Ana had returned—for her dad, for Iridian and her sisters, for all of them.

  “It’s true,” Iridian said to the boys. “Ana is back, but she’s not the same anymore.”

  The Day Iridian Torres Walked Away from the Tenth Grade

  Iridian Torres never went anywhere without three things: a worn-out paperback copy of The Witching Hour by Anne Rice, a black-and-white composition notebook, and a peacock blue ink pen. She carried The Witching Hour and the notebook with her, from class to class, stacked on top of whatever textbook or binder she was required to have. She always sat in the back row. If there was a window in the room, she’d sit in the desk closest to that. Her spine was always bent way forward, and her legs were folded underneath her on the hard plastic seat. Iridian didn’t really talk to people after her sister died, and people didn’t really talk to her. But even in mourning, Iridian managed to make pretty good grades, so the teachers gave her a pass when, instead of taking notes, she’d just write in her composition book with her blue ink pen or open up The Witching Hour in her lap. Everyone—teachers, other students, staff—figured it was best to leave her alone, not because she would snap at them like Jessica, but because when someone puts up that thick a wall around themselves, you just respect it.

  We didn’t have uniforms at our school, but Iridian had created her own. She wore white slip-on sneakers, narrow-legged and high-waisted jeans that made her already skinny body appear skinnier, a short-sleeved T-shirt of some kind (always a solid color; never with a graphic), and a jean jacket. The jacket had a patch on it, on the back, over her right shoulder blade. It was of a nopal cactus with a couple of pink flowers in bloom.

  We imagined that if some stranger had walked into one of the classrooms and had seen Iridian there, in her uniform, writing in her notebook, they would have thought, That girl is lost in her own world. But that wasn’t it at all. Iridian wasn’t lost, and she was the furthest thing from being in her own world. In truth, Iridian was very aware of the real, actual world. The way she sat at her desk, with her long limbs folded up close to her body like an insect—she looked uncomfortable, like everyone else’s breath was pressing too hard against her, making her smaller and more compact. She felt everything—too much. The world seemed so hard for her to live in.

  Of course, we wanted to know what Iridian was writing in her notebooks. Jimmy thought it was some kind of burn book, a list of classmates Iridian felt deserved to suffer the way she clearly suffered. Calvin thought the burn book idea was overdramatic. The answer, according to him, was obvious: Iridian was writing about vampires because Anne Rice wrote about vampires, and if someone reads the exact same book over and over again, it’s probably going to get stuck in their brain. That made a lot of sense until Hector pointed out Iridian always carried around The Witching Hour, which, by the very title, would seem not to be about vampires, but witches.

  We really had no idea what we were talking about, but when we discovered the truth of what Iridian was writing about in her notebooks, it was a nightmare. There weren’t any vampires or witches, but it was a nightmare all the same.

  On a Tuesday in December, Iridian was in the cafeteria eating lunch alone. Right there, by her tray, like always, was The Witching Hour, her composition notebook, and her blue pen. Evalin Uvalde—the girl who was making out with John Chavez until Jessica threw a cup at her face—came up from behind Iridian and snatched her notebook. On instinct, Iridian whipped around and reached back, but Evalin spun out of the way, cackling. Evalin then hopped onto a nearby table and opened Iridian’s notebook. After scanning through a few pages, she landed on one that made her grin so wickedly wide.

  This moment was important. It was the moment when the three of us who also had this lunch period, and who were sitting just a couple of tables away from where all this was happening, could’ve stopped what came next, or attempted to stop it and spin its trajectory on a different path. We could’ve saved Iridian Torres—it was so obvious she needed saving—but we didn’t. We remembered what happened the last time we tried saving one of the Torres sisters. Our heroics had backfired in the worst possible way. So instead of doing anything, we just sat there, our curiosity burning.

  Evalin cleared her throat, and we couldn’t help it—we leaned toward the sound. Other students—almost the entire lunchroom—stopped talking and also leaned toward the sound. People hushed each other. Even the workers behind the counters got quieter, or so it seemed. The dings of the registers and the clanks of trays lessened, softened. That day, we were all hungry for nastiness.

