about Jack's mouth. But Ca.s.s's eyes are serious now.

"Be careful," she says.

"I will."

"You don't know him."

"It feels like I do." Is that true? I don't know. Something in me recognizes something in him. His body brings my body home. If that's not a kind of knowing, I don't need to know what knowing is.

She sighs and runs her hands through her hair. There is grey in it now, which still surprises me. Ca.s.s has always seemed barely older than I am. She refuses to dye her hair dark again, which I think is funny, considering how many unnatural colors it was when she was younger. "That's a different kind of vanity," she'd said when I pointed that out. "I'm not afraid of growing up."

Now she scowls at me. "That's always how it feels."

"This is different."

"You're seventeen. You think everything is different when you're seventeen. How old is he? What does he do?"

"He's a musician." I ignore the first question.

"Stay away from musicians."

"Don't worry."

"Of course I worry. I let you do whatever you want, I let you grow up without" She stops. She had been about to say without a father. "I let you run around with Aurora," she says instead. "Be careful." Her face is impossible to read.

"I promise."

"Is someone baking bread?" Aurora asks from the doorway. She's sleepy-eyed and tousled, her shirt slipping off one shoulder, her white hair disordered.

"It should be about done," Ca.s.s says, and gets up to check the oven. Aurora takes a mug out of a cabinet, pours the last of the coffee. She has never commented on the fact that my house has four rooms and hers has forty, or that you can see the floorboards through our fraying rugs, or that nearly all the beautiful things we own are things Aurora bought for us. She gave me a Kiki Smith print for my birthday last year that's worth more than everything else in our house put together.

"G.o.d, I had the weirdest dream," she says, sitting down.

"What did you dream?" Ca.s.s asks.

"I was being chased by this man, and his eyes were made out of fire, and he wanted something from me but I didn't know what it was. I was running through this weird apartment with all these windows and on the walls were these terrible paintings of people being tortured, and everywhere there was this music and it was getting louder and louder. And all I wanted was to stop and go to sleep there and forget everything, but I knew if I stopped the man would never let me leave again." As she talks a cloud moves across the sun and the light in the kitchen dulls. Ca.s.s closes her eyes, reaches forward, touches Aurora's forehead with two fingers. She whispers something, opens her eyes, takes her hand away.

"I'll make you some tea." She takes away Aurora's coffee mug. Aurora makes a noise of protest as Ca.s.s pours the coffee down the drain and sets the kettle on the stove.

"Humor her," I say.

Ca.s.s takes jars down from her shelves, measures out herbs. "Will you tell me if you have that dream again?" Like me, she's trying to keep her words light, but I know she is as unnerved as I am.

"Sure," Aurora says, yawning. "Can I have a little coffee?"

"Later," Ca.s.s says.

"It was like I wanted the man to catch me, though," Aurora says. "In the dream. Like I knew he could give me something in return, for whatever it was he was going to take, and I wanted to know what it was. There was something beautiful about him, too. The whole thing felt so real."

"It's a mask," Ca.s.s says quietly with her back to us. "Beauty like that is always a mask."

"It was a dream," Aurora says. "Can I have some bread, at least?"

Later, after Aurora goes home, and Ca.s.s takes her cards and her crystals and her charts and goes to meet a client, I try to draw Jack. I rifle through my records and put on the Gits, smooth the blank sheet of paper with my palms, get out my pencils, arrange and rearrange them, pick them up and put them down again. Whenever I close my eyes all I see is him. I draw a line and it's wrong, another line and it's worse, turn the paper over, try again. I can see him in my mind but not with my hands. Everyone at the party had moved toward him when he played, unseeing, their mouths open, their eyes blank. My work does not have that kind of power, or anything close. There is no magic in anything I ever draw; only labor, and love, and sometimes a grace that becomes larger than the paper or the canvas, so that you can see for a moment the person inside as though they are about to speak to you or come alive. But that does not happen very often, and most of the time my pictures are only pictures, and a lot of the time they are not very good at all. I put the pencil down. I don't want to draw him. I want him here, in my room, his hands across my skin again, his mouth. I want him to play me songs. I want tangle my fingers in his hair. I want things that make me blush. It is unseemly, I think, to want someone this much. I can't draw what I'm seeing. I would have an easier time trying to draw the shape of a cloud moving across the sky.

