fighting, like a family. That’s the thing you have to understand: None of this seemed that weird to me, because Cass and Maia had already set the bar high.
After we left Maia’s, Cass and I lived a lot of places. I don’t remember most of them, or they blur together in my mind, one long series of big kitchens full of people, dirty bathrooms, broken instruments. Wooden floorboards with gaps in between them full of dust and windows that never kept out the cold. Walls painted haphazardly in weird, clashing colors. The smell of incense. Communal houses, punk houses, hippie houses. Sometimes there were other kids around, but usually I was the only one. We lived in one house for a while with ten other people. A desiccated cat that someone had found in the basement hung on the wall over the fireplace. It used to give me nightmares. Dinner was always a giant pot of Dumpstered vegetables cooked on the stove all day into a tasteless mash. Too many guests. Travelers, punks, maybe sometimes homeless people who’d wandered in off the street. On the weekends, there would be shows in the basement, so loud the house shook. Cass and I had the attic, low- ceilinged but big, and there was a triangle-shaped window at one end that went all the way from the floor to the pitch of the roof. I’d lie next to it for hours, looking out at the street below. Sometimes in the night I’d wake up, shaken out of sleep by the sound of Cass crying in her bed across from mine.
That time didn’t last too long. Cass was working two or three jobs at a time, and it was easiest for us to live in a place where other people could take care of me. She’d taught herself to read people’s cards and make spells years ago, even before she met Maia. She’d turned out to be good at it, good enough to see other people’s lives unwinding in front of them, good enough to untangle the delicate threads of sex and death and money and hope. Our housemates would come to her with their questions, their love problems, their private mysteries and sorrows. I got used to it, dozing late at night in my little bed while Cass held someone’s hand, her fingers moving across their palm. Got used to the shirring sound of her tarot cards as she shuffled them, the low raspy murmur of her voice as she spelled out the future. She never asked for money, but people gave it to her, or other gifts if money was something they didn’t have. A velvet coat, an antique rosary, muffins, a patchwork bag. Presents for me: colored pencils, drawing paper, my first set of oil paints, the tubes half-spent but still good. I remember squeezing out dabs of color for the first time, the sharp tangy smell that is like no other smell in the world. Touching the vibrant paint and bringing my finger to my mouth for the barest taste.
Cass’s name got around and she started reading cards for people with real money, people who lived in new houses all by themselves. Houses with dishwashers and microwaves and carpet. Refrigerators shone white and clean; inside them were cartons of milk and eggs, neatly ordered condiments, the orange juice I wasn’t allowed to have because it was too expensive. When Cass took me with her I’d sit and draw quietly in a corner while women with shining hair and perfectly lipsticked mouths asked Cass if their husbands were cheating on them, if their kids would get into good colleges, if they’d find love and, if so, where it would be waiting for them. The most boring questions I could imagine. “So well behaved,” they’d say, looking over at me, like I was in a zoo. I didn’t understand how people who lived in houses like that could worry about anything at all.
As soon as Cass got enough money together we moved into an apartment of our own, the apartment we live in now. I had my own room, my own window. Our own kitchen—“Dear god,” Cass said, when we first moved in, “I thought I’d never see a clean kitchen again”—and our own living room with our own couch. Shabby and small, but it was clean, and it was ours. No guests unless we invited them. No guests really but Aurora, and sometimes men Cass dated for a while, always the same quiet, gentle types who stared moonily at her over the breakfast table and disappeared after a month or two, banished from her orderly macrobiotic world as soon as they got too close. Never, ever Maia. Cass has a guillotine heart, severing ties as neatly as a whistle-sharp blade cutting the head from the body. Like any good revolutionary, she pretends that the casualties mean nothing.
We were still poor. For a while when things were really bad, Cass and I would stand in line at the food bank once a week, where white-haired church ladies handed out yellow bricks of government cheese and big plastic bags of instant oatmeal. There was always a pile of bread, one or two days stale, from a bakery near our apartment, and meat that came in a can with a silhouette of a chicken. I thought they had somehow put a real chicken in there, that you could open the can to find a pet. I cried when Cass said we didn’t eat that kind of stuff and handed it back. She’d send me over to Aurora’s for dinner, but there was never any food at her house, either. Trips to the grocery store and wholesome meals didn’t make it on Maia’s to-do list between shooting up and sleeping it off. Half the time, Aurora didn’t eat unless she ate with us. All that money might as well have been dust. Sometimes, Maia would get it together enough to hire people to help, but she’d forget to pay them, or they’d end up holing up in her room with her and doing drugs, or one day they’d wander off, and Aurora would be left to run feral again, with only me and Cass to make sure she showed up for school and ate a meal every now and then. When I took Cass’s food stamps to the grocery store around the corner, piled up bulk brown rice and oatmeal and sixteen different kinds of vegetables, the lady who always worked the register would sometimes put a bag of Doritos on top of my groceries, hold her finger to her lips, and wink at me.
Aurora and I ran wild young. Cass tried to keep us locked down but gave up quick, settling for exhaustive lectures on the functions and maintenance of the human reproductive system; a crash course in what to do when people got too wasted; and firm exhortations to me to keep myself and Aurora not pregnant, free of disease, and more or less sober. “And
I was at a party with Aurora last year. The hosts were friends of friends of people she knew. People who were a lot older than us, and weren’t too interested in hiding how much money they had. “Tacky,” Aurora hissed, fingering sequin-crusted throw pillows and cashmere blankets thrown over the overstuffed couches. Velvet drapes. Scented candles in gold sconces. Cold cuts on cut-crystal plates. A painting on the wall that turned out, on closer examination, to be a Monet. “Of course, it’s one of the lesser-known pieces,” said the hostess with false modesty, coming up behind me.
Aurora and I were giggling in a corner when a shrink-wrapped babe stalked over to us. Up close, she was total construct, younger woman stapled on top of old bones. Fake boobs straining her satin dress, chemical-plump mouth. Her eyebrows had that surprised look women get after one too many plastic surgeries. “I know who you are,” she said to Aurora, jabbing her with one red-taloned finger. She was very, very drunk. She wobbled there for a moment, glaring at us.
“I don’t know you,” Aurora said. “Thankfully.”
“You know my
“Oh my god,” Aurora said. We looked at each other and then we both began to laugh. “That was
I never asked who the husband was. It didn’t really matter.
After the night in the park I send out a psychic call. I’m so hooked I hijack a pile of Cass’s crystals and leave them under my pillow, willing them to bring him to me, but all they do is give me a stiff neck. Aurora says she has no idea who he is or where he came from. He wouldn’t let us give him a ride home from the park, strode off into the darkness before we came to our senses and asked how to find him again. Rockers are a dime a dozen in this town, but he’s something else again. I’ve never heard anyone play music like that.
“You’re in love,” Aurora says. She thinks it’s cute. If she’s staking her own claim on him, she’s not saying. She’s sitting in my kitchen, drinking Dr Pepper that she brought over herself. If Cass is home Aurora puts the soda in a mug. She can’t bear, she says, to watch Cass’s face when she sees the can. But we’re home alone and so an unlit cigarette dangles in her fingers and she runs a thumb around the can’s edge between sips.
“I am not in love,” I snap. “You can’t fall in love with someone you just met.”
Aurora rolls her eyes. “Someone’s never read a fairy tale.”
“We’ve read all the same fairy tales. This is the real world.”
“This is the
