Our Crooked Hearts(31)

My brother looked relieved. “See, you do remember.”

“No.” I was cold and prickling with sweat. “Why have you never said anything to me before, about Billy?”

His shoulders twitched up, like he was bracing himself. “Mom.”

“What about her?”

“She told me not to.”

I didn’t know what I looked like when he said that. But going by the way his expression changed, I’d say dangerous. “When was this?”

“Summer before I started high school,” he said immediately. “So you were going into seventh grade. I remember because it was right before I came out. You were acting weird for a while, but my mind was on my own shit.”

“What exactly did she say to you?”

“She said—she told me you and Billy had a falling-out and I should leave you alone about it, I shouldn’t tease you. I assumed he’d done something. But then he was so obviously lovesick, I figured it must’ve been you.”

“But you never asked.”

“Like I said.” He looked miserable. “I was distracted.”

“She was lying,” I told him. “I remember none of this. Nothing.”

“That’s…” Hank trailed off, mouth twisting.

“I saw Billy tonight. He told me I broke his heart when we were kids, and that I made Mom do it for me. Whatever is happening here, she did it.”

“Made you forget an entire person? How? Why?”

“Oh, come on, Hank,” I said. “We both know she can do stuff.”

I thought he’d argue with me, but he didn’t. “Yeah,” he said quietly.

We looked at each other for a while, neither of us talking.

“What about Dad?” I said. “How much does he know?”

“Ivy, stop.” Hank flopped back onto his bed and covered his face. “Three in the morning is not the time to get into it. Also I may have eaten mushrooms with Jada today and I cannot talk any more about this right now. Obviously you need to talk to Mom. And Billy.”

“Right, except Mom is hiding from us, and Billy hates me.”

“Billy’s been in love with you since he was seven,” he said faintly, laying a pillow over his face. “And Mom’ll be home eventually.”

“Billy what?”

He moved the pillow. “If you let me sleep now, I promise I’ll talk to her with you. Okay? I’m not promising I’ll talk, but I’ll be in the room. I’ll be, like, your lieutenant. But right now you have to let me go to bed.”

I did. I went to the bathroom and stared at my reflection like I might see straight through to my brain, to the traces she’d left when she broke into my head.

Then I remembered standing outside my aunt’s house feeling the subtle weight of being watched, reading the texts Aunt Fee just happened to send right after I rang her bell. What if they were there? Hiding out, taking care of the mysterious “something” that had started with that first dead rabbit. My dad was staying in the city, which meant his car was at the train station less than a mile away. There were spare keys in the junk drawer, and a key to my aunt’s house. This time, if she didn’t answer, I’d let myself in.

Billy’s car was gone from his drive when I stepped outside. I guessed he couldn’t sleep, either.





CHAPTER SEVENTEEN



The city

Back then

Sharon turned the CLOSED sign over and led us into the shop’s back room. Boxes were stacked against one wall, bookshelves lined another. There was a hot plate and an electric kettle and a Lost Boys poster pinned up on the whitewash. Beside it hung a molting bulletin board layered in postcards and flyers and a few bright oddities: dried flowers, lengths of woven thread, a plait of hair so shiny it had to be synthetic.

In the room’s center was a chipped mint Formica table. An East Asian girl in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt sat in one of its two chairs looking at Sharon with the hungriest eyes I’d ever seen. A wooden ruler and a piece of knotted rope lay on the tabletop in front of her. When she saw me looking she swept both into her lap.

“Who are they?” she demanded, her voice a deep-dish wedge of South Side.

Sharon smiled at her perfunctorily. “Sweet Jane. This is Marion and her friends.” We didn’t rate names, apparently. “Honey, would you run out and grab us some sandwiches? Four, make ’em turkey.”

“I’m not hungry,” Marion said colorlessly.

“Right. You’re fasting. Three, then.”

Jane looked at her unhappily. “I’m hungry.”

Sharon squeezed her shoulder, kissed her cheek. It was motherly, I was pretty sure. “Just three, okay?”

Jane avoided looking at us as she tucked her ruler and her rope into a purple JanSport. Watching her reminded me we’d be back in school soon, surrounded by girls her age. Our age. But it was sundown in summer and I was standing in a head shop’s back room, my temples aching with last night’s magic. High school couldn’t have felt further away.

Sharon pulled limp greenery from her mini-fridge and stuffed it into a plug-in kettle. Soon the room smelled like hot cilantro. When she handed me a mug I noticed, among the silver and the topaz and the black ink, a ring of pale hair on her right middle finger.