All Our Pretty Songs (17 page)

I sleep for what feels like days. Years. The entire rest of my life. I sleep so much that when I’m awake I don’t feel right and the edges of my vision go furry. I dream about her, always, all the time. Aurora in the ocean, her white hair floating behind her. Aurora in a house like a palace, white walls, white-hot sky. Aurora, huge dark eyes looking back at me out of a pool in the earth ringed with flowers. Aurora with Minos’s long bony fingers around her throat. One night I can see her again with the syringe, the strip of silk. She’s in a bathtub the size of a fish pond. Marble-floored bathroom, candles everywhere. Floor-to-ceiling windows and beyond them black sea, black sky. I can see the steam rising off the bathwater, smell lavender and salt breeze and the rich vanilla of Aurora’s skin. She’s skinnier than ever, barely any flesh on her long bones, the line of her cheek knife-sharp. Her white hair like a beacon in the dark. Her lips part and her eyes roll back in her head. She’s sliding underwater, down, down, down.
No!
I cry, and reach for her, but she’s too far away for me to touch.
You left me
, she whispers.
You let me go.
And then she’s gone and I jerk awake, dripping with sweat, in my own dirty sheets, my own bed, my own shabby apartment. Our kingdom glimmers on the far wall, the country that we made together. “Aurora,” I say aloud into the dark, but there’s no one there to hear. “Aurora. I’m sorry. Come back.”

Cass tiptoes around me, takes to leaving my meals outside the door of my room. I don’t want to eat, but the smell lures me out like a bear to bait. Betrayed again by my animal body and its stupid animal wants: food, friendship, sex, love. Cass and I don’t talk. I’m a chalkboard that’s been erased over and over again until there’s nothing left but a haze of white dust. Before this I never understood how long an hour could take, how many ticks of the second hand are in a minute, how endless the space between seconds can be.

I can never put together a whole picture of Jack in my head. Shoulders, hips, the line of his belly, the muscles of his back. The soft place behind his knee. Long tendons in his forearms, long fingers, long narrow toes. Sunlight throwing bone into relief: the sharp place at the inside of his elbow, the bird-fine bones of his wrist, the muscles of his thigh moving under his skin like water. The tangle of his hair. I draw pieces of him and tape them together, take them apart again. I draw a single line and already it’s wrong. I draw the angle of his cheek. I draw his palms the way I remember them, but on paper they are nothing I recognize. My desk is piled with crumpled sheets of newsprint, my fingers covered in charcoal dust. Jack cutting fruit in his kitchen, frozen with his knife parting the apple’s green skin. Jack playing me Leonard Cohen songs on his porch, the birds in his garden creeping forward to listen better. Jack in my room, laughing, shirt unbuttoned. Jack watching me draw. Jack’s voice in my ear, low and rough. I don’t know if it’s worse to have a thing like that and then have it taken away from you or to never have a thing like that at all.

My brain’s not shy about coming up with other images that, for all I know, are just as real: Jack and Aurora hand in hand on the California beach, Jack and Aurora in a convertible with the top down, drinking margaritas by the ocean and watching the sun set. Did they go away for Minos, or did they go away for each other? Did they go to get away from me? Does Jack know by now that Aurora loves anchovies and olives on her pizza but would die before touching pineapple, that she drinks her coffee with so much sugar it’s a wonder she has any teeth left? Does he know that
The Lost Boys
reminds her of her dad for no rational reason? Does he know she learned French so she could read Rimbaud in the original? Has she told him we used to take turns reading
The Dark Is Rising
aloud to each other every Christmas? Does he have his motorcycle wherever he is now and are they together, her arms around his waist, her hair whipping back from her helmet, are they driving down Highway 1 to Mexico like Jack and I said we were going to do, are they sleeping on the beach and watching the sun rise over the Pacific and learning all the constellations? Is he cutting her slices of peach with his knife, feeding them to her one by one? Does he touch her the same way he touched me? Are they lost, or lonely, and do they think of me, and if he has kissed her does he wish it is me he is kissing, or has her perfect face already wiped mine from his memory? Does he touch her the way he touched me? Every night I go over to my window and look out, at the spot in the shadows where I thought I’d seen Minos before, but the street is empty and dark and even the shadows have no weight. I’m not who he was waiting for.