  “I have a problem,” Evalin read out loud, while Iridian curled into herself, shrank deeper into her jean jacket. “I can write most of the parts, like the parts describing the characters, what they look like, or how it feels when one character wants another character so much their knees turn to jelly and their heart starts to beat all fast and jangled. I know what this feels like. I can write that. But what I can’t write are the sex scenes. I have no frame of reference! I’ve never been with a guy or a girl. I’ve never even been kissed, and while I’m pretty sure I can fake those descriptions or borrow them from one of Ana’s books, that would be . . . disingenuous. I’d feel like a fraud. The descriptions wouldn’t be from the heart. It wouldn’t be real, and I want it to be real.”

  Evalin read all this with a fake-earnest tone, and not once did she break character, even though her friends had their hands clasped over their mouths, their eyes watering from holding in their cruel laughter.

  It got worse. Of course it did. Evalin looked up from the notebook and straight to where we were sitting.

  “I’m thinking about asking one of the boys across the street at Hector’s for a favor,” she said. “I wonder if one of them will have sex with me.” Evalin snorted. “Just once. For research.”

  Evalin lost it. She doubled over, gasping and laughing, clutching the notebook to her chest. Her friends all lost it as well. They laughed these loud, full-throated, messy laughs. We could see past the tops of their mouths, to their tongues, to the bits of french fries or the remains of ham sandwiches speckled across those tongues. John Chavez, the biggest shithead in town, was there, hooting and laughing. Eventually, Evalin—still laughing, laughing so hard she was hiccupping—straightened up and put her hand in the air, palm facing forward, silently commanding everyone to wait.

  There are two things that gutless boys do when they’re being laughed at: They get defensive or they join in. The gazes of the people in the lunchroom that weren’t on Iridian—who was still sitting, frozen at her table—were on us. In that moment, we hated Evalin and the evil pride shining in her eyes. We hated watching Iridian fold into herself. Most of all, we hated the fact that we—the ones who had wanted more than anything to be Ana Torres’s heroes—buckled under the pressure. We sat there and started laughing, like cowards.

  We laughed and laughed at Iridian, but later we talked about how much we hated that we just went along with it. We were sick with regret. It felt like a bunch of slick worms writhing around in our stomachs.

  Regret. It’s so useless so much of the time.

  Evalin wasn’t done. She’d needed a moment to compose herself, to shake out her shoulders and take a big breath, like she was some Olympic athlete about to run a big race, before she was able to continue.

  She read on: “I need to know what it feels like, how to do it. I’d like for it to be with someone who doesn’t already have a girlfriend and someone who wouldn’t feel the need to go tell everyone after it happened, and someone who wasn’t a virgin, because it would be helpful if he knew what he was doing. That last thing, the virgin thing, is just a request though, not a requirement. Also, I will not form an attachment.”

  Evalin snickered. She looked up from the notebook and tilted her head at us in a gesture of mock sincerity.

  “I promise.”

  There was still laughter throughout the room, but in some corners it had stopped. People with shreds of feeling in their hearts ducked their heads closer to one another, probably whispering about poor Iridian and cruel Evalin. Like us, they didn’t do anything but whisper, though. The cash registers went back to their dinging, and the trays went back to their clanging.

  One might think Iridian, overcome by embarrassment, would’ve run from the lunchroom and hid in the bathroom or the library or nurse’s office for the rest of the day. She didn’t do that. She just sat there, compact, staring straight down at the surface of the table. Her mouth was closed, but her lips were moving, twitching a little, like she was talking to herself.

  Iridian’s request was for sure a shock, but, when we think about it now, it wasn’t totally bizarre. Iridian was the type of girl who was both withdrawn and hyperfocused. She saw things, and not in the dreamy, pseudoclairvoyant way Rosa saw things. Iridian was observant and keen in her own way. She was good with details, sharp like a knife. So it made sense that if she wanted to write something and make it true, she’d really want to know the thing she was writing about. She’d want to suck the thing up with her senses and then document it in her notebook.

