Chapter III #2
She takes another, smaller sip of her drink, the sweet burn somehow going both down her throat and up into her head.
She closes her eyes and leans into the wall, feels the bass beat against her spine, hum along her ribs, tells her body to relax, and it’s starting to listen when a hand jerks her back into the room, and there’s Catty’s whiskered face, her tilted grin, her fingers like a bracelet on Alice’s wrist as she drags her off the wall.
“Come on, barnacle.”
She leads Alice through a kitchen—past another skeleton, a girl painted like a porcelain doll, a guy with fake blood running down his face—and then out, into the cool night of the backyard, where the music isn’t deafening and a bonfire blazes in an orange peak against the dark.
Alice sighs in relief, fills her lungs with the fresh air as Catty tugs her toward the flames.
A group of teens stand ranged around it, chatting and sipping from their own red cups, the light splashed against their faces, and for a moment, neither of them talks.
Catty’s attention has disappeared into the flames, the way it does when she’s looking through something instead of at it, so Alice copies her, stares right into the fire even though it’s hot and bright, and burns her cheeks.
She closes her eyes, can see the whole thing ghosted on her lids.
“Let’s get out of here,” says Catty.
Alice blinks, hopes rising for a moment because she thinks Catty’s talking about the party, but then she adds, “Once you finish school,” and Alice knows she means after. After, that weird nowhere word that can mean an hour or a day or a year or never but not now.
“Where?” asks Alice.
Catty keeps her eyes locked on the blaze. “London. Madrid. Tokyo,” she muses, listing all the places in Mum’s photos. “What about America?”
“How will we get there?” asks Alice. “What will we do?”
Catty shrugs, as if the questions aren’t important.
“You’re smart, Bones. You can go to one of those big fancy schools, and I’ll—I dunno, I’ll take photos.
Or make drinks. Be a bartender. Or a model.
You always hear those stories about girls getting discovered.
That never happens here. But out there, it could. ”
She stares into the fire, and Alice can see the future taking shape in Catty’s mind, the way it plays like light across her face. She tips her head, just so, as if she’s already on some fancy set, limbs gracefully arranged like she’s waiting for someone to snap her photo.
That’s why Catty likes Derrick. Or at least, that’s what she claimed, when Alice asked. She didn’t insist he was handsome, or clever, or even kind. She just shrugged and said, “He sees me.”
As if he’s the only one, or even the first.
As if Alice didn’t come into this world with both eyes focused on her sister.
Catty catches her staring, so Alice makes a camera of her hands, and Catty rolls her head toward the imaginary lens, and winks, and Alice clicks her tongue and prints it on the back of her mind, and then Catty brightens, and Alice smiles, till she realizes it’s because Derrick has shown up, a piece of gray plastic perched on his dark hair.
Alice cocks her head. “What are you supposed to be?”
He flicks the plastic down over his face, smug expression vanishing behind a wolfish mask, spreads his arms as if waiting for applause, then says, “But wait, there’s more,” and pulls out a red umbrella, opens it over his and Catty’s heads.
“See? Now we’re raining cats and dogs.”
Alice rolls her eyes because wolves and dogs aren’t even the same thing, but Catty cackles with delight, and Alice can’t help but wonder which one of them she dressed up for, and the whole thing leaves a bad taste in her mouth, and then as if on cue, Derrick reaches behind his back and produces a bottle of something neon blue.
He spins the cap off and takes a swig, then points the lip toward Alice, as if to say, You want a sip?
And she would have probably shaken her head, scrunched up her nose, half because it’s the kind of booze their granddad wouldn’t even stock on the lowest shelf of the pub, and half because he’s just had his mouth all over it.
But before she can, Catty waves him off.
And Alice knows there’s no malice in the gesture, but something about the way her sister does it, the look in her eye, like Alice is still a kid who needs protecting, makes her snatch the bottle from Derrick’s hand and take a long swig.
She nearly chokes as the liquor stings her eyes, and strikes a match inside her throat, going down like a mouthful of hot tea.
Derrick whistles, and Catty swipes the bottle off her.
“Whoa, slow down,” she says, and isn’t that ironic, given all the times Alice has said those same words to her big sister.
Slow down, slow down.
Alice doesn’t know she’s laughing until Catty frowns, sends Derrick to fetch a glass of water.
