All Our Pretty Songs (18 page)

“I got a call from the school.” Cass points me to the couch. I collapse in a sulky pile.

“About?”

“What do you think?” She perches on the edge of an armchair we once reupholstered in scraps of tapestry. They’re fraying now. Like everything. I chew on my fingers and fidget. She tries to stare me down, but I refuse to meet her eyes.

“Look, baby. I know this is hard, but there’s nothing you can do. If they want to come back, they’ll come back. If you don’t bring up your grades, you won’t get into art school.”

“We can’t afford art school.”

“All the more reason not to alienate the person responsible for recommending you for scholarships, don’t you think?”

“I really miss them.”

“I know you do. I miss Aurora, too. But you’re not doing anyone any good by turning into a little gothic nightmare. Your art teacher is terrified of you.”

“He’s an idiot.”

“I’m sure he is, but you’re not, and there’s no reason to burn a bridge that might lead to a happier place. You really want to spend the rest of your life hustling fruit and shacking up with your hippie mom?”

“The horror.” I let a smile through. Throw her a bone.

“So we’ll put our game face on, shall we?” I shrug. Her hand whips forward and seizes my chin. “I said, shall we?”

“Yes,” I mutter, and her grip tightens. “Yes!” I yelp. “Jesus.” She releases me and I flee for the safety of my room. After that, I draw the vases and the apples and Cass leaves me alone.

It’s hard to believe I didn’t imagine the entire summer. Every morning I put on gloves and a beanie and two hoodies before I ride to school. The cheerleaders make a show of displaying their tans in short shorts and cropped jackets, but even they give up the fight after one too many days clustered together in the hallway like a gaggle of plucked chickens, prickling with goosebumps.

Fall is usually my favorite season. I love the sharp clear days, the smell of fallen leaves, even the lurking menace of winter with its endless rains around the corner. I love spending long afternoons with Aurora, drinking coffee until our fingers twitch and watching the sky grow dark a little earlier each day, borrowing her cashmere sweaters and biker jackets, stomping around in my tallest boots. I love that feeling of cocooning inward. Aurora hates any weather in which she cannot be constantly naked, but she’s always gone along with my enthusiasm, trying to knit scarves or make soup or take up weaving or some other project she’s constitutionally unsuited for. She never fails to leave off in the middle, with predictably disastrous results. She nearly set her house on fire the night she tried to make me minestrone. It was supposed to be a surprise, and then she forgot about it, and the soup burned down to a puck of coal while we watched
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
in her bed, and it wasn’t until we smelled smoke that she yelled “Shit! Shit!” and catapulted downstairs to a blackened, toxic mess. She threw it, pot and all, in the yard, where it stayed for weeks.

But now she’s gone, and so is Jack, and with them my dreams of piling up together in Jack’s house, the three of us watching rain fall against the windows and drinking tea and reading books out loud to each other. Later, Jack and I falling asleep under a pile of blankets, safe from the storm thundering overhead, skin to skin. Him writing me songs and me painting him pictures. This hazy fantasy does not include such trivial details as school, or work, or the fact that I still live with my mother. Cass has her quirks, but worrying about sex and nights away from home isn’t one of them. I could probably have worked around her as long as I came home for dinner sometimes. But none of that is going to happen now. I scuff through the fallen leaves on my own.

I go to shows without Aurora, feeling like half of me is missing. I hand over my fake ID and watch as the guys working the door look around me, waiting for her. I slam-dance at the front of the pit, throwing myself up against sweaty shirtless boys who punch me back when I punch them. Afterward I let them shove me up against the wall in the alley or the bathroom and kiss me, push their hands up under my clothes. When I kiss them back I bite down until I draw blood. Less like sex and more like a fistfight, dirty and mean. It feels good. In those moments I forget about Jack and Aurora at last, forget about everything except my body’s need for harder, faster, louder, bigger, bigger, more. I wear scarves to school, never let Cass see my bruise-colored skin, go to all my classes and keep my eyes open and then do it all over again. When the music stops the hole inside me is so huge I think I might die from it.

