“Uh, right.” Rafe cleared his throat, removed his hand from Jessica’s, and checked his watch. “Right. Jessie, just give me a minute.”

  He pushed his chair back from the table and went to his bedroom. The police had shown up the previous day, but since a sobriety test had proven Rafe wasn’t drunk and no one had actually seen him hit the dog, no charges had been filed. Still, Jessica was worried about her dad behind the wheel—for everyone’s sake—so that morning she’d hidden his keys and offered him a ride.

  “We all know how you feel about him, Iridian,” Jessica said, once their dad was out of earshot. “You could make it a little less obvious.”

  “He’s awful,” Iridian snapped. “He’s awful, and he doesn’t deserve our comfort or your hand-holding.”

  Jessica wiped away the tear that was threatening to spill from the corner of her eye, and her finger came away smudged black from her eyeliner.

  Iridian snickered. “I can’t believe you shed tears for that man.”

  “Like you’re so fucking perfect,” Jessica replied.

  Iridian shoved away from the table, the legs of her chair squealing against the linoleum floor. She stalked into the living room, turned on the television, and started to flip through the channels.

  Rosa moved her chair so that she could sit facing Jessica. She then lifted her fingers up to her sister’s face to smooth out the eyeliner. The rising sun coming in from the windows lit Rosa up from behind. In that light, she was weirdly pale. Her eyelids, nostrils, and the upper crest of her ears were practically translucent. Jessica closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Rosa’s skin was cool, and the light pressure of her fingers was soothing.

  Out in the living room, Iridian landed on what sounded like the local news. With her eyes still closed, Jessica listened for updates about the weather. Overnight there’d been another thunderstorm. Hurricane season had come early that year. Even this far inland, they’d been hit with bad storm after bad storm.

  Jessica heard updates, but they weren’t about the weather.

  . . . already at least a couple of sightings near Concepcion Park. If you see the animal, please don’t approach it. Do not attempt to feed or capture it. Instead, call police immediately . . .

  “Iridian!” Rosa called out. “What is it?”

  “What is what?”

  “The animal that escaped. What is it?”

  Iridian took a couple of seconds before replying. “A spotted hyena. It escaped from the zoo yesterday morning. Those things are gross. They eat babies.”

  “They do not eat babies,” Jessica said.

  “They do,” Iridian insisted. “They come into people’s houses at night, steal the little babies, and eat them. I read about it.”

  “Did the storm wake you last night?” Rosa asked Jessica, giving the corner of her sister’s eye one last dab with her finger.

  “Yeah,” Jessica replied, “I thought the thunder might break my window.”

  “Ready, Jessie?”

  Jessica opened her eyes. Rafe was standing in the entrance to the kitchen. That little crust of foam was still there on his ear, and Jessica’s traitor heart clenched at the sight.

  “Ready,” she said.

  The air-conditioning in Jessica’s car had been broken for months, so she always kept the windows rolled down while she drove. It was hard to have a conversation or listen to the radio because the wind and the street noise drowned everything out. This meant Jessica couldn’t really talk to her dad as she drove him across town to the factory, where he had a job building cars on an assembly line. The silence was fine with her.

  Jessica pulled into the lot and let the car idle as her dad climbed out of the passenger seat. After shutting the door, he leaned in through the open window and clasped his calloused hands together. He really did look bad. The sunlight made it worse.

  “Jessie. Keep the faith for your old man, huh?”

  Jessica smiled. She imagined it looked unconvincing.

  “And don’t worry about coming to get me later.” Rafe gazed up, squinting into the sun. The fingers on his right hand twitched. Jessica worried that he was going to try to reach for her hand like he did earlier at the kitchen table, but he didn’t. “I’ll figure out a way back. Catch the bus, find a ride or something.”

  Jessica’s phone buzzed in her cup holder. She glanced down to see several missed messages—calls and texts—from John. She’d never heard any of them come in.

  Her smile—convincing or otherwise—disappeared completely.

