All Our Pretty Songs aops-1

by Sarah Mccarry

  “Everyone needs to be loved through their first broken heart,” he says, and I love him so much I can hardly stand to look at him. I tell him what Jack said to me before he left.

  “I bet they’re there together. I bet they wanted to be together this whole time. I bet she—”

  “Why would you say a thing like that?” Raoul interrupts.

  “Because everyone falls in love with her. She can’t even help it. It’s not her fault. She wanted him and she got him and now they’re probably in Los Angeles laughing at me.”

  “Did you ever think that maybe Aurora loves Jack because he’s the only person in her life who doesn’t want anything from her?”

  “I don’t want anything from her,” I say, stung.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I tried to protect her.”

  “Did you? Or did you just want an excuse to follow where she was already going?”

  “Raoul. I love her.”

  “I know you do, but love can make us do ugly things, too. Sometimes I think you don’t really see her; you see the same thing everyone else sees when they look at her. Something ornamental. Underneath, though, she’s just as real and hurt as you are.”

  “But Jack and Aurora have this kind of magic. I’ll never have whatever it is that makes them what they are.” Raoul opens his mouth to protest, but I cut him off. “It’s fine. I don’t mind. I mean, I do mind. But it is what it is. I wish sometimes it came that easily for me, too. It’s hard not to be jealous.”

  “I don’t think it’s easy,” he says. “Not for Jack, and certainly not for Aurora.”

  “How can it not be easy for Aurora? Look at her.”

  “That’s what I mean,” he says. “Look at her. Look at both of them. Do you ever think about what a curse it might be, to look like that? To know that no matter what you were made of, no matter what you did with your life, no one would ever see past your face? Your skin?”

  “What does that have to do with Jack leaving me for Aurora?”

  “Now you’re not listening to me, either.” For the first time, he’s angry. I feel a hot surge of hurt and open my mouth to say something, close it again. “Just think about it,” he says. “For me.”

  “Do you feel like that?”

  “All the time,” he says simply. “I mean, I write poetry, so there’s not much chance I’ll have to make a choice like Jack did, but if it ever happens I know what it will be like. Do I see myself as a poet or as a brown poet or as a queer poet, as if all of those things are separate boxes I check depending on what day of the week it is. If I write about my family, people will ask me why I don’t write poetry that’s relatable, and if I don’t write about my family, they’ll ask me how I can stand to betray my roots. If I write about nature people will tell me how moving it is that my people are so connected to the earth. If I write about the city people will tell me how brave I am for talking about the realities of the urban experience. And none of those people will actually read the words I write. Everyone lives with it differently. Some people push it down so far inside they think it can’t hurt them, and it festers there. Some people talk about it. Some people don’t. Jack told you he was making the best decision he knew how to make in the circumstances he has to deal with. He has something people want, and it’s up to him to decide how he gives it to them. How he lets them take it.”

  “But it was selfish.”

  “All the best artists are selfish. You can’t be good unless you care about the work more than you care about anything else.”

  “But what about me?” As soon as I say it I want to take it back. This is the most Raoul has ever said to me about anything serious, this is the biggest thing he has ever trusted me with, and all I can do is come out of it sounding like a spoiled child. But with that hanging in the air between us, I see what Raoul has been trying to tell me. What Jack was trying to tell me. “Oh,” I say. “It’s not about me at all.”

  “No.”

  I cover my eyes with my hands. I always thought Aurora could metabolize love the way she can metabolize Dr Pepper and vodka and bad speed, that it passed through her without marking her and left only more emptiness in its wake. I have known her as long as I have known myself; there is no story of me without her written in every chapter. But now for the first time I wonder if the flaw isn’t hers, but mine. If all along it was me taking without thinking, not her. If what Aurora has given me isn’t infinitely more priceless than what I’ve given her, and if now I’m letting her slide into darkness without a fight because it’s easier than bringing my own faults into the light.

  “Why are you always right,” I mumble into my palms.

  “I do a lot of thinking.”

  “It hurts,” I say. “It hurts a lot.”

  “I know it does. And it doesn’t mean Jack doesn’t love you. It just means there are bigger things than you. Jack’s allowed to love music more than he loves you. I know it’s hard to hear, but that doesn’t make it any less true. That’s what he said, isn’t it?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Then there’s not much you can do about it except choose how you’re going to deal with it. You can hate him for it, or you can figure out how to let him go.”

  “I don’t want to let him go. I want him back. I want both of them back.”

  “Indeed,” he says. “There’s the rub.”

