Tigers, Not Daughters - Samantha Mabry Page 0,17

she could feel the humidity breaking and giving way to cool, pre-storm winds.

“I know,” Rosa replied, taking a bite of what Jessica could now see was a granola bar. She stepped closer to the car, and Jessica saw blades of grass sticking to the fabric of her sister’s dress, and mud caking her boots. Rosa was also, for some reason, wearing a backpack. “I was on my way home.”

“On your way home from where?” Jessica demanded.

“The river,” Rosa said, simply. “I was looking for the hyena.”

John barked out a laugh.

“Of course you were,” Jessica replied. “Just get in the car.”

The Day Jessica Torres Attacked a Priest

Hector’s parents, being good Catholics, opened their home after Ana’s funeral so that the neighbors could gather, pick at potluck dishes, and express their condolences to the thoroughly distraught Torres family. The girls were there, of course. Rosa was wandering around in a somber daze. Iridian was wide-eyed and stunned, and Jessica was looking . . . lost. It was so unlike her. She just shuffled from room to room, her gaze pinned to the floor. She was wearing Ana’s lipstick, a dangerous shade of near-hot pink, as well as a bluebonnet-blue sundress that used to belong to her older sister. It was several sizes too big and it swallowed her up.

We were there, too, of course—forced by our parents to wear our church clothes and to stay downstairs with everyone else and not hide up in Hector’s room. That was okay because we were on a mission. We started out in a cluster at the base of the stairs and then fanned out from there. We hovered, eavesdropping, seeking more details about Ana.

On the night she died, we’d all fallen asleep watching television in Hector’s room and had woken up to a sound—at first, Jimmy thought it was a gunshot; Calvin said it was more like the hard, sharp beat of a snare drum—followed by a girl’s strangled cry. That cry was followed by the hard snap of a tree limb breaking, which was followed by the squeal of tires against the asphalt as a car tore down the street. We tumbled over one another to get to the window. The first thing we saw were Ana’s curtains, flapping gently in the summer wind. Her window was open—no, not open, broken. Someone must’ve thrown something through it. We watched a piece of glass the size of a hubcap dangle from the frame, then fall. Then, Ana’s sisters appeared in the window. They were screaming.

They were screaming because there, facedown in the yard, at the base of the oak tree, was Ana. Her body was not twisted, her legs and neck not kinked at strange angles, but her long dark hair was fanned out across the dried-out patches of grass, and she wasn’t moving. A flip-flop was on her right foot. Its mate was on top of a nearby bush. Clutched in Ana’s right hand was a branch from the oak tree, as if she’d tried, at the very last second, to reach out, take hold, and break her fall.

After that, everything happened so fast: Ana’s sisters kept screaming, but now they were out in the yard. The ambulance came; the cops came. Rafe was sitting on the porch step with his head in his hands. The neighbors had to run into the yard to console the Torres sisters because it was clear Rafe wasn’t going to do it himself.

The official word was that Ana was in the process of sneaking out her window when she lost her footing and fell. As much as we’d wanted to be Ana’s heroes and take her away to wherever it was she wanted to go, there were other guys who played that role for her. Several nights a week, various guys—older guys, older guys with cars—would ease to a stop a couple of houses down the street, turn off their lights, and wait. Eventually, Ana would open her window and climb down the oak tree. She’d run to the car and be off and gone for a couple of hours, and when she’d come back she’d be in a state of sort-of undone: Her skirt would be a little twisted, the hem of it not quite lined up right. Her hair would