All Our Pretty Songs

shirt over my head as gently as if he is undressing a child. Touches the amulet but leaves it there. “Which one of us do you like best,” I ask, and he hushes me.

“You silly thing. How could you even ask me that?” He kisses his way down my throat, pausing in the hollow at the base of my neck. What is happening to me?

“I love you,” I say, but so soft I don’t know if he hears me, and I don’t want to say it again in case he did. His skin tastes of honey. He whispers my name, over and over, and when I begin to cry he does not ask why, only kisses the salt tracks the tears leave on my skin until I fall asleep in the circle of his arms.

When I wake up my bed is empty and the room is cool. I draw aside the curtain and look out. The patch of sky I can see is as black and starless as obsidian.

The skeleton man is where I know he will be, a shadow darker than shadow. He raises one bony hand to me in a salute, and I know, although I cannot see his face, that he is laughing.

“You are such a fucking goner,” Aurora says at the beach the next day. She’s coating her limbs with baby oil, running her hands up and down her legs carelessly while all around us people try not to watch and fail. “You’ll never get a tan if you don’t take your shirt off,” she adds.

“I am not and I’m fine,” I snap, hugging my knees and glaring.

“Oh my god, look at you!”

“I am fine.”

“You’re a pasty little bitch and you’re in love.”

I look around me for something to throw at her head but we didn’t bring anything from the car except towels and Aurora’s giant bag. She sees me looking, growls. She tackles me, limbs flying, knocking me back onto my towel. I get a mouthful of her hair and a baby-oiled elbow to the jaw. I’m stronger than she is and we both know it, but I’m scared of hurting her and so I yield without a fight. She straddles me, one eyebrow raised, blows hair out of her face like a gangster puffing a cigar. Behind her the sky is an impossible blue. “Uncle!” she barks.

“You won,” I point out. “You’re not supposed to say uncle.”

“You say uncle.”

“Aunt. Mom. Brother.”

“Say you’re in love!”

“Second cousin once removed.”

“Look at me rolling my eyes. I am rolling my eyes so hard my face might break. At least take your shirt off so I don’t look like a giant slut sitting over here by myself, practically naked.” She is shouting by “practically naked.” I turn my head and catch a batch of frat boys gaping openly.

“We are definitely fulfilling some kind of girls-gone-wild fantasy happening over there right now.”

“Stay frosty, motherfuckers!” she bellows at the frat boys, and then she kisses me. Familiar Aurora smell, vanilla and cigarettes; warm skin; soft mouth. Salt breeze on my bare legs, sound of boats creaking in the harbor. She breaks away. “Come on, take off your shirt,” she says again, arranging herself on her towel. “For me. Tell yourself, ‘Here is a tiny sacrifice I, repressed and angry as I am, am still capable of making for my very best friend in all the world.’”

“Why am I making this sacrifice again?” I obey, trying not to think about the folds of my belly next to the flawless length of her.

“So I’m not alone. You know I hate to be alone. Are you seriously still wearing that stupid thing Cass gave you?” I look over at her, but her face is turned away.

“Aurora. Remember, we covered this. There is no one I love more than you.”

“I was joking.” She wasn’t, though, and I know it, and she knows I know it. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“I don’t know. Maybe it is stupid. It makes Cass feel better.”

“Huh.” Aurora sits up, finds a plastic soda bottle in her bag, and offers it to me, smiling brightly now. “Dr Pepper?”

“That’s not Dr Pepper, Aurora.”

“How can you tell?”

“Dr Pepper isn’t clear.”

“Oh, nonsense.” She uncaps the bottle and takes a swig, makes a face. “It is way too early for vodka, you’re right. I’ll wait an hour.” She looks at an imaginary watch, tick-tocks her head at the imaginary second hand, takes another drink, stretches out on her towel. “Much better. What are you doing tonight?”

“What am I ever doing tonight? Hanging out with you.”

“Then you’re going to a party.”

“Oh boy. Sounds great.”

“You’re a turd. A bratty turd. Come on, it’s friends of Minos’s. It’ll be fun.”

“Minos has friends?”

“Minos has lots of friends. Minos has very important friends. Can I ask you something really emo?”

“Shoot.”

“How well do you remember my dad?”

The question is so out of the ordinary for her that I don’t even register it for a second, distracted as I am by the thought of Minos: Minos and Aurora, whatever is going on with Minos and Aurora and whether I want to know or should know or should intervene or am powerless to stop it, is Jack coming to the party, do I want Jack to come to the party if it’s Minos’s party, will Minos steal everyone I care about and make them into creepy skeleton people also, am I insane, is Aurora sleeping with my boyfriend. No way. But if I were my boyfriend I would definitely want to sleep with Aurora, so there is that. Aurora’s dad. Is Jack my boyfriend? Probably. Yes. No. Definitely. Aurora’s dad. What. “Your dad?” I echo, confused.

“Yeah.” Her eyes are closed, her face still. “Do you remember him?”

“Not really. You know that.”

“I think I’m forgetting him. Like all the way.”

“You were a kid.”

“I miss him.” She’s as emotionless as if she is telling me the rest of the afternoon will be hot.

“Of course you do, Aurora.”

“You don’t miss your dad.”

“I don’t have a dad.”

“You can have my dad.”

I don’t want Aurora’s dad. Or maybe I do. What’s worse: croaker or bailer? Does my dad even know I exist? That would be classic Cass, cutting and running without even mentioning the pending stork. “I remember him in your garden,” I say. I close my eyes, too, trying to project the picture against my lids like an old reel of film playing in a darkened theater. Haze and rain clouds, blurry as Super 8 film, the motions jerky. A sweater. His tangle of bleached hair, his face, his bony arms reaching for me. Green grass in the grey light. Dandelions an electric yellow. But it’s so hard to know, now, if what I see is really what I saw or if it’s pasted together out of magazine covers and posters in record stores. News footage clips and television specials and that documentary someone made about him that none of us will admit to watching but all of us saw. I know Cass has a copy of it stashed away somewhere; I found it, once, when we were moving. I wonder if anything I remember of him is really mine to share with Aurora or if it’s stolen from other people who didn’t know him at all. “It’s just a picture,” I say. “I don’t remember what we were doing.”

“It’s like that for me, too. Frozen moments. Nothing real.”

“That’s real.”

“It’s not the same.”

“What about Maia? Do you ask her?”

Aurora snorts and doesn’t bother to answer. “What are you going to wear tonight?”

“Aurora—”

“I want to talk about something else now.”

“Changing the subject every time it hurts is going to catch up with you one of these days.”

“Hasn’t yet. Want to borrow something? It’s a fancy party.”