Beautiful Broken Girls Read online

  In those times, she’d hear her mother’s voice too, commands reminding her of thing she already knew.

  You can make it stop, Mira.

  Though she heard her mother’s voice less often now, which made her relieved and sad at the same time.

  She pushed a plate of toast toward Francesca, who shook her hair about her face. “I’m a freak,” she said.

  Mira exhaled through her teeth. She flicked the gas under the tin teakettle (a gorgeous gust of gas and flame) and disappeared into the dining room. From the built-in china cabinet she chose two teacups and matching saucers. Mira thought she could see the brushstrokes in the gold filigree pattern encircling each cup. She balanced them on top of each other with the saucers in between, china tinkling as she walked.

  Francesca sobbed again.

  The teakettle whistled. Mira ran to lift the pot and the whistle died. As she poured steaming water into the tiny cups, Mira wished the water would move faster. Anything so that she could finish her pretty tableau and make Francesca feel better. Mira dropped a tea bag into each cup and stepped back swiftly, a small cock of her head. She moved the tag of one cup to the opposite side and stood back again, frowning. She disappeared into the pantry and returned with a box of sugar cubes, which she stacked in a glass bowl, and poured milk into a matching glass creamer. She scanned the kitchen and settled on a cutting board, on which she set the cups, sugar, and milk.

  Francesca blotted her nose on the inside of her shoulder and reached for her tea.

  “Wait,” Mira said. “Let me serve you.”

  Francesca sniffed. “I can serve myself.”

  “Let me serve you.” Mira used a small gold spoon to deposit two squares of sugar and placed the cup in front of Francesca.

  “We’re not supposed to have caffeine,” said Francesca.

  “It’s mint tea. It’s calming.”

  “Daddy said I should have juice.”

  Mira placed the gold spoon in front of her. “There is no juice.”

  Francesca stirred her tea awkwardly. “Do you think I tried to … you know … do it, and I don’t remember?”

  “Of course not,” Mira said. “That’s crazy. Besides, there were no instruments.”

  “By instruments you mean razor blades,” Francesca said.

  “You ought to drink your tea,” Mira said, marching to the refrigerator and pulling out a bowl of hard-boiled eggs. She cracked one and peeled it, washed it and set it on a shot glass. Mira wrinkled her nose at the smell. She placed the egg next to the tea. “And eat. Please, Francesca.” Mira thought of feeding Francesca, after she found their mother. Right before Dr. Amendola was about to insert the feeding tube, Francesca had allowed her sister to pop a bite of yellow custard into her mouth, for show. Only Mira and Connie understood that Francesca could fast for months and still go on, gaunt and spiny, but herself in most ways.

  “Salt?”

  “Stop trying to make everything pretty and perfect. What are we going to tell Connie?” Francesca pushed the egg away. It fell off its perch and rolled across the table.

  Mira set the egg back on its perch. “You don’t have to explain. I will. She’ll want to come over right after school.”

  “What if I don’t want Connie knowing?”

  “Connie knows about your episodes. This is just another one.”

  “She’ll make such a big deal out of it. She’s my blood, and I love her, but she gets so worked up.”

  “Connie’s in awe of your talents. Besides, your talents make her special by association,” Mira said, thinking, even if no one knows but us.

  But Francesca ignored the gap in Mira’s logic. Instead, she snorted. “Special.”

  “Gifted, then,” Mira replied.

  Francesca raised her hands. “You can’t even call this a gift. A gift is something you use for good. The birds, the languages, the fasting. At least those things aren’t horrid. And I can hide them. Seem like a normal sixteen-year-old. Holes in my hands are not something I can hide.”

  Their father’s voice came, rushed and insistent, behind his closed office door. Francesca mashed her cheek against her swathed palm and stared through the kitchen doorway. “Who’s he talking to? And why can’t he talk in front of us?” she murmured, piqued.

  “Eat. Before I go,” Mira said.

