“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, anyhow. 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 to sleep, Gigi,” Elv said. “Close your eyes.”
IN THE FIRST week of June, there was an unexpected heat wave, with temperatures reaching into the nineties. It was the kind of weather in which people did stupid things, such as throwing themselves off a dock into the cool water, only to break their necks on the rocks. Elderly residents were warned not to go outside. Birds died in their nests. On impulse, Claire decided to have her hair cut short. She usually was a follower and she thrilled herself with her own fierce determination to make a change. She was broiling in her casts, nearly fainting with the heat. Her scalp itched and there was no way for her to scratch it. Annie took her to the hair salon on Main Street, where a young woman named Denise fastened a smock around her shoulders.
“Are you sure? You have such beautiful hair. It seems a shame.”
Claire was sure. Denise cut her mane of heavy black hair to just below her chin. They would donate what had been shorn to Locks of Love and a wig would be made for a cancer patient. Claire loved her hair short—it was so much cooler—but when her sisters saw her they were horrified. The older girls were at home watching an old black-and-white movie about a werewolf. They had been captivated by the poor werewolf’s plight, enough so that they actually didn’t argue the way they usually did. When they saw Claire’s haircut, each let out a shriek. Elv said, “Who did that to you? I’ll bet it was Mom’s idea.” Meg, near tears, cried, “Oh, Claire. Now we don’t look alike.”