Read All Our Pretty Songs for Free Online

blankets thrown over the overstuffed couches. Velvet drapes. Scented candles in gold sconces. Cold cuts on cut-crystal plates. A painting on the wall that turned out, on closer examination, to be a Monet. “Of course, it’s one of the lesser-known pieces,” said the hostess with false modesty, coming up behind me.
    Aurora and I were giggling in a corner when a shrink-wrapped babe stalked over to us. Up close, she was total construct, younger woman stapled on top of old bones. Fake boobs straining her satin dress, chemical-plump mouth. Her eyebrows had that surprised look women get after one too many plastic surgeries. “I know who you are,” she said to Aurora, jabbing her with one red-taloned finger. She was very, very drunk. She wobbled there for a moment, glaring at us.
    “I don’t know you,” Aurora said. “Thankfully.”
    “You know my husband, ” the woman said. Aurora’s eyes got big. “You think your pert little ass will get you anything you want. You think you’re really something. But you know why men want to fuck little whores like you? Because you’re stupid .” She teetered on her perilous heels and stabbed her finger at us one last time. “Stay away from him,” she snarled. She pivoted, nearly overshooting her spin and coming around to face us again, and stalked away.
    “Oh my god,” Aurora said. We looked at each other and then we both began to laugh. “That was so weird, ” she gasped. “Let’s get out of here.”
    I never asked who the husband was. It didn’t really matter.
    After the night in the park I send out a psychic call. I’m so hooked I hijack a pile of Cass’s crystals and leave them under my pillow, willing them to bring him to me, but all they do is give me a stiff neck. Aurora says she has no idea who he is or where he came from. He wouldn’t let us give him a ride home from the park, strode off into the darkness before we came to our senses and asked how to find him again. Rockers are a dime a dozen in this town, but he’s something else again. I’ve never heard anyone play music like that.
    “You’re in love,” Aurora says. She thinks it’s cute. If she’s staking her own claim on him, she’s not saying. She’s sitting in my kitchen, drinking Dr Pepper that she brought over herself. If Cass is home Aurora puts the soda in a mug. She can’t bear, she says, to watch Cass’s face when she sees the can. But we’re home alone and so an unlit cigarette dangles in her fingers and she runs a thumb around the can’s edge between sips.
    “I am not in love,” I snap. “You can’t fall in love with someone you just met.”
    Aurora rolls her eyes. “Someone’s never read a fairy tale.”
    “We’ve read all the same fairy tales. This is the real world.”
    “This is the real world . Sure.” Her skin glows gold-brown against her white tank top and her clotted tangle of necklaces. She’s wearing cutoffs that are barely more than underwear, and under the shirt a tiny crocheted bikini that’s so bright I can see it through the fabric like a beacon. “Let’s go swimming,” she says. “Get your suit.”
    The beach is crowded with little kids and their parents, basking in the hot afternoon sun, drunk on the glorious summer. We spread our towels, stretch out at the lake’s edge. Aurora leaps up, bellowing, runs pell-mell into the water with a crash, and then runs back out again and flings herself on her towel. Dads sit up, shading their eyes with one hand, staring after her long legs and white hair. She rolls around on the towel like a puppy and lies there, panting. “The water’s great. We could drive around until we find him.”
    “I’m sure that would work.”
    “Probably better than spirit messengers.”
    “Shut up.” I roll over on my stomach, make a show of ignoring her. If you mapped the inside of my brain, it would go like this: his hands, his mouth, his skin, his face, his palm against mine. But I had no idea it was that obvious. Aurora kicks