Page 7 of Persephone's Curse
“I know,” Bernie said, smiling at me, eye squinted closed, and I felt very, very happy she was there, no matter what the reason was.
We walked to the museum right from the diner, waving bye to the rest of our family and heading east. It was only a block away, and the skies had brightened; you could just see some blue coming out from behind the clouds. I felt sort of empty, since I hadn’t eaten much, but also sort of full, because Bernadette was home. She took off her leather jacket and swung it over her shoulder and then put her arm around me, squeezing, and then kissed the side of my head.
“Fuck, I love this neighborhood,” she said. We’d reached a corner with a little flower shop on it, and I caught the long leaf of a tulip between two of my fingers. “It always smells so good.”
“Right now it smells good,” I agreed. “Because we’re standing next to a floral explosion.”
She snorted. The light changed and we crossed the street and dove forward into the park and despite what Clara had said, the sound of the cars actually did die away quite quickly. If you squinted and looked a certain way and suspended a little bit of disbelief, you could pretend you were in a deep, dark forest. A forest of another world. I tried to do that, but Bernadette seemed to be in a bit of a hurry and took my hand and pulled me along before I could really get into it. She dragged me deeper into the park.
“Oh, you mean the Met?” I asked, because I’d thought we were going to the Natural History Museum, Bernadette’s favorite.
“Unless you have something better to do.”
“The Met is fine, but can you stop pulling me?”
She stopped pulling me abruptly, stopped walking altogether, and stepped off the path, her hands on either side of her head, her fingers tugging gently at the ends of her hair.
“Bernie? What’s going on?” I asked, taking a step toward her.
“I can’ttell you,” she said. Crying again. She rubbed at her chest with the butt of one hand. “I can’t.”
“Why can’t you tell me? You can tell me anything.”
“I justcan’t,Winnie,” she sobbed.
“Does your chest hurt?”
“Everything hurts.”
“What does it feel like?”
“Like claws,” she said, and she made her own hands into hooked, pointy things, and dragged her fingernails down my chest, scratching against my sweatshirt.
“I know exactly what you mean,” I said.
She nodded. She had already stopped crying. Like a faucet. Tears starting and stopping with the blink of an eye. She looked at my sweatshirt, where she’d scratched me. There were marks in the fabric. She buffed them out with the palm of her hand.
“Why do you like this?” she asked.
It was a sweatshirt with the name of her college on it. She’d brought it home with her after her first semester, but she never wore it, so I took it.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. It reminds me of you.”
“I hate it. I hate looking at it.”
“I won’t wear it again.”
“Take it off. Burn it.”
“I don’t have any matches.”
“At least take it off. It’s fucking… I don’t want to see it right now.”
I took the sweatshirt off, pulling it over my head and tying it around my waist. The shirt I was wearing also belonged to Bernadette. She squinted at it for a minute.
“Hey. I was looking for that.”
“Do you want me to take it off, too?”