  Finally—finally—the bell rang. Iridian grabbed her copy of The Witching Hour and snatched her notebook from Evalin’s hand, ripping a couple of pages in the process, and left the lunchroom. That was the last day we ever saw her at school.

  Rosa

  (Sunday, June 16th)

  “It came for you?”

  Rosa was crouched in front of a bush in the yard, examining a bit of loose squirrel fur the color of red clay. At the same time, she was fighting down the strange urge to cause petty harm to her sister. It was like she wanted to tug out a strand of Iridian’s hair or step down on her bare big toe. Rosa had never felt that way before.

  “It didn’t come for me,” Iridian explained. “It was just here.”

  “How did it seem?” Rosa urged. “Like, how did it look? Was it sick?”

  Iridian obviously didn’t know how to respond to that, so Rosa’s focus shifted from the fur tangled in the bushes over to Hector’s house, where a jumble of boy-shaped shadows had appeared at the upper window. A bird cawed from a nearby tree.

  “Come on,” Rosa said, standing. “It’s getting dark. Let’s go inside.”

  “Wait.” Iridian latched on to Rosa’s arm, a little too hard. “Did you not hear what I told you, about the boys, about Ana? They said—”

  “I know what they said,” Rosa replied. “They told you about how they saw her ghost by the window last summer. I know. They sent me a note when it happened.”

  When Rosa looked into her sister’s eyes, she saw a hunger there. Or like a dis-ease, a wildness. Maybe that wildness had passed to Iridian from the hyena. Iridian squeezed Rosa’s arm harder, and Rosa’s urge to tug a piece of Iridian’s hair got stronger.

  Everything was connected.

  Rosa was on the bus on the way back to San Fernando. It wasn’t the first time she’d been to church twice on the same Sunday, but there was a new kind of urgency to this trip. She supposed she could have tried to find Walter’s mom for a ride—Walter was probably still at church, working—but she wanted to be alone before talking to Father Mendoza.

  Sunday buses were usually empty, and Rosa’s bus was no exception. It was just her, a woman in a uniform—a knee-length pink dress and tan-colored tights that made her seem like she worked in a diner—and the driver. Traffic was light, and the bus was only a couple of stops away from the church when the driver slammed on his brakes. Rosa flew—forehead first—into the seat in front of her. Dazed, she checked for blood, but there was no cut, just a tender spot that would for sure form a goose egg. The woman in the pink dress, though, was moaning from the floor. She’d been thrown completely out of her seat and was in a crumpled heap, bleeding from the mouth. There was a long run in her tights, all the way up her shin.

  The driver got to the woman before Rosa could. He was trying to open a first aid kit and speak into his radio at the same time. He was saying something about an animal running out into the street, and how he’d had to come to a sudden stop to avoid hitting it.

  “It looked sort of like a dog,” he said. “Or like a real skinny wolf.”

  Rosa bolted out the side doors of the bus, first checking under the wheels and then looking frantically up and down the street. She thought she saw something—a flicker of a shadow low to the ground—on the other side of a parked car, and she ran toward it. There was nothing there, but then that same flicker caught her eye, this time as if it had just rounded the corner of a building up ahead. It was leading her closer and closer to the church.

  This was perfect. This was just what she’d been hoping for.

  Like last time, there was a line of people waiting to see Father Mendoza, but Rosa shoved ahead of all of them.

  “I have another question,” Rosa said, standing across from the priest’s desk.

  Father Mendoza’s dry-kindling eyes were, as usual, patient and kind. His stark white office wasn’t the type of room that Rosa expected would change much from day to day, but she hadn’t expected it to be exactly the same as before. There were the same simple cross, the same simple ticking clock, and also the same line of ants marching in the same curve up the wall behind where the priest sat.

  “Is it possible,” she began, still slightly out of breath, “for the spirit of a person to enter another creature?”

  “You’re talking about possession?” Father Mendoza asked. “Like when a demon enters a person’s body?”

