Tigers, Not Daughters - Samantha Mabry Page 0,24
Jessica said.
“Hey, girl.” Jenny flicked the ash of her cigarette out her open window and reached up to the steering column to shift the car into drive.
John threw his arm around Jessica’s shoulders.
“Seriously,” Jessica urged. “What are you doing here?”
“C’mon, Jess.” John brought her into an embrace that was just a little too tight. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”
Jenny drove north, into the heart of downtown San Antonio, and then parked her car on an empty side street. From there, John led Jessica across a large, empty square toward the Cathedral of San Fernando. This was Rosa’s church, and the family’s church back when they pretended to be Catholics. It wasn’t just a church, though. It was more like a monument, an architectural marvel, a mammoth thing built hundreds of years ago with towers and arches and spires and bells that rang to mark the hours.
As Jessica neared this church-monument, she could hear whispers and hushed laughter, but she couldn’t yet see who was there. She could only make out dark, body-shaped clouds and phone screens and the glowing tips of cigarettes.
“Hey,” Jenny called out. “Sorry we’re late.”
Heads turned. People said hey back. At this point Jessica could see that the group was made up of people from school or friends of friends, maybe a dozen total, including, of all people, Peter Rojas.
Peter was standing on the fringes, next to Calvin, another one of the boys who was always at Hector’s house. It was weird to see Peter there, out of his element, wearing normal clothes—army green shorts that came just past his knees and a white T-shirt—and without a name tag pinned to his chest. His shoes were the same, though: off-white canvas sneakers, not that Jessica would admit to noticing. Their eyes met, and Peter gave Jessica a small nod before looking away.
“So what’s going on?” John asked.
“Okay,” Jenny said, pausing to light another cigarette. “We’re playing sardines in the church. Someone hides, like in hide-and-seek. The rest of us wait out here for five minutes, then go in. When you find the person who’s hiding, you hide with them. The point is for the group of hiders to get bigger and bigger until there’s just one person left running around the church wondering where the hell everyone is. So.” Jenny looked around, took a drag from her cigarette, and exhaled a puff of smoke into the dark night. “Who’s hiding first?”
“Me,” Jessica said. “I’ll go.”
John cocked his head. “Really?”
“Really.” Jessica smiled. “Here’s my sense of adventure.”
“Okay,” Jenny said. “Good luck. You have five minutes.”
Jessica skipped quickly up the stone steps that led to the entrance of the church and kicked off her flip-flops so they wouldn’t suck and slap against the tile. It took both of her hands to open the giant wooden door and shut it behind her, and once inside, she waited for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. Directly in front of her was the font of holy water, and beyond that were the doors that led to the cathedral proper. On either side of her were more closed doors that led to hallways, offices, more rooms—all good places to hide, for sure. The cathedral, though—that’s where Jessica wanted to go.
It was dark there, except over to her left where the red glass candles glowed in staggered rows. Jessica remembered the church smelling like blown-out matches and incense, but that night it didn’t smell like that. If anything, it smelled like Rosa: clean, comforting, and faintly like dust. Jessica padded down the center aisle, the tile ice cold under her bare feet, and turned down one of the rows.
She could’ve sat or reclined on the pew, but instead she shimmied beneath it so that she was flat on the floor. The wood of the bench was inches from her face, and just above the tip of her nose was a gray, penny-sized circle of chewed and flattened gum. She took a big breath in and then out and then waited.
It seemed like longer than five minutes before the front doors of the church opened. There were whispers, followed by a bright, loud laugh. Jessica heard everyone