half-hoping to see lights inside, maybe even him sitting on the front porch playing guitar in the cold. But the jungle of vines in his front yard has withered into desiccated husks that snag at my clothes as I push my bike down the walkway. His flowers are reduced to rank brown piles that give off a sour smell of rot. His spare key is still in its spot under a loose brick. I hold it for a moment, thinking, and then I let myself in.
The bed is unmade and there are dirty dishes in the sink, dregs in a coffee cup furred over with mold. Clothes on the floor, a pair of his boots leaning against each other in the corner. The emptiness in the room is so thick I can taste it. The house is cold. A draft stirs against my cheek. The window is open. I’m already inside; might as well keep going. I cross the room and shut the window against the night air. Run my finger across the card table. My fingertip comes back grey with dust. One corner of the Rousseau poster has come loose from the wall and dangles forlornly. If there is a magic trick that will bring Jack back to me, its instructions are not here.
I pick up a shirt off the floor. Worn flannel with a hole in one elbow. I remember him in it. It’s the shirt he was wearing the night I read his cards. I slip my arms into the sleeves, wrap it around me. The cuffs dangle past my knuckles. If this were the kind of story I want to be in, he’d have left something for me. A note under the pillow, a charm under a loose floorboard. A box of talismans, a salve for sore losers. If this were the kind of story I want to be in, I’d have a trail of breadcrumbs to follow, a message written in invisible ink that I only needed to shine a light on to make the words real. Better yet, the quest would end here and he’d be waiting for me, sitting on his bed, wondering where I’d been. He’d tell me he was sorry, that what mattered most was not the music, not the outside world, not what he had come here to seek out, but what he had found in me. That we could spend the rest of our lives here in this room, learning all each other’s stories, learning the patterns of our bodies, the rhythms of our breath. If this were the kind of story I want to be in, I’d flip back to the pages where all the words made sense and the ending wasn’t written yet.
His bed still smells like him, honey and sweat. I crawl between the covers, put my head on the dirty pillow. His shirt, his bed, his house. His absence is so strong it has a texture.
I wake up a few hours later with a start, not sure where I am for long moments. I don’t remember crying, but my face is tracked with salt. The room has the spare, washed-thin feel of very early morning. Outside, a misty rain is falling. I take Jack’s shirt and leave everything else as it is. Dirty dishes, books with cracked spines, unmade bed, silence. I ride home in the damp night, in and out of the pooled light of streetlamps.
I let myself into the apartment as quietly as I can. Cass’s door is closed. No bar of light seeps out the bottom, but there’s a plate of muffins in the kitchen that still carry a trace of the oven’s heat. I eat one standing over the sink, tearing it apart with my fingers into smaller and smaller pieces, soft chunks of apple tangy-sweet in my mouth. If I keep doing nothing I will lose my mind. In my room I take off all my clothes, shivering, and then put Jack’s flannel on again. The fabric is soft against my skin, the smell of him somehow stronger. I put my hand between my legs. No matter how hard I try I cannot quite picture his face.
OCTOBER
It’s the week before Halloween when I see the poster. I bike a roundabout way to school that morning, wanting to put off the inevitable as long as possible despite the gentle, half-hearted rain that mists down in a chilly cloud. I’m listening to the same Earth album I’ve been playing for weeks, the sludgy wall of guitar soothing me as I pedal, like a metalhead version of those tapes of whale songs and crashing waves that are supposed to help you fall asleep. I smoke a joint in the morning now, on the days I go to school, and another one at lunch, until I’m so stoned I’m moving around in my own impermeable bubble, my thoughts stilled into silence.
Aurora and I love Halloween best of all the holidays. I always pretend to be lazy and disinclined to find a costume, and she makes a great fuss about it and berates me for my indifference; but of course secretly I love the ritual of her convincing me every year, and she knows it. Aurora’s a magnificent scavenger, a holy terror in thrift stores and secondhand shops, with a magpie’s eye for glitter and an unerring instinct for hidden treasure buried among the detritus of molting down jackets and dog-eared paperbacks. What I lack in thrifting skills I make up for in the kind of single-minded, tenacious patience that allowed me to sew hundreds of white feathers to a set of leotards the year Aurora decided we should be owls, or stud a pair of denim jackets with so many fake gemstones they were as heavy as armor the year we went as Jem and a singular Hologram. Aurora smokes out my window while I work, drinking coffee and nattering at me and pretending to help. She throws glorious parties every year, legendary parties—ice sculptures of monsters dotting the yard, the whole house done up like a haunted mansion with cobwebs and people leaping at you out of darkened hallways, dressed as mummies or vampires or corpses with their flesh peeling away. This year, without her, it’s like the color has gone out of the world, and the growing tribe of jack-o’-lanterns grinning from front porches and windows only serves to remind me of what I’ve lost.
I’m waiting at an intersection when I see the poster out of the corner of my eye. I swing a leg off my bike and walk it over. The paper is faded and stained, one corner missing, but there’s no mistaking Jack’s name, or the name of the club, or the date. Halloween. Four days away.
I stand there for a long time, as the light changes and then changes again. A man leans out his car window. “Hey kid, you okay? You got a flat?” I turn, and he sees my face. “You okay?” he says again.
“I’m fine.” Forever pestered by earnest middle-aged men longing to help and destined to be spurned. He’s driving a minivan; he’s probably used to it. The car behind him honks, and he shrugs and drives away. I tear the poster off the telephone pole, fold it into smaller and smaller squares. Stuff it in my pocket. I have three days to decide what I’m going to do about it.
That night, Cass makes us curry. I chop vegetables while she sautes tofu, puts a pot of brown rice on the stove to simmer. “I saw a poster for a show Jack’s playing,” I say. Casual. No big deal.
“Where?”
“Los Angeles. I’m going to find a way to go. I’m sure Aurora is there.”
She raises an eyebrow at me, incredulous. “Oh you are, are you? This event taking place over my dead body?”
“What do you care?” I’m traveling fast from pouty to fully porcupined, the hot fire of rage taking me by surprise. Get on this roller coaster, see where it flies off the track.
“What do I
“That’s never stopped you from letting me do whatever I wanted before.”
“We’re not having this conversation now.”
“Oh yeah? Were we going to have this conversation, like, ever? I’m not like you.” I’m shouting now, the words coming out of the ragged hole in my chest I’ve been filling with strangers and too many drinks, but now that I’m reaching into the mess there’s no stopping me. “I’m not like you,” I snarl again. “I’m not going to write Aurora off. Everyone else in her fucking life has abandoned her. She’s down there on her own and she needs me and I’m going to get her.”
Cass is staring at me like I’ve hit her. “I love Aurora. You know that.”
“Not enough to pay attention! Not enough to stop her from practically killing herself! You left her in that house with Maia, you never even tried to take her with us—”
Cass cuts me off. Her voice is deadly. “I left that house because if I stayed there I knew I would be a junkie for the rest of my goddamn life. I left that house for
