I called Grey. I needed to hear her voice. She’d always been good at calming me down.
It went to voicemail; she must be on the plane from Paris already. I left a message. “Hey. Uh. Call me back when you land. I’m kind of freaking out. I think someone is following me. Okay. Bye.”
Reluctantly, I called Vivi. “I knew you’d change your mind!” she said after one ring.
“I haven’t.”
“Oh. Well, this is awkward. Turn around.”
I turned. In the distance, in the parking lot, I could see her waving.
“Ugh,” I said. “I’ve got to go. Some weird woman is stalking me.”
At nineteen, my middle sister was a tattooed, pierced, clove-cigarette-smoking bass player with a blond buzz cut, a zigzag nose, and a smirk so sharp it could cut right through you. When I reached her in the school parking lot, she was lounging on the hood of some teacher’s red midlife crisis car, unbothered by the rain. Despite just landing from Budapest, she carried no luggage but a small leather backpack. She was dressed like that old Cake song, in a short skirt and a long jacket. Two years ago, when Grey’s scar had become the season’s hottest fashion accessory and teenage girls had started carving half-moons into their necks, Vivi had covered hers with a wisteria tattoo that unfurled across her collarbones, her back, halfway down her arms. Her tongue was pierced, her nose was pierced, and her ears probably contained enough metal to melt into a bullet.
Grey was high fashion, but Vivi was pure rock ’n’ roll.
I looked her up and down. “Lose your way to the Mad Max set, Furiosa?”
She let her black eyes linger on me while she took a draw of her cigarette. Few people could pull off a shaved head and a gross smoking habit and still manage to look like a siren, but Vivi could. “Like you can talk, Hermione.” I thought of the Cake song again: A voice that is dark like tinted glass.
“Oh, sick burn,” I said, shaking my head. “Your mind is slipping in your old age.”
We both laughed then. Vivi slid off the car and pulled me into a bear hug. I could feel the tensile strength of her muscles beneath the heavy curtain of her coat; she could handle herself. She’d been serious about self-defense classes ever since that guy had tried to pull her into his car. “It’s good to see you, kid,” she said.
“God, you smell terrible. What is that?”
“Ah.” Vivi wafted air from under her armpits in my direction. “That noxious stench would be Grey’s perfume.”
Hollow by Grey Hollow, her eponymous scent, the one she stitched in little vials into her couture. For Christmas two years ago, she’d sent me a bottle of perfume that smelled like smoke and forest, with something wild and rotten scratching beneath it. One sniff made me drop to my knees, gagging.
Like everything that Grey Hollow made, it became a bestseller. Fashion magazines called it heady and cryptic. Grey sent a carton of the vile stuff to my school, a fuck-you-look-at-me-now gift for every teacher who’d ever given her grief. They wore it like drugstore perfume. It clung to their hair and clothing, a damp green aura. It seemed to sweep other scents into its orbit and take them hostage, hints of curdled milk and wood rot tugging at the edges of the perfume whenever the heating climbed too high. Classrooms stank of it. Nobody else seemed to mind the smell.
“How many of your friends said no to meeting you today before you called me?” I asked, though we both knew that, much like me, Vivi had no friends in London.
“Like, five, six max,” Vivi said. “Everyone’s getting jobs. It’s disgusting. So are you coming or not?”
“I can’t just leave school.”
“You can. I should know. I did it every day.”
“Yes, well, some of us want to go to university. Besides, Cate will freak out if I cut. It was hard enough getting permission to come to your gig. You know what she’s like.”
“Cate’s codependence on you and your respect for authority are equally repulsive. Give me your phone.” Vivi guessed my passcode—16 for Grey’s birthday, 29 for Vivi’s birthday, 11 for my birthday—then called our mother, who picked up immediately. “No, Cate, nothing’s wrong.” Vivi rolled her eyes. “I’m kidnapping Iris for the day.” We locked eyes on the word kidnapping. I shook my head. “She’s not going to be at school, so don’t flip when you check your creepy, privacy-invading tracker, okay? . . . Yes, I know. No, Grey isn’t here. It’s just Iris and me, I promise . . . I will . . . I know . . . Yes, Cate, I know. She’s safe with me, okay? . . . Yeah, I’m going to crash at home after the show. I’m looking forward to seeing you too. Love you.” Vivi hung up and threw my phone back to me. “Done. Easy.”
I wondered what Cate’s reaction would be if Grey showed up at my school unannounced and tried to pull me out of classes for the day. There would probably already be police sirens screaming in the distance.
“Kidnapping?” I said. “Really? Stellar word choice.”
“It was an accident. Oh shit, incoming.”
Mrs. Thistle was hurrying toward us. “Iris,” she said, “I was on my way to check on you. Are you feeling better?”
“Oh,” I said. “No. I think I need to go home.” I pointed at Vivi.
Mrs. Thistle’s gaze slid to my sister. “Hello, Vivienne,” she said flatly.
“Hello, Thistle,” Vivi replied with a wave . . . which she then turned around into the middle finger. Mrs. Thistle pursed her lips and went back the way she came, shaking her head. Vivi hadn’t been the easiest student. I smacked her in the stomach with the back of my hand.
“Vivi,” I said.
“What? No matter how many times I tell that old hag my name is just Vivi, she insists on calling me Vivienne. Plus, she failed me in English.”
“Yeah, because you never, ever went to English.”
“Allegedly.”
I rolled my eyes. “Have you heard from Grey today?”
“No. Not for a few days. I tried calling her when I landed, but her phone must be out of juice. She knows the plan, though. Come on. Let’s go get food and wait for our terribly busy and important sister to grace us with her presence.”
* * *
Vivi slammed through the day, chain-smoking clove cigarettes and drinking spiked Earl Grey tea from a flask. I forgot how much fun she could be. After lunch at a kebab shop, we spent the afternoon crashing her favorite London haunts: guitar shops on Denmark Street, vintage shops in Camden, Flamin’ Eight Tattoo Studio in Kentish Town, where she spent a good fifteen minutes trying to convince me to get a full sleeve. We snacked on croissants and slices of sourdough pizza, and Vivi told me all about the six months since I’d last seen her: the European tour through Germany and Hungary and the Czech Republic, the gigs in ruin bars and abandoned warehouses and empty swimming pools, the beautiful European women she’d bedded along the way, in more detail than I cared to hear.