  SEPTEMBER

  After everything that’s happened, it’s hard to believe in high school, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have to go. It’s only September, but the summer’s ended as swiftly as a doused fire. The first morning of school is so cold the sidewalk outside my building is rimed with frost. I put on a ratty black hoodie over my rattiest shirt and rattiest pair of black jeans, run my fingers through my ratty hair, lace up my ratty combat boots. Ratty fingerless gloves and a ratty wool beanie and a ratty down vest. Jack used to joke he’d pay me to wear a color other than black. I tug the hood of my sweatshirt up over the beanie. Maybe if I turtle down far enough into it I’ll disappear altogether.

  I bike to school with my headphones in my ears, even though Cass always tells me I’ll get killed that way, listening to an old Earth album cranked up as loud as a headache. Coming down the last hill, I hit a patch of ice and the back wheel skids out from under me before I know what’s happening. I land flat on my back, somehow manage not to crack my skull on the ground. I’m starting a trend: the full-on wipeout, by foot or by wheel. Awesome. I lie in the street for a moment, stunned. Maybe another hapless suit will wander past and I can scream my head off at him, too.

  I pick myself up, check for damage. There’s a hole in my sleeve and my neck hurts. No one saw me, for which I’m grateful. Bike’s fine, wheels still true, but I walk it the rest of the way to school anyway, limping as the pain sets in. I’ll have hefty war wounds and no one to show them off to.

  High school has gotten no less prisonlike over the summer. I’m a senior now, officially at the top of the totem pole, building memories and planning for my future. No one bothered to clean the hallways over summer break. Dark smears of spilled soda and other, more mysterious fluids have dried to a gummy residue that absorbs the lurid fluorescent light and gives the linoleum floors a three-dimensional effect. I slouch from class to class, sit in the back, keep my head down and speak only when spoken to. Which is, thanks to the halo of menace I radiate, pretty much never. Between classes I jam my headphones back into my ears and glare. People look at me, look away quickly, and then glance back. They want to know why Aurora’s ray of sunshine isn’t around to offset my personal cloud of doom. Want to know why we aren’t joined at the hip, cutting class to smoke in the parking lot or get stoned with the metalheads behind the gym. Aurora making eyes at everyone, Aurora in her ridiculous clothes, Aurora dancing by herself on the football field, not caring who sees her, not caring that the music is in her head.

  At lunch, some girl from my homeroom sidles up to me with a puppy face. “What.” I take off my headphones.

 
; “I was just wondering, you know, where Aurora was.”

  “Not here.”

  “Is she having a back-to-school party?”

  “Do you see anything to celebrate?”

  She stares at me, and I put my headphones back on. That’s the last time anyone tries to talk to me for a week.

  I pull my Bartleby routine like cheer has gone out of style. Even in art class I’m sullen. The teacher is new this year, some fresh-out-of-college stoner who can’t quite hide his hanker for the choicer meats of the senior class. I refuse to participate in his earnest still lifes, leaving my sketchbook ostentatiously blank and staring out the window, or drawing weird landscapes peopled with stag-headed men moving through the shadows when I’m supposed to be drawing a vase and an apple. On Friday, Cass pounces as I slink through the door after work. My hours at the market are patches of post-school heaven. Raoul won’t let me mope. He tells me jokes, tugs my hair, makes eyes at the fish-stall boys in front of me. I’m almost in a good mood by the time I get home.

  “I got a call from the school.” Cass points me to the couch. I collapse in a sulky pile.

  “About?”

  “What do you think?” She perches on the edge of an armchair we once reupholstered in scraps of tapestry. They’re fraying now. Like everything. I chew on my fingers and fidget. She tries to stare me down, but I refuse to meet her eyes.

  “Look, baby. I know this is hard, but there’s nothing you can do. If they want to come back, they’ll come back. If you don’t bring up your grades, you won’t get into art school.”

  “We can’t afford art school.”

  “All the more reason not to alienate the person responsible for recommending you for scholarships, don’t you think?”

  “I really miss them.”

  “I know you do. I miss Aurora, too. But you’re not doing anyone any good by turning into a little gothic nightmare. Your art teacher is terrified of you.”

  “He’s an idiot.”

  “I’m sure he is, but you’re not, and there’s no reason to burn a bridge that might lead to a happier place. You really want to spend the rest of your life hustling fruit and shacking up with your hippie mom?”

  “The horror.” I let a smile through. Throw her a bone.

  “So we’ll put our game face on, shall we?” I shrug. Her hand whips forward and seizes my chin. “I said, shall we?”

  “Yes,” I mutter, and her grip tightens. “Yes!” I yelp. “Jesus.” She releases me and I flee for the safety of my room. After that, I draw the vases and the apples and Cass leaves me alone.