Without Aurora to watch over, I’m free to get as drunk as I want, to fuck up and fuck up again. Free to say yes to anything, to all the bad ideas. Free to slam so hard in the pit my teeth hurt, to let anyone in. One night I meet a boy I’ve never seen before. Brown doe eyes in a hard face. I can’t tell which is the true part, whether the gentleness in his eyes is real or a mask. He asks me my name. “Aurora,” I say.

“That’s pretty.” He buys me a drink, and then another one. Is this what it feels like to be beautiful? Is this what it feels like to know everyone is watching you, everyone wants what’s under your skin? I can’t ask her because she’s not here. But if she were here, no one would look at me first. Later, I let the boy kiss me in the back of his van, yank my jeans down, shove his way inside. He licks my ear and it’s supposed to be sexy. His breath smells like beer and unbrushed teeth. I close my eyes. If I concentrate hard enough I can be back at the park, that very first night. The night I met Jack and everything started to fall apart. “Aurora,” he grunts in my ear. “Aurora, Aurora.” I think for a minute he is saying her name because she is here, in the front seat, smoking, rolling her eyes.
Come on, babycakes, let’s go.
But when I open my eyes the night is real and his van smells like cigarettes and old takeout and my legs are cold despite the press of his body, and I am all the way alone.

“Get off me.”

“What?”

“Get the fuck
off
me.” I shove him over, wriggle out from under him, zip up my jeans. Try not to think about the blanket underneath me or where it’s been.

“That’s not what you were saying a minute ago.” In that moment I have never hated another human being so much in my life. If I stay here I’ll put out his eyes with my thumbs.

“I have to go.”

“Will I see you again?”

“You better hope not.” I open the door of his van and stumble out into the night.

There is no one to look out for me except Raoul. If I call him, if I need him, he’ll come for me, but I like feeling as though I am falling into darkness so wide no one will be able to see when I hit the bottom. I’ll be out of sight before they even know where to look. Going, going, gone.

I ride past Jack’s house on my way home from work a few nights later. I stop my bike in the street outside, half-hoping to see lights inside, maybe even him sitting on the front porch playing guitar in the cold. But the jungle of vines in his front yard has withered into desiccated husks that snag at my clothes as I push my bike down the walkway. His flowers are reduced to rank brown piles that give off a sour smell of rot. His spare key is still in its spot under a loose brick. I hold it for a moment, thinking, and then I let myself in.

The bed is unmade and there are dirty dishes in the sink, dregs in a coffee cup furred over with mold. Clothes on the floor, a pair of his boots leaning against each other in the corner. The emptiness in the room is so thick I can taste it. The house is cold. A draft stirs against my cheek. The window is open. I’m already inside; might as well keep going. I cross the room and shut the window against the night air. Run my finger across the card table. My fingertip comes back grey with dust. One corner of the Rousseau poster has come loose from the wall and dangles forlornly. If there is a magic trick that will bring Jack back to me, its instructions are not here.

I pick up a shirt off the floor. Worn flannel with a hole in one elbow. I remember him in it. It’s the shirt he was wearing the night I read his cards. I slip my arms into the sleeves, wrap it around me. The cuffs dangle past my knuckles. If this were the kind of story I want to be in, he’d have left something for me. A note under the pillow, a charm under a loose floorboard. A box of talismans, a salve for sore losers. If this were the kind of story I want to be in, I’d have a trail of breadcrumbs to follow, a message written in invisible ink that I only needed to shine a light on to make the words real. Better yet, the quest would end here and he’d be waiting for me, sitting on his bed, wondering where I’d been. He’d tell me he was sorry, that what mattered most was not the music, not the outside world, not what he had come here to seek out, but what he had found in me. That we could spend the rest of our lives here in this room, learning all each other’s stories, learning the patterns of our bodies, the rhythms of our breath. If this were the kind of story I want to be in, I’d flip back to the pages where all the words made sense and the ending wasn’t written yet.

His bed still smells like him, honey and sweat. I crawl between the covers, put my head on the dirty pillow. His shirt, his bed, his house. His absence is so strong it has a texture.
You asshole
, I think.
You weren’t supposed to leave me behind
. But in my head Aurora’s face overlaps his, the edges blurring, until I can’t tell which one of them is standing in front of me, waiting for me to follow. I am at the edge of the river again, the bone trees all around me. I see the flash of her white hair on the far bank, hear the passing music of a single chord, and then nothing. I am standing, barefoot and bloody, knowing Aurora and Jack are ahead of me somewhere in the dark. They have gone on together and I am lost on this, the opposite side.