  “Don’t leave me home alone. Staying home is so depressing.” Francesca covered her head with her hands. “I’m a freak. This will become one more reason for Daddy to keep me locked in the house.” She dropped her head to the table with a thump and tented her forearms around her ears, shoulders rising with fresh sobs.

  “You are not a freak.” Mira came beside her and leaned over, pressing her body over her sister’s heaving back, as if to stamp her with her calm. “This new gift only makes you more special.”

  “Please stop using those two words!” Francesca cried, muffled.

  Mira turned her head to the side, her sister’s hair cool on her cheek, and thought for a moment. “Touched.”

  Francesca’s body stilled underneath her.

  From his office, their father’s voice grew excited. Mira straightened and Francesca wiped her tears, both faces to the door.

  Francesca straightened her neck. “Shh!”

  “I didn’t say anything,” Mira said.

  Francesca slipped from her seat and ran lightly across the linoleum tile to her father’s office. She pressed her ear to the door.

  “Francesca, get away!” Mira whispered harshly.

  Francesca’s head snapped, eyes bulged. “He said Nick!”

  Mira wasn’t sure. It made no sense, that her father should call Mr. Falso about Francesca’s problem that seemed so personal. But she was used to agreeing with her when it was easier. Her best skill was being Francesca’s ideal audience, of saying exactly what her older sister needed to hear. It was a talent she had cultivated through years of fielding Francesca’s insecurities, nearly always related to the veracity of someone’s love for her (this boy, their father, Mira herself). Mira knew the truth: Francesca’s heart was so big and she loved so hard that it was nearly impossible for anyone to love her back as fiercely. Mira had often pictured Francesca’s heart—overgrown, muscular, pulsing—barely contained inside her narrow chest. So, when they talked, Mira never asked, “Are you certain?” Rather, she asked for details that served to make Francesca’s vision more real: the color of his cheeks, the set of his shoulders, the smile on his lips. Anything to keep Francesca calm, anything to keep her near. Because nothing frightened Mira more than when Francesca moved away from her into that space inside herself and went dim.

  Mira inched toward Francesca. “Then I’m certain it has to be Mr. Falso.” She brushed her older sister’s hair behind her ear and whispered inside it. “There’s no other Nick.”

  PART 2

  Hair

  AUGUST 2016

  Ben sat upright in the gray soup of morning. He wasn’t sure if he’d slept. He felt as though he hadn’t. It was already hot, or it had stayed hot, for days on end. The june bugs buzzed early, or they hadn’t stopped. The days without Mira were beginning to run into one another, indistinguishable in their emptiness.

  Ben jammed his knuckles into his eyes and smelled Eddie’s dried blood on his hands. After arriving home from the boat club, he’d collapsed on the couch watching stupid kids’ sitcoms, stuff he hadn’t watched in ten years. Each show ran exactly twenty-three minutes and followed the same formula. The flash of trendy clothes and the flip way they spoke to one another and their disdain toward adults was the opposite of the weirdly antiquated Cillo world and so was an antidote to his pain. Ben had let it wash over him.

  The green numbers of his clock read 5:58 a.m. He couldn’t sleep or lie unsleeping for one more minute. Not when there were still six places where he had touched Mira. Ben swung his legs over the bed. He pulled on a pair of nylon basketball shorts from the floor and a clean shirt from his drawer, and lifted Mira’s note and the first letter, fanned and
damp, from his underwear drawer, where he’d thrown them the night before. He slipped them back inside the cheap string bag and strapped it over his shoulders, then closed his door with a soft click—his parents wouldn’t bother to open it; they’d let him sleep in on his day off. He slid out the back of the house and mounted his bike. The air was heavy with low tide. He pedaled against the early morning traffic, past bland faces in cars, shipyard laborers, garbagemen, and people in suits leaving Powder Neck to commute into Boston, and the people who served sweet muddy doughnut-shop coffee to those people. The road trailed along the edge of the Neck until it merged into busier Route 3. Ben rubbed his eyes every few seconds to clear the ocean mist that settled in them. He remained firmly to the right of the white line, rode through glass and Red Bull cans and sticks, knowing that most people who drove cars at this hour were either rushed or half-asleep. He rode and rode, his shirt pillowing out from his back. He left the Neck with the sun climbing behind him and coasted into the parking lot of Johnny’s Foodmaster and around back, where he jammed his front tire into the bike rack and popped the rubber-coated chain lock around the cage.

