John squeezed tighter, and Jessica sagged a little from the sudden hit of pain. She knew that John had seen Peter looking at Jessica. He knew what Peter saw, and that’s why he’d squeezed harder. In the past—like, a couple of days ago—Jessica would’ve been scared. She would’ve anticipated anger and then pain, and it would’ve made her weak with fear. Not today, though. Not on this bright and beautiful day. Peter’s eyebrow twitched again, and Jessica sucked in a breath.

  She didn’t know exactly what would happen next, but she had an idea. She lifted her free hand to cover a smile.

  “What the fuck are you looking at?” John sneered at Peter.

  Peter leapt over the table, knocking over several cups and sending their contents splashing. He shoved John, not on the shoulder or on the chest, but on the face—like, he put his entire hand on John’s face and pushed it backwards, chin to sky. John stumbled but recovered, and then quickly landed a punch on Peter’s left eye.

  Hector and Calvin were sprinting across the street—to do what, Jessica had no idea. This amazing fight didn’t need to end, and Peter didn’t need any help. A line of blood was trailing down the side of Peter’s face—just like that line of sweat from a few days ago in the parking lot—but Jessica didn’t have the urge to go up and wipe it away. She liked it. Liked the way it started at his brow and traced his cheekbone. She also liked it when Peter grabbed John by the front of his shirt and punched him in the nose. The resulting crunch was loud and oddly inhuman, like a grunt a dog makes when it launches itself into a bowl of food. John landed hard against one of the folding tables. Plates and serving bowls flew, and the table itself crashed to the ground.

  It took a moment, but when John stood, he was covered in a swirl of food and blood. His white T-shirt was smeared with red but also something brown—chocolate cake, maybe—and a deviled egg was stuck, yolk-side, to his upper arm. John lumbered toward Peter, fists clenched. The blood on Peter’s face had reached his chin. Then it dripped—so perfectly—right onto the toe of Peter’s off-white sneaker. Peter didn’t notice. He didn’t blink, didn’t back down, as John lunged.

  Peter ducked. He elbowed John in the stomach, and when John doubled over, Peter punched him underhand. Again, blood sprayed, Corvette red, into the grass and onto Peter’s sneakers. John straightened, and Jessica noticed the skin around his eyes was already turning colors.

  And what was Jessica doing all this time? She was just standing there. She wasn’t trying to pull John away or yelling for them to stop or anything. Ice and iced tea had sprayed onto her at some point, but she’d made no effort to wipe it off. Her hand had moved from her mouth, her fingers splayed across her nose and her eyes. She was doing that thing, faking horror, watching while pretending not to be watching. But if someone were to take a closer look, they’d see her cheekbones hiking up and gentle crinkles around the corners of her eyes, like she was smiling and trying to cover up her glee. Like she was laughing.

  And where was Rafe? He was still behind the grill, watching. Norma was huddled up against him. A spatula hung from one hand. Jessica glanced his way and thought he looked kind of limp, kind of frightened, like the last thing he’d ever want to do was leap into the fray and break up a fight between two young men. That’s the kind of man Rafe Torres was—the kind who would cling to a spatula in a time of crisis. Even Hector and Calvin had finally decided to step in and were now attempting to pry John and Peter away from each other.

  Jessica couldn’t hold it in anymore. She laughed. The sound burst out of her, and it sounded harsh and mean, like a row of grackles squawking on a telephone wire. She didn’t think she’d ever laughed like that before. Clearly, she was losing her mind. She laughed and laughed.

  Calvin and Hector were pulling John away from Peter, and John kept yelling, “I will fucking kill you!” which somehow made Jessica laugh harder. There were tears in her eyes. Her vision blurred. She started hiccupping. She doubled over, clutching her stomach, and eventually landed on her knees in the grass. The sun was still shining on this bright, cloudless day. It was hot, but the grass was cool, and the ground beneath was soft.

  Jessica collapsed onto her side, and it was like she was a tiny bug peering through the tall blades of grass. She felt as if she could laugh there forever.

