Tigers, Not Daughters - Samantha Mabry Page 0,58
“No way,” Hector sneered.
“It was there,” Iridian insisted. “In the yard. It was right there.”
“There’s nothing there,” Jimmy whined. Both of his palms were spread out against the glass, and the tip of his nose was squashed flat against the pane.
“I swear it,” Iridian said. “I heard something. I thought it was my dad, but when I went to check . . .”
Iridian’s voice cracked. What a stupid thing to be doing, crying in a room full of boys she hardly knew, hardly ever spoke to, who she knew thought she was an awkward freak.
“I believe you,” Peter replied, turning to face her. “Alright? Just ignore them. They thought it was—”
He paused. Hector, Luis, and Calvin all turned, nearly in unison, away from the window.
“You thought it was what?” Iridian asked.
Peter glanced to Hector. “Ana,” he said. “We should probably tell you something.”
Iridian listened to a story from a year ago about Ana standing outside, tapping on a window, and then Rafe stalking around the yard with a baseball bat. It wasn’t the best, most dramatic ghost story she’d ever heard, which is how she knew it was true.
Ana had returned—for her dad, for Iridian and her sisters, for all of them.
“It’s true,” Iridian said to the boys. “Ana is back, but she’s not the same anymore.”
The Day Iridian Torres Walked Away from the Tenth Grade
Iridian Torres never went anywhere without three things: a worn-out paperback copy of The Witching Hour by Anne Rice, a black-and-white composition notebook, and a peacock blue ink pen. She carried The Witching Hour and the notebook with her, from class to class, stacked on top of whatever textbook or binder she was required to have. She always sat in the back row. If there was a window in the room, she’d sit in the desk closest to that. Her spine was always bent way forward, and her legs were folded underneath her on the hard plastic seat. Iridian didn’t really talk to people after her sister died, and people didn’t really talk to her. But even in mourning, Iridian managed to make pretty good grades, so the teachers gave her a pass when, instead of taking notes, she’d just write in her composition book with her blue ink pen or open up The Witching Hour in her lap. Everyone—teachers, other students, staff—figured it was best to leave her alone, not because she would snap at them like Jessica, but because when someone puts up that thick a wall around themselves, you just respect it.
We didn’t have uniforms at our school, but Iridian had created her own. She wore white slip-on sneakers, narrow-legged and high-waisted jeans that made her already skinny body appear skinnier, a short-sleeved T-shirt of some kind (always a solid color; never with a graphic), and a jean jacket. The jacket had a patch on it, on the back, over her right shoulder blade. It was of a nopal cactus with a couple of pink flowers in bloom.
We imagined that if some stranger had walked into one of the classrooms and had seen Iridian there, in her uniform, writing in her notebook, they would have thought, That girl is lost in her own world. But that wasn’t it at all. Iridian wasn’t lost, and she was the furthest thing from being in her own world. In truth, Iridian was very aware of the real, actual world. The way she sat at her desk, with her long limbs folded up close to her body like an insect—she looked uncomfortable, like everyone else’s breath was pressing too hard against her, making her smaller and more compact. She felt everything—too much. The world seemed so hard for her to live in.
Of course, we wanted to know what Iridian was writing in her notebooks. Jimmy thought it was some kind of burn book, a list of classmates Iridian felt deserved to suffer the way she clearly suffered. Calvin thought the burn book idea was overdramatic. The answer, according to him, was obvious: Iridian was writing about vampires because Anne Rice wrote about vampires, and if someone reads the exact same book over and over again, it’s probably going to get stuck in their brain. That made a lot