  He looked toward the quarry and beyond, toward the jagged, low skyline of Boston. A haze lay over the familiar string of high-rises, their broken reflections on the ocean beneath. For a second, Ben was transfixed, sensing he was seeing something special and beautiful.

  “Are you watching?” he called to the sky, his voice thin.

  The expressway hummed back.

  He shifted. The nylon bag felt disproportionately heavy for two scraps of paper. He told himself it was just damp, not trying to get his attention. He tore himself away. If he didn’t hurry, kids who couldn’t stand the heat would start showing up. And he wanted to be alone with Mira’s words when he found them.

  Ben switched to a jog. If Mira was watching from heaven, he wanted her to see him running, with purpose, to make things right for her memory. His feet had gone numb riding, and it felt good when his sneakers touched the ground. He allowed himself to imagine he was running through these same woods centuries ago, living peacefully on top of five acres of rock, before a steel company machine-blasted a crater into it and the crater filled with rain and bodies and rusted things. He tired of jogging and took long strides over rock and patches of rough vegetation. Brambles scraped his calves and branches blocked his path. He didn’t remember the path being so tough to pass. Maybe the flow of kids had slowed since the accident, and nature crowded in. He shook the idea off. It had been little more than a week, and quarry kids weren’t the scared type. You don’t jump a hundred feet off a ledge or watch other kids doing it if you don’t have some balls. Besides, the quarry was a grave before Francesca and Mira fell. Half the time, when they were looking for one body, they found another, sometimes from decades earlier.

  Ben came to the clearing and froze. He knew the quarry held majesty for blue-collar kids who hadn’t seen the world’s wonders beyond the Internet. For Ben, it had a different aura, the sense that the whole place was alive, rank and pulsing, and the quarry kids were trapped in it, like in movies where the characters got shrunk and injected into the vena cava, or the throat, or tumbled along arterial walls.

  Today was entirely different. He had never seen the quarry still. No bodies on the ledges, slick from sunblock, playlists belting the same overlapping songs, a scene at once fun and grotesque. This was closer to what Mira must have seen that night. Underneath the morning mist, the water was silver instead of its usual iridescent patina. Ben’s mother had warned him that decades earlier, Bismuth Steel Company had pumped hundreds of gallons of poisonous pickle liquor—waste left over from cleaning metals—into the quarry. If his mother knew Ben swam in the quarry she would have grounded him, and, possibly, called a Realtor to put their little cape on the market. She had been looking for such an excuse. The real danger wasn’t poison, but the objects underneath: boulders, old refrigerators, cranes left to rot. High dives had become competitions. That the water was contaminated amped the X factor, but it wasn’t something kids talked about.

  There would be no diving today. Ben was on a mission.

  He used his hands to lower himself down to the altar rock. The pack on his back swung as he climbed. The altar rock was the flattest, best ledge, left empty for the Cillos every day of the summer, and the site of a growing memorial: two stuffed bears, wilted carnations in a plastic cone, a ceramic cross, old ballet slippers, a bottle of Panama Jack suntan lotion, and a plush angel with a halo made of gold pipe cleaner.

  Ben looked down into the water. The high-speed ride and hike had left him shredded. Vertigo slammed him, a shift deep in his ear that made the painted quarry walls take on funhouse angles. His eyes fuzzed over, and he backed away from the tip, dropping to his knees and easing himself to the ground. Already, the sun was fierce and open, same as that day when Ben had touched Mira for the second time.

  He entered the memory like it was a safe room.

