Page 11 of Our Crooked Hearts
She stepped out in a black sack dress, hair piled high and lit redder by the sun. Her eyes were hidden behind big white-framed sunglasses, so I couldn’t make out her expression. But I knew when she saw the rabbit.
She hunched. Shoulders curling forward like she’d been socked in the stomach, hands catching her knees. Just as rapidly, she straightened. The way her head twisted toward the house made me think of a predator scenting along the breeze.
Then she was running. Up the drive, through the front door. When she saw me in front of the window, her hands went up. Not in surprise. Not to shield herself. She held her palms straight out, crooking her fingers in a gesture that plucked at my guts likea guitar pick. It was an attitude so unreadable yet so obviously malevolent it sent a bolt of cold thudding down my spine.
Then her face slackened and her hands dropped. “Ivy!” she said. “Your hair!”
I touched it, the ragged white ends that curled at my chin and smelled of chemical.
“I thought…” She was panting. “I didn’t recognize you.”
“Sorry,” I said.
Her eyes wouldn’t settle, on me or anything. She kept pressing two fingers to the hollow of her throat. “Are you alone?”
“Yeah.”
“Have you been here all day?”
“Um. Yes? I’m still grounded, right?”
She came closer. Her eyes were a lucid blue, like lucky Hank’s. She touched her own hair. “You covered the red.”
I shrugged. What, was I supposed to apologize?
“I don’t like it.” Her voice sliced cold and clean. “The blonde looks cheap on you. Between the hair and the lip, you could play one of those dead girls onSVU.”
I bit my cheek and saw her seeing the hurt I couldn’t hide. For a second I thought she might actually acknowledge it.
“I’m going upstairs,” she said instead. “My head’s still not right.”
That was the closest to an apology that I was gonna get.
She stayed in her room until dinner.
The late light coming into the kitchen made it seem darker. My mom moved forkfuls of takeout around her plate, her righthand smooth and her left scarred from knuckles to wrist. She’d always had those scars but tonight they seemed to stand out, to pulse like swollen veins. It was so strange to me, suddenly, that I’d never been told how she got them.
My dad worked through a pile of gnocchi, struggling to find something nice to say about my hair. Hank kept his eyes on his phone the entire meal. I could tell by his smirk he was texting a guy, and probably not the one he was dating. Hank should not have been granted massive blue eyes and Kaz Brekker cheekbones. It was like giving a toddler a ray gun.
My mom cried out.
We all snapped to, Hank included. She pressed a hand to her mouth, spit something into her palm. A brief glance and she folded her fingers neatly in to hide it.
“Dana?”
She took her time looking back at my dad. Her balled hand was in her lap, the other tight around her water glass. “Hmm?”
He put down his fork. “What was that? What did you just take out of your mouth?”
She watched him steadily. “Shrimp shell.”
“Are you sure? It looked like… could you have cracked a tooth?”
She pulled her lips back in a frozen smile. My brother and I glanced at each other, then away. “How do I look, Rob? Did I lose a tooth and just not notice? It was a shrimp shell.”
“Fine,” he said. That was the last word anyone spoke for the rest of the meal.
She was lying, of course. I’d seen it, too. The thing she’d spitout was a hard yellowish sliver. Not her own tooth, but somebody else’s.