  Iridian

  (Monday, June 10th)

  In the weeks following their sister’s death, the Torres girls would play a game called Who Loved Ana Most. Iridian would always win because she was the best at remembering small details. For example: Ana’s left eye sat a little lower on her face than her right. There was a freckle on the inside of her right wrist, at the pulse point. There was a spot on the crown of her head where gray hairs would always sprout. Iridian knew about that last thing because sometimes Ana would ask her to sit up on the bathroom counter and pull those hairs out with tweezers. Ana’s favorite movie was The Princess Bride, but she’d tell people it was The Craft. When she was thirteen, Ana decided she wanted to be a majorette, not because she had school spirit—she didn’t—but because the girls’ mother was once a majorette, and, most of all, because Ana liked the idea of going out on a great big football field and being the only one of her kind.

  The grand prize for Who Loved Ana Most was her room, her clothes and shoes, her makeup, her hairbrushes, and the ancient pack of cigarettes she kept hidden behind the stack of towels in her bathroom cabinet. Jessica, though, kept crying about losing (shocking!), so Iridian caved and gave most of her winnings—Ana’s room, Ana’s clothes—to her older sister. One night, Iridian spied on Jessica sitting on the edge of the bathroom sink. She had on one of Ana’s long, ratty T-shirts and a pair of her old underwear and was wearing her bright pink lipstick. She was leaning against the frame of the open window, trying to mimic Ana’s far-off, dreamy look. Iridian hid behind the door and watched Jessica smoke four stale cigarettes, one right after the other. She was puckering her lips so that a perfect hot-pink O would form on the filter. Later, after Iridian had gone back to her room, she could hear her sister throwing up from all the way down the hall. Sometimes Jessica tried too hard.

  When Iridian decided to let Jessica have most of Ana’s old room, she had one condition: She would get to keep Ana’s collection of romance novels, all of which Ana had arranged in three three-foot stacks at the back of her mess of a closet, with the spines facing the wall so that the titles were hidden. It was obvious that most of them had been stolen from the library because they still had the yellowing call slips in them, and because their covers were soft and curled from being read hundreds of times by hundreds of different ladies. The responsible thing would’ve been to return Ana’s books to the library, but Iridian didn’t do that. Instead, she carried them all to her room and arranged them the same way Ana had arranged them—in three stacks at the back of her closet, spines facing the wall.

  It took a few months to read Ana’s old novels, and when Iridian was done, she had a clear sense of her purpose in life: She decided that she wanted to write her own book—a slightly disturbing kind of romance with a slightly disturbing kind of ghost or witch or were-person as the love interest. She had several notebooks full of ideas. She’d brainstormed possible character names: Leticia or LaTisha or Letisha, Gabriel, Viridiana, Sam. She had character descriptions: long chestnut hair, curly auburn hair, crow-black hair, eyes like clear pools, earth-toned skin, freckly skin, freckles that danced across skin, membranous wings, glistening fangs, delicate fingers, scents like clove, lemon, cinnamon, and other things found in a hot tea bag. She’d come up with hundreds of lines of witty banter, and had drawn out intricate family trees featuring the offspring of humans and nonhumans. She’d written out page after page of what it felt like to have body parts come in contact with other body parts, and how that contact would result in gasps, moans, twitches, and full-body shudders. The main characters in most of Ana’s novels were fair-skinned and had corn-silk hair that gleamed in the sun, but in Iridian’s, the heroines all had hair and skin in various shades of brown.

  There was only one book of Ana’s that Iridian didn’t keep: a school copy of Shakespeare’s King Lear. It not only had Ana’s writing in it—Iridian could tell it was Ana’s because of the way she wrote her a’s, typed-style with the curl on top—but layers and layers of other students’ notes and highlights. Most of the pages were dog-eared and smelled like other people’s houses, like cat litter and corn. Iridian wasn’t interested in reading a story about daughters and their father—it was a story she lived every day. She took the book back to the school, handed it to Ana’s former teacher, and that was that.