  Rosa

  Almost exactly two years ago, Rosa and Ana had been sitting together on their back porch, doing nothing special, just drinking iced tea on a warm summer night. Even if they never had anything to talk about, since they were so far apart in age, Rosa had always liked being alone with her oldest sister. She liked that they shared an appreciation of the dark sky, and she liked the way Ana’s long hair was always wavy and dynamic, like it was caught on a breeze even if there was no breeze at all.

  There had been fireflies that night, blinking at the edges of the yard, and as time passed, the fireflies had multiplied. There were still some in the distance, but others were lighting up just inches away from Rosa’s face. Ana had been reaching out and lazily trying to grab them. More and more had started blinking—so many that they’d played tricks with Rosa’s vision, leaving tracks and trails, the way fireworks do.

  “Are you doing this?” Ana had asked Rosa, and in the next moment, the yard went dark. The fireflies had blinked out, all at the same time, but Rosa could still feel them there, hovering in the heavy air. She could hear the hum of their little wings.

  “You are,” Ana had said, and then the yard had burst with light, so suddenly that it made Rosa gasp. The fireflies had lit up, all together. Then, a long moment later, they’d gone back to their regular, irregular blinking.

  “I didn’t,” Rosa had said. “I’m not.”

  “I’ve always known there was something special about you,” Ana had replied. She’d said it sternly, like a schoolteacher. “Now we know.”

  No one had ever said anything like that to Rosa before. It would’ve seemed like a tacky, bad-luck thing to say. Rosa had never thought there’d been something special about her. In fact, she’d thought there’d been something very sad about her. Her life was the cause of someone else’s death. She’d been born, and her mother had died. It was a simple and terrible fact.

  “Listen,” Ana had said. “You’re different than everyone else. You’re blessed. I mean, God has gifted you with something. I don’t know what it is, but it’s something. I hope you figure out what it is. I hope you can make the fireflies do that again.”

  Rosa

  (Saturday, June 15th)

  Rosa was walking to Concepcion Park when she heard shouting, followed by the crunching and crashing of things colliding. She hustled back toward home and saw that Peter Rojas and John Chavez were fighting. People had gathered around. Jessica was in the grass, on her back. She looked like she was convulsing. Rosa ran to her sister and saw that Jessica wasn’t convulsing. She was laughing.

  “Girls?” Mrs. Bolander asked, tentatively approaching. “Is everything alright?”

  “We’re fine,” Rosa said, putting her hand on her sister’s shoulder. “Jessica? What happened?”

  Jessica couldn’t respond. She was gripping her stomach, hardly able to breathe, overcome by her cackles.

  The shouting and crashing and crunching continued just a few feet away. Rosa didn’t look, but she could hear the sound of flesh thwacking against flesh, followed by stupid John telling Peter he would kill him. Jessica laughed harder.

  Rosa glanced up just in time to see Peter punch John in the eye. The blood was so red as it left John’s body. Red like the feathers of the cardinal that had fallen from the tree.

  Iridian

  (Saturday, June 15th)

  Iridian hadn’t understood the sunlight at first. She’d woken up on the couch after a nap of hours or minutes, licked her dry lips, and stretched out from fingertip to toe before she’d noticed the long rays of light seeping in through the curtains. The light caused her to sit straight up, and that’s when she saw the notebook on her lap. It was new. She could tell without even opening it. The cover was yellow plastic, but it had a paper half-cover on top of that, one that boasted the brand name and page count. Iridian knew it was a gift from Jessica because when she picked it up, a receipt from the pharmacy showing a twenty-percent employee discount fell out.

  Iridian held her new notebook for a moment before flipping through the crisp, blank pages. Some were stuck together. They smelled beautiful, fresh like ink and chemicals.

  Laughter from the block party outside filtered through the walls of the house. Iridian’s sisters had suggested earlier that she get out, if just for a little while, if just for a hot dog and a piece of Mrs. Bolander’s famous buttermilk pie, but Iridian would rather stay inside with a ghost than go outside with actual living people and animals and who knew what else. She went to the kitchen to grab a snack and maybe even make herself a cup of tea. Even though she spent most of her time indoors, Iridian could appreciate a nice day. The sun was shining after several dreary days of rain. There were breezes. Iridian couldn’t feel them, of course, but she could see the leaves and the branches of the trees swaying, and she watched a squirrel chase another squirrel across the abandoned frame of the trundle bed in the dirt yard. It was all very simple. Bad things didn’t happen on a day like this, when the sky was bright and people were outside laughing.

