She arrived earlier than usual on her last day at St Ambrose High, earlier even than the neat, bleary pupils decanted from expensive cars by parents on route to city jobs, and certainly earlier than the dawdlers loitering at favoured corners within close proximity. They’d be still drinking their sugar loaded breakfasts, purchased daily with
“I need your eyes,” Ben said, scanning the road through the windshield. “You’re supposed to be the navigator and you’re not paying attention.” And then, under his breath, “like usual.” In fairness, she wasn’t. Amanda was watching a huge group of blackbirds alight from an electrical line, together, a living swirl of beaks and feathers,
It isn’t blind adrenaline or fury that drives her but a kind of flat blackness, a steady humming like the engine, somewhere deep in the gut. Nelly gurgles in the baby seat behind her and when she looks at her in the rear-view mirror she catches her own eye, black and swollen. The last time,
I fell in love as she brought us daiquiris on a silver platter held above her head. She was breathtakingly, unbelievably, beautiful. Her hair was a rich, onyx black; her eyes were deep storms; freckles lay like constellations across her nose. And she was less than three feet tall. Not that that was part of
