Tigers, Not Daughters - Samantha Mabry Page 0,10
because Ana liked the idea of going out on a great big football field and being the only one of her kind.
The grand prize for Who Loved Ana Most was her room, her clothes and shoes, her makeup, her hairbrushes, and the ancient pack of cigarettes she kept hidden behind the stack of towels in her bathroom cabinet. Jessica, though, kept crying about losing (shocking!), so Iridian caved and gave most of her winnings—Ana’s room, Ana’s clothes—to her older sister. One night, Iridian spied on Jessica sitting on the edge of the bathroom sink. She had on one of Ana’s long, ratty T-shirts and a pair of her old underwear and was wearing her bright pink lipstick. She was leaning against the frame of the open window, trying to mimic Ana’s far-off, dreamy look. Iridian hid behind the door and watched Jessica smoke four stale cigarettes, one right after the other. She was puckering her lips so that a perfect hot-pink O would form on the filter. Later, after Iridian had gone back to her room, she could hear her sister throwing up from all the way down the hall. Sometimes Jessica tried too hard.
When Iridian decided to let Jessica have most of Ana’s old room, she had one condition: She would get to keep Ana’s collection of romance novels, all of which Ana had arranged in three three-foot stacks at the back of her mess of a closet, with the spines facing the wall so that the titles were hidden. It was obvious that most of them had been stolen from the library because they still had the yellowing call slips in them, and because their covers were soft and curled from being read hundreds of times by hundreds of different ladies. The responsible thing would’ve been to return Ana’s books to the library, but Iridian didn’t do that. Instead, she carried them all to her room and arranged them the same way Ana had arranged them—in three stacks at the back of her closet, spines facing the wall.
It took a few months to read Ana’s old novels, and when Iridian was done, she had a clear sense of her purpose in life: She decided that she wanted to write her own book—a slightly disturbing kind of romance with a slightly disturbing kind of ghost or witch or were-person as the love interest. She had several notebooks full of ideas. She’d brainstormed possible character names: Leticia or LaTisha or Letisha, Gabriel, Viridiana, Sam. She had character descriptions: long chestnut hair, curly auburn hair, crow-black hair, eyes like clear pools, earth-toned skin, freckly skin, freckles that danced across skin, membranous wings, glistening fangs, delicate fingers, scents like clove, lemon, cinnamon, and other things found in a hot tea bag. She’d come up with hundreds of lines of witty banter, and had drawn out intricate family trees featuring the offspring of humans and nonhumans. She’d written out page after page of what it felt like to have body parts come in contact with other body parts, and how that contact would result in gasps, moans, twitches, and full-body shudders. The main characters in most of Ana’s novels were fair-skinned and had corn-silk hair that gleamed in the sun, but in Iridian’s, the heroines all had hair and skin in various shades of brown.
There was only one book of Ana’s that Iridian didn’t keep: a school copy of Shakespeare’s King Lear. It not only had Ana’s writing in it—Iridian could tell it was Ana’s because of the way she wrote her a’s, typed-style with the curl on top—but layers and layers of other students’ notes and highlights. Most of the pages were dog-eared and smelled like other people’s houses, like cat litter and corn. Iridian wasn’t interested in reading a story about daughters and their father—it was a story she lived every day. She took the book back to the school, handed it to Ana’s former teacher, and that was that.
After spending the day finishing her reread of The Witching Hour in a mostly empty house, Iridian opened her notebook and clicked her pen. Just as she was about to start a conversation between a witch and vampire who were falling in love despite a multigenerational curse, she heard someone coming up the stairs. She knew who it was because the steps were too slow to be Jessica’s and too heavy to be