Tigers, Not Daughters - Samantha Mabry Page 0,47
had suggested earlier that she get out, if just for a little while, if just for a hot dog and a piece of Mrs. Bolander’s famous buttermilk pie, but Iridian would rather stay inside with a ghost than go outside with actual living people and animals and who knew what else. She went to the kitchen to grab a snack and maybe even make herself a cup of tea. Even though she spent most of her time indoors, Iridian could appreciate a nice day. The sun was shining after several dreary days of rain. There were breezes. Iridian couldn’t feel them, of course, but she could see the leaves and the branches of the trees swaying, and she watched a squirrel chase another squirrel across the abandoned frame of the trundle bed in the dirt yard. It was all very simple. Bad things didn’t happen on a day like this, when the sky was bright and people were outside laughing.
As she smacked on her chocolate puffs, Iridian surveyed the kitchen—the cracked and stained linoleum floor; the loud, whining appliances that had probably come with the house back in the 1970s; the fridge that randomly released ice cubes from its door; the food-spattered range.
It made her think: This house isn’t good enough to be haunted. There weren’t any libraries with old, cryptic notes shoved between the yellowing pages of dusty books. There weren’t winding staircases with polished banisters. There weren’t wood floors that were warm and worn from the soles of many generations of family feet. There weren’t any gables or widow’s walks or turrets. There weren’t any rooms that were a little bit colder than the others, or rooms that were kept locked up “just in case.” The walls didn’t moan when the wind blew. The Torres family wasn’t entangled in some generational curse like the Mayfair witches. They had no important heirlooms, just a banker’s box full of their mom’s old stuff that their dad kept on a shelf in his closet. It contained a couple of button-up blouses, a pair of red flat shoes, a bundle of crepe-paper flowers, a recipe book that used to belong to Grandmamá de la Cruz, and a postcard their mother had once sent home from a trip she took to see family in Morelia, Michoacán.
There were piles of dirty laundry in the closets and unwashed dishes in the kitchen sink. The faucet in Iridian’s bathtub always dripped, and there was a ring of rust around the drain. Jessica didn’t even have a real shower curtain, just a plastic liner that was once clear but was now streaked with layers of mineral deposits and grime. Everywhere, the carpet was old and dirty. Some of it was buckling, wrinkled like waves on water. Not a single bed in the house was made. The furniture was practically all from estate sales. The house was just some crappy old house, not in any way ghost-worthy.
Iridian knew that if she died on the couch or from falling down the stairs, and had any kind of choice in the matter, she would never, ever stick around this place.
Again, laughter rose up from outside. There was the shrieking of little kids doing something like chasing each other around. Then Iridian heard a woman’s gleeful whoop, followed by a man shouting Hey! to someone.
People were happy. They deserved their nice party. If Iridian were there, things would only get worse. She’d be forced into talking to someone. She would probably say the wrong thing.
The spoon Iridian had been using to eat her cereal slipped from her fingers and fell with a clang into her bowl. The milk tasted acidic. She gagged, nearly choking on mushy chocolate puff.
Even now, a year later, she could still feel the sudden, vibrant shame she’d felt after saying the wrong thing to Ana, just hours before she died. It felt like a full-body rumble, an oh shit shock followed by the intense desperation of wanting to scoop words back into her mouth and eat them.
The day Ana fell from her window, she and Iridian had fought. It started when Iridian went into Ana’s bathroom to borrow some shampoo. At the time, Ana had been downstairs in the kitchen with Jessica—Iridian could hear them both laughing, followed by the sound of one of them mashing the buttons on the