Tigers, Not Daughters - Samantha Mabry Page 0,21

sweat had tracked all the way down the side of Peter’s face. A bead was hanging there, right at the edge of his jaw. Instead of reaching out and swiping it away like she still wanted to, Jessica began tapping her fingers against her steering wheel.

Peter looked down. The bead of sweat dropped from his jaw to the asphalt and then vanished.

“Okay, well.” Jessica shifted her car into reverse. “Thanks again.”

Even before she’d pulled all the way out of her parking space, Jessica’s phone buzzed, immediately buzzed again, and then started buzzing nonstop. A call was coming in. She ignored it.

When she was about halfway to John’s, Jessica pulled over but kept the car running on a side street. She tilted her head back against the seat and started to sing. Just to herself—along with nothing. She began softly, but then got louder and louder. The singing turned to shouting, and Jessica became vaguely aware of a woman walking her dog—one of those peque?o dogs, but neither a Yorkie nor a Chihuahua—who had slowed and kept glancing her direction.

Jessica’s phone buzzed again and, finally, she grabbed it. Without even reading the message, she typed out a reply.

Sorry. On way. Manager made me stay late. xo

Jessica hesitated, trying to think of a better way to lie or not-quite lie. She couldn’t come up with anything, so she just hit send. She pulled away from the curb, still belting out a song to no one but herself.

What a question: Do you still sing?

Peter would never know her secrets.

Rosa

(Tuesday, June 11th)

Rosa’s searching at night hadn’t yielded any results, so she thought the daytime might be better. It wasn’t. She’d spent hours out in the heavy humidity and had found nothing. When she was on her way back, and just a block from her house, she stopped to watch two cardinals swoop through the branches of an oak tree in a neighbor’s yard. The birds were spinning in circles, diving into each other, knocking leaves loose. They were a happy tangle of flapping and chirping. Eventually, one of them landed on a branch so thin that it couldn’t support its light, hollow bones. The branch snapped. The bird fell. Rosa expected the cardinal to stop itself, do a graceful midair pivot, and resume playing with its bird-friend. Instead, it plummeted all the way to the ground and landed without a sound, in the grass. Rosa looked up the street and then down to see if anyone else had noticed, but aside from Teddy Arenas checking his mailbox a few houses away, she was alone. The other cardinal, on a high branch above, waited for a moment, let out a couple of mournful chirps, and flew away. On the ground, a red wing fanned above the blades of grass, motionless.

She’d never seen anything like that before.

Iridian

(Tuesday, June 11th)

Iridian was staring at herself in the mirror. The midday light was good. She was tilting her head—left, right, up, down—to catch the shadows, and putting her fingers on her skin to mash it around. When Iridian was younger, she’d stick Scotch tape all over her face to pull the corners of her lips up or down or to try to flatten out her sharp nose.

She was practicing at becoming invincible. Every day, she’d stand in front of her bathroom mirror and come up with insults to hurl at her reflection. She practiced keeping her expression blank and worked at dodging and deflecting.

“Beakish,” she said to herself. “You look like a fucking bird.”

It had taken a long time and a lot of practice, but Iridian had gotten pretty close to convincing herself that her face—with eyes set too wide like a lizard’s, a nose like . . . well, like a beak, and lips so thin that when she puckered they looked like a wadded-up gum wrapper—had character. Most of the books she read had girls in them who weren’t beautiful, but whose faces had character. This just meant that the things that made them them were on the inside. In those stories, it may take a while, but eventually a person would come around who admired those girls for their giant hearts or