Free About a Girl by Sarah McCarry

while she finished packing—Aunt Beast was not much of an advance planner—until she cut me off.
    “Tally, the pep club routine is not fooling me,” she said. “I don’t have to go away if you need me here.”
    “You’re only going for a month, and I have Raoul and Henri. And I would feel like a total shit if you stayed here for me.” And I’m leaving, too, I thought, and I have a better chance of getting away with it if you’re not around . Anyway, Aunt Beast’s entire sex life in the last couple of years had consisted of steamy, short-lived affairs at artists’ residencies—the last one had been some musician who made whole albums out of looped recordings from the Apollo space missions, which I’d appreciated—and I didn’t need to curse the whole household with celibacy just because I was batting zero in the romance department. Raoul and I sometimes discussed Aunt Beast’s disturbing lack of a personal life when she was out of the house, but she seemed essentially content on her own, wrapped up in her work, sitting for hours in the MoMA or the Met staring at a single painting, running endless laps of the park. Aunt Beast is the most wholly self-sufficient person I have ever met; I have no doubt she loves us, but if an apocalyptic plague wiped us from the map, she’d be the one to calmly hole up in the apartment with a shotgun and a pit bull, occasionally emerging to perhaps eat one of the downstairs neighbors or make a run to the art supply store, happy as Dorian Gray in front of a newly opened tin of wet food.
    She hefted her bag experimentally and winced. “I should have just shipped this crap,” she said. “Are you sure you’ll be okay?”
    “You already called the car service. Henri will make me eat, Raoul will nurture my minimal emotional needs; if I totally freak out we’ll call the residency phone and they can go fetch you in your cabin.”
    “That’s frowned upon.”
    “It’s fine,” I said. “Nothing’s going to happen. I’ll just go to the bookstore—” Shit, I thought, what am I going to tell Jenn and Molly —“and put on a brave face, and—and—I don’t know, maybe he’ll call me and grovel and everything will be normal next week.”
    “You could call him.”
    “He stood me up on my birthday . I’ll call him when hell freezes over.”
    She looked at me with frank amusement. “The stubbornness, I’m afraid, you got from me.” There was a honk outside the window. “That’s the car—are you sure, Tally?”
    “Yes,” I said. She gave me a kiss on the cheek and a brief hug that knocked the air out of my lungs, and dragged her bag out of the room. I watched out her window until she reappeared in the street below, then waved to her, but she didn’t look up. One down, I thought.
    That night Henri had a client, and so I ate dinner alone in the kitchen with Raoul, Dorian Gray meowing pitifully at our feet until I shoved him brusquely with my toe. He gave me an offended look and stalked away with his tail lashing. Raoul frowned at his plate, but I ignored him. Raoul is largely unwilling to acknowledge Dorian Gray’s multitudinous faults; I do not agree that loving Dorian Gray means overlooking his inadequacies as a pet.
    “Shane played me this tape,” I said. Mr. M hadn’t said not to mention Jack. “This musician, Jack—I think he knew Aurora?”
    Raoul looked up from his soba noodles, his expression unreadable. “He did, yes.”
    “Did you know him too?”
    “Not well.”
    “Did he know Aunt Beast?”
    “We were all—we all knew each other, then,” he said slowly. “You’ll have to ask her if you want to know anything about Jack.”
    “Was he Aurora’s boyfriend?”
    “I don’t know. He—” He paused. “He left town the same time she did,” he said, but I thought it wasn’t what he had meant to say originally. “You have to ask your aunt about all of that.”
    “Why?”
    He made a helpless, exasperated face. “There’s a lot that’s not