Sarah McCarry - All Our Pretty Songs

“Right now?” he asks. She nods. “Isn’t this your party?”

“These people,” she says, contemptuous. “They’ll be fine.”

Aurora’s too drunk. “I’ll drive,” I say. She pouts, but she gives me the keys. We roll down all the windows in her car and let the night in. He sits in the back, leans his elbows on the headrests of our seats. His mouth is inches from my ear. I take us to the park Aurora and I loved best when we were children, rolling grassy hills at the very edge of the water, next to an abandoned factory surrounded by a chain-link fence. The buildings loom alien and strange in the moonlight. We walk to the place where the grass ends in a thin strip of sand at the edge of the water. Aurora collapses gracefully. I follow, less so. He lies between us in the grass. My skin hums electric, so close to his. Some key connection shorts out in my head and my brain goes dark, neatly wiped of reason. I want to roll over and take a bite out of his shoulder. Pummel him with my fists. I can hear the beat of his heart, I swear. The fabric of his shirt whispers as he breathes. All the cells in my body rearrange, compass needles pointing to his north. I could do anything, anything, anything, wonderful things, terrible things, all the things. Hit him, grab him, kiss him. Smell him. Eat him. Seize his hands and drag him off into the night. Put my head on his shoulder and sleep there until the sun rises and makes the world real again. Does he want to touch me? Is he trying to touch me? If he were trying to touch me he would touch me. If I moved my arm a hair’s breadth it would be touching his arm. Should I move my arm? If I moved my arm would he know it was on purpose or would he think it was an accident? You should definitely, definitely touch me. I send this message with so much force my eyes cross.

“We could live here,” Aurora says sleepily, “and never go home. We could sleep inside a velvet tent and have midnight picnics.” Jack strokes the inside of my wrist with his thumb and I nearly startle out of my skin.

“A velvet tent wouldn’t be much good against the rain,” he says. My fingers rest in his broad palm, and I feel the charge running between us.

“Wherever I go,” she says, “it’s always summer.” After that we are quiet. For the first time in my life I wish Aurora weren’t here. I wish I could straddle him, tear off his clothes. Chew away the flesh to the muscle beneath. Rip him open, take him inside. Nothing I have ever felt in my life has readied me for hunger like this. I can smell him: wood, earth, smoke. The stars wheel overhead in their quiet, orderly way. Here they’re veiled by the nightglow of the city, but you don’t have to go very far out of town before they blaze white and thick across the sky. I want to do everything, everything, everything, but I leave my hand in his and tamp all that desire into a hot coal at the center of my chest. If I never see him again I will definitely go Juliet. Knife to the chest, fade to black. What is happening to me? I am not this girl. I am half monster, with spite and bile where normal girls nurture kittens and kind feelings. I do not fall for strangers, do not come unmoored in the dark at a single touch. Already I am cataloguing all the things I would be willing to give up for him if he asked. The night cools and a chill creeps in across the water. It’s only when I sit up at last, ready to go back to the car, that I see he’s holding Aurora’s hand, too.

When I was smaller, sometimes I wanted my life to be normal. Mom, dad, puppy, two cars. Goldfish in a bowl. Home videos of my first steps. A baby book with my first words written down. School pictures on the fridge, brothers and sisters, curfews. Grandparents. Thanksgiving with a turkey and everyone getting too drunk and fighting, like a family. That’s the thing you have to understand: None of this seemed that weird to me, because Cass and Maia had already set the bar high.

After we left Maia’s, Cass and I lived a lot of places. I don’t remember most of them, or they blur together in my mind, one long series of big kitchens full of people, dirty bathrooms, broken instruments. Wooden floorboards with gaps in between them full of dust and windows that never kept out the cold. Walls painted haphazardly in weird, clashing colors. The smell of incense. Communal houses, punk houses, hippie houses. Sometimes there were other kids around, but usually I was the only one. We lived in one house for a while with ten other people. A desiccated cat that someone had found in the basement hung on the wall over the fireplace. It used to give me nightmares. Dinner was always a giant pot of Dumpstered vegetables cooked on the stove all day into a tasteless mash. Too many guests. Travelers, punks, maybe sometimes homeless people who’d wandered in off the street. On the weekends, there would be shows in the basement, so loud the house shook. Cass and I had the attic, low-ceilinged but big, and there was a triangle-shaped window at one end that went all the way from the floor to the pitch of the roof. I’d lie next to it for hours, looking out at the street below. Sometimes in the night I’d wake up, shaken out of sleep by the sound of Cass crying in her bed across from mine.

That time didn’t last too long. Cass was working two or three jobs at a time, and it was easiest for us to live in a place where other people could take care of me. She’d taught herself to read people’s cards and make spells years ago, even before she met Maia. She’d turned out to be good at it, good enough to see other people’s lives unwinding in front of them, good enough to untangle the delicate threads of sex and death and money and hope. Our housemates would come to her with their questions, their love problems, their private mysteries and sorrows. I got used to it, dozing late at night in my little bed while Cass held someone’s hand, her fingers moving across their palm. Got used to the shirring sound of her tarot cards as she shuffled them, the low raspy murmur of her voice as she spelled out the future. She never asked for money, but people gave it to her, or other gifts if money was something they didn’t have. A velvet coat, an antique rosary, muffins, a patchwork bag. Presents for me: colored pencils, drawing paper, my first set of oil paints, the tubes half-spent but still good. I remember squeezing out dabs of color for the first time, the sharp tangy smell that is like no other smell in the world. Touching the vibrant paint and bringing my finger to my mouth for the barest taste.

Cass’s name got around and she started reading cards for people with real money, people who lived in new houses all by themselves. Houses with dishwashers and microwaves and carpet. Refrigerators shone white and clean; inside them were cartons of milk and eggs, neatly ordered condiments, the orange juice I wasn’t allowed to have because it was too expensive. When Cass took me with her I’d sit and draw quietly in a corner while women with shining hair and perfectly lipsticked mouths asked Cass if their husbands were cheating on them, if their kids would get into good colleges, if they’d find love and, if so, where it would be waiting for them. The most boring questions I could imagine. “So well behaved,” they’d say, looking over at me, like I was in a zoo. I didn’t understand how people who lived in houses like that could worry about anything at all.

As soon as Cass got enough money together we moved into an apartment of our own, the apartment we live in now. I had my own room, my own window. Our own kitchen—“Dear god,” Cass said, when we first moved in, “I thought I’d never see a clean kitchen again”—and our own living room with our own couch. Shabby and small, but it was clean, and it was ours. No guests unless we invited them. No guests really but Aurora, and sometimes men Cass dated for a while, always the same quiet, gentle types who stared moonily at her over the breakfast table and disappeared after a month or two, banished from her orderly macrobiotic world as soon as they got too close. Never, ever Maia. Cass has a guillotine heart, severing ties as neatly as a whistle-sharp blade cutting the head from the body. Like any good revolutionary, she pretends that the casualties mean nothing.