Malina was still sound asleep as I gingerly dropped both feet onto our splintered hardwood floor, toe to heel, bending over to deposit my flip-flops beside them. My stomach lurched; maybe that rumble hadn’t been all triumph. I leaned my butt back against the sill, breathing deeply to settle my insides. We kept our window flung wide open in the summer, and the slight breeze stirred the multicolored Japanese parasols fanned out across our ceiling, stripped of their handles and overlapping one another.
This was one of my projects from years ago, before I graduated to proper glassblowing under ?i?a Jovan’s watchful eye. When my gleam began to wane, Mama had presented me with a consolation prize, an article about American artist Dale Chihuly’s largest installation: the Fiori di Como, a garden of glass flowers blossoming on the ceiling of the grandest hotel in Las Vegas. Its steel armature alone weighed ten thousand pounds; it had to, to support the forty thousand pounds of glass that clung to it. It was the biggest glass sculpture in the world.
I had painted the parasols with a painstaking, delicate rendering of the wisteria flower tunnel in Kitakyushu, Japan, gridding out the slim ribbing of the tunnel’s truss to create the optical illusion of dimensionality—so that whenever Malina and I looked up, it would feel like we stood in the Kawachi Fuji Garden, beneath a pink-and-violet, pastel rain of dripping wisteria. Mama hated it. She didn’t have to say so, but I’d seen the tightening in the small muscles of her face so many times when she came in to fetch one of us and couldn’t keep herself from looking up into the shower of flowers I had painted for Malina and me.
Maybe her distaste made me love it just that much more; I wouldn’t have put that past me. But that was a fringe benefit, far beside the point. What I really loved was looking up and knowing that a place existed for me somewhere far away from here. A place that belonged to me at least in half.
But this morning, the sight of the paper petals gave me a flutter of unease. Passed out on Nevena’s couch last night, I’d dreamed of flowers, fields of black roses that glistened wet beneath a sky hovering on the brink of storm. Each time I woke it had been gasping and sweaty, heart stuttering in my chest until the alcohol and weed dragged me back down. I hardly ever remembered my dreams, but I could still nearly smell those dark roses, taste the slippery dew on the petals as I tore them off their stems and placed them on my tongue.
Shaking off the sudden chill, I tripped over one of Malina’s strappy sandals and banged into our vanity table, cursing under my breath as our perfumes rattled. Our room was so tiny that we could reach out and bridge the gap with touched palms when we sat on the edge of our beds. On cue, Malina flung herself over from her stomach to her back, like a breaching dolphin. She draped an arm over her face and mumbled thickly. I caught a drawn-out “Riss,” followed by what sounded suspiciously like “calzone.”
“Oh, I think not, milady,” I told her. “Fetch your own lunch. You don’t have to be at the café until one anyway, so just grab a sandwich on the way or something and we can have calzones from the Bastion for dinner, if you like.”
She gave a disgruntled groan and rolled back over to face the wall. I shrugged and turned to our tarnished mirror. My black tank top from last night was at least three years old and too small, embossed with a pair of glossy red lips pursed around a sequined skull. With my low-slung denim cutoffs, it showed the canvas of lower belly pinned between my hip bones—and if there was one thing Mama couldn’t stand, it was an unseemly amount of daughterflesh on display. My hair was too straight to tangle, but the eyeliner had smeared nicely in my sleep. The overall effect was a little like something wary, pale-eyed, and possibly bitey peering out from the overhang of a cave.
Perfect. Degenerate chic, at your service.
Before I slipped out, I darted over to kiss Lina’s sleep-mussed temple. Her black curls—so dark they seemed nearly blue in certain light, but with the most surprising sable undertone where the sun caught their depths—were bird’s-nest tangled, and she smelled warm and sleepy, Dove soap and the lingering patchouli that was the base of her favorite homemade perfume. Beneath it, I could smell her skin, and my stomach bucked with love. For a moment I had a pang of powerful longing, like a gong rung inside my belly, for the nights when we had slept cuddled together, our sweet baby breath whispering over each other’s faces.
Lina stirred, scrunching up her face like a little girl. “Riss,” she mumbled, “is there a reason you’re sniffing me like a truffle pig?”
I dropped down onto my own bed as she propped herself up on her elbows, yawning hugely. “Maybe I just relish the scent of sister in the morning.”
“That sounds purely wrong.” She wrinkled her nose. “Can’t say I reciprocate, either. What were you doing at Nevena’s, anyway, bobbing for apples in a tub of rakija? I don’t know how you stand that stuff; you’d think they could make apricot brandy taste better than rat poison mixed with cheap perfume. Who else was there?”
“That is for us, the cool and popular, to know, and you to find out.” I grimaced. “Or more like the cool and the popular and yours truly, Nev’s impostor tagalong. No one else much worth talking to, really. But you should still come out with me sometime. Get all wild and free and such, for once.”
She gave me a sleepy half smile, a glossy black curl sliding over her rounded cheek. My sister had the sweetest face, a gentler rendering of our mother’s that drew from our father mostly in the slight slant of her gray eyes. Her full lower lip was cleft like a cherry, and it made all that beauty somehow both playful and kind. You could easily see the shared blood between us, and maybe on the surface, you might even mistake us for the same substance.
But like water and alcohol, the resemblance ended there.
“Maybe I like staying home?” she said. “Maybe I have better things to do with my nights than tag along to your spite parties?” It always got under my skin when Lina talked in questions; she’d picked it up from years of playing ambassador between me and Mama.
“Oh, like maybe walking on eggshells around Jasmina the Peerless while she plans the next day’s menu and ignores you?” I mimicked. “And I don’t go out just to spite her, you know. Not everything I do is about her.”
“Seems like it is, these days,” Lina said quietly. She dropped her eyes, black lashes fanning lush against her cheeks, her fingers twisting into the sheets. Her hands were the unloveliest part of her, wide palms and spidery violinist’s fingers with cuticles run ragged from her nervous nibbling. My own had gathered a respectable collection of burns and nicks from glassblowing and working at the café, but they were still fine-boned and pretty, the nailbeds slim. I won when it came to hands. At least there was that.
“A little easy for you to say, isn’t it? You can still sing like you used to, back when she still let us practice with her.” I couldn’t keep the bitterness from my voice, like one of Mama’s orange rinds before she candied them. “I can’t make anything bloom other than flowers anymore, and even then only I can see it.”