Does he touch her the way he touched me.

At work, Raoul knocks gently on my skull. Anyone home? No. He covers for me while I sit on a crate, staring out over purple mounds of plums. He mothers me back to his apartment, feeds me soup, puts Oscar Wilde on my head to make me laugh. It’s the only thing that works. We smoke pot and watch television and when he brings me more and more snacks I realize he’s getting me stoned so I’ll eat. I tell him I don’t deserve him, and he hushes me.

“Everyone needs to be loved through their first broken heart,” he says, and I love him so much I can hardly stand to look at him. I tell him what Jack said to me before he left.

“I bet they’re there together. I bet they wanted to be together this whole time. I bet she—”

“Why would you say a thing like that?” Raoul interrupts.

“Because everyone falls in love with her. She can’t even help it. It’s not her fault. She wanted him and she got him and now they’re probably in Los Angeles laughing at me.”

“Did you ever think that maybe Aurora loves Jack because he’s the only person in her life who doesn’t want anything from her?”

“I don’t want anything from her,” I say, stung.

“Are you sure?”

“I tried to protect her.”

“Did you? Or did you just want an excuse to follow where she was already going?”

“Raoul. I love her.”

“I know you do, but love can make us do ugly things, too. Sometimes I think you don’t really see her; you see the same thing everyone else sees when they look at her. Something ornamental. Underneath, though, she’s just as real and hurt as you are.”

“But Jack and Aurora have this kind of magic. I’ll never have whatever it is that makes them what they are.” Raoul opens his mouth to protest, but I cut him off. “It’s fine. I don’t mind. I mean, I do mind. But it is what it is. I wish sometimes it came that easily for me, too. It’s hard not to be jealous.”

“I don’t think it’s easy,” he says. “Not for Jack, and certainly not for Aurora.”

“How can it not be easy for Aurora? Look at her.”

“That’s what I mean,” he says. “Look at her. Look at both of them. Do you ever think about what a curse it might be, to look like that? To know that no matter what you were made of, no matter what you did with your life, no one would ever see past your face? Your skin?”

“What does that have to do with Jack leaving me for Aurora?”

“Now you’re not listening to me, either.” For the first time, he’s angry. I feel a hot surge of hurt and open my mouth to say something, close it again. “Just think about it,” he says. “For me.”

“Do you feel like that?”

“All the time,” he says simply. “I mean, I write poetry, so there’s not much chance I’ll have to make a choice like Jack did, but if it ever happens I know what it will be like. Do I see myself as a poet or as a brown poet or as a queer poet, as if all of those things are separate boxes I check depending on what day of the week it is. If I write about my family, people will ask me why I don’t write poetry that’s relatable, and if I don’t write about my family, they’ll ask me how I can stand to betray my roots. If I write about nature people will tell me how moving it is that my people are so connected to the earth. If I write about the city people will tell me how brave I am for talking about the realities of the urban experience. And none of those people will actually read the words I write. Everyone lives with it differently. Some people push it down so far inside they think it can’t hurt them, and it festers there. Some people talk about it. Some people don’t. Jack told you he was making the best decision he knew how to make in the circumstances he has to deal with. He has something people want, and it’s up to him to decide how he gives it to them. How he lets them take it.”

“But it was selfish.”

“All the best artists are selfish. You can’t be good unless you care about the work more than you care about anything else.”

“But what about
me
?” As soon as I say it I want to take it back. This is the most Raoul has ever said to me about anything serious, this is the biggest thing he has ever trusted me with, and all I can do is come out of it sounding like a spoiled child. But with that hanging in the air between us, I see what Raoul has been trying to tell me. What Jack was trying to tell me. “Oh,” I say. “It’s not about me at all.”

“No.”

I cover my eyes with my hands. I always thought Aurora could metabolize love the way she can metabolize Dr Pepper and vodka and bad speed, that it passed through her without marking her and left only more emptiness in its wake. I have known her as long as I have known myself; there is no story of me without her written in every chapter. But now for the first time I wonder if the flaw isn’t hers, but mine. If all along it was me taking without thinking, not her. If what Aurora has given me isn’t infinitely more priceless than what I’ve given her, and if now I’m letting her slide into darkness without a fight because it’s easier than bringing my own faults into the light.

