Sarah McCarry - All Our Pretty Songs

We were still poor. For a while when things were really bad, Cass and I would stand in line at the food bank once a week, where white-haired church ladies handed out yellow bricks of government cheese and big plastic bags of instant oatmeal. There was always a pile of bread, one or two days stale, from a bakery near our apartment, and meat that came in a can with a silhouette of a chicken. I thought they had somehow put a real chicken in there, that you could open the can to find a pet. I cried when Cass said we didn’t eat that kind of stuff and handed it back. She’d send me over to Aurora’s for dinner, but there was never any food at her house, either. Trips to the grocery store and wholesome meals didn’t make it on Maia’s to-do list between shooting up and sleeping it off. Half the time, Aurora didn’t eat unless she ate with us. All that money might as well have been dust. Sometimes, Maia would get it together enough to hire people to help, but she’d forget to pay them, or they’d end up holing up in her room with her and doing drugs, or one day they’d wander off, and Aurora would be left to run feral again, with only me and Cass to make sure she showed up for school and ate a meal every now and then. When I took Cass’s food stamps to the grocery store around the corner, piled up bulk brown rice and oatmeal and sixteen different kinds of vegetables, the lady who always worked the register would sometimes put a bag of Doritos on top of my groceries, hold her finger to her lips, and wink at me.

Aurora and I ran wild young. Cass tried to keep us locked down but gave up quick, settling for exhaustive lectures on the functions and maintenance of the human reproductive system; a crash course in what to do when people got too wasted; and firm exhortations to me to keep myself and Aurora not pregnant, free of disease, and more or less sober. “And no junk food, ” she’d add. Girls at school wanted in on me and Aurora’s twinhood, our late nights and freedom, our recklessness and our crazy stories. But those girls didn’t understand how good they had it with someone in charge, someone who called the shots, stayed up until they came home, left the porch light on.

I was at a party with Aurora last year. The hosts were friends of friends of people she knew. People who were a lot older than us, and weren’t too interested in hiding how much money they had. “Tacky,” Aurora hissed, fingering sequin-crusted throw pillows and cashmere blankets thrown over the overstuffed couches. Velvet drapes. Scented candles in gold sconces. Cold cuts on cut-crystal plates. A painting on the wall that turned out, on closer examination, to be a Monet. “Of course, it’s one of the lesser-known pieces,” said the hostess with false modesty, coming up behind me.

Aurora and I were giggling in a corner when a shrink-wrapped babe stalked over to us. Up close, she was total construct, younger woman stapled on top of old bones. Fake boobs straining her satin dress, chemical-plump mouth. Her eyebrows had that surprised look women get after one too many plastic surgeries. “I know who you are,” she said to Aurora, jabbing her with one red-taloned finger. She was very, very drunk. She wobbled there for a moment, glaring at us.

“I don’t know you,” Aurora said. “Thankfully.”

“You know my husband, ” the woman said. Aurora’s eyes got big. “You think your pert little ass will get you anything you want. You think you’re really something. But you know why men want to fuck little whores like you? Because you’re stupid .” She teetered on her perilous heels and stabbed her finger at us one last time. “Stay away from him,” she snarled. She pivoted, nearly overshooting her spin and coming around to face us again, and stalked away.

“Oh my god,” Aurora said. We looked at each other and then we both began to laugh. “That was so weird, ” she gasped. “Let’s get out of here.”

I never asked who the husband was. It didn’t really matter.

After the night in the park I send out a psychic call. I’m so hooked I hijack a pile of Cass’s crystals and leave them under my pillow, willing them to bring him to me, but all they do is give me a stiff neck. Aurora says she has no idea who he is or where he came from. He wouldn’t let us give him a ride home from the park, strode off into the darkness before we came to our senses and asked how to find him again. Rockers are a dime a dozen in this town, but he’s something else again. I’ve never heard anyone play music like that.

“You’re in love,” Aurora says. She thinks it’s cute. If she’s staking her own claim on him, she’s not saying. She’s sitting in my kitchen, drinking Dr Pepper that she brought over herself. If Cass is home Aurora puts the soda in a mug. She can’t bear, she says, to watch Cass’s face when she sees the can. But we’re home alone and so an unlit cigarette dangles in her fingers and she runs a thumb around the can’s edge between sips.

“I am not in love,” I snap. “You can’t fall in love with someone you just met.”

Aurora rolls her eyes. “Someone’s never read a fairy tale.”

“We’ve read all the same fairy tales. This is the real world.”

“This is the real world . Sure.” Her skin glows gold-brown against her white tank top and her clotted tangle of necklaces. She’s wearing cutoffs that are barely more than underwear, and under the shirt a tiny crocheted bikini that’s so bright I can see it through the fabric like a beacon. “Let’s go swimming,” she says. “Get your suit.”

The beach is crowded with little kids and their parents, basking in the hot afternoon sun, drunk on the glorious summer. We spread our towels, stretch out at the lake’s edge. Aurora leaps up, bellowing, runs pell-mell into the water with a crash, and then runs back out again and flings herself on her towel. Dads sit up, shading their eyes with one hand, staring after her long legs and white hair. She rolls around on the towel like a puppy and lies there, panting. “The water’s great. We could drive around until we find him.”

“I’m sure that would work.”

“Probably better than spirit messengers.”

“Shut up.” I roll over on my stomach, make a show of ignoring her. If you mapped the inside of my brain, it would go like this: his hands, his mouth, his skin, his face, his palm against mine. But I had no idea it was that obvious. Aurora kicks her feet and laughs at her own joke. “Sorry,” she says. “I never see you being, like, irresponsible. Less than focused. He’s your first boyfriend. It’s adorable.”

“He’s not my fucking boyfriend. I don’t even know him.”

“You wish he was your boyfriend.”

“I don’t need a goddamn boyfriend! Jesus. You’re such a bitch.”

“You love me.”

“I do love you.”

She stretches her hand across our towels and takes mine, tugs it toward her. I roll over on my side, facing her, and she stares at me with her inscrutable eyes. Like she’s going to tell me a secret. Something crucial she found out about love, or sex, or what happens to you when you feel like this and it makes no sense, when someone you’ve only talked to once takes over your entire brain until you’re twitchy with it, until you drop things in the kitchen and turn the stereo up way too loud and think about shaving your head or kicking through a wall or running out into the street and screaming because you can’t even stand yourself anymore. She widens her eyes at me and I wait for her to give me the answer.

“I’m starving,” she says. “Let’s go eat hamburgers.”

I work at a fruit stand in the open-air market downtown. It’s built on a hill, and underneath the open-air part there are layers of shops clinging to the steep hillside. The street level’s made up of long intersecting covered arcades full of stalls: fruit and fish and bread, flowers, ugly tie-dyed hippie clothes. Silver jewelry and amber pendants, bundles of lavender, fuzzy wool pullovers imported from Ecuador next to sandals made out of leather straps and tire rubber. Crafts for rich people, like handmade wooden children’s toys, or flavored jams you buy for relatives you don’t know very well that stay unopened in a cupboard for years until someone throws them out. Pierogi and humbow, gyros and hot dogs.