“I’m not sorry.” Rosa turned toward Jessica and tried with little success to tuck the long strands of her hair behind her ears.
“I know,” Jessica replied. “I just wish I were the one who had done it. Everyone’s been fighting my battles lately.” She paused and looked to Iridian in the rearview mirror. “What happened at the house?”
“He found my stories,” Iridian said. “He read them. He wouldn’t give them back.”
“Then Ana got mad,” Rosa said, smirking. “She broke the TV.”
“Did you know about John?” Iridian blurted. She met her sister’s sharp glance in the rearview mirror.
“Did I know what about John?” Jessica asked.
“How he drove off.” Iridian paused to nibble on the inside of her lip, where the skin had split and blood was still trickling out. “After seeing Ana slip, he left her there in the yard.”
Jessica’s eyes slid back down to the road. “Who told you that?”
“Peter,” Iridian replied. “He said he and his friends had watched it all from the window.”
“That’s not what he told me,” Jessica said. “He said they didn’t see the car. And when were you talking to Peter Rojas?”
“I was at Hector’s,” Iridian replied.
She then told her sister about what had happened with her notebooks, the smell of oranges, and the hyena.
Fat drops started to fall on the windshield, and Jessica turned on the wipers. Several seconds passed, and the only sound was the click-swish of the blades skimming across the glass.
“What else did Peter say?” she urged.
Rosa shifted in the passenger seat.
“He said he and his friends saw Ana’s ghost,” Iridian replied. “Last summer. She was outside, tapping on Dad’s window. Rosa knows.”
“They left me a note,” Rosa said.
Jessica’s expression was unreadable, which meant she was furious—because maybe she’d learned the truth about John and Ana, but also because the boys had seen the ghost and had thought to tell Rosa and not her. Jessica had always believed that Ana belonged to her and only her. There’d been the insistence on moving into her room and smoking her cigarettes, but Iridian knew Jessica had also spent the weeks immediately following Ana’s death building shrines. She refused to throw anything of Ana’s away, and would pile up used mascara tubes and hair ties and half-eaten boxes of SweeTarts all over the floor. They were tiny ofrendas, built there as if to welcome Ana back, as if she’d just momentarily lost her way out the window that night. So, no. Jessica wouldn’t have liked hearing that Ana had appeared to the boys across the street—and not her—an entire year ago.
“Where are we going?” Rosa asked.
Good question. Iridian had been so stunned by everything that had just happened, she’d failed to realize they were driving farther and farther away from her house, her street, her neighborhood. She started to panic a little. She didn’t know how far the chain on her anchor would stretch before it snapped.
“To the pharmacy,” Jessica said. “Iridian’s bleeding. She needs stuff.”
Again, Iridian tongued the wound in her mouth. Then she tapped her fingertips up her thigh. The skin there was pricked and torn. It burned when she touched it, so yes, she guessed she needed stuff.
“You two can just wait in the car if you want,” Jessica said. “Let me know if you can think of anything you need—anything for the house.”
“I need a new notebook,” Iridian said. “And another pen.”
Jessica
(early Monday, June 17th)
For the last year, Jessica had heard all kinds of things because most people didn’t have the decency to wait until she was out of earshot before they ran their mouths. They’d accused Jessica of being desperate. They’d wondered what she could have possibly been thinking. Of course, she’d known John and Ana had been seeing each other for months up until the time Ana died. That was the reason she’d pursued John in the first place. Jessica coped with her sister’s death by becoming her sister. She’d wanted Ana’s room, her clothes, her makeup, her boyfriend. Looking back, that all seemed so stupid. Maybe not stupid. Maybe more like grief-sick. Now all this time had passed, and Jessica was still stuck hard in the role as Ana-Not-Ana-Not-Jessica.
And then there was Peter. Fucking Peter. Peter got everything, and Jessica got nothing. Peter got to see Ana knocking on a window at night. All Jessica got was a shadowed hand and wicked laugh. Peter got the glory of fighting John and winning. Peter got to take a quick trip to Mexico and then wash his hands of Southtown.
As she pulled her car into the parking lot of the pharmacy, Jessica itched at her scalp, then between each of her fingers. She wished she could scratch off all of her skin and start over.
With her sisters waiting in the car, Jessica stalked across the parking lot. Before she’d even made it through the pharmacy’s doors, her phone chimed once, then again. She tugged it out of her pocket and chucked it into a trash can.
Cotton squares, hydrogen peroxide, a tube of Neosporin. She’d just bought these things for John, and here she was, buying them again for Iridian, who had gone outside twice in two days and had been damaged each time because of it.
When Jessica turned into the school supply aisle to grab a pen and another notebook, there was Peter, just a few feet away, bent over and hacking at a taped-up box with a cutter. She knew that blade. The handle was cracked and held together with bright blue duct tape.
“I used that box cutter on Evalin Uvalde’s tires,” Jessica said.
“Everyone knew it was you,” Peter replied, with a glance over his shoulder. He said it like it was no big revelation, like it was no surprise Jessica was a petty vandal. “No one could prove it, though.”
“I should’ve slashed your tires, too,” Jessica added.
Peter’s blade stilled. He sat back on his heels.
“Are you fighting with me again?” He looked to the basket in Jessica’s hand and rose to his feet. “What happened?”
Jessica still itched like she wanted to peel off her skin, and now the spot on her head where John had grabbed her hair started to throb. She was so tired of boys pulling on her, attempting to invade the life she’d tried so hard to keep protected.
Again, Peter eyed the contents of Jessica’s basket and then did a quick scan of her body: her bare legs, her wrists, her throat, her face. As he breathed out, his lips separated slightly. He was concerned. Jessica didn’t want him to look at her like that. She wanted him to look at her like that. She wanted to look at him like that. She had no idea.