Blanca & Roja

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  “What?” The word wavered in Blanca’s throat. “You want to load it?”

  “I don’t care what we have to do.” I checked Yearling. This would take more than peroxide, and I had to know if he had wounds I couldn’t see. “Liam’s not getting near him again.”

  Blanca swallowed hard enough to show in her neck. “His cousin did that?”

  I ignored the question. “Call Page. Go meet him. Then bring him back here.” I brushed Yearling’s hair out of his face, looking at a cut on his temple. His hair caught on his skin, dried blood sticking it to his forehead.

  When he woke up enough to know what was going on, he wouldn’t trust me. I had broken whatever had begun growing between us, like shattering a forest of frost into glass glitter.

  “You want Page here?” Blanca asked. “Why?”

  I tried to take in her words, let them spread through me so that no one point of my body felt them most. It was what I’d done with Yearling’s weight, with the salt-smell of his sweat and blood, and what I did now with the pressing tone in Blanca’s voice.

  But then I registered the flickering of blood that told me I was bleeding past my pad, probably staining my underwear. It was so small compared to everything else, but it took the last space I had in me. That familiar annoyance was the thing that made me snap at my sister, “Stop asking questions, okay?”

  My voice came so sharp that Blanca straightened.

  “Just go,” I said. “Now.”

  She did, and for once I was the sister who knew what to do. I was the one leading us through the pale blur of swans’ feathers, and the blood seeping up from under birchbark, and everything else in our world too strange and sharp for us to hold.

  PAGE

  Blanca stopped me. She felt how badly I wanted to go after Liam before I did.

  She put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Don’t.”

  With that one word, she stilled me. Being near her, being so close I could smell how the scent of her shampoo stayed on her hair, was the point of an icicle traced down my back.

  So instead I told lies.

  I told my grandmother and Barclay’s that Blanca and Roja didn’t want to be alone. I told them Liam’s friends had shown up in the back garden again.

  We couldn’t lie forever. We couldn’t go more than a day or two without our grandmothers wanting to see us, to make sure we hadn’t gotten lost again. Even with our best efforts Barclay would still be in bad enough shape to rattle Tess.

  But for now, we lied. For now, helping bring Barclay back to life was the only thing holding me up.

  Barclay slept, and the three of us tried to pretend we weren’t all watching to make sure he was still breathing. We stood around, hands fidgeting because we hadn’t settled on when we would call Tess, or a doctor, or both.

  Roja worked with a clean efficiency I hated—her unmoving expression, her sureness, her lack of feeling at this broken boy in front of her. But at the same time, I swallowed gratitude over it. There was no space for anyone to cry or scream, and I sure as hell didn’t have the space for her to.

  She knew enough not to wrap his rib cage in all-cotton elastic. I knew that from Grandma Lynn catching me binding down my chest with it, warning me that I could bruise a bone or even crack a rib. She got me compression shirts the next week, ones I wore on days when I wanted strangers who didn’t know me to call me him more than her.

  Roja stripped off his bloodied clothes so fast it left us all less embarrassed about seeing him naked. Once she checked him below the waist, she put another pair of her grandfather’s jeans on him, and for a flinching second I wondered if Barclay and I had angered the del Cisnes’ dead by wearing their clothes.

  She kept his left side toward the wall, his right side toward us, so none of us would accidentally startle him, and I silently admitted that Roja was more careful than I had ever thought. She got him sitting up, even in his sleep, in case his nose was broken, so he wouldn’t choke on the blood going down his throat. “Come on,” she said as though he was all the way awake. She cleaned where he was cut, iced where he was bruised, changed the butterfly bandage on his temple, even against his half-asleep protests. She woke him up to give him whatever painkillers she could find, ones in bottles and ones from her grandmother’s recipe books.

  Whenever he half woke up, he said Tess’s name like a question, like he thought she might be in the next room. Or Roja’s name like he was trying to find her in the dark. Or Liam’s, in the withered voice of fearing his cousin’s shadow had fallen over him.

  It was only when he woke up all the way that he said mine.

  He was sitting up now, his eyes holding the last trace of a startled look, like he’d woken up unsure of where he was.

  I sat next to him, forearms on my thighs, like the nights we spent out by the cranberry bog with hard cider we weren’t supposed to have.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice so hoarse he sounded sick. “I wanted it to be good for you.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Everything.” He only shook his head a little, but it showed every bruise on his face, purple as a Blue Pearmain apple. “The world.”

  He understood. I cringed thinking of the moment he’d realized it—had Liam’s fists mixed up everything he’d ever thought?—but now I knew he understood.

  There was no making the world take me as I was. All I could do was make the people who did my family.

  “You can’t go back home, Page,” he said. “Please, don’t go back home.”

  I saw my fingers reaching for him before I knew I was doing it. “Barclay.”

  “They’ll turn you into someone you don’t want to be.”

  I set my hand on his back, as lightly as I could. And I said the words I’d been afraid to say out loud since the day we became boys again.

  “That’s your family.” I made the words come as soft as I could. “Not mine.”

  For so long, I thought I had to put distance between me and my parents. But the truth of the Holts was as far from the truth of my family as the cranberry bog was from the sky.