  After spending the day finishing her reread of The Witching Hour in a mostly empty house, Iridian opened her notebook and clicked her pen. Just as she was about to start a conversation between a witch and vampire who were falling in love despite a multigenerational curse, she heard someone coming up the stairs. She knew who it was because the steps were too slow to be Jessica’s and too heavy to be Rosa’s. Iridian slammed her notebook shut and crammed it into the space between her bed and the wall. She then barreled across her room and braced herself against the doorframe.

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” she said, barring her dad’s entrance. “Did you get fired?”

  “No, I did not get fired, Iridian,” Rafe sneered. “My boss let me come home a couple of hours early.”

  Rafe worked twelve-hour shifts on the line, which meant he shouldn’t have been home until after 9 p.m. Iridian glanced at her clock. It was only 5:30.

  “More than a couple,” she said. “You’re not allowed up here.”

  Rafe towered over his daughter. It was obvious he’d been crying again. It was too dim to see if his eyes were red, but his eyelids were puffed. His gaze swept the darkened room that Iridian and Rosa shared, taking in the two unmade beds, the carpet that hadn’t been vacuumed in months, the clothes thrown all over the place.

  “Where’s your sister?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.” Iridian paused. “Which one?”

  “Your little sister.”

  Rosa hadn’t been home since the morning, but Iridian wasn’t worried. Rosa was a wanderer, had been since she’d been able to walk.

  “You’re not allowed up here,” Iridian repeated.

  “This is my house,” Rafe replied. “I can go anywhere.”

  “What do you want?” Iridian felt her fingers dig into the doorframe. She never would’ve considered herself brave, but she was ready to use her long, weak limbs to defend the contents of her room.

  Again, Rafe peered over Iridian’s shoulder.

  “I’m wondering if you have anything of Ana’s,” he said. “Anything that I could have.”

  “Why? What for?”

  Rafe waited a moment. “Do I need a reason?”

  “Yes,” Iridian said, even though she didn’t need or want to hear that reason. It wouldn’t matter. It probably had to do with missing Ana and wanting a keepsake, a scrap of something that used to belong to her.

  He didn’t even need to be there, upstairs and lurking. The whole house was still full of Ana’s things. Just last week, Iridian had found one of Ana’s hairs bundled up in a pair of socks. She knew it was hers because it was long and dark, with about an inch of gray at the root. She’d squeaked with glee when she’d found it, and then wedged it between a couple of pages of The Witching Hour like a macabre little bookmark.

  “Are you hiding something?” Rafe asked.

  “Probably,” Iridian shot back. “Get out of my door.”

  Rafe leaned forward. Lamplight hit his face, and Iridian could see the pink lines from where recent tears had tracked down his cheeks. They looked like burn marks. They did not make her feel sorry for him.

  “You girls don’t understand,” Rafe said.

  Iridian said nothing.

  “You girls don’t understand,” Rafe repeated. He braced his weight against the doorframe and then dropped his head, shook it.

  Iridian couldn’t stand this, how her dad always turned his grief into a performance piece.

  “You have no idea what it’s like,” Rafe said. “Ana was my heart.”

  Oh, Iridian had some idea what it was like. For her, Ana was hardly even gone. She was everywhere all the time. She was in the walls. She was in the wood of the walls, the wood of the cabinets, the cheap porcelain of the family’s mugs, the loops of the terry-cloth hand towels they used to dry their faces, the threads of the worn sheets they slept beneath at night, the pages of the books all stashed in Iridian’s closet. She was in the tiniest details of the ways in which the Torres sisters lived their lives, the choices they made, the directions in which they steered themselves, the shades of lipstick Jessica wore. Ana was the one who told Rosa, long before Father Canty ever did, that she was full of magic, that she was different and had a heart that was better-crafted than most people’s.