  “Not a demon, no. I’m wondering if the spirit of a person can enter the body of an animal.” Rosa paused to look to the ants on the white wall. “Or an insect.”

  “Is that what you think has happened with Ana?” Father Mendoza asked.

  “Yes,” Rosa replied. “Maybe, yes. There were fireflies and a bird that fell. And the hyena. It escaped from the zoo on the anniversary of the day my sister died. It killed a squirrel on our front lawn.” There was a little pinch in Rosa’s heart, and she pushed the palm of her hand against her chest. “I think . . . it may be close by.”

  Father Mendoza was quiet for a moment. Then he asked, “You think your sister is controlling these things?”

  “Yes,” Rosa replied. “Does this mean something?”

  For a long time, Father Mendoza said nothing. He had to have known there was still a line of people waiting outside to speak with him, but he didn’t look at his ticking clock. Rosa could see a spark in his eyes, like he was calling to mind a memory. He was off somewhere, in the room but not in the room. Rosa knew what that was like.

  “Ever since you came last time, I’ve been doing some thinking,” he finally said, “and I have a question of my own. Why is it Ana who is doing these things? Why isn’t it your mother?”

  Rosa suddenly felt very heavy. Over the course of the last year, she and her priest had talked for hours and hours about faith and death and the meaning of life, but they’d never talked about Rosa’s mother. Rita de la Cruz was a woman who had grown up in the Rio Grande Valley, who’d met Rafe Torres when they’d both been in the ninth grade, and who’d died just hours after giving birth to Rosa. All Rosa knew was that, during the delivery, something had gone wrong. There was blood loss. Even the strongest heart can’t beat without blood.

  “I’ve never told you this,” Father Mendoza went on, “but I knew Rita. I’m a couple of years younger than her, but we both grew up in Mission. It’s a small place. Everyone knew everyone.”

  Father Mendoza’s chair squeaked as he sat back and brought his fingers into a tent. His eyes were doing what dry kindling does when it heats up. They were smoldering. Rosa knew what was coming. Her priest was about to launch into a story. He probably thought this story, which would no doubt be about the young Rita de la Cruz down in Mission, Texas, was going to be a gift Rosa could then take home with her and cherish like a bird’s bright feather or a perfectly coiled snail shell. Father Mendoza probably thought he was being kind and generous. But Rosa knew his story wouldn’t really have anything to do with Rosa or her mother. She could tell by the warm glow in his eyes that, even if the story seemed on the surface to be about Rita de la Cruz, it was really about him.

  “Our mothers had been friends since high school,” he said, “but it wasn’t until Rita was fifteen that we officially met. I was thirteen.”

  Rosa looked to the cross on the wall, and then to the clock. She closed her eyes and took a breath. Father Mendoza wasn’t listening. She’d come to him with something specific and important, and he was turning it into something about himself. He was launching into this tale as if he had all the time in the world to tell it, as if it wasn’t getting late in the day or if there wasn’t a small mob of people still waiting outside his door for his counsel.

  “You look a lot like her,” Father Mendoza said.

  Rosa felt even heavier. What a waste this was turning out to be. Jessica had always had a bad taste in her mouth when it came to priests, and now Rosa was beginning to understand why.

  Just a moment earlier, Father Mendoza had said, “Everyone knew everyone.” Rosa disagreed. No one knew anyone. Not really.

  She wasn’t there to argue that point, though, so she put up her hand, palm facing out, just like she’d seen Father Mendoza do hundreds of times while he led services. He’d hold one hand like that while the other rested on the opened pages of a Bible. The priest saw Rosa’s hand, and he stopped talking.

  “Thank you,” Rosa said. “I’m leaving now.”

  Rosa found Walter outside, sweeping the steps. He was facing away from her and didn’t know she was there. Rosa liked the look of it: Walter, a tall boy with strong arms, sweeping stone in the twilight. Still unaware of Rosa, Walter stopped his work and looked for a moment to the darkening sky, to the lightning flashes in the distance. She liked the look of that, too: a boy watching a storm.