All Our Pretty Songs

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.

“I got a call from the school.” Cass points me to the couch. I collapse in a sulky pile.

“About?”

“What do you think?” She perches on the edge of an armchair we once reupholstered in scraps of tapestry. They’re fraying now. Like everything. I chew on my fingers and fidget. She tries to stare me down, but I refuse to meet her eyes.

“Look, baby. I know this is hard, but there’s nothing you can do. If they want to come back, they’ll come back. If you don’t bring up your grades, you won’t get into art school.”

“We can’t afford art school.”

“All the more reason not to alienate the person responsible for recommending you for scholarships, don’t you think?”

“I really miss them.”

“I know you do. I miss Aurora, too. But you’re not doing anyone any good by turning into a little gothic nightmare. Your art teacher is terrified of you.”

“He’s an idiot.”

“I’m sure he is, but you’re not, and there’s no reason to burn a bridge that might lead to a happier place. You really want to spend the rest of your life hustling fruit and shacking up with your hippie mom?”

“The horror.” I let a smile through. Throw her a bone.

“So we’ll put our game face on, shall we?” I shrug. Her hand whips forward and seizes my chin. “I said, shall we?”

“Yes,” I mutter, and her grip tightens. “Yes!” I yelp. “Jesus.” She releases me and I flee for the safety of my room. After that, I draw the vases and the apples and Cass leaves me alone.

It’s hard to believe I didn’t imagine the entire summer. Every morning I put on gloves and a beanie and two hoodies before I ride to school. The cheerleaders make a show of displaying their tans in short shorts and cropped jackets, but even they give up the fight after one too many days clustered together in the hallway like a gaggle of plucked chickens, prickling with goosebumps.

Fall is usually my favorite season. I love the sharp clear days, the smell of fallen leaves, even the lurking menace of winter with its endless rains around the corner. I love spending long afternoons with Aurora, drinking coffee until our fingers twitch and watching the sky grow dark a little earlier each day, borrowing her cashmere sweaters and biker jackets, stomping around in my tallest boots. I love that feeling of cocooning inward. Aurora hates any weather in which she cannot be constantly naked, but she’s always gone along with my enthusiasm, trying to knit scarves or make soup or take up weaving or some other project she’s constitutionally unsuited for. She never fails to leave off in the middle, with predictably disastrous results. She nearly set her house on fire the night she tried to make me minestrone. It was supposed to be a surprise, and then she forgot about it, and the soup burned down to a puck of coal while we watched Fast Times at Ridgemont High in her bed, and it wasn’t until we smelled smoke that she yelled “Shit! Shit!” and catapulted downstairs to a blackened, toxic mess. She threw it, pot and all, in the yard, where it stayed for weeks.

But now she’s gone, and so is Jack, and with them my dreams of piling up together in Jack’s house, the three of us watching rain fall against the windows and drinking tea and reading books out loud to each other. Later, Jack and I falling asleep under a pile of blankets, safe from the storm thundering overhead, skin to skin. Him writing me songs and me painting him pictures. This hazy fantasy does not include such trivial details as school, or work, or the fact that I still live with my mother. Cass has her quirks, but worrying about sex and nights away from home isn’t one of them. I could probably have worked around her as long as I came home for dinner sometimes. But none of that is going to happen now. I scuff through the fallen leaves on my own.

I go to shows without Aurora, feeling like half of me is missing. I hand over my fake ID and watch as the guys working the door look around me, waiting for her. I slam-dance at the front of the pit, throwing myself up against sweaty shirtless boys who punch me back when I punch them. Afterward I let them shove me up against the wall in the alley or the bathroom and kiss me, push their hands up under my clothes. When I kiss them back I bite down until I draw blood. Less like sex and more like a fistfight, dirty and mean. It feels good. In those moments I forget about Jack and Aurora at last, forget about everything except my body’s need for harder, faster, louder, bigger, bigger, more. I wear scarves to school, never let Cass see my bruise-colored skin, go to all my classes and keep my eyes open and then do it all over again. When the music stops the hole inside me is so huge I think I might die from it.

Without Aurora to watch over, I’m free to get as drunk as I want, to fuck up and fuck up again. Free to say yes to anything, to all the bad ideas. Free to slam so hard in the pit my teeth hurt, to let anyone in. One night I meet a boy I’ve never seen before. Brown doe eyes in a hard face. I can’t tell which is the true part, whether the gentleness in his eyes is real or a mask. He asks me my name. “Aurora,” I say.

“That’s pretty.” He buys me a drink, and then another one. Is this what it feels like to be beautiful? Is this what it feels like to know everyone is watching you, everyone wants what’s under your skin? I can’t ask her because she’s not here. But if she were here, no one would look at me first. Later, I let the boy kiss me in the back of his van, yank my jeans down, shove his way inside. He licks my ear and it’s supposed to be sexy. His breath smells like beer and unbrushed teeth. I close my eyes. If I concentrate hard enough I can be back at the park, that very first night. The night I met Jack and everything started to fall apart. “Aurora,” he grunts in my ear. “Aurora, Aurora.” I think for a minute he is saying her name because she is here, in the front seat, smoking, rolling her eyes. Come on, babycakes, let’s go. But when I open my eyes the night is real and his van smells like cigarettes and old takeout and my legs are cold despite the press of his body, and I am all the way alone.

“Get off me.”

“What?”

“Get the fuck off me.” I shove him over, wriggle out from under him, zip up my jeans. Try not to think about the blanket underneath me or where it’s been.

“That’s not what you were saying a minute ago.” In that moment I have never hated another human being so much in my life. If I stay here I’ll put out his eyes with my thumbs.

“I have to go.”

“Will I see you again?”

“You better hope not.” I open the door of his van and stumble out into the night.

There is no one to look out for me except Raoul. If I call him, if I need him, he’ll come for me, but I like feeling as though I am falling into darkness so wide no one will be able to see when I hit the bottom. I’ll be out of sight before they even know where to look. Going, going, gone.

I ride past Jack’s house on my way home from work a few nights later. I stop my bike in the street outside,