I wake up a few hours later with a start, not sure where I am for long moments. I don’t remember crying, but my face is tracked with salt. The room has the spare, washed-thin feel of very early morning. Outside, a misty rain is falling. I take Jack’s shirt and leave everything else as it is. Dirty dishes, books with cracked spines, unmade bed, silence. I ride home in the damp night, in and out of the pooled light of streetlamps.

I let myself into the apartment as quietly as I can. Cass’s door is closed. No bar of light seeps out the bottom, but there’s a plate of muffins in the kitchen that still carry a trace of the oven’s heat. I eat one standing over the sink, tearing it apart with my fingers into smaller and smaller pieces, soft chunks of apple tangy-sweet in my mouth. If I keep doing nothing I will lose my mind. In my room I take off all my clothes, shivering, and then put Jack’s flannel on again. The fabric is soft against my skin, the smell of him somehow stronger. I put my hand between my legs. No matter how hard I try I cannot quite picture his face.

OCTOBER

It’s the week before Halloween when I see the poster. I bike a roundabout way to school that morning, wanting to put off the inevitable as long as possible despite the gentle, half-hearted rain that mists down in a chilly cloud. I’m listening to the same Earth album I’ve been playing for weeks, the sludgy wall of guitar soothing me as I pedal, like a metalhead version of those tapes of whale songs and crashing waves that are supposed to help you fall asleep. I smoke a joint in the morning now, on the days I go to school, and another one at lunch, until I’m so stoned I’m moving around in my own impermeable bubble, my thoughts stilled into silence.

Aurora and I love Halloween best of all the holidays. I always pretend to be lazy and disinclined to find a costume, and she makes a great fuss about it and berates me for my indifference; but of course secretly I love the ritual of her convincing me every year, and she knows it. Aurora’s a magnificent scavenger, a holy terror in thrift stores and secondhand shops, with a magpie’s eye for glitter and an unerring instinct for hidden treasure buried among the detritus of molting down jackets and dog-eared paperbacks. What I lack in thrifting skills I make up for in the kind of single-minded, tenacious patience that allowed me to sew hundreds of white feathers to a set of leotards the year Aurora decided we should be owls, or stud a pair of denim jackets with so many fake gemstones they were as heavy as armor the year we went as Jem and a singular Hologram. Aurora smokes out my window while I work, drinking coffee and nattering at me and pretending to help. She throws glorious parties every year, legendary parties—ice sculptures of monsters dotting the yard, the whole house done up like a haunted mansion with cobwebs and people leaping at you out of darkened hallways, dressed as mummies or vampires or corpses with their flesh peeling away. This year, without her, it’s like the color has gone out of the world, and the growing tribe of jack-o’-lanterns grinning from front porches and windows only serves to remind me of what I’ve lost.

I’m waiting at an intersection when I see the poster out of the corner of my eye. I swing a leg off my bike and walk it over. The paper is faded and stained, one corner missing, but there’s no mistaking Jack’s name, or the name of the club, or the date. Halloween. Four days away.

I stand there for a long time, as the light changes and then changes again. A man leans out his car window. “Hey kid, you okay? You got a flat?” I turn, and he sees my face. “You okay?” he says again.

“I’m fine.” Forever pestered by earnest middle-aged men longing to help and destined to be spurned. He’s driving a minivan; he’s probably used to it. The car behind him honks, and he shrugs and drives away. I tear the poster off the telephone pole, fold it into smaller and smaller squares. Stuff it in my pocket. I have three days to decide what I’m going to do about it.

That night, Cass makes us curry. I chop vegetables while she sautés tofu, puts a pot of brown rice on the stove to simmer. “I saw a poster for a show Jack’s playing,” I say. Casual. No big deal.

“Where?”

“Los Angeles. I’m going to find a way to go. I’m sure Aurora is there.”

She raises an eyebrow at me, incredulous. “Oh you are, are you? This event taking place over my dead body?”