Catty turns to Alice, hands on her hips. “What’s gotten into you?”
“Nothing,” she says, because how can she explain this pit inside her, the way she wants to either shrink or grow, go back to when they both were kids, or fast-forward to when they’re both grown up, that either one’s better than this feeling, like the gap between them’s somehow growing, and Alice can’t catch up.
“I just—” She falters. The swig was two shots, maybe three, but her head is already spinning. The sounds around her rise and fall like she’s on a roller coaster instead of standing, boots on grass. “—I want to be like you.”
She wants Catty to smile, to hook an arm around her shoulders and say You are, say We’re two of a kind, or some silly shit, but she doesn’t. Her expression changes, like someone pulled a curtain down.
“No, you don’t,” she says, cupping Alice’s face. “Don’t be me, Bones. Just be you.”
The bonfire crackles. Alice swallows. “But I don’t know who that is.”
“That’s okay.” Catty cracks a smile. “You’ve got all the time in the world to find out.” And maybe that’s true, but Alice can’t help but think about the fact that Catty’s always known exactly who she is. And then, her sister shrugs and says, “But I know who you are.”
And it’s probably a joke, a trick, but Alice feels her heart lift anyway. “Really?”
“Yeah,” says Catty, light playing in her eyes. “Want me to tell you?”
Alice nods, and Catty leans in close, puts her mouth right against her ear, and Alice holds her breath and listens as Catty starts to speak, but just then someone lobs a firecracker into the fire and it goes off with a sudden, deafening shriek, and then Derrick is back, putting a glass of water in her hands as he pulls Catty away,
And Alice is left standing there, alone—
With no answers—
Only a ringing in her ears, and—
Her toe hits a jutting piece of sidewalk, forced up by a nearby tree and—
Alice lurches, and her eyes fly open, and there is Ezra, his arm looped so casually through hers, his head tipped back as if considering the night, but there is a studied air to it, like a head turned tastefully away to give a person privacy, and she can’t help but wonder if somehow he felt or heard what she was thinking—if her mind, her memories, are just spilling out, painted on the air around her, and the thought makes Alice queasy, she wants to pull them back, tuck them under the collar of her shirt with the little golden pendant, but he just clears his throat and says, “It’s not far now. ”
They are almost to the Commons, the park stretching like a shadow up ahead.
Ezra slips free of Alice, and tugs a flask (of all things) from his coat pocket, and when he opens it she can smell the penny scent of blood.
Her throat tightens as he takes a swig, teeth aching as he hands it to her.
She drinks, and it doesn’t even touch the edges of her thirst, knows that she could drain a dozen flasks and it wouldn’t make a dent, but can’t stop herself from swallowing, feels guilty for how light it is when she hands it back.
But Ezra just slips it back into his coat.
“Where does it all go?” she asks, exasperated. “No matter how much I drink, the thirst is always there.”
“That,” he says, “is one of the great questions. The bigger one is, if you know that it won’t fill you, why bother drinking at all?”
“Don’t we have to? Won’t we starve?”
“Starving,” he says, “is far harder than you think. Go on,” he says, as if he can hear her racing thoughts, the way they trip and tangle. “I’m sure you have more questions.”
“How long can you go?”
“Some go months. Others years.”
“ Years? ” She can’t seem to go more than a day without unraveling.
Ezra nods. “Madness will take you before hunger ever will.”
Alice chews her bottom lip, as gently as she can. There is so much she wants to ask. So much she doesn’t know or understand, but the question that pushes to the front is this.
“Why a coffee shop?”
Ezra laughs, clearly expecting something else. “The coffee shop’s fairly new. Before that it was a bar. And before that, a bookstore. And back during Prohibition it was a speakeasy. I change it around every ten to twenty years, to keep from standing out, or ending up on a historic registry.”
“Why bother, then?”
He considers. “After a while you learn, it helps to have a purpose. Besides, keeps me from getting lonely. I get to meet all kinds of people.”
“Like angels and demons and psychics.”
He snorts. “Exactly. But normal people, too. After all, if I only catered to a certain clientele, I’d be out of business. There’s not that many of us.”
Us. The word feels like an ill-fitting coat. She resists the urge to shrug it off. Instead asks, “Why not?”
Ezra exhales another plume. “Fickleness, I suppose. And folly.”