But when I got my courage up, she leaned in close and combed her fingers through my hair, right down to the undyed roots. Her hands were very delicate, and I clammed up. My sullen silence was no barrier to Rainbow. She just cranked up Taylor Swift.
We were sitting in a greasy bus shelter opposite Walmart when the man committed suicide. There was no showboating hesitation in the way he appeared on the roof, then stepped off at thirty feet. He landed on the spines of a wrought-iron fence. The sound was like a cocktail weenie going through a hole punch.
There was nobody around but us. I froze and did not look away. Next to me, Rainbow was equally transfixed. I felt terrible shame when she was the one to drag us over to him. She already had her phone out. I had seen corpses before, but this was very fresh. There was a terrible amount of blood. He was irreparably dead. I turned my head to inform Rainbow, in case she tried to help him or something equally demented, and then I saw she was taking his picture.
“Got your notebook?” she said.
There was no fear in her. No concern. Rainbow reached out to prod at one mangled, outflung leg. Two spots of colour bloomed high on her cheeks; she was luminously pleased.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” My voice sounded embarrassingly shrill. “This man just killed himself!”
“The fence helped,” said Rainbow helplessly.
“You think this is a joke – what reason could you have for thinking this is okay –”
“Excuse you, we look at dead shit all the time. I thought we’d hit jackpot, we’ve never found a dead guy...”
Her distress was sulky and real. I took her by the shoulders of her stupid cropped jacket and gripped tight, fear a tinder to my misery. The rain whipped around us and stung my face. “Christ, you think this is some kind of game, or... or a YouTube stunt! You really can’t imagine – you have no comprehension – you mindless jackass –”
She was trying to calm me, feebly patting my hands. “Stop being mad at me, it sucks! What gives, Hester –”
“You’re the bride, Kipley. It’s coming for you.”
Rainbow stepped out of my shaking, febrile grip. For a moment her lips pressed very tightly together and I wondered if she would cry. Then her mouth quirked into an uncomprehending, furtive little smile.
“Me,” she repeated.
“Yes.”
“You really think it’s me?”
“You know I know. You don’t outrun fate, Rainbow.”
“Why are you telling me now?” Something in her bewilderment cooled, and I was sensible of the fact we were having an argument next to a suicide. “Hey – have you been hanging with me all this time because of that?”
“How does that matter? Look: this the beginning of the end of you. Why don’t you want to be saved, or to run away, or something? It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters,” said Rainbow, with infinite dignity, “to me. You know what I think?”
She did not wait to hear what I imagined she thought, which was wise. She hopped away from the dead man and held her palms up to the rain. The air was thick with an electrifying chilclass="underline" a breathless enormity. We were so close now. Color leached from the Walmart, from the concrete, from the green in the trees and the red of the stop sign. Raindrops sat in her pale hair like pearls.
“I think this is the coolest thing that ever happened to this stupid backwater place,” she said. “This is awesome. And I think you agree but won’t admit it.”
“This place is literally Hell.”
“Suits you,” said Rainbow.
I was beside myself with pain. My fingernails tilled up the flesh of my palms. “I understand now why you got picked as the bride,” I said. “You’re a sociopath. I am not like you, Miss Kipley, and if I forgot that over the last few weeks I was wrong. Excuse me, I’m going to get a police officer.”
When I turned on my heel and left her – standing next to a victim of powers we could not understand or fight, and whose coming I was forced to watch like a reality TV program where my vote would never count – the blood was pooling in watery pink puddles around her rain boots. Rainbow didn’t follow.
MAR HAD GRILLED steaks for dinner that neither of us ate. By the time I’d finished bagging and stuffing them mechanically in the fridge, she’d finished her preparations. The dining-room floor was a sea of reeking heatherbacks. There was even a host of them jarred and flickering out on the porch. The front doors were locked and the windows haloed with duct tape. At the center sat my aunt in an overstuffed armchair, cigarette lit, hair undone, a bucket of dirt by her feet. The storm clamored outside.
I crouched next to the kitchen door and laced up my boots. I had my back to her, but she said, “You’ve been crying.”
My jacket wouldn’t button. I was all thumbs. “More tears will come yet.”
“Jesus, Hester. You sound like a fortune cookie.”
I realized with a start that she’d been drinking. The dirt in the bucket would be Blake family grave dirt; we kept it in a Hefty sack in the attic.
“Did you know,” she said conversationally, “that I was there when you were born?” (Yes, as I’d heard this story approximately nine million times.) “Nana put you in my arms first. You screamed like I was killing you.”
My grief was too acute for me to not be a dick.
“Is this where you tell me about the omen you saw the night of my birth? A grisly fate? The destruction of Troy?”
“First of all, you know damn well you were born in the morning – your mom made me go get her a McGriddle,” said Mar. “Second, I never saw a thing.” The rain came down on the roof like buckshot. “Not one mortal thing,” she repeated. “And that’s killed me my whole life, loving you... not knowing.”
I fled into the downpour. The town was alien. Each doorway was a cold black portal and curtains twitched in abandoned rooms. Sometimes the sidewalk felt squishy underfoot. It was bad when the streets were empty as bones in an ossuary, but worse when I heard a crowd around the corner from the 7-Eleven. I crouched behind a garbage can as misshapen strangers passed and threw up a little, retching water. When there was only awful silence, I bolted for my life through the woods.
The goblin shark in Rainbow’s backyard had peeled open, the muscle and fascia now on display. It looked oddly and shamefully naked; but it did not invoke the puke-inducing fear of the people on the street. There was nothing in that shark but dead shark.
I’d arranged to be picked last for every softball team in my life, but adrenaline let me heave a rock through Rainbow’s window. Glass tinkled musically. Her lights came on and she threw the window open; the rest of the pane fell into glitter on the lawn. “Holy shit, Hester!” she said in alarm.
“Miss Kipley, I’d like to save you,” I said. “This is on the understanding that I still think you’re absolutely fucking crazy, but I should’ve tried to save you from the start. If you get dressed, I know where Ted at the gas station keeps the keys to his truck, and I don’t have my learner’s permit, but we’ll make it to Denny’s by midnight.”
Rainbow put her head in her hands. Her hair fell over her face like a veil, and when she smiled there was a regretful dimple. “Dude,” she said softly, “I thought when you saw the future, you couldn’t outrun it.”
“If we cannot outrun it, then I’ll drive.”