  As she smacked on her chocolate puffs, Iridian surveyed the kitchen—the cracked and stained linoleum floor; the loud, whining appliances that had probably come with the house back in the 1970s; the fridge that randomly released ice cubes from its door; the food-spattered range.

  It made her think: This house isn’t good enough to be haunted. There weren’t any libraries with old, cryptic notes shoved between the yellowing pages of dusty books. There weren’t winding staircases with polished banisters. There weren’t wood floors that were warm and worn from the soles of many generations of family feet. There weren’t any gables or widow’s walks or turrets. There weren’t any rooms that were a little bit colder than the others, or rooms that were kept locked up “just in case.” The walls didn’t moan when the wind blew. The Torres family wasn’t entangled in some generational curse like the Mayfair witches. They had no important heirlooms, just a banker’s box full of their mom’s old stuff that their dad kept on a shelf in his closet. It contained a couple of button-up blouses, a pair of red flat shoes, a bundle of crepe-paper flowers, a recipe book that used to belong to Grandmamá de la Cruz, and a postcard their mother had once sent home from a trip she took to see family in Morelia, Michoacán.

  There were piles of dirty laundry in the closets and unwashed dishes in the kitchen sink. The faucet in Iridian’s bathtub always dripped, and there was a ring of rust around the drain. Jessica didn’t even have a real shower curtain, just a plastic liner that was once clear but was now streaked with layers of mineral deposits and grime. Everywhere, the carpet was old and dirty. Some of it was buckling, wrinkled like waves on water. Not a single bed in the house was made. The furniture was practically all from estate sales. The house was just some crappy old house, not in any way ghost-worthy.

  Iridian knew that if she died on the couch or from falling down the stairs, and had any kind of choice in the matter, she would never, ever stick around this place.

  Again, laughter rose up from outside. There was the shrieking of little kids doing something like chasing each other around. Then Iridian heard a woman’s gleeful whoop, followed by a man shouting Hey! to someone.

  People were happy. They deserved their nice party. If Iridian were there, things would only get worse. She’d be forced into talking to someone. She would probably say the wrong thing.

  The spoon Iridian had been using to eat her cereal slipped from her fingers and fell with a clang into her bowl. The milk tasted acidic. She gagged, nearly choking on mushy chocolate puff.

  Even now, a year later, she could still feel the sudden, vibrant shame she’d felt after saying the wrong thing to Ana, just hours before she died. It felt like a full-body rumble, an oh shit shock followed by the intense desperation of wanting to scoop words back into her mouth and eat them.

  The day Ana fell from her window, she and Iridian had fought. It started when Iridian went into Ana’s bathroom to borrow some shampoo. At the time, Ana had been downstairs in the kitchen with Jessica—Iridian could hear them both laughing, followed by the sound of one of them mashing the buttons on the microwave. As Iridian had been leaving with the shampoo bottle in hand, she’d seen that one of Ana’s drawers was open. Normally, whatever was crammed in a drawer wouldn’t have caught Iridian’s eye—decades’ worth of anything and everything filled every corner of the Torres house—but what she’d seen made her heart plummet.

  It was a pregnancy test. It was new, unopened, safe in its box. But still.

  There were footsteps on the stairs, and Iridian heard her sister—Ana—call out her name.

  For a moment, Iridian considered acting like nothing had happened and nothing was wrong. She could slide the drawer all the way closed and Ana would never know about her snooping. But Iridian didn’t want to act like nothing had happened. Of course, she knew Ana snuck out her window all the time to meet boys, but she never would’ve guessed her sister would be so careless—so stupid—as to get herself pregnant, or in a situation where she might even think she was pregnant.