  Mira hugged her knees and smiled at Ben behind her arm. Ben could hardly look at her, fixing instead on her rounded back, and the bumps of her vertebrae, and the strings on her bikini top with the metal caps on their ends, and wondered if they got hot in the sun, and if they could burn her. The guys were relentless that day, giddy to be at the quarry with the girls, a non-coincidence involving a slip from Eddie. The shoving and besting was at an all-time high, and Francesca was grave and reserved, barely spoke, flat on her towel with her wrist over her eyes. The special care Connie took not to aggravate her exercise-induced anaphylaxis made the hike from the parking lot of Johnny’s take twice as long, and Francesca had barely hidden her irritation. Still, Piggy pressed cold beer cans against her thigh to make her jump, and tried to interest her in videos on his phone. Louis Gentry, in love with love, challenged Ben to dives, over and over again, begging attention from everyone, indiscriminate in his need. Piggy was the last to give up on Francesca, eventually butt-scooting on to Connie, who offered half her towel and a set of earbuds. Unlike Francesca, Connie accepted male attention from any source, even one who wore sweatpants puddled over his sneakers on a ninety-degree day. Usually Francesca’s moods infected Mira, but Mira had been playful, flirting with Ben.

  Louis’s chest lifted and fell. He jumped off and spun, heels over head, and tucked his knees, flipping twice before hitting the water with a slap. Mira sat up as Louis entered the water, her hair clinging to the top of her back. Seconds passed. Colors swirled over the spot, silver, blue, purple. Mira made a low whistle.

  Francesca rolled onto her stomach and groaned, burying her face in the bend of her elbow. The muscles in her back bunched up. Mira patted her arm absentmindedly, and Connie asked “Everything copacetic, cuz?” for the twentieth time, but they were rote gestures meant to placate, because their eyes were on Louis—Connie gazing over the lip, Mira five steps back—who finally emerged and shook beads of water from his hair, grown long before the August football shave. Louis swam to the side and climbed to the altar as kids on other ledges hooted and clapped. He was tan from roofing, and, Ben noticed with irritation, more ripped every week.

  Louis collapsed into the narrow space between Ben and Mira. “That’s what they call throwing down the mic, Benny. Now it’s your turn.”

  Mira lifted her hair off her back with one hand and shaded her eyes with the other, fixing Ben with a smile. “What’s your answer to that?”

  Piggy murmured in Connie’s ear, and she giggled.

  “Impressive,” Ben said, trying for cool. “Too bad it was one somersault away from the three-and-a-half reverse somersault with a tuck, the dive perfected by, oh yeah—me.”

  “Fine, fancy man. I’m calling it.” Louis glanced sideways at Mira before cupping his fishy lips and yelling out to anyone who’d listen: “Three-and-a-half reverse somersault with a tuck!”

  On other cliffs, heads rose. Mira straightened her back. Ben stood slowly and looked out over the water, then at Mira. She raised her eyebrows. Ben was a good diver, and an even be
tter swimmer, with hollows in front of his broad shoulders and bones like pipes. There was nothing to fear here. He had this.

  Ben stepped back and forth like a colt.

  Francesca aimed a dark look from under her brows. Connie gazed at Ben too, all wide expectancy, her closed-mouth smile stretching her eyes even farther apart. Piggy aimed his phone at Ben, ready to record. Now everyone was staring at Ben, waiting for him to plunge into the viscous stuff, like he’d done a hundred times before, but the stakes were higher, heightened and dangerous, a violence against him that he felt, an unconscious but palpable wish for him to fail.

  Ben took a deep breath and rose on his toes before stepping out. As he lifted his arms over his head, locked his thumbs and pushed off, he heard the shout—

  “Francesca!”

  —but he was already spinning backward, heels over head, and tucking in, flipping three times. As he hit the water, he felt a vibration to his right, a seismic underwater shove. It spooked Ben, and he fought not to panic, surfacing fast and gasping. A foot away, a sleek black head popped up. Francesca’s eyes bulged as she gulped for air.