  Sometimes, Iridian felt like Ana was the itch in her skin, like she breathed in pieces of her, and then breathed out pieces of her. She cycled through and through. It was overwhelming. Sometimes, like in that very moment, it was too overwhelming. And when things got too overwhelming, Iridian wished she could just shut herself down.

  “Your sister died,” Rafe said slowly, “because she was keeping secrets.”

  God, she hated him. Her hate was a sour film coating the back of her throat.

  “My sister died,” Iridian countered, just as slowly, “because she was trying to get away from you.”

  She stepped back into her room and tried to slam the door, but Rafe was too quick and caught it. His other hand whipped out and wrapped around Iridian’s upper arm.

  “Apologize,” Rafe demanded.

  “No!”

  “You’re a miserable girl. Because you’re a miserable girl you try to make everyone else miserable.”

  Maybe that was true—but was it possible that Rafe thought Iridian was the only miserable girl in his house?

  “You spread your misery,” Rafe hissed, squeezing harder. “You’re like a disease.”

  Iridian wrenched her arm free, slammed her door, and bolted it from the inside. She then braced herself there, with both palms and her forehead pressed against the wood, ready for her father to kick the door down or other­wise try to force his way in. She breathed in and out, inhaling the particles of the paint on the door, the particles of Ana. Eventually, Iridian heard Rafe’s footsteps receding down the hall. There was a pause and then a slight rattle as he tried the knob on Jessica’s locked door. Then there were more steps, hard and heavy, as Rafe went down the stairs.

  Iridian counted to one hundred, and then to one hundred again. The weak limbs she would’ve used to fight her father started to feel even weaker, like foam. Just blow on her and she’d scatter. Once she was fairly certain that her dad wasn’t going to come back, Iridian raced to her bed, reached for her notebook, and smacked it to her chest. She was used to her dad throwing out all kinds of insults: little ones that barely pricked and big ones that were meant to crack bone. The best ones were the ones Iridian could snatch out of the air and then save for later, when she’d make them her own. If she could take Rafe’s words—no matter how hard or hurtful they were—and write them in her own hand, it transferred their power and made her feel less insignificant. Iridian needed that, to feel less insignificant.

  She reached for her pen and opened to a fresh page.

  You’re like a disease, she wrote.

  Jessica

  (Monday, June 10th – early Tuesday, June 11th)

  “It attacked a little boy in his own front yard, then ran off with one of those pequeño dogs,” the older woman said. “What kind is that?”

  “A Chihuahua?” Jessica offered.

  “No, no. More fur.”

  “Uh . . . a Yorkie?”

  “Sí, a Yorkie.”

  “Oh. Well,” Jessica said. “Your total is $14.23.”

  The woman on the other side of the register took out her wallet, handed Jessica a bank-fresh hundred-dollar bill, and then dumped out all her coins on the counter to hunt for exact change. Of course this was happening while Jessica was the only person working checkout, and while there were five other people in line who were starting to get visibly impatient. One of them was rocking side to side, right foot to left foot to right foot, like he had to go to the bathroom. A man holding a baby in a car seat with one hand and a jug of laundry detergent with the other let out a loud sigh. The old lady ignored him, or she didn’t hear him. She bent over the counter and squinted, trying to tell the difference between a penny and a moldy dime.

  Jessica picked up the intercom. “Backup to the registers.”

  “I stopped letting out my cat,” the lady said, still hunched. “All night he scratches at the back door, but I don’t want Hudspeth snatched up by a hyena. Can you imagine?”

  A high school–aged girl joined the line. She was trying to hide a pregnancy test in the sleeve of her hoodie and was biting her lip like she was about to burst into tears. An older man walked over to the photo-maker, holding a flash drive and looking confused.

  “I’m confused,” he called out.

  Again, Jessica reached for the intercom, but stopped when she saw Peter Rojas jogging up from the back of the store.

  “I can help the next person,” Peter cheerfully announced, sliding behind the counter while clipping on his name tag.

  “Thanks,” Jessica muttered.