“Why are you always right,” I mumble into my palms.

“I do a lot of thinking.”

“It hurts,” I say. “It hurts a lot.”

“I know it does. And it doesn’t mean Jack doesn’t love you. It just means there are bigger things than you. Jack’s allowed to love music more than he loves you. I know it’s hard to hear, but that doesn’t make it any less true. That’s what he said, isn’t it?”

“Pretty much.”

“Then there’s not much you can do about it except choose how you’re going to deal with it. You can hate him for it, or you can figure out how to let him go.”

“I don’t want to let him go. I want him back. I want both of them back.”

“Indeed,” he says. “There’s the rub.”

SEPTEMBER

After everything that’s happened, it’s hard to believe in high school, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have to go. It’s only September, but the summer’s ended as swiftly as a doused fire. The first morning of school is so cold the sidewalk outside my building is rimed with frost. I put on a ratty black hoodie over my rattiest shirt and rattiest pair of black jeans, run my fingers through my ratty hair, lace up my ratty combat boots. Ratty fingerless gloves and a ratty wool beanie and a ratty down vest. Jack used to joke he’d pay me to wear a color other than black. I tug the hood of my sweatshirt up over the beanie. Maybe if I turtle down far enough into it I’ll disappear altogether.

I bike to school with my headphones in my ears, even though Cass always tells me I’ll get killed that way, listening to an old Earth album cranked up as loud as a headache. Coming down the last hill, I hit a patch of ice and the back wheel skids out from under me before I know what’s happening. I land flat on my back, somehow manage not to crack my skull on the ground. I’m starting a trend: the full-on wipeout, by foot or by wheel. Awesome. I lie in the street for a moment, stunned. Maybe another hapless suit will wander past and I can scream my head off at him, too.

I pick myself up, check for damage. There’s a hole in my sleeve and my neck hurts. No one saw me, for which I’m grateful. Bike’s fine, wheels still true, but I walk it the rest of the way to school anyway, limping as the pain sets in. I’ll have hefty war wounds and no one to show them off to.

High school has gotten no less prisonlike over the summer. I’m a senior now, officially at the top of the totem pole, building memories and planning for my future. No one bothered to clean the hallways over summer break. Dark smears of spilled soda and other, more mysterious fluids have dried to a gummy residue that absorbs the lurid fluorescent light and gives the linoleum floors a three-dimensional effect. I slouch from class to class, sit in the back, keep my head down and speak only when spoken to. Which is, thanks to the halo of menace I radiate, pretty much never. Between classes I jam my headphones back into my ears and glare. People look at me, look away quickly, and then glance back. They want to know why Aurora’s ray of sunshine isn’t around to offset my personal cloud of doom. Want to know why we aren’t joined at the hip, cutting class to smoke in the parking lot or get stoned with the metalheads behind the gym. Aurora making eyes at everyone, Aurora in her ridiculous clothes, Aurora dancing by herself on the football field, not caring who sees her, not caring that the music is in her head.

At lunch, some girl from my homeroom sidles up to me with a puppy face. “What.” I take off my headphones.

“I was just wondering, you know, where Aurora was.”

“Not here.”

“Is she having a back-to-school party?”

“Do you see anything to celebrate?”

She stares at me, and I put my headphones back on. That’s the last time anyone tries to talk to me for a week.

I pull my Bartleby routine like cheer has gone out of style. Even in art class I’m sullen. The teacher is new this year, some fresh-out-of-college stoner who can’t quite hide his hanker for the choicer meats of the senior class. I refuse to participate in his earnest still lifes, leaving my sketchbook ostentatiously blank and staring out the window, or drawing weird landscapes peopled with stag-headed men moving through the shadows when I’m supposed to be drawing a vase and an apple. On Friday, Cass pounces as I slink through the door after work. My hours at the market are patches of post-school heaven. Raoul won’t let me mope. He tells me jokes, tugs my hair, makes eyes at the fish-stall boys in front of me. I’m almost in a good mood by the time I get home.