  I didn’t blame Barclay. He’d been working from what he knew. But he’d been wrong.

  My mother and father had been scared. It had led to mistakes. It had made them cautious and hesitant when I’d only wanted us to be the family we’d always been. Grandma Lynn told them to just love me, and it made them even more nervous, because then they worried they weren’t even doing love right.

  But I wasn’t giving up on them.

  I’d always thought Barclay was the one who’d teach me what to hold on to and what to throw out. He’d been the sharp red needle of magnetic north.

  But sometimes he spun and wavered. He lost his way, and instead of admitting it, he decided things just so he’d feel like he’d gotten his bearing again. I knew things he didn’t. He needed me as much as I needed him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. The hitched sound of held-back sobbing splintered through his voice. “I’m so sorry.” He ran the heels of his hands over his eyes. “You don’t want to be around me, Page, trust me.”

  I set my palm flat against his back, giving it just enough weight to remind him I was there. “You can’t decide that for me.”

  He shook his head again, then stopped, like it hurt. “You don’t know what I did.”

  “I know you were trying to do the right thing.”

  “No, I mean with Liam. You don’t know what I did to him.”

  The faint gloss of tears on his bruised temple almost made me call Tess right then, because I did not know how to do this. I saw his shame coating his skin like blood, drying and cracking.

  I put my other hand on his upper arm, turning him toward me as slowly as I could. “But I do know you.”

  I stayed with him until he fell asleep again. He slept deeper and breathed more slowly than he would’ve, thanks to what Blanca made him drink.

  I heard the click of metal and wood.

  Roja was sitting at the kitchen table, o
pening the box I’d brought over. She stared into the center of the unlit kitchen, only the flame blue of the pilot light revealing the shape of things.

  “Thank you,” I said, the words catching in my throat.

  Gratitude for this girl did not come easily. I might have been friends with Roja del Cisne if she hadn’t had my best friend’s heart. But it was hard to settle around anyone who held something that valuable without seeming to realize it. It was like a visitor coming into my family’s house, picking up an antique glass ornament. Shifting it from one hand to another while I looked for the right moment and the right words to mention how much it was worth to us, and how suddenly it might break.

  Roja didn’t look up.

  “For what you did,” I said, in case she didn’t hear me.

  She took a birdshot round out of the box.

  The cut to her eyes made me tense. The gauge she was loading might not kill Liam, but it’d mess him up enough that there’d be doctors and a hell of a lot of questions.

  No one with that look belonged within a hundred feet of a Winchester. Grandma Lynn always said if you’re too worked up to fill an ice cube tray without spilling, you’re not steady enough to hold a gun. Rage or fear or clouded-over thinking turned something dangerous into something not just dangerous but unpredictable.

  “Liam’s not getting near him again,” I said. “I won’t let that happen.”

  “I know. But if he does”—Roja jammed it into the magazine hard enough that I thought the old gun might break into scrap metal and wood—“we’ll be ready.”

  ROJA

  I hoped everyone wanted scrambled eggs in the morning. I’d cleared out the shells, the blue-green and brown now empty and drying.

  Yearling wandered into the dark kitchen, the front of him catching the faint glow off the stove. His steps were slow and careful, like he was getting used to his body.

  The things I wanted to say weighted my tongue. Telling him I was sorry. Confessing everything about the awful game he’d gotten dragged into. Admitting that I felt for him some glimmer of what Blanca felt for Page, and it left me panicked and cruel.

  But all these things got pulled so hard between the truth that lived in me, unspoken, and what I had to do to survive, that they didn’t hold together.

  All I landed on was “Look who’s up.”

  He gave me a faint smile. He looked like he was trying not to wince from the effort.

  I went over to the counter. “You hungry? Can I interest you in a”—I lifted the glass bowl on the table and counted yolks—“nine-egg omelet?”

  “Where is everyone?” he asked.

  “Asleep.” I picked up a hollowed-out egg. The sheen of water was gone from the inside, the shell dry. “I told Blanca to make Page take my side of the room.”

  “What are you doing?” He sounded like he was still shrugging off sleep.

  “Making cascarones.”

  “What?”

  “They’re something we make every Easter.”

  “It’s October.” He looked toward the window like he was checking to make sure he was right, searching the world outside for winter ice, or spring blossoms. He’d forgotten that, right now, the woods wore both. “Isn’t it?”

  “You gave me these.” I neatened the row of vials on the table, each glinting with its own shade of glass glitter. “So I thought I’d try now.”

  “What’s a…?” he asked.

  “Cascarón?” I handed him a blue shell to hold, and then poured moss-green glitter into it. “It’s a hollowed-out egg filled with confetti or glitter or perfume powder. We break them over each other’s heads for good luck.”

  “I hope you’re not planning on doing that to me. I think I’m a lost cause. Not worth the egg.”

  “No one’s a lost cause.” I covered the opening with a square of teal tissue paper.

  “Careful when you and Blanca go breaking those on each other,” he said. “You don’t want glass glitter in your eye, trust me.”

