“I’ll bring my fancy attitude.”
“You cannot wear that repulsive Misfits shirt. I will wail and gnash my teeth.”
“I’ll wear the 7 Year Bitch one. It only has a couple of holes.”
“You are impossible.
“I learned from the best,” I say, and take her hand.
Aurora doesn’t get me in party clothes, but she tantrums at me that night in her room until I let her put makeup on me and festoon me with baubles. “At least look like you are wearing this awful thing on purpose,” she says, scowling and tugging on my shirt. She leans in to draw thick black lines around my eyes. She smears the eyeliner with her thumb, checks her handiwork, shakes her head. “More.” She goes after me with the pencil again. I duck.
“You always make me look like I got the wrong end of a fistfight.”
“Hold still! Jesus, you’re like a little kid at the doctor.”
I acquiesce to her ministrations, tug on the crucifix of the metal-beaded rosary she’s draped around my neck, grimace like a martyr. She mock-slaps me and then pats my cheek. “There, all better. Let’s go pick up Jack.”
Jack, Jack. I don’t like to say his name around her, knowing the way my face lights up when my tongue shapes the word. I can’t form the sound without thinking of the taste of him, his hands moving across my body, the way he likes to kiss the place between my breasts and listen there for the metronome of my heart. I’m grateful she’s ahead of me, leading the way to her car, so she can’t see the flush that starts in my cheeks. I stumble at the first stair and she laughs without turning around. “Fucking goner,” she says, “I am never wrong,” and not for the first time I think it is not a blessing to be known so well.
Jack hasn’t dressed up, either. He’s waiting on his porch, his house dark behind him. He puts his guitar in the trunk and folds himself into the backseat gracefully, kisses my cheek. “Hey, lovely,” he says into my ear.
“What about me,” Aurora says, and he kisses her cheek, too.
“You don’t need anyone to tell you you’re lovely.” There’s a hint of reproach in his tone. Aurora puts the car into gear.
“I tried to get her in a dress,” she tells him in the rearview mirror.
“I wouldn’t recognize you in a dress,” he says to me mildly.
“I wouldn’t recognize me in a dress either,” I agree.
“Sometimes people put an effort into how they look,” Aurora tells the steering wheel.
“I’m not going to put in an effort for Minos,” I say. Aurora scowls.
“What is your damage?” she snaps. “He’s fun. Jack likes him.”
“You don’t like him,” I say to him.
“I don’t think we should have this conversation right now,” Jack says, although I don’t know which one of us he’s telling to stop. “Let’s have fun.”
“I’m having fun.” But Aurora’s voice is cold and the air in the car is charged now with some unfamiliar force and all the joy has gone out of the night. I look out the window at the dark empty streets. We’re headed downtown. I lean forward to turn up the stereo, but Aurora slaps my hand away. “I mean it,” she says, “I want you to stop saying shit like that about him.”
“Aurora, I don’t think he’s a nice guy.”
“I don’t need a fucking mother.”
“I really think we should talk about something else,” Jack says.
“I’m not done,” Aurora says. “He’s my friend, and my friends don’t have to be your friends but you don’t get to tell me how to live my fucking life, okay?”
“Minos isn’t anyone’s friend,” Jack says quietly. Aurora ignores him.
“Okay?” Aurora is staring at the road, her mouth set.
“Okay,” I say, although I’m not sure what I just agreed to. “Okay. I’m sorry.”
Aurora stops the car in front of a high-rise downtown, one of those horrible glass and steel monstrosities that’s sprung up here and there in the last few years out of the old brick buildings and shabby warehouses. A valet opens her door and she hands him the keys like she’s done this all her life. I wonder if she has. Wonder what she’s been up to on the nights I spend with Jack. She doesn’t look at me as she gets out of the car. Whatever I did wrong, I am not forgiven. I want to go home. “Hey,” I say to her back, “I don’t feel great all of a sudden. I might go.”
Aurora pretends not to have heard me. Jack’s opening his door, stops with one leg outside the car, touches my shoulder. “Please,” he says into my ear. “Please come.” The valet comes around to my side of the car. He’s wearing sunglasses, and there is something about his still face and too-white skin that makes me uneasy. He offers me his hand and I take it. His skin is cold and I drop his hand as soon as he’s helped me out of the car, resisting the urge to wipe my palm on my jeans. Aurora’s already inside. “Please,” Jack repeats. He’s as nervous as I am. More nervous.
“What do you know that I don’t?” I ask.
“Just come,” he says. I sigh and let him lead me inside.
I can’t shake my growing dread as the elevator climbs to the top floor. The sleek steel doors open onto an empty hallway, as white-walled and harshly lit as a dentist’s office, with a single door at the far end. Aurora skips down the hall. Jack balks, then takes a deep breath and grabs my hand. I give him a reassuring squeeze and he looks down at me. His face is serious and still. “It’s a party,” I say. “Not an execution.” He flinches.
“Not for you,” he says. I drop his hand.
“I would really, really like to know what it is you are not telling me.”
He shakes his head. “Not now. I need you to understand—” He pauses. “Think of it like an audition.”
“Audition for what?” He doesn’t answer, turns away from me and walks down the hall, guitar case banging gently against his long legs. “Audition for
Behind the door is the biggest apartment I have ever seen. Apartment is the wrong word.
I shrink back against the door, whacking my elbow on the knob. Pain flares through me, and for a second the room sharpens somehow, like before I was trying to look at everything through a haze of fog and now it’s fallen away. But what I’m seeing now isn’t real, can’t be real—men and women with skulls where their faces should be. A woman wearing a dress that looks like it’s made out of deerskin stumbles into me, laughs in my face. Jesus. Not deerskin. Parts of a deer. I can see the head with the tongue lolling, the neck smeared with blood. Her hot breath stinks of something awful, like rotten meat. She laughs again at my expression and dances away. I grind the heels of my palms into my eyes, look again. The pain in my elbow fades to a dull throb, and as it does, the faces around me go ordinary again; unfriendly, maybe, but not inhuman. I touch my shirt where the leather bag Cass gave me rests against my chest. I can feel the reassuring lump of it through the worn fabric. I could turn around and leave, right now, leave this place where I clearly do not belong.
