All Our Pretty Songs

before and turning my legs shaky with desire. I am not this kind of girl, I think, trying to be fierce with myself. I am not the kind of girl who ditches her best friend and runs out into the night with a stranger and kisses him until dawn. I am not some lovesick dupe. I am not at the mercy of my new, most favorite vice. I am not. I scrub until all traces of the ink are gone and the shower’s out of hot water.

Cass and Aurora are still in the kitchen, stir-frying vegetables. A pot of brown rice simmers on the stove. Hippie dinner. I sigh. Some days, like this one, I wish Cass was not a witch so that we could have steak. After we eat, Aurora follows me into my room and rummages through my records, and I know I’m forgiven. She sprawls across my bed with an old issue of Magnet and I take out my sketchbook to draw her. We’re quiet for a while, Aurora turning pages and humming, me laboring over each line, trying for fluid grace and failing miserably. “I have something for you both,” Cass says from the door.

“Presents!” Aurora says happily. “I love presents!” She rolls over, sits up.

“Hey,” I say. “Now I’ll never finish this.” Getting Aurora to hold still long enough for me to draw her is a futile endeavor, but that never stops me from trying. Cass hands us each a bundle wrapped in silk. I unfold the cloth to find a little leather bag on a leather string. She’s given Aurora the same thing.

“What’s in here?” Aurora says, tugging at the bag’s knotted drawstrings.

“Don’t,” Cass says sharply. “Don’t open them. They’re bound.”

“I know it’s bound,” Aurora says. “I want to see what’s inside.”

“Not bound like that,” I say. I take Cass’s witchiness more seriously than Aurora does, although nowhere near as seriously as Cass does herself. “They’re amulets. Thanks, Mom.”

“Amulets for what?” Aurora leaves off picking at the strings, but she’s still eyeing the bag like she thinks it’s full of secret treasures and wants to tear it apart.

“Protection,” Cass says. “Safe travels through dark places.” Her voice is even. A chill runs through me, and for a moment the room is very still. Aurora stares at Cass. I can the challenge in the set of her chin. The leather bag is warm in my hand, warmer than the heat of my skin.

“I don’t need amulets,” Aurora says. They are watching each other like cats raising hackles, growls starting in the backs of their throats. I look from Cass to Aurora and back again. Whatever is happening here, it definitely bypassed go and went straight to really fucking weird without collecting two hundred dollars.

“Hey,” I say, but they ignore me. Cass blinks first and Aurora looks away, the corner of her mouth curving up in a malicious smile. “Hey,” I repeat. Cass shakes her head as if she’s walked into a spider web.

“I can only help you if you let me.”

“I don’t need anyone’s help.” Aurora hands her amulet back to Cass. “Thanks, though,” she says in a normal voice, and some of the tension seeps out of the room.

“You’ll wear it,” Cass says to me.

“Sure.” She looks at me. “Okay.” I loop the leather over my head. The bag settles between my breasts. It’s heavier than it felt in my hand.

“Don’t take that off,” she says. “Good night.”

“’Night,” Aurora says to her retreating back. “God,” she yawns when Cass closes the door behind her. “Your mom is such a fucking weirdo.”

“Tell me about it,” I agree, touching the leather bag.

“I should go.”

“Spend the night.”

“Nah.” She looks almost furtive. “I have to be somewhere.”

“Where?”

“It’s nothing.”

“Aurora.”

“No, really. Just this dumb thing.”

“You want me to come?”

“You would hate it,” she says.

“I’ll still come.”

“I know.” She smiles. “You’re the best. I’ll spare you.”

“Okay,” I say. “Have fun.” After she goes I sit on my bed, staring at nothing. We’ve always had secrets, me and her. But we’ve never had secrets we didn’t share.

Aurora calls me late the next morning, talking nonstop as soon as I pick up the receiver. “What are you doing? Go to the window. Go to the window right now.” Dutifully, I carry the phone across the room.

“And?”

“And look outside. Look! Outside!” I peer down the street.

“I’m looking?”

“Tell me that is not the most magnificent motherfucking morning you have ever seen in your natural life, sweet child of mine. We are going out into it, you and I. Call Jack.”

“Jack doesn’t have a phone.”

“Then send him a missive of the heart. We are coming to fetch him. He’s going to busk for us.”

“I don’t—”

“Perfect, I’ll be there in ten.”

I’m still laughing when she pulls up outside my window, honking furiously. I grab my backpack and take the stairs two at a time. “What are you wearing,” she says.

“Clothes.”

“God grant me the serenity to accept the disastrous fashion choices of my best friend in all the world, who elects to garb herself in rags even when being transported by her faithful chauffeur to the abode of her beloved, possibly the foxiest man in the

entire—”

“He is not my beloved. Lord. What’s wrong with my clothes?”

Aurora snorts and takes a corner so fast I nearly go through the open window. “Seatbelts are recommended,” she says.

Aurora leaps up Jack’s steps and pounds briskly on his front door. He opens it, blinking sleepy-eyed at the morning sun. “Come on!” she yells. “Get your guitar! Come on!” She’s on the verge of jumping up and down. Jack looks at me over her shoulder.

“It’s like saying no to a tornado,” I tell him.

“I see,” Jack says. Obediently, he fetches his guitar from next to his bed, puts it in Aurora’s trunk, gets in the backseat.

“We’re going to the canal!” Aurora says, gleeful as a toddler. “You can busk and we’ll pass a hat around. And then we’ll make garlands out of flowers and put them on your head. And everyone will love us and you’ll be famous.”

“I think the steps to fame are typically more complex,” Jack says, but he’s grinning.

“Nope,” says Aurora. “Stick with me. I’ll make you a star.”

The grassy parkland along the canal is packed with people. It’s a farmer’s market day. Hippies tote babies and trail dogs on hemp ropes, and wholesome-looking types are weighed down with cloth bags overflowing with greens. Cass’s idea of heaven. If I had the power, I’d send the lot of them straight to hell. Aurora buys a still-warm loaf of bread and some goat cheese and shoves chunks of bread in her mouth as she directs us to a clear spot next to the water. Jack takes out his guitar, tunes it. No one pays much attention. “Play a happy song,” Aurora says through a mouthful of cheese.

“The happy songs are never the good ones,” Jack says.

“Fine then,” she says. “Play something that will devastate us all.”

Jack winks at her. When he starts to sing his voice is a surprise: low and rough with the raspy longing of a much older man, weighted with decades of hard living and cruel twists of fate. A bourbon-thick smoker’s voice, a voice of old sorrows and older wants. “I went to the crossroads, fell down on my knees,” he sings, the chords under his fingers sinuous and sorrowful. I tilt my head back, let the impossible yearning fill me with a hunger I never knew I had. “Standin’ at the crossroad, baby, risin’ sun goin’