Tigers, Not Daughters - Samantha Mabry Page 0,11

Rosa’s. Iridian slammed her notebook shut and crammed it into the space between her bed and the wall. She then barreled across her room and braced herself against the doorframe.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” she said, barring her dad’s entrance. “Did you get fired?”

“No, I did not get fired, Iridian,” Rafe sneered. “My boss let me come home a couple of hours early.”

Rafe worked twelve-hour shifts on the line, which meant he shouldn’t have been home until after 9 p.m. Iridian glanced at her clock. It was only 5:30.

“More than a couple,” she said. “You’re not allowed up here.”

Rafe towered over his daughter. It was obvious he’d been crying again. It was too dim to see if his eyes were red, but his eyelids were puffed. His gaze swept the darkened room that Iridian and Rosa shared, taking in the two unmade beds, the carpet that hadn’t been vacuumed in months, the clothes thrown all over the place.

“Where’s your sister?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” Iridian paused. “Which one?”

“Your little sister.”

Rosa hadn’t been home since the morning, but Iridian wasn’t worried. Rosa was a wanderer, had been since she’d been able to walk.

“You’re not allowed up here,” Iridian repeated.

“This is my house,” Rafe replied. “I can go anywhere.”

“What do you want?” Iridian felt her fingers dig into the doorframe. She never would’ve considered herself brave, but she was ready to use her long, weak limbs to defend the contents of her room.

Again, Rafe peered over Iridian’s shoulder.

“I’m wondering if you have anything of Ana’s,” he said. “Anything that I could have.”

“Why? What for?”

Rafe waited a moment. “Do I need a reason?”

“Yes,” Iridian said, even though she didn’t need or want to hear that reason. It wouldn’t matter. It probably had to do with missing Ana and wanting a keepsake, a scrap of something that used to belong to her.

He didn’t even need to be there, upstairs and lurking. The whole house was still full of Ana’s things. Just last week, Iridian had found one of Ana’s hairs bundled up in a pair of socks. She knew it was hers because it was long and dark, with about an inch of gray at the root. She’d squeaked with glee when she’d found it, and then wedged it between a couple of pages of The Witching Hour like a macabre little bookmark.

“Are you hiding something?” Rafe asked.

“Probably,” Iridian shot back. “Get out of my door.”

Rafe leaned forward. Lamplight hit his face, and Iridian could see the pink lines from where recent tears had tracked down his cheeks. They looked like burn marks. They did not make her feel sorry for him.

“You girls don’t understand,” Rafe said.

Iridian said nothing.

“You girls don’t understand,” Rafe repeated. He braced his weight against the doorframe and then dropped his head, shook it.

Iridian couldn’t stand this, how her dad always turned his grief into a performance piece.

“You have no idea what it’s like,” Rafe said. “Ana was my heart.”

Oh, Iridian had some idea what it was like. For her, Ana was hardly even gone. She was everywhere all the time. She was in the walls. She was in the wood of the walls, the wood of the cabinets, the cheap porcelain of the family’s mugs, the loops of the terry-cloth hand towels they used to dry their faces, the threads of the worn sheets they slept beneath at night, the pages of the books all stashed in Iridian’s closet. She was in the tiniest details of the ways in which the Torres sisters lived their lives, the choices they made, the directions in which they steered themselves, the shades of lipstick Jessica wore. Ana was the one who told Rosa, long before Father Canty ever did, that she was full of magic, that she was different and had a heart that was better-crafted than most people’s.

Sometimes, Iridian felt like Ana was the itch in her skin, like she breathed in pieces of her, and then breathed out pieces of her. She cycled through and