father’s pottery shed and used it to shatter my own.
It was a question without answer. It was not a question at all.
I didn’t follow my sister. I was my sister. I breathed when she breathed. I blinked when she blinked. I felt pain when she felt pain. If Grey was going to jump off a bridge, I was going to be there with her, holding her hand.
Of course, of course, of course.
In the evening, we met up with Vivi’s bandmates for dinner before the gig: Candace, a hard-drinking German with a voice like Janis Joplin, and Laura, the Danish drummer, who looked like a pixie and played drums like a banshee. I’d had something of a crush on her since I’d first seen her play, on a weekend trip to Prague six months ago. Grey had met us there and we’d spent two nights wandering the labyrinthine stone alleys of the Old Town, eating nothing but trdelník and drinking nothing but absinthe.
When we’d watched the band play at a red-lit basement bar, Grey had mouthed the words to each of their songs. It was one of the things I loved most about her: you might not see her for months, and then she’d show up and know every word to every song you’d written and recite them back to you like they were Shakespearean poetry. Grey didn’t just know I got good grades; she contacted my teachers and requested to read every essay I handed in, then commented on their merits the next time we met up.
So where was she now?
For dinner, we ate bowls of spicy chicken karaage at Vivi’s favorite pub, the Lady Hamilton, named after the famous eighteenth-century muse and mistress Emma Hart. Vivi’s first ever tattoo had been George Romney’s painting Emma Hart as Circe, a soft beauty with round eyes, pouting lips, and hair whipped around by the wind. I wasn’t sure if Vivi had discovered the pub or the woman first, but either way, whenever she came to London, we inevitably ended up eating here. Inside, the pub was warm and cozy, the walls and furniture all dark wood, the roof a lattice of Bordeaux cornice and ceiling roses. Candles dripped white wax onto our table as we ate. Vivi slipped me a sneaky glass of house red wine. Another difference between my sisters: the budgets. If Grey were here, we’d likely be eating the tasting menu at Sketch and knocking back twenty-pound cocktails like they were candy.
I thought about the classes I had the next day, all the prep work I was missing out on by taking a night off. I thought about the skin of Laura’s neck, what it might taste like if I kissed her. I thought about how young I looked in my uniform. I thought about the horned man, and how Vivi couldn’t be in town for ten minutes before weird shit started happening.
After dinner, we wandered down Kentish Town Road toward Camden, past convenience stores and late-night barbers and the hot-oil smell that lingered around the doorways of chicken shops. Even on a weeknight in winter, the streets around Camden Town Station were humming with people: a punk in a leather jacket and a fluorescent-orange Mohawk was charging tourists a pound for photographs; a vape company handed out free tester kits to the crowds coming home from work or heading to the nearby market for food; revelers spilled out of honey-lit bars; couples held hands on their way to the Odeon cinema; shoppers carried bags of groceries from M&S and Sainsbury’s and Whole Foods.
Vivi’s band, Sisters of the Sacred, had been booked to play at the Jazz Café, which, contrary to what its name would suggest, was not actually a jazz café but rather a nightclub/live music venue in an old Barclays Bank. Its white columns and arched windows gave it a faux Grecian vibe, and blue neon letters loudly declared it LONDONS FAMOUS JAZZ VENUE. There was a line out the front already, despite the cold, which made Vivi and her bandmates stop.
“Oh my,” Laura said. “Are we famous now?”
Sisters of the Sacred was semi well known in the underground scenes of the mainland’s coolest, grungiest cities, but they certainly weren’t famous. Not in the way that Grey was famous.
Vivi stared at the line and lit a cigarette. “I may have told the venue manager that my sister and a gaggle of scantily dressed supermodels would come and watch our show if they booked us.”
“This is the