  It’s hard to believe I didn’t imagine the entire summer. Every morning I put on gloves and a beanie and two hoodies before I ride to school. The cheerleaders make a show of displaying their tans in short shorts and cropped jackets, but even they give up the fight after one too many days clustered together in the hallway like a gaggle of plucked chickens, prickling with goosebumps.

  Fall is usually my favorite season. I love the sharp clear days, the smell of fallen leaves, even the lurking menace of winter with its endless rains around the corner. I love spending long afternoons with Aurora, drinking coffee until our fingers twitch and watching the sky grow dark a little earlier each day, borrowing her cashmere sweaters and biker jackets, stomping around in my tallest boots. I love that feeling of cocooning inward. Aurora hates any weather in which she cannot be constantly naked, but she’s always gone along with my enthusiasm, trying to knit scarves or make soup or take up weaving or some other project she’s constitutionally unsuited for. She never fails to leave off in the middle, with predictably disastrous results. She nearly set her house on fire the night she tried to make me minestrone. It was supposed to be a surprise, and then she forgot about it, and the soup burned down to a puck of coal while we watched Fast Times at Ridgemont High in her bed, and it wasn’t until we smelled smoke that she yelled “Shit! Shit!” and catapulted downstairs to a blackened, toxic mess. She threw it, pot and all, in the yard, where it stayed for weeks.

  But now she’s gone, and so is Jack, and with them my dreams of piling up together in Jack’s house, the three of us watching rain fall against the windows and drinking tea and reading books out loud to each other. Later, Jack and I falling asleep under a pile of blankets, safe from the storm thundering overhead, skin to skin. Him writing me songs and me painting him pictures. This hazy fantasy does not include such trivial details as school, or work, or the fact that I still live with my mother. Cass has her quirks, but worrying about sex and nights away from home isn’t one of them. I could probably have worked around her as long as I came home for dinner sometimes. But none of that is going to happen now. I scuff through the fallen leaves on my own.

  I go to shows without Aurora, feeling like half of me is missing. I hand over my fake ID and watch as the guys working the door look around me, waiting for her. I slam-dance at the front of the pit, throwing myself up against sweaty shirtless boys who punch me back when I punch them. Afterward I let them shove me up against the wall in the alley or the bathroom and kiss me, push their hands up under my clothes. When I kiss them back I bite down until I draw blood. Less like sex and more like a fistfight, dirty and mean. It feels good. In those moments I forget about Jack and Aurora at last, forget about everything except my body’s need for harder, faster, louder, bigger, bigger, more. I wear scarves to school, never let Cass see my bruise-colored skin, go to all my classes and keep my eyes open and then do it all over again. When the music stops the hole inside me is so huge I think I might die from it.

  Without Aurora to watch over, I’m free to get as drunk as I want, to fuck up and fuck up again. Free to say yes to anything, to all the bad ideas. Free to slam so hard in the pit my teeth hurt, to let anyone in. One night I meet a boy I’ve never seen before. Brown doe eyes in a hard face. I can’t tell which is the true part, whether the gentleness in his eyes is real or a mask. He asks me my name. “Aurora,” I say.

  “That’s pretty.” He buys me a drink, and then another one. Is this what it feels like to be beautiful? Is this what it feels like to know everyone is watching you, everyone wants what’s under your skin? I can’t ask her because she’s not here. But if she were here, no one would look at me first. Later, I let the boy kiss me in the back of his van, yank my jeans down, shove his way inside. He licks my ear and it’s supposed to be sexy. His breath smells like beer and unbrushed teeth. I close my eyes. If I concentrate hard enough I can be back at the park, that very first night. The night I met Jack and everything started to fall apart. “Aurora,” he grunts in my ear. “Aurora, Aurora.” I think for a minute he is saying her name because she is here, in the front seat, smoking, rolling her eyes. Come on, babycakes, let’s go. But when I open my eyes the night is real and his van smells like cigarettes and old takeout and my legs are cold despite the press of his body, and I am all the way alone.

  “Get off me.”

  “What?”

  “Get the fuck off me.” I shove him over, wriggle out from under him, zip up my jeans. Try not to think about the blanket underneath me or where it’s been.

  “That’s not what you were saying a minute ago.” In that moment I have never hated another human being so much in my life. If I stay here I’ll put out his eyes with my thumbs.

  “I have to go.”

  “Will I see you again?”

  “You better hope not.” I open the door of his van and stumble out into the night.

  There is no one to look out for me except Raoul. If I call him, if I need him, he’ll come for me, but I like feeling as though I am falling into darkness so wide no one will be able to see when I hit the bottom. I’ll be out of sight before they even know where to look. Going, going, gone.

  I ride past Jack’s house on my way home from work a few nights later. I stop my bike in the street outside, 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 th
at 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.