The world goes blurry and dark, and I fight to hang on to the words. My arms have gone numb. My legs feel miles away.
Think, I order myself. When I try to roll out from under her, she only jabs her knee more into my spine. With all the strength I have, I bend my knees, cross my ankles, and kick her with as much force as I can manage. My heels land into her flesh with a satisfying whack. She eases up just long enough for me to tumble out onto the floor.
I land on my hands and knees, gasping. Iris grabs me by the forearm and I try to get away, but she only hauls me to my feet.
We’re both breathing hard. She’s slightly hunched because I hit her lower back full force. Her eyes are dark and stony. After a few seconds, she grabs my face in her hands and kisses my forehead.
“I love you,” she pants. “You know that, yeah?”
I want to punch her. I hate her. But all that fire and venom coil themselves around my soul, and the truth is that she means so much to me that I’d die if anything happened to her. Iris and Moody both.
I nod, still wheezing. “Yeah.”
Sharks are murderous before they’re born. The biggest embryo develops eyes and teeth before its siblings and hunts them one by one, filling the womb up with blood. Sharks are born knowing what death looks like. And what survival looks like.
When the egg split into three, Iris got the teeth, and I got the keen eye. Moody got the hunter’s instinct. Warily we orbited one another in the darkness, but somehow we knew even then that we needed one another. The world was going to be our enemy, and we wouldn’t survive unless it was together.
Iris hands me the phone as the feeling slowly comes back to my fingertips. “Go to the store, Jade,” she says. “Don’t forget the goddamn raw honey.”
I glance down at the screen, not letting on that my heart is still pounding as I check my messages. Edison still hasn’t replied since last night. This morning’s text was an automated message from the phone company to let me know my bill is due. Iris’s message is still typed and unsent in the text field.
She gives me a playful wink when I look up at her, and I meet her with a blank expression. I can read anyone, but Iris is the only one who can read me back.
6
The neighbor is still outside when I step out onto the porch. The smell of menthol cigarettes and some manufactured sugary scent lingers warmly in the morning air.
She’s staring down at her phone, but she looks up when she hears me.
“Hey,” I say.
The strap of her flip-flop dangles from one toe as her leg bobs gently up and down, draped across her knee. “Hi,” she says, not quite as cheery as she was yesterday. “Sorry if our music kept you up last night. These walls can be pretty thin.”
“I didn’t hear anything,” I lie. I fell asleep to the persistent throb of some unidentifiable song. But I don’t mind. Growing up in the foster system, you almost don’t know what quiet even sounds like.
I start down the stairs, but she says, “Wait. Are you going through town?”
I turn to face her, but I don’t answer the question. Not until I know what she wants.
“Because I really need to go to the ATM, and Tim took the car.”
“I’m just going to Safeway,” I tell her. “I’m not sure if that counts as ‘through town.’ ” I give her my best contrite shrug. I’m just a lost, timid, shy thing in someone else’s state. “I don’t know where everything is yet.”
Her eyes widen and her face lights up, and it’s so charming that it almost knocks me back. She hasn’t been ugly a day in her life. I can tell, because she doesn’t care that her hair is a disaster and bits of burgundy lipstick are cracked and clinging to her mouth from the day before. She’s friendly to me because the world has been good to her, the way it often is to the pretty ones. She was popular in high school, nice to everyone. If anyone was ever mean to her, she wouldn’t have noticed. She would have spun around in the hallway, smiling with all her teeth, and asked them to repeat themselves because she didn’t quite hear them. And they would have been instantly shamed into silence.
I’ve only known her for a handful of minutes, and already I can feel a pull to find out what she wants—what small thing I can do for her. Offer her a lighter because hers is out of fluid, or retrieve something she’s dropped through the slats of the deck.
“That’s perfect. They have an ATM right by the door!” She’s already sprinting inside, and she’s back out a moment later with a pink leather purse hanging on her shoulder. It’s designer, not a knockoff. The stitches around the zipper are perfect, and that’s the best way to tell. It must have cost at least two months’ rent.
This sets an alarm bell off for me. It’s clear that Tim is the only one who works, while she is left to languish at home all day without a car or anything to do but watch the neighbors.
Not your problem, Sissy,I have to remind myself. I’m not here to insert myself into my neighbors’ marriage. I am only here to utilize her to my advantage however I might need to. But I can’t shake the sense that something isn’t right.
“Your car is that silver one, right?” she says.
I don’t know anything about mothers, but the ones in books always told their daughters not to get into cars with strangers. I guess they meant men. The shadowy, strange ones who try to snatch you off the sidewalk. If I had a daughter, I would tell her the truth, which is that the whole world is bad and you had better learn how to use anything at your disposal as a weapon.
Two days ago, there was a man in the trunk on his way to certain death. After we got rid of him, I combed through the wool lining with a flashlight. I didn’t find any blood, but I took a pair of craft scissors and shaved some of the fibers that looked a little discolored anyway. Never use the flashlight on your phone. All that data gets stored. There was a teenage girl on the news who was found dead in the woods. Her boyfriend had utilized his phone’s flashlight for three hours the night she went missing, and that was enough to put him away.
