The Story Sisters. Alice Hoffman
sisters were friends enough. Alan showed up with his new girlfriend, who taught biology at the same high school. Annie noticed how young she was, how she was trying to make a difficult situation less strained.
“Alan talks about the girls all the time,” the girlfriend said. Her name was Cheryl Henry and she yearned for children of her own. “They’re his pride and joy.”
“Really,” Annie said. “How nice.” She offered Cheryl a piece of cake. It was chocolate, with mocha frosting, Elv’s favorite. Not that Elv had eaten a bite. They were in the kitchen and Alan had arrived too late for the actual birthday dinner. Elv had been waiting for him, but once he was there, she didn’t even say hello.
Alan kissed her on the forehead and gave her a hundred dollars. That was her birthday present.
“Don’t spend it all in one place,” he’d said to her. Elv watched her father as he fixed himself a cup of coffee, then she disappeared while the others were having their cake. She got into bed and pulled up the covers. Sixteen was nothing. It was meaningless. Elv heard her mother come upstairs, open the door, see that she was in bed, then carefully close the door once more. Her mother was just as blind as her father. What had she thought that summer when Elv wept as the gardeners swept away the cocoons? “It’s not a bad thing. It’s necessary. Otherwise the moths will eat all the trees,” Annie had assured her.
“I don’t care,” Elv had said. “I couldn’t care less.”
THE MORNING AFTER her birthday, Elv took the hundred dollars her father had given her and hitchhiked to Hempstead. The guy who picked her up kept looking at her, as though she was a mirage, a faerie who’d appeared in his passenger seat. “Do you have a problem?” she said coolly. She had a paring knife in her pocket, taken from the silverware drawer. “Maybe,” the guy had answered. He looked at her as if he expected something to happen, so she got out at a red light and walked the rest of the way. She found the tattoo shop. Patrons were supposed to be eighteen, but Elv looked old enough, as if she knew what she wanted, so no one asked for ID. She had two black stars tattooed above each shoulder, in the place where her wings would be. She found the pain soothing in a strange way, a gateway out of her body, into Arnelle. There was an army gathering there: the Queen had posted them at the doorway. Anyone residing in the human world was suspect, including Elv. Prove yourself, one of the guards said to her. She was wearing a black dress. Black ballet shoes. She could smell jasmine. The tattoo artist was a bit leery now that her shirt was off. He said, “This might hurt.” As if she cared about that. He covered the tattoos with white bandages. “There might be some blood seeping through,” he told her. As if that mattered.
She waited for the bus, then, once she was home, she walked along Main Street, her shoulder blades burning. She felt free in the dark. When she got to Nightingale Lane, she walked more slowly. She stationed herself across from her house and watched the family inside. Her mother and Meg and Claire and their cousin Mary Fox and Mary’s mother, Elise, were all having dinner together. Elv wished she was inside with them, pouring the spaghetti into a colander, cutting up cucumbers, setting the table. She wished she was laughing at Mary’s stories of how stupid her classmates were. But she was beside a hedge at the end of Nightingale Lane, and she could barely understand what they were saying, even though the windows were open and their laughter filtered outside.
She heard a rustling. She thought there might be a demon there. She put her hand on the knife in her pocket, but when she turned she spied a boy from school creeping out of the Wein-steins’ yard. He was wearing a black sweatshirt and jeans. He saw Elv, hesitated, then came over. His name was Justin Levy and he was madly in love with her.
“Hey,” he said, sitting down next to her beneath the hedge.
“Robbing the Weinsteins?” Elv asked.
Justin pulled two vials of pills from his pockets. “OxyContin. Mr. Weinstein has cancer.”
He took one of the pills and offered Elv one. She swallowed it, then they lay back in the grass. Elv didn’t feel a thing. She just felt quiet. She felt like she could stay under the hedge forever. Her tattoos didn’t even sting.
“What kind of cancer?” she said.
“Pancreatic. My dad works with him. My dad said he doesn’t have a chance. They’re over at my house, having dinner, not that Mr. Weinstein can eat much.”
“How’d you get in and out of the house? I thought they had a dog.”
“I brought a hot dog with me,” Justin Levy said.
Elv laughed. “I’ll bet you did.”
“He’s a nice dog.”
The Weinsteins had an old basset hound named Pretzel that woofed when anyone passed by. But if you bent down and patted his head, he instantly became your best friend. For some reason Elv felt like crying when she thought about the Weinsteins’ dog. Justin Levy must have known she was upset. He took her hand. When she glared at him, he let go. “Just so you know, I’m not interested in you,” Elv told him. “I’m never going to be your girlfriend.”
“Okay.” Justin Levy was stoned and taken aback. He’d never in his wildest dreams imagined that she would be. Every guy he knew was terrified of her and wanted to fuck her. He was happy just to lie beside her in the grass.
Elv sat up and took off her blouse. Justin Levy watched her, stunned. When she told him to remove the bandages on her shoulders, he did. There was hardly any blood, and underneath, the black stars.
“You know what it means?” Elv asked him.
“That you’re beautiful?” Justin ventured.
Elv laughed. That was too funny. People saw with their eyes and nothing else. The day she met a man who knew her for who she was would be the day she would be rescued from this pathetic human world. “That I’m invisible,” she said. There, she said to the Queen of Arnelle. There’s your proof.
AT NIGHT, AFTER Meg was asleep, Claire got into bed with Elv to hear stories about Paris. She heard about the different shades of green the river could be, about the way the rain had fallen in sheets. Claire asked for the black painting, but Elv said she couldn’t remember what she had done with it. It was ugly, any-how. When Claire wanted to know about the man Meg had told her about, Elv said he was nothing to her.
“That Meg,” she said. “What a bigmouth. She couldn’t keep a secret if you paid her.”
“Tell me something,” Claire begged. “Tell me a secret.”
“You have to swear you’ll never tell.”
“You know I won’t.”
Elv whispered to Claire that on the night she found the cat, stuffed and mewling in a burlap bag, thrown into the water like so much garbage, there had actually been two bags. She hadn’t told Meg or their ama. Elv hadn’t been able to reach the second kitten. That haunted her. She couldn’t let it go.
“You saved one,” Claire said.
“But not the other.”
She showed Claire the black stars on her shoulders. Claire was hushed and impressed. “Mom will kill you,” she said admiringly.
“She’ll never know.” Their mother was an optimist, which in Elv’s opinion meant she was a fool. “She never knows anything.”
They were whispering. They could hear the hawthorn tree and Meg’s sleepy breathing and the wind outside. Claire had a lump in her throat. They had secrets they couldn’t say aloud. “Where did he take you?” she asked. She had wanted to ask this question for four years. It had taken that long for the words to come out. Some words drew blood, they cut your tongue, they made you know things you couldn’t unknow. Elv had been missing for an entire day. Claire had run back and waited at the stop sign. She’d stayed there until it grew dark, until the fireflies appeared in the woods. Until Elv came back. She wouldn’t tell her then, and she wouldn’t tell now.
“Go