Tracy’s house. I liked it, but I didn’t like it. Tracy’s house was a different planet, a planet with order and strict scheduling. Tracy always had the newest Barbies, which she handed down to her younger sister as more current models were released. We ate dinner at the same time every night there, and we had cereal from a box in the mornings unless I slept over on the weekend, and then her mom would make us toast with holes cut out of the center and an egg where the bread had been. Once her mom asked if I wanted to go to church with them and I said okay, and so they took me in their van that smelled like old fast food with her brothers and her sister strapped in the back. Tracy gave me one of her dresses to wear, and I remember it had ruffles and the collar left a red mark on my neck. At church her family sang a lot of different songs they already knew the words to. Tracy liked a boy a grade ahead of us who left her a chocolate bar in her desk. They were going out. “Where do you go,” I asked, and she looked at me funny. Right away I knew that was the wrong question, but I didn’t know why. Cass let me go anywhere I wanted. I kissed Tracy’s boyfriend inside a tractor tire on the elementary-school playground. Three times. On the third time, I let him put his hand up my shirt. I never told Tracy. Afterward when he passed me in the hall he would look at his friends on either side and they would cover their mouths with their hands and laugh.
Cass never cut my hair and it grew in brown tangles down my back until the year I started seventh grade, when I cut it myself with Cass’s sewing scissors in our kitchen. That was the year Tracy and I decided not to be friends any more. We never talked about it; it just happened. We had only been friends in the first place because Cass needed somewhere for me to go after school. That was when she was still washing dishes in a restaurant. She’d come home late, smelling like fryer grease and cigarette smoke, and I’d rub her back and tell her about Tracy’s cookies that weren’t real, and she’d laugh. I didn’t know why it was funny, but I always laughed, too.
I knew we were poor, but it wasn’t a thing I could explain. Other people explained it for me. They’d pull my hair and tell me it was dirty, or they’d tell me my clothes were wrong. Tracy’s mom gave me a bag of Tracy’s old clothes with a sanctimonious smile, but everything Tracy wore was ugly and didn’t fit. Looking at that sad pile of pink frillery filled me with a sick, unnamable shame. I took the bag home and stuffed it in the back of my closet. Cass found it months later and asked me what it was, and when I told her, she cried, and I didn’t have to go over to Tracy’s anymore. After that, it was me and Aurora, sisters and twins, the way it always should have been. After Tracy, Cass didn’t try to stop me from spending all my time at Maia’s, running around past bedtime with Aurora, who’d figured out a million ways to get into trouble before she figured out anything else.
I know the first time I see him that Jack isn’t who I’m supposed to love. Too old, trouble. Musician. We’re wary of musicians, in my family. My family being Cass and Aurora and me. Musicians get famous and cry about it. They knock you up and bail. Musicians are on heroin. They mope around. Musicians: seriously not worth the investment of your time and energy. You always have to pay their rent—this is what Cass has told me—until they make it, and then they leave you for a swimsuit model. Or else they die. “What about girl musicians,” Aurora asked once.
“Girl musicians, too,” Cass said, and got that face she gets when she is done talking. “You want to date, baby girls, go for accountants.”
But that’s not how it happens when your heart gets in the middle. Jack is like a light turned on in a room I didn’t even know was dark. It’s always been Aurora who’s loved boys with danger written under their skin. Until now, I’ve never loved anyone except Aurora. It’s more than his music, more even than the smell of his skin. More than the way his body is like a magnet calling all the iron in my blood. He’s a drug that’s hooked me on the very first trip. I knew it, the first time he kissed me, knew I was caught. Who am I, to fight the hand of fate? I already know what happens to people who tell the gods how to do their job.
When I get home from the ocean Aurora is asleep in my bed and Cass is gone. The apartment is quiet and cool. Aurora is curled tightly in on herself, her arms crossed on her chest. I tuck the blanket around her shoulders. She makes a soft anguished noise in her sleep and then opens her eyes, staring at me without seeing. “He’s here,” she says. I walk to the window and look out. The street is empty.
“There’s no one,” I say, but then I see a shadow that is darker than all the other shadows and at its center a spark of red. Like the skeleton man’s eyes, the man from Aurora’s party. I close the curtains. “He can’t get in.”
“Who can’t get in?” Aurora asks behind me. She sits up, blinking. “Who are you talking to?”
“No one. Never mind.” I climb into the bed and put my head in her lap and she tangles her fingers in my hair, smoothing it away from my face.
“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 Cass 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 Cass’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 glasses, 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 Cass allows, and sit at the table, tucking my feet up underneath me. Cass looks tired, the lines around her grey eyes more pronounced. 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 was––I’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 Cass’s eyes are serious now.