I could see the shape of her, the curve of her body under the T-shirt. I knew I should stay back, but suddenly, all I wanted was to touch her. I crossed the kitchen and stood next to her so at least we wouldn’t be shouting our secrets at each other across a room. Her mouth was set in a hard, cynical smile, and nothing good could come of it. Her hair smelled like grapefruit and something light and fluttery that seemed out of place on her, but it was nice.
“What are you supposed to be?” I asked, reaching over to flick one of her antennae.
“Oh, I don’t know—I’m a robotic praying mantis. I’m a Martian. I’m aluminum foil. What are you supposed to be?”
I set down my beer and pressed my hands flat on the counter. I’m not me—I’m someone else.
I’m a normal, ordinary person, born to a normal, biological family, with brown eyes and fingernails that don’t turn blue just because the cafeteria ladies used steel trays for the french fries instead of aluminum.
But I didn’t say anything. Her eyes were hard and mysterious. She reached for Danny’s failed drink without looking away from my face.
I dropped my chin and watched the floor. “Stop looking at me like that.”
“Like what?”
Like I’m stupid and pathetic and you hate me?
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Nothing.” I glanced up and gave her a helpless look. “Just, what are you even doing here?”
There was a fast, pop-y track playing on the stereo—you know the one—how everything will be all right and you just have to be yourself and try your hardest and it’ll work out and all that other bullshit. In the next room, girls were dancing together, singing along.
“The amazing thing about this song,” Tate said, in a voice that sounded aggressively cheerful, like she wasn’t changing the subject completely. “The amazing thing about this song is that it contains absolutely no irony.”
Her gaze was direct, full of a sadness so raw and crystallized that I could see the shape of it. It ringed her pupils in rusty starbursts, but she was grinning—this terrible, ferocious grin. It made her look like she wanted to tear someone’s throat out.
I leaned against the counter, trying to think of something to say that would end the discussion and not drag it out. I needed something definitive that would take care of the problem once and for all. She just finished Danny’s drink in one long swallow, grinning up at me.
I couldn’t work out what she actually wanted. Her sister was dead. Whether being dead happened in a pretty box on Welsh Street or someplace else, it didn’t make a difference. Dead was irreversible. It was permanent. You couldn’t do anything about it, and still, Tate seemed determined to take it back, like with the right answer, she could fix everything.
