All Our Pretty Songs by Sarah McCarry Read Free Book Online Page B

out of scraps. Creaky wooden floors, a bathroom full of chipped tiles, baseboards Cass had to continually tack back to the walls. My house had crumbling terracotta pots bursting over with herbs and tendrilly, disordered houseplants. Piles of records in the corners and books spilling from their shelves onto the floor, the couch, the kitchen table. Set lists and fliers from old punk and hardcore shows that Cass and Maia used to steal every time they went out to a club. Old medical posters and anatomy books, a plastic model of a human torso with transparent skin and multicolored organs. Tracy wasn’t allowed to come over to my house.
    Tracy’s house. I liked it, but I didn’t like it. Tracy’s house was a different planet, a planet with order and strict scheduling. Tracy always had the newest Barbies, which she handed down to her younger sister as more current models were released. We ate dinner at the same time every night there, and we had cereal from a box in the mornings unless I slept over on the weekend, and then her mom would make us toast with holes cut out of the center and an egg where the bread had been. Once her mom asked if I wanted to go to church with them and I said okay, and so they took me in their van that smelled like old fast food with her brothers and her sister strapped in the back. Tracy gave me one of her dresses to wear, and I remember it had ruffles and the collar left a red mark on my neck. At church her family sang a lot of different songs they already knew the words to. Tracy liked a boy a grade ahead of us who left her a chocolate bar in her desk. They were going out. “Where do you go,” I asked, and she looked at me funny. Right away I knew that was the wrong question, but I didn’t know why. Cass let me go anywhere I wanted. I kissed Tracy’s boyfriend inside a tractor tire on the elementary-school playground. Three times. On the third time, I let him put his hand up my shirt. I never told Tracy. Afterward when he passed me in the hall he would look at his friends on either side and they would cover their mouths with their hands and laugh.
    Cass never cut my hair and it grew in brown tangles down my back until the year I started seventh grade, when I cut it myself with Cass’s sewing scissors in our kitchen. That was the year Tracy and I decided not to be friends any more. We never talked about it; it just happened. We had only been friends in the first place because Cass needed somewhere for me to go after school. That was when she was still washing dishes in a restaurant. She’d come home late, smelling like fryer grease and cigarette smoke, and I’d rub her back and tell her about Tracy’s cookies that weren’t real, and she’d laugh. I didn’t know why it was funny, but I always laughed, too.
    I knew we were poor, but it wasn’t a thing I could explain. Other people explained it for me. They’d pull my hair and tell me it was dirty, or they’d tell me my clothes were wrong. Tracy’s mom gave me a bag of Tracy’s old clothes with a sanctimonious smile, but everything Tracy wore was ugly and didn’t fit. Looking at that sad pile of pink frillery filled me with a sick, unnamable shame. I took the bag home and stuffed it in the back of my closet. Cass found it months later and asked me what it was, and when I told her, she cried, and I didn’t have to go over to Tracy’s anymore. After that, it was me and Aurora, sisters and twins, the way it always should have been. After Tracy, Cass didn’t try to stop me from spending all my time at Maia’s, running around past bedtime with Aurora, who’d figured out a million ways to get into trouble before she figured out anything else.
    I know the first time I see him that Jack isn’t who I’m supposed to love. Too old, trouble. Musician. We’re wary of musicians, in my family. My family being Cass and Aurora and me. Musicians get famous and cry about it. They knock you up and bail. Musicians are on heroin. They mope around.