All Our Pretty Songs

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