Tigers, Not Daughters - Samantha Mabry Page 0,60

Most of all, we hated the fact that we—the ones who had wanted more than anything to be Ana Torres’s heroes—buckled under the pressure. We sat there and started laughing, like cowards.

We laughed and laughed at Iridian, but later we talked about how much we hated that we just went along with it. We were sick with regret. It felt like a bunch of slick worms writhing around in our stomachs.

Regret. It’s so useless so much of the time.

Evalin wasn’t done. She’d needed a moment to compose herself, to shake out her shoulders and take a big breath, like she was some Olympic athlete about to run a big race, before she was able to continue.

She read on: “I need to know what it feels like, how to do it. I’d like for it to be with someone who doesn’t already have a girlfriend and someone who wouldn’t feel the need to go tell everyone after it happened, and someone who wasn’t a virgin, because it would be helpful if he knew what he was doing. That last thing, the virgin thing, is just a request though, not a requirement. Also, I will not form an attachment.”

Evalin snickered. She looked up from the notebook and tilted her head at us in a gesture of mock sincerity.

“I promise.”

There was still laughter throughout the room, but in some corners it had stopped. People with shreds of feeling in their hearts ducked their heads closer to one another, probably whispering about poor Iridian and cruel Evalin. Like us, they didn’t do anything but whisper, though. The cash registers went back to their dinging, and the trays went back to their clanging.

One might think Iridian, overcome by embarrassment, would’ve run from the lunchroom and hid in the bathroom or the library or nurse’s office for the rest of the day. She didn’t do that. She just sat there, compact, staring straight down at the surface of the table. Her mouth was closed, but her lips were moving, twitching a little, like she was talking to herself.

Iridian’s request was for sure a shock, but, when we think about it now, it wasn’t totally bizarre. Iridian was the type of girl who was both withdrawn and hyperfocused. She saw things, and not in the dreamy, pseudoclairvoyant way Rosa saw things. Iridian was observant and keen in her own way. She was good with details, sharp like a knife. So it made sense that if she wanted to write something and make it true, she’d really want to know the thing she was writing about. She’d want to suck the thing up with her senses and then document it in her notebook.

Finally—finally—the bell rang. Iridian grabbed her copy of The Witching Hour and snatched her notebook from Evalin’s hand, ripping a couple of pages in the process, and left the lunchroom. That was the last day we ever saw her at school.

Rosa

(Sunday, June 16th)

“It came for you?”

Rosa was crouched in front of a bush in the yard, examining a bit of loose squirrel fur the color of red clay. At the same time, she was fighting down the strange urge to cause petty harm to her sister. It was like she wanted to tug out a strand of Iridian’s hair or step down on her bare big toe. Rosa had never felt that way before.

“It didn’t come for me,” Iridian explained. “It was just here.”

“How did it seem?” Rosa urged. “Like, how did it look? Was it sick?”

Iridian obviously didn’t know how to respond to that, so Rosa’s focus shifted from the fur tangled in the bushes over to Hector’s house, where a jumble of boy-shaped shadows had appeared at the upper window. A bird cawed from a nearby tree.

“Come on,” Rosa said, standing. “It’s getting dark. Let’s go inside.”

“Wait.” Iridian latched on to Rosa’s arm, a little too hard. “Did you not hear what I told you, about the boys, about Ana? They said—”

“I know what they said,” Rosa replied. “They told you about how they saw her ghost by the window last summer. I know. They sent me a note when it happened.”