I draw a line instead, a line of trees that becomes a dark wood with eyes peering out of it, shadows moving through the trees, dark shapes flitting from one branch to another. The afternoon shades into evening, and my room dims. The figures in the trees seem to move without my drawing them, as though they have taken on a life of their own, reaching out to me, whispering my name. I can see into a world without sunlight, a darkness so dense I can shape it with my hands. My bare feet are on a rough dirt path through the trees and the air has gone cold. Thick vines bristling with thorns wrap around the trunks, a viscous sap dark as blood running down the bark where the thorns have pierced it. The darkness around me is alive, creaking and rustling. The branches of the trees are bare and dry as bones. I hug myself, shivering. I am at the river again, the river in my dream. It gleams with a dull sheen as though it were made out of oil. I am looking for someone. Someone I must find, before it is too late. I can hear the dog howling. A figure steps onto the path between me and the river, a darkness blacker even than the darkness around it, and it speaks my name aloud in the dark and reaches its arms toward me. I scream and jerk backward, and my room floods with light from the hallway, and I hear my name again, over and over, Ca.s.s running through the open door. The darkness is an ordinary darkness again, my own small room with the lights off, my unmade bed, my stereo, my windowsill lined with candles and dried flowers, the disintegrating rag rug underneath my feet. "I didn't hear you come home."

"I thought you were asleep, and then I heard you scream."

"I was drawing." I turn to my desk to show her the forest but the paper is blank.

She lets go of me and walks into the kitchen. I wonder how long I was in that forest. Where that forest was. Ca.s.s brings me a steaming mug of something bitter and sharp-smelling. I climb into my bed without taking off my clothes and she sits with me while I drink the tea, stroking my forehead, and when I fall asleep at last I do not dream again.

"You have got it bad," Raoul says. I'm so dopey with l.u.s.t I've been tripping over fruit crates all day. We're sitting in the street behind the stand now, on a smoke break, watching the fish-stall boys chuck salmon. They look good and they know it. They're like a tribe of Nors.e.m.e.n, all bulging muscles and piercing blue eyes. Tourist ladies are always trying to get their pictures taken with the handsomest ones. Not so much my speed, but I like to watch Raoul flirt with them. Across the street, the pierogi girls are reading each other's palms. Occasionally the summer breeze brings me a whiff of their patchouli.

Raoul is wearing tight black leather pants, despite the summer sun, and a black tank top that hangs soft and loose and shows off his tattoos and the wooden rosary I've never seen him without. Me, threadbare black T-shirt, black jeans, black boots. The fish-stall boys call us the vampire twins. "Vampires be happy!" the one with the green hat likes to shout at us. "Cheer up, vampires!"

"You don't even know," I say now. I want to fling myself across something but I settle for flailing my arms. "He's, like, I don't even know. Oh my G.o.d."

"Like so good he takes away your capacity for intelligent speech," Raoul suggests.

"Shut up." I pretend to chuck a peach at him.

"He's pretty hot."

"Right? But it's more than that. He has this, like, power. Like a magnet. I wish you could have seen him play."

"A magnet. Wow. That must be so compelling."

"You're impossible."

"What do you talk about?"

I blush. "Um. Not a whole lot, so far."

"Ah, yes. The magnet."

"You are such a d.i.c.k."

"I would never malign the power of the magnet." He stubs out his cigarette on the bottom of his boot and tucks the b.u.t.t in the compost pile.

"Raoul."

"What?" he says, a portrait of innocence. "Just doing my part for the earth."

After work I follow Raoul home like a puppy. He heats up tamales, and I eat mine with my fingers. Raoul eats his tamales with a pair of chopsticks and turns on MTV.

"When I was little I thought everyone's best friend's aunts and uncles were in music videos," I tell him.

"Yeah? That's kind of weird."

"You want weird, try being Aurora."

