Jessica couldn’t hold it in anymore. She laughed. The sound burst out of her, and it sounded harsh and mean, like a row of grackles squawking on a telephone wire. She didn’t think she’d ever laughed like that before. Clearly, she was losing her mind. She laughed and laughed.
Calvin and Hector were pulling John away from Peter, and John kept yelling, “I will fucking kill you!” which somehow made Jessica laugh harder. There were tears in her eyes. Her vision blurred. She started hiccupping. She doubled over, clutching her stomach, and eventually landed on her knees in the grass. The sun was still shining on this bright, cloudless day. It was hot, but the grass was cool, and the ground beneath was soft.
Jessica collapsed onto her side, and it was like she was a tiny bug peering through the tall blades of grass. She felt as if she could laugh there forever.
Rosa
Almost exactly two years ago, Rosa and Ana had been sitting together on their back porch, doing nothing special, just drinking iced tea on a warm summer night. Even if they never had anything to talk about, since they were so far apart in age, Rosa had always liked being alone with her oldest sister. She liked that they shared an appreciation of the dark sky, and she liked the way Ana’s long hair was always wavy and dynamic, like it was caught on a breeze even if there was no breeze at all.
There had been fireflies that night, blinking at the edges of the yard, and as time passed, the fireflies had multiplied. There were still some in the distance, but others were lighting up just inches away from Rosa’s face. Ana had been reaching out and lazily trying to grab them. More and more had started blinking—so many that they’d played tricks with Rosa’s vision, leaving tracks and trails, the way fireworks do.
“Are you doing this?” Ana had asked Rosa, and in the next moment, the yard went dark. The fireflies had blinked out, all at the same time, but Rosa could still feel them there, hovering in the heavy air. She could hear the hum of their little wings.
“You are,” Ana had said, and then the yard had burst with light, so suddenly that it made Rosa gasp. The fireflies had lit up, all together. Then, a long moment later, they’d gone back to their regular, irregular blinking.
“I didn’t,” Rosa had said. “I’m not.”
“I’ve always known there was something special about you,” Ana had replied. She’d said it sternly, like a schoolteacher. “Now we know.”
No one had ever said anything like that to Rosa before. It would’ve seemed like a tacky, bad-luck thing to say. Rosa had never thought there’d been something special about her. In fact, she’d thought there’d been something very sad about her. Her life was the cause of someone else’s death. She’d been born, and her mother had died. It was a simple and terrible fact.
“Listen,” Ana had said. “You’re different than everyone else. You’re blessed. I mean, God has gifted you with something. I don’t know what it is, but it’s something. I hope you figure out what it is. I hope you can make the fireflies do that again.”
Rosa
(Saturday, June 15th)
Rosa was walking to Concepcion Park when she heard shouting, followed by the crunching and crashing of things colliding. She hustled back toward home and saw that Peter Rojas and John Chavez were fighting. People had gathered around. Jessica was in the grass, on her back. She looked like she was convulsing. Rosa ran to her sister and saw that Jessica wasn’t convulsing. She was laughing.
“Girls?” Mrs. Bolander asked, tentatively approaching. “Is everything alright?”
“We’re fine,” Rosa said, putting her hand on her sister’s shoulder. “Jessica? What happened?”
Jessica couldn’t respond. She was gripping her stomach, hardly able to breathe, overcome by her cackles.
The shouting and crashing and crunching continued just a few feet away. Rosa didn’t look, but she could hear the sound of flesh thwacking against flesh, followed by stupid John telling Peter he would kill him. Jessica laughed harder.
Rosa glanced up just in time to see Peter punch John in the eye. The blood was so red as it left John’s body. Red like the feathers of the cardinal that had fallen from the tree.
Iridian
(Saturday, June 15th)
Iridian hadn’t understood the sunlight at first. She’d woken up on the couch after a nap of hours or minutes, licked her dry lips, and stretched out from fingertip to toe before she’d noticed the long rays of light seeping in through the curtains. The light caused her to sit straight up, and that’s when she saw the notebook on her lap. It was new. She could tell without even opening it. The cover was yellow plastic, but it had a paper half-cover on top of that, one that boasted the brand name and page count. Iridian knew it was a gift from Jessica because when she picked it up, a receipt from the pharmacy showing a twenty-percent employee discount fell out.
Iridian held her new notebook for a moment before flipping through the crisp, blank pages. Some were stuck together. They smelled beautiful, fresh like ink and chemicals.
Laughter from the block party outside filtered through the walls of the house. Iridian’s sisters had suggested earlier that she get out, if just for a little while, if just for a hot dog and a piece of Mrs. Bolander’s famous buttermilk pie, but Iridian would rather stay inside with a ghost than go outside with actual living people and animals and who knew what else. She went to the kitchen to grab a snack and maybe even make herself a cup of tea. Even though she spent most of her time indoors, Iridian could appreciate a nice day. The sun was shining after several dreary days of rain. There were breezes. Iridian couldn’t feel them, of course, but she could see the leaves and the branches of the trees swaying, and she watched a squirrel chase another squirrel across the abandoned frame of the trundle bed in the dirt yard. It was all very simple. Bad things didn’t happen on a day like this, when the sky was bright and people were outside laughing.
As she smacked on her chocolate puffs, Iridian surveyed the kitchen—the cracked and stained linoleum floor; the loud, whining appliances that had probably come with the house back in the 1970s; the fridge that randomly released ice cubes from its door; the food-spattered range.
It made her think: This house isn’t good enough to be haunted. There weren’t any libraries with old, cryptic notes shoved between the yellowing pages of dusty books. There weren’t winding staircases with polished banisters. There weren’t wood floors that were warm and worn from the soles of many generations of family feet. There weren’t any gables or widow’s walks or turrets. There weren’t any rooms that were a little bit colder than the others, or rooms that were kept locked up “just in case.” The walls didn’t moan when the wind blew. The Torres family wasn’t entangled in some generational curse like the Mayfair witches. They had no important heirlooms, just a banker’s box full of their mom’s old stuff that their dad kept on a shelf in his closet. It contained a couple of button-up blouses, a pair of red flat shoes, a bundle of crepe-paper flowers, a recipe book that used to belong to Grandmamá de la Cruz, and a postcard their mother had once sent home from a trip she took to see family in Morelia, Michoacán.