Daisy understood the way of the world because she was fourteen, and at fourteen, the way of the world went like this: it sucked. She spent a lot of time with her cat. His name was Felix, and he walked across her lap as if his fingers were strumming a guitar or pushing the keys on a piano, slow, yet steady, like Bach. Bach, however, was the name of her goldfish. Bach’s fishtank was black with permanent magic marker that she squiggled across the back when her parents ignored her demands to sign a waiver so she could get a tattoo.

“Wait until you’re eighteen, and then don’t do it either,” they said. So she came to drawing tattoos on her arms, like black spiderwebs arcing their way up and down her biceps and forearms. She drew a skull with an X for a mouth, and a stick figure man with a fishing pole; and then she saw the fishbowl, and Bach blowing small tic-tac sized bubbles, and decided she’d give him a more gothic abode.

When not with Felix, she was with Janine, a best friend, as they go at fourteen, which means that she’d trade Janine in the click of a ticking home-room clock, if one of the more popular girls in the school would give her the time of day. She didn’t admit this, but it ended up happening, and she didn’t feel bad about it until those friends exchanged her in for new friends, and she spent that afternoon alone with Felix; and he played Bach on her tatoo’d thighs, until he grew tired of pressing the keys of her skin, and settled in on her pillow, to a slightly purring dream, where he dreamt of eating the goldfish. Janine, of course, knew nothing about this.