on other planets—but a fate like that, quite another.
7:11 p.m.—Liyana
Liyana sits on her bed, drawing. Her fingers hurt. The shift at Tesco’s was only five hours—half of what she’d be expected to do in a day if she takes the job. She’s trying not to think about what Kumiko said, but she can’t. Is she so spoiled? Is it true that she always takes the easy route, that she’d rather be given something than earn it? No, that’s not fair. She crafts her illustrations until they’re perfect; she swam until she passed out—one doesn’t become an Olympic hopeful without working damn hard for it. Harder than most people ever do. But then . . . she loved swimming more than anything in the world, and she loves drawing almost as much. The question is: Would she be willing to work a sixty-hour week of night shifts at Tesco?
Temporarily ignoring that awkward argument, Liyana focuses on shaping BlackBird’s current exploits to reflect her own, wondering if her heroine might find a long-lost sister she never knew. If so, which bird-woman would she be? A white girl with blue eyes and blond hair. Liyana scans her internal list of yellow birds but finds none with suitable superhero potential. A chaffinch? No. Goldfinch? No. But what about the blue eyes—a peacock, perhaps?
Liyana chews the end of her pen. She’d surely do night shifts to put herself through art school, wouldn’t she? Standing, Liyana crosses the bedroom to her desk and picks up the tarot cards sitting under the lamp. Unwrapping them from their silk cloth and shuffling as she walks, Liyana returns to her seat on the edge of her bed and deals them out onto the duvet.
“What should I do next?”
First is the Eight of Swords: a fairy, dazzlingly dressed, is blindfolded and bound by thorned brambles snaking up from the soil, twisting around the swords, four yellow, four green. Entrapment, limitations, waiting to be rescued. Next, the Four of Pentacles: a skinny girl sits in the branches of a thorny winter tree, clutching her pentacles to her chest. A forlorn catlike creature hangs on beneath with one slipping paw. Ownership, protection of possessions, materialistic. Then the Two of Swords: an Elizabethan woman crosses her swords, averting her gaze from a mirror behind her back. Birds fill the sky while one nests in her hair. Compromised judgment, fear, hiding from the truth. Followed by the Ten of Wands: a boy is bent-backed by the ten sticks roped to his body and the ten boulders he lifts at his feet. He stares sadly at a wilted plant while a parched dog howls beside him. Overwhelmed, exhausted, pressurized.
“Yeah.” Liyana sighs. “Tell me about it.”
She deals the fifth card and scowls down at it. The damned Devil again: that green-skinned, red-eyed, horned Satan and his Mardi Gras bride, flashing a stockinged leg, sit atop a locked treasure chest on a mosaic floor. Spiders hang above weaving webs.
Liyana picks up the card from the bed, squinting at it in the darkened room. The woman is chained to the Devil’s hoof, but she’s also caressing his cheek, and the look on her face isn’t despairing but flirtatious. Had she never noticed that before? The Devil has captured his bride, but she’s been complicit in her capture. Greed, temptation, selfishness, entrapment, addiction.
Liyana stares down at the cards. They seem to stare back up at her. She waits for them to shift, to tell a different tale, to give her a different answer.
They don’t budge.
8:09 p.m.—Bea
“What the hell did you do to yourself?” Her mamá sits forward, leaning across the table, seizing hold of her daughter’s hand.
Bea twists out of the grip. “Nothing.”
Once a month her mamá visits, taking her out to lunch at the Ivy. It’s their tradition. Rather, it’s Cleo’s tradition. Designed, Bea thinks, to keep her under a watchful eye.
“That’s not nothing. What did you do?”
What did I do? ¿Y ahora, que hice? What the fuck did I do? Every thought other than this has left Bea’s head since that frightful night. Three days later, she’s still stumbling about in a daze, unable to focus on anything else. She can’t read a fucking book, can’t hold a two-line conversation, can’t close her eyes without seeing Vali’s body, without feeling his still-beating heart in her palm before she . . . What the hell had she done? Stopped his heart.
“I was washing up. I picked up a knife at the wrong end.”