Tigers, Not Daughters - Samantha Mabry Page 0,40

for what had happened the other day in the car, bought Jessica some roses—wilted pink ones from the grocery store—and took her out for soft serve. He’d do better, he’d said. Jessica had forgiven him but not really. She’d said the words it’s okay, but she hadn’t meant them. Every day in the work bathroom, she inspected the little bruise on her cheek, watched the colors change, watched it fade. She imagined all the ways she could leave bruises of her own.

Did she say anything, though? Do anything? Of course not.

“My battery’s dead,” Jessica lamely replied.

It was a bad lie. John would know. The word dead sounded fake, cracked in half.

“I asked her to stay and help,” Peter said, rising to stand.

“Let’s go,” John commanded, ignoring Peter altogether. “What’s wrong with your hair, Jess?”

Jessica was still holding the plastic bag of red candy fish. It was the perfect, stupid prop for this scene—this one scene of her entire, stupid life. She closed her eyes, willing the doors inside her to all bang shut. It was time to play dead. Tonight, after they left here, John would get pissed, then probably want to have sex with her, and she’d probably let him.

After dropping the bag of candy, Jessica stood. John approached her and reached out to brush his hand across her cheek. Jessica looked at Peter, and saw his gaze jumping from the bruise on her cheek to John’s thumb. He didn’t even try to hide his open staring. The muscles in Peter’s jaw twitched as he noticed how they matched—the size and shape of John’s thumb and the size and shape of the mark on Jessica’s face. Jessica turned away and grasped John’s hand in hers before Peter could catch her eye or say anything. She didn’t want be on the receiving end of his rage or his pity. She didn’t want anything from him. She didn’t care if he was leaving in a couple of days, and she wasn’t going to sign his fucking card.

But then Jessica did something she couldn’t really explain. On her way down the aisle, she grabbed a couple of chocolate truffles and stuffed them in her pocket. She hoped that Peter had seen her. Maybe he’d take it as a reminder that she was a bad influence. Or maybe she wanted him to know that, in a way, she’d be carrying a little piece of him in her pocket for a while.

The Night Jessica Torres Made Out with John Chavez in Front of Everyone

It was the first party we’d ever been to.

That’s not true, of course. We’d been to plenty of birthday parties, block parties, baptisms, but this was different.

It was the first party we’d ever been to where we’d walked in, stood among the kids we went to school with, and felt like the smallest people in the world. Not small in stature, but small in spirit. We’d done everything, of course, to try to make that not be the case. We’d planned it to where we walked into Evalin Uvalde’s house on that Friday night in the early days of September, three months after Ana had died, like a pack, like a gang, with blasé-sneering expressions on our faces, intentionally two and a half hours late, dressed in our coolest clothes and wearing too much cologne. The goal was to make an impression while pretending like we didn’t care about making an impression. When we walked into Evalin’s house, however, we made absolutely no impression. None. People may have looked at us, but they didn’t see us. They looked through us. We were wallpaper.

The very first thing we saw when we walked into Evalin’s house was Evalin herself. John Chavez had her pressed up against the wall of the entryway—right inside the front door—and they were really going at it. Behind them and around them were tons of people drinking, laughing, and shout-talking into each other’s ears. All those people were acting like it was no big deal that John had one hand up Evalin’s shirt and was full-on groping her boob. Honestly, it kind of looked painful for Evalin, like John was squeezing the way someone might furiously juice an orange. And the sounds their mouths were making were so weird and