Raoul's apartment is much smaller than mine, one room with tiny bathroom and a tinier kitchen. He's covered the walls with velvet and dried roses and white Christmas lights, crucifixes and paintings of saints. On a table sits a big wooden Virgen de Guadalupe surrounded by candles and flowers and ceramic skulls and rosaries, crystals and cones of incense and miniature bottles of liquor. He has a Pendleton blanket folded on his bed, triangles of color that repeat themselves mosaiclike, and an old acoustic guitar his father gave him. I am not allowed to touch the blanket. When Raoul looks at it his face glows.

I often wonder what it is like for Raoul here, in this city where white people spring everywhere from the damp earth like fungi, but I never ask. I love Raoul because he does not treat me like a teenager, and because he is funny and kind and wise, and because he makes me weird techno mixtapes, stuff like Autechre and Orbital and Plaid, the Chemical Brothers, Carl Craig. I know his family lives in Arizona, and he grew up in the desert, and he spoke Spanish before he spoke English, and he is teaching himself Navajo, which his dad never spoke at home because he got beaten at the reservation school for using it when he was a kid. But that's about all Raoul's told me about his life before he came here. I know he misses living somewhere the sky is so big it makes you feel like a speck of dust, and I know his mom sends him mole sometimes, because when she does he makes chicken in mole and it is so good it almost makes me cry. Oscar Wilde jumps in my lap, angling for tamale. "Uh-uh," I say, pushing him away, and he flicks his tail at me in disdain. Raoul smiles.

MTV is playing hair metal, and we laugh at the outfits. "I need me some of that," Raoul says, when the singer prances across the screen in a leopard vest. I imagine Raoul shirtless in a fur vest, deliberately overcharging tourists for their plums. It's a glorious picture. When I get up to go home Raoul stops me. "You be careful with those older boys," he says. His voice is teasing but his eyes are serious. I think of Ca.s.s in our kitchen with those same eyes. When all the adults in your life are telling you the same thing, I know you're supposed to pay attention. But you know what Aurora says? The hard way is my favorite way to learn.

When Aurora and I were little girls we slit open our palms in the room where her father died, pressed our hands together. Palm to palm is holy palmer's kiss. We were clumsy with the knife and cut too deep, and the blood ran down our arms and fell in fat red droplets to the floor. We both still have the scars, matching white slashes, and if you push aside the rug in that room you can see where the blood left a stain.

When we were fourteen, Aurora almost died, too. We were drinking Maia's bourbon and watching a movie. I fell asleep, woke with a start when the credits began. Aurora wasn't there. I wandered the whole house looking for her before I thought to go outside. She was lying facedown in the gra.s.s, her skin cold, her face in a puddle of her own vomit. When the paramedics came, they said if I had found her any later there would have been nothing they could have done. "What were you thinking?" I asked her, when she woke up in the hospital with tubes coming out of her nose. Even like that she was beautiful.

"I thought I could see him if I got far enough toward the other side," she said. I didn't have to ask who she meant.

"Aurora," I said, and then I didn't know what to say after that. She looked at me and her eyes were very old.

"I guess it runs in the family," she said. Only much later did it occur to me I hadn't even thought to call either of our mothers. It was the hospital that called Maia. She'd shown up disheveled and confused, and she held my hand in the hospital room while Aurora slept. "I'm so sorry, baby," she'd whispered, over and over again, until finally I asked her to stop. I'd told the paramedics I was Aurora's sister. I never told Ca.s.s about it at all.

After that I tried not to get drunk around Aurora. One of us would always have to know when to stop, and I understood after that night that it was never going to be her. One of us had to learn how to say no, figure a way out, count the exits. It was up to me to keep her safe. There was no one else who could.

"Come over," Aurora says. "Jack's here." I'm trying to draw him again and it's not working. When the phone rang I thought I would jump straight out of my skin.

"Jack's at your house?"

"Uh-huh. Want me to pick you up?"

"Why is Jack at your house?"

"You're right. We should go somewhere. You want pho?"

I give up. "Yeah, sure."

