The Killing Jar Read Online Free

and her blood so thin she was liable to pass out if she had to stand too long. She had a bad heart along with asthmatic tendencies, but where my asthma seemed to manifest only during moments of stress, hers was exacerbated by pollution, exercise, dust, and a hundred other things I could list from memory.
    â€œWhen do you go on?” Erin asked, pushing up her comically thick glasses, which had slid to the tip of her nose. “Are you freaking out? I’m freaking out! Did you know Lorde was only seventeen when she won a Grammy? That could be you!”
    â€œIf I ever win a Grammy, it will be because of you,” I told her.
    Erin was the only person I never turned away when I was working on a song. I let her sit in the basement and listen to me play as long as she wanted. She may have had a broken body, but her mind was sharp and analytical. If my entry for Folk Yeah! had impressed anyone, it was partly thanks to Erin’s critical ear.
    Our mom wrestled her way through the crowd to reach us. She must have come straight from her bakery, Knead. Flour powdered her jeans and her shoulder-length, blond hair, which she always cut at home with a pair of scissors that needed sharpening. I had a vague childhood memory—my first memory—of my mom’s hair long as a horse’s tail, of sitting on her lap and wrapping myself in it like hiding inside a curtain. I would have thought I was imagining this version of my mom, but for the huge, intricate tattoo of a moth on her back, stretching across both her shoulders like a shawl. Whoever Mom had been before she had Erin and me, she must have been a lot more interesting than she was now. There was also the matter of our father—or lack thereof—and how Mom told us she didn’t know his name. But Erin and I had done the math, and we knew our mom had been only eighteen when she gave birth to us. Much of her passion for life must have been lost to the stress of having one daughter who’d been knocking on death’s door since she was born, and another who had sent someone through that door.
    Mom took Erin’s chin in her hand and tipped her head up to face her. “I told you to stay right next to me,” she said as though she were speaking to a five-year-old who’d wandered away in the grocery store.
    Erin rolled her eyes, but redness crept into her pale cheeks. She was used to our mom treating her like a baby in front of me, but in front of Blake it was another story.
    â€œGive her a break, Mom,” I said.
    â€œA break is what she’ll get if she falls or gets knocked down out here.”
    â€œCan you guys please not talk about me like I’m not here?” Erin said, her voice small and barely audible over the buzz of the crowd.
    Mom and I shared an anxious glance, and I knew we were both thinking the same thing: if Erin’s doctors were to be believed, Erin wouldn’t be here much longer.
    My twin was dying, and she had been all her life, ever since she was born blue and cold and with a hole in her heart. Our mom, too, had nearly died during childbirth right along with her. Afterward, she told us in a rare moment of openness, she went through a period of postpartum depression so vicious that she’d considered suicide. She probably would have gone through with it if it weren’t for the fact that we would have become orphans without her. But Mom’s postpartum depression had never really ended, and I thought I might have inherited my own depression issues from her. Then again, we both had plenty of practical reasons to be depressed, the first of which was the constant threat of losing the person we loved most.
    When she was a baby, Erin’s doctors said she probably wouldn’t make it to her fifth birthday, but she had. Then they told us she wouldn’t make it to her tenth birthday, but she had. Then they said she wouldn’t make it to fifteen, and here she was, seventeen and still alive. But the