Tigers, Not Daughters - Samantha Mabry Page 0,55

but you should figure out a way to fight him, too. You don’t have to do it alone, but you have to do it.”

The words were on the tip of Jessica’s tongue: You don’t know me. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Things aren’t so fucking easy.

But also these words: I still sing. I do it when I’m alone in my car in empty parking lots. My voice is better than it’s ever been.

Jessica closed her eyes, and her ears tuned in to the wheezing rattle of her dad’s truck, coming up the street. Soon there was the sound of a steel door slamming shut, followed by a wet, uncovered cough. Jessica opened her eyes, and Peter was there, still hovering in front of her.

“My dad’s home,” she said. “You should probably go.”

Jessica walked Peter out of the house in silence, but once they were out in the yard, Peter stopped and turned.

“I can’t hear,” he said.

“What?”

“I can’t hear anymore,” Peter replied. “Not like I used to.”

Jessica realized he was answering a question she’d asked when she’d been flat on her back on the floor of a church: Do you still sing?

“I was in a fight,” Peter said. “I was drunk, and I picked a fight with my sister’s boyfriend over nothing, and he hit me in the ear and broke some bones behind my eardrum. I can’t find pitch anymore.”

“I never heard about that,” Jessica said.

“I’m glad.” Peter looked out to the empty street. “It’s not exactly my proudest moment. And I don’t want people thinking I’m a violent drunk, which apparently I am.”

Jessica didn’t know what to think. She didn’t drink, but she knew what it was like to blow up and lash out and pick pieces of other people’s skin from beneath her finger-nails. On the other hand, she was getting really, really sick of sharing space with boys who were also capable of blowing up and lashing out. She was just so tired of pain. But what she wasn’t tired of, and what she was just starting to get a taste of, was honesty. Peter had shared something hard and true with her, and for that she was grateful.

“I’m sorry about your ear,” Jessica said.

Peter shrugged. “I deserved it.”

“Maybe,” Jessica replied, smirking. “Too bad you won’t be around for me to teach you how to sing again.”

When Jessica came back inside, her dad was sitting at the kitchen table, in the dark, nursing a bottle of Negra Modelo.

“Boys aren’t allowed in the house,” Rafe said.

Jessica didn’t reply. She was too busy humming a little tune to herself.

“There are rules here,” Rafe added.

Jessica kept ignoring her father as she made her way back to the staircase. She’d just placed her hand on the banister when Rafe called out her name again. There was something, a pleading sadness in his voice, that made her stop—stop walking, stop humming.

“Anything about that two hundred dollars you were gonna let me borrow?” he asked. “For the truck?”

Jessica should’ve been mad. Her fingers should’ve gripped the banister with more force, but she just started up the stairs again and continued to hum.

Iridian

(Sunday, June 16th)

The routine on Sunday was simple. Iridian ate chocolate puffs up on the kitchen counter while Rosa sat in the backyard and tried to talk to the animals. Jessica eventually strolled in wearing her work clothes, but this Sunday she didn’t look perfectly perfect. Her hair was thrown up in a clip, and her only makeup was a dash of mascara. She smelled weird, too sharp and sterile, like Lysol or air freshener.

“Dad’s asleep in his room,” Iridian said.

Jessica grabbed her keys off the kitchen table and left without a word.

Rosa came in just as the Matas’ car outside started honking its horn.

“See you later,” she said, hustling toward the front door.

Iridian finished her cereal, put the bowl in the dishwater, and then went back to the couch. Once there, she wrote and wrote, page