I could change my clothes but that would be weird, because he has only ever seen me in the same clothes. So if I changed them it would be obvious I changed them for him. But maybe he wouldn't know, since he's only seen me twice. But even if he doesn't know, Aurora will, and if she knows I changed my clothes she will know it is more than liking him. She'll know how much I like him, that I really, really like him, and if he is already hers and not mine I don't want her to know. I take off my shirt and stare at myself in the mirror over the dresser. I look like myself with no shirt. Pale soft belly, pale soft b.r.e.a.s.t.s in the worn-thin sports bra I wear to hide them, broad shoulders heavy with muscle. I put the shirt back on. Maybe I need a different shirt. But all my shirts look the same. From the back I look like a boy. From the front, too, if I am being honest with myself. Oh my G.o.d, I think, stricken. What if my entire life I have looked like a hideously ugly boy and everyone loves me too much to tell me. My face in the mirror is filled with panic. Maybe Jack prefers girls who look like girls. Maybe Jack was confused when he came and got me at the market, was hoping I would lead him to Aurora, with her sylph's body and veil of white hair. Maybe kissing me was a pit stop on the way to the finish line. Maybe they are having s.e.x, like, right now. Maybe even if they are he will still have s.e.x with me. But what if I need a different shirt. If there were something in my room I could hit myself over the head with, I would do that. Before this week I had only two worries: Don't let Aurora kill herself, and don't let Ca.s.s find out how messed up Aurora is. Now the spectrum of things to be anxious about has exploded into a full-scale rainbow.

I hear Aurora's honk in the street below my window and I grab my bag and run downstairs. I forgot to leave a note for Ca.s.s, but I can call her if we're out late. Jack turns around in the pa.s.senger seat of the car as I climb into the backseat and gives me a long, greedy kiss. "Gross," Aurora says peaceably as she drives. When Jack lets me go I'm breathless and fl.u.s.tered.

"Hi," I say, running my hands down my jeans. "What were you guys up to?" Aurora meets my eyes in the rearview mirror and winks. Jack winds one long arm behind his seat, brushes his fingers against my knee. I am mortified by the effect this gesture has on me, stare resolutely out the window, try to gather some semblance of dignity as a rich glow spreads between my legs. Maybe Aurora will pull the car over right now and go for a walk. A really long walk. Maybe Jack will take off all his clothes.

"I want pho," Aurora says, her raspy voice reeling me back to a world where everyone is wearing clothes and having an ordinary conversation about dinner. If Raoul could see inside my head right now he would die laughing. I send him a psychic message. Raoul. Help. Is. This. Normal.

"What's pho?" Jack asks.

"Oh my G.o.d," Aurora says. "How do you not know this glory? Noodles in broth with cow parts. And they bring you a cream puff with your order."

"What kind of cow parts," Jack says.

"Like all the parts. You can get tofu and vegetable if you're going to be a baby."

"I just like to know what parts, before I make a commitment."

I'm quiet as they banter. Aurora's playing Aphex Twin, the ambient stuff, pulsing and spooky. The streetlights flash by. There is this sense of expectation that fills the car, like before everything was one way, and now everything is going to be another. We're driving into the night where everything begins. Jack touches my knee again and I take his hand. He rubs one thumb across my knuckles, and if I weren't sitting down already I'd fall over. "Let's go to California," I say.

"Now?" Aurora's excited. I can see her perk up. "We should get coffee first."

"I'm supposed to work tomorrow night," Jack says.

"Quit." Aurora bounces in her seat. "I'll drive. It's only eight hours to the border. We can wake up on the beach."

"They have a beach in this state, too," Jack points out.

"It's not the same beach."

"It's the same ocean."

"Only technically."

"In California you can sleep on the beach without freezing to death," I say.

"Even in the winter," Aurora adds. "In southern California."

"We could call your work and say we kidnapped you," I offer. "We're holding you for ransom."

"I think they might just fire me."

"That works fine," Aurora says. "Because then you wouldn't have to worry about your job." We're at the pho place now. She circles the block a few times, finds a parking spot down the street. Jack unfolds himself from the car. I get out, and he pulls me to him again. "Hey, you," he says into my ear.

"Get a room!" Aurora yells. "Or I'll eat your f.u.c.king noodles!"