  It was a nightmare. Iridian saw it all unfold. She knew Ana would have the baby. It would be a little girl because this was a house full of girls, and all Iridian’s plans of running away with her sisters would be ruined. They couldn’t run with a baby. Ana couldn’t be both their leader and a mother. None of the rest of them could be the leader. Iridian wasn’t brave enough—not brave like girls in books. Jessica could make a decision but could never follow through with anything. Rosa would just lead them in circles.

  Iridian had sucked the end of her braid into her mouth, hoping to taste the faint tang of the dirt from the South Texas orange groves. Instead, she’d tasted oil and sweat—it wasn’t the same at all.

  Iridian took the box from the drawer. She held the tragedy in her hand, and when Ana finally reached the top of the stairs and found her, Iridian said, “You said we’d go back. You told us.”

  “Go back where?” Ana asked. Her gaze fell to the box in Iridian’s hand. “Iridian, wait.”

  Iridian didn’t wait. Instead she hurled out the ugliest thing she could think of—a thing that was not true, but true in that moment. “How could you do this to us, you dumb whore?”

  Ana slammed the bathroom door shut and leapt forward.

  “You’re going through my stuff?” Ana demanded, all up in Iridian’s face.

  Iridian waited—to get smacked, to be yelled at, for Ana to get defensive and then apologize and apologize again—but Ana just crumbled. She fell back against the closed door, covered her eyes, and sobbed. Eventually, Ana slid all the way down to the ground and tossed the pregnancy test across the bathroom. Iridian was trapped. All she could do was stand there, mortified, radiant with shame. She did swallow, a couple of times, as if trying to gulp down her sour-tasting mistake. At last, Iridian took a step toward her sister, but Ana held up a hand, silently commanding Iridian to stay back.

  “I was so scared,” Ana hiccupped. She wiped her eyes roughly. “But it’s nothing. It’s fine now. You’re fine now, Iridian. Alright?”

  Again, Iridian took a step forward. She reached out, but her sister smacked her hand away.

  “No,” Ana said. “You fucked up.”

  Ana stood and left, and those were the last words Iridian ever heard her sister say.

  The laughter continued outside as Iridian spit out her half-chewed cereal, rinsed out her bowl, and put it in the overstuffed dishwater. The front door opened, and there was a new sound—gaspy and raspy, a sort of hysterical giggling. It belonged to Jessica. When was the last time Iridian had heard Jessica giggle? When had she ever heard her do that?

  “What’s going on?” Iridian asked, stepping into the living room.

  “There was a fight,” Rosa replied. Jessica was collapsed against her little sister, gripping Rosa’s shoulders to keep from falling over. She was wet, like someone had tripped and spilled a drink on her shirt. “Between John and Peter Rojas.”

  Jessica laughed harder.

  Iridian looked to Rosa to explain, but all Rosa could do was shrug and shake her head. After a few seconds, Jessica managed to get herself together enough to head toward the staircase on her own.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” Iridian asked.

  Jessica hiccupped. “I just need to change clothes.” She hiccupped again.

  Jessica got halfway up the stairs, and then spun toward her sisters. Her head had swiveled so fast, it looked like she’d been hit in the face. She wasn’t laughing anymore.

  “Wh—?” Iridian started.

  She couldn’t finish the question because she didn’t want the answer. There had to be something else, some new terrible thing—phantom steps on the stairs, a misplaced, girl-shaped figure in a doorway, or more writing on the walls—more I wants. Iridian reached back to grip the couch and dug her nails into its scratchy fibers.

  Jessica shook her head and tapped her ear.

  That meant: Listen.

  There was still the sound of laughter coming from outside, but new laughter had joined it. It was different: joyful, rising like a cluster of bubbles, but also sort of cruel and breathy and gleeful. It was the sound of someone who’d just been told a good-bad secret. It was as familiar as the handwritten letter a’s on the wall. It was Ana’s laugh, and it was coming from upstairs, in the direction of Jessica’s bedroom.

  Jessica spun again and then ran down the stairs. Halfway down, she tripped over an old tear in the carpet and was thrown into a waiting Rosa.