  “Oh, we know how to be careful,” I said. “These’ve been around for a long time. My great-great-great-grandmothers filled them with minerals. Galena. Mica. Hematite. Malachite. You don’t want any of those in your eye, either.”

  His laugh was weak. But it was there, a sound I wanted as much as the soft brush of my father pulling books from the shelves, or my mother whispering in the kitchen, not realizing she was reading Abuela’s recipes out loud.

  “What’s funny?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I just realized you know a lot more about my family than I know about yours. Tell me something else.”

  “Well”—I shook copper glass glitter into a blue-green shell—“this isn’t just about my family, but back where my family came from, there are temples that are thousands of years old, and there’s glitter paint on the walls.”

  “Thousand-year-old glitter paint?” he asked. “How stupid do I look?”

  “I’m serious.” I almost bumped his shoulder with mine, like I might have once, but I stopped myself, remembering how broken Liam had left him. “The colors they find most of the time are red, green, and gray. They’re probably made of the same minerals my family used to fill cascarones with.”

  I poured more glitter—a vial of dark rose, another of deep turquoise—into the empty shells.

  “Thank you,” Yearling said.

  “Anytime. Next time I’ll tell you about how my great-grandfather tamed a quetzal to help him pick up women. No idea if it’s true, but it makes a good story.”

  “No,” Yearling said. “I meant for today.”

  The words felt like something too hot in my hands, a ceramic cup heating through as I held it.

  I set the cascarón on the counter.

  His fingers brushed mine.

  He pulled away. “Sorry,” he said, a sharp breath under the word. “I didn’t … I didn’t see your hand there.”

  It was the inverse of what I’d seen him do before, how he’d reach for a pen or a spoon and be a little bit off, and slide his hand over to find it.

  My fingers met his again, slowly enough to let him draw back if he wanted to.

  He stayed.

  I traced the crescent moon on his chest, following the curve of the outline. It wasn’t smooth; it felt rough, uneven like a scar.

  Yearling took shallow breaths to steady his voice. “Please don’t do this because you feel sorry for me.”

  I narrowed the space between us, and with my next words I gave away more than any nixie or witch or ruthless mermaid ever would. “I’m not doing anything I haven’t thought about before.”

  He slid one hand on the small of my back, his fingers pulling at my shirt until his palm was against my bare skin. He pushed the heel of his hand into the hollow of my spine. I had to fall into him to keep my balance. He cupped the back of my neck in his other hand.

  Right then, we held the air of every season in the space between our mouths. The middle of spring, when the perfume of apple blossoms is so sweet it draws ribbons of ants up the trees. Deep in summer, wildflowers leaving yellow pollen on our skin and in our hair. Fall, with its warm and ash smell of leaves becoming mulch.

  Early winter, with the scent of clean snow and the brush of pine needles.

  We stayed there, our breath held between our lips, and I realized he was asking for permission. I nodded, my forehead still against his.

  He held me up against the kitchen counter like it was a birch tree and we were outside, the stars flickering on and off with the leaves.

  He kissed me, hard, and in that moment, we were October. We were the taste of rain and of cranberries becoming their deepest red. We were everything turning bright and brilliant before it falls away.

  I felt the mirroring of my own wonder, how we both wanted to know what the other one felt like. Even with him bruised and me careful, he was warm and alive under my hands.

  I put my mouth to his ear every time I wanted to say something, still afraid the moon might hear us. But we
kept the moon behind the lace film of the curtain linings. There were no rose trees in the woods to reach their thorns through the windows. Not tonight.

  YEARLING

  In that second, I would have taken any name she called me. Barclay. Yearling. Holt.

  Wind shook the trees outside the windows, and the branches cast leaf patterns over the counters. I could hear it. I could feel it, like the sound and shadows had teeth. Everything hurt.

  I didn’t care.

  I kissed her, and she kissed me back. Hard, fearless, like nighttime made her free to do whatever she wanted with me.

  The way she almost bit me as she kissed me back left the feeling of her teeth hot on my tongue. The rose oil she wore on her lips came off on mine.

  The feeling of her mouth left a charge on my skin. It lit me up from inside. It stayed with me as I slept.

  This girl, with her hair like rosewood and her skin like the inner peels of birchbark, she wasn’t the kind of girl who showed up in fairy tales with a name like Snow-White. In my dreams, she took the name Rose-Red, as easily as if it were an apple she’d twisted off a tree. She was fearless as she found me in my bear-body, unhesitating as she took me into the house and beat the snow out of my fur. Her hands were sure holding the hazel branch, like in the story, but with one flick of her fingers it silvered into a birch wand, wood from the same tree that gave me my name.

  She didn’t know when to stop. I was supposed to tell her. The story said I should. But I didn’t stop her. I didn’t want her to stop.

  My coat fell away like the snow. The only fur left became my hair. She let the hazel branch fall from her fingers, and ran her hands over my raw skin like she was trying to learn my new body.

  She held her hand against the lighter spot below my collarbone and kissed my forehead, lightly, like she might kiss her brother if she had one. Then she kissed me on the mouth and moved her hand down my chest. Not like I was her brother.

  It hurt, her hands on a body I hadn’t gotten used to having. But I didn’t stop her. I didn’t want her to stop.