Jessica’s phone buzzed again and, finally, she grabbed it. Without even reading the message, she typed out a reply.
Sorry. On way. Manager made me stay late. xo
Jessica hesitated, trying to think of a better way to lie or not-quite lie. She couldn’t come up with anything, so she just hit send. She pulled away from the curb, still belting out a song to no one but herself.
What a question: Do you still sing?
Peter would never know her secrets.
Rosa
(Tuesday, June 11th)
Rosa’s searching at night hadn’t yielded any results, so she thought the daytime might be better. It wasn’t. She’d spent hours out in the heavy humidity and had found nothing. When she was on her way back, and just a block from her house, she stopped to watch two cardinals swoop through the branches of an oak tree in a neighbor’s yard. The birds were spinning in circles, diving into each other, knocking leaves loose. They were a happy tangle of flapping and chirping. Eventually, one of them landed on a branch so thin that it couldn’t support its light, hollow bones. The branch snapped. The bird fell. Rosa expected the cardinal to stop itself, do a graceful midair pivot, and resume playing with its bird-friend. Instead, it plummeted all the way to the ground and landed without a sound, in the grass. Rosa looked up the street and then down to see if anyone else had noticed, but aside from Teddy Arenas checking his mailbox a few houses away, she was alone. The other cardinal, on a high branch above, waited for a moment, let out a couple of mournful chirps, and flew away. On the ground, a red wing fanned above the blades of grass, motionless.
She’d never seen anything like that before.
Iridian
(Tuesday, June 11th)
Iridian was staring at herself in the mirror. The midday light was good. She was tilting her head—left, right, up, down—to catch the shadows, and putting her fingers on her skin to mash it around. When Iridian was younger, she’d stick Scotch tape all over her face to pull the corners of her lips up or down or to try to flatten out her sharp nose.
She was practicing at becoming invincible. Every day, she’d stand in front of her bathroom mirror and come up with insults to hurl at her reflection. She practiced keeping her expression blank and worked at dodging and deflecting.
“Beakish,” she said to herself. “You look like a fucking bird.”
It had taken a long time and a lot of practice, but Iridian had gotten pretty close to convincing herself that her face—with eyes set too wide like a lizard’s, a nose like . . . well, like a beak, and lips so thin that when she puckered they looked like a wadded-up gum wrapper—had character. Most of the books she read had girls in them who weren’t beautiful, but whose faces had character. This just meant that the things that made them them were on the inside. In those stories, it may take a while, but eventually a person would come around who admired those girls for their giant hearts or their razor wit or their unbendable will.
Iridian was leaning forward, her nose practically grazing the mirror, when a thump on the wall behind her caused her to jolt.
“Rosa?” Iridian called.
Her sister didn’t respond, so Iridian stuck her head out into the hall. The door to their bedroom was slightly open. There were no lights on, but the sun was shining in through a gap in the curtains. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe there was a squirrel in the attic.
Iridian went downstairs. She sat on the counter and ate cereal for the second time that day. After she was done eating, she rinsed her bowl, went back to her room, and brought one of her notebooks from her hidden stacks into her bed. She picked up a pen and opened to a page in the middle. She’d been making progress on her witch-vampire love story. The plot wasn’t really there yet, but she’d been brainstorming some good scenes.
I want him, Iridian wrote. But above all, I want him to want me. I want him to want me so badly that he’ll bury his teeth into the flesh of my arm and tear off a piece of it.
I like to watch his hands and the way he grips his pen when he scribbles a note to himself, or how, when he sleeps, his fingers still seem to move, knowingly, tapping lightly across the covers. I reach out with my own hand, mimicking the movements across his skin, and he twitches. Sometimes he startles awake.
I want to float into him, for him to absorb me, for him to eat me up.
Iridian wrote and wrote and wrote.
After a while, she heard the sound of her sister’s light footsteps coming up the stairs. She looked up to see Rosa standing at the door.
“What’s up?” Iridian asked.
“Dad’s home.”
It was the second time in two days he was home when he shouldn’t have been.
“Okay.”
“He doesn’t look good.”
Iridian paused. “And?”
Rosa didn’t reply.
“Where’s Jessica?” Iridian asked.
This was what she did: dealt with Dad.
“Still at work, I think.”
Iridian made a big show of throwing down her notebook before following her sister downstairs.
Rafe was on the couch in the living room, bent over and gripping the sides of his head. Rosa was right: He didn’t look good. He was grimacing, pressing his fingers against his temples so hard that the tips were going white.
“He’s drunk,” Iridian said to her sister.
Rosa gave her head a shake. “I don’t think so.”
Iridian knelt down in front of her dad. He didn’t smell drunk, but he sure looked it. He was still folded in half, so Iridian pushed him up to where he was sitting semi-straight. His hands fell limply into his lap, and Iridian’s gaze fell to his wrist, around which was a piece of yellow string. Three beads were threaded on it: a white one, a blue one, and a black one. Even though Iridian hadn’t seen that bracelet in probably ten years, she recognized it immediately. Ana had made it one day in elementary school, during art class. God only knows where Rafe had found it—probably shoved in the back of a kitchen drawer. Iridian made a noise—sort of like a cluck or a gurgle—and had to look away. She felt sick, actually nauseated, by the sight of a little girl’s bracelet on a grown man’s wrist.
Rafe coughed a couple of times. He didn’t cover his mouth. Usually when he was drunk his face would turn punch red, but this was different. His skin was pale, mottled like a TV-show corpse. He coughed again, then wheezed. He unzipped his jacket partway, revealing the white V-neck shirt beneath. His chest heaved as he struggled to get breath down into his lungs.
“Are you okay?” Iridian asked. “You don’t look so great, Dad.”