YEARLING
I wanted out.
Out of my own body, out of everything I knew and didn’t know what to do with, out of the life I had walked away from weeks ago.
The world shifted and blurred at the left edge, worse than how it usually did. The weight of what I couldn’t see on my left side pressed up against me, like everything there wasn’t just dimmed but was closing in on itself, folding up and disappearing. I couldn’t breathe in deep enough to shake that off. I couldn’t get enough air to remind myself that the world was still what it was, even if I’d been relearning how to see it and move through it. It was still wide but with a million hard edges to look out for. And now I was better than I’d ever been at noticing all those corners and sharp places, but worse at gauging exactly where they were.
I kept flinching over my shoulder, starting with the sense that Liam or anyone else in my family had found me again. But no one was there, and I got the feeling that the trees and the air itself were watching me. They knew I had no one left. No one I could trust and who I could trust myself not to hurt.
The few right things I’d tried to do had gotten me here, back in the woods, both me and the world worse off than when they first took me.
So I waited for the woods to take me again. I breathed in rhythm with the wind. I imagined my skin turning to birchbark. I thought of my veins becoming roots and my tongue turning to the red blaze of a maple leaf.
Each skitter of rabbit’s feet or a far-off deer made me jump. I snapped back to where I was, far enough from the del Cisnes’ house that its light didn’t touch me. And each time, I had to begin again, sinking down into the feeling of losing myself.
But I stayed me.
I tried to hear my voice vanishing under a hawk’s call. I tried to let every thought in my head fade beneath the skimming of water over stones. The woods could turn me into anything they wanted. I left myself so open to it I lost any sureness of my own body. They could make me a fox, or a few flashes in a lightning storm. They could make me the Irish moss or reindeer lichen coating a tree’s base, I didn’t care.
But they wouldn’t do it. My body stayed, my life and my name tethered to it.
When the woods first took me, I felt the sighing of the air in the branches above me. I felt them giving me a place to fall.
Now I felt their refusal, like pressing my hands against a stone wall, hoping it would give, knowing it wouldn’t.
Whatever the woods once thought worth saving, it had gotten torn out of me. The loss had its own weight. The absence had enough gravity to wear me down.
All that was left was that wall that wouldn’t give. But I still wanted to drive my hands into it. Pitch the weight of my fists at it. Throw my knuckles against it until they bled. I wanted my blood on the stone to prove I had tried to get through.
I raged against how this place would not take me, even though I knew why. I just didn’t like why.
“You think I didn’t try that?” Page’s voice fell behind me.
I turned around, looking over my right shoulder so that when I found him, he’d be clear. Him. Not a Page made of the contrast thrown between shadow and light.
Page put his hands in his pockets, the look on his face less sad than resigned. “They’re not letting us hide anymore.”
PAGE
Please don’t tell her, Blanca had insisted. She doesn’t know.
I didn’t believe it.
Blanca and Roja were as braided together as different-color thread woven into cloth. They breathed in the same way when something startled them, an almost-whistling sound. They both had laughs louder than anyone would guess by looking at them. And in the short time I lived in the del Cisne house, Roja watched her sister so closely, as though where Blanca stood was the center point of a map.
If Blanca had meant to give herself up, Roja must have known it. I had caught the off-kilter sense Barclay gave off when he was hiding something, and he wasn’t even my blood. I hadn’t even grown up with him.
The way all of this had twisted inside Blanca, how it had wounded her, Roja must have seen it. Roja would have noticed the weight of the secret Blanca carried, even if she didn’t know the shape of the secret itself.
“Is this just what you do?” I asked Roja when I found her. “Do you just like hurting people?”
Roja’s glare was so hard it brought a sound with it, like the buzzing of fig beetles. “You don’t know anything about me, Page.”
Even with the air humming like a june bug’s drone, even with her anger as bright as the iridescent green of their bodies, I wasn’t backing down from this.
“I know Blanca did all of this for you,” I said. “She’s ready to sell her soul to a flock of swans to save you, and you don’t even care.”
The anger on her face softened. “What are you talking about?”
“Everything she’s been doing has been for some bargain she made with those swans. Everything she’s put herself through has been for you.” I didn’t stop. I was losing the girl I loved, and this was my chance to make sure it meant something. “You’re turning your back on her. You’re leaving things like this between both of you. Is that what you want? For things to be this way when you lose her?”
Roja pulled back like the ground in front of her was caving. She wavered and stared at the leaves like they were spinning into a whirlpool.
“I—” Her try at words came clipped and half breathed. “She…”
All that humming and green wound down into a single bright point.
“You really didn’t know,” I said, “did you?”
ROJA
My sister loved me. Even now, when it felt like there were oceans and islands and whole years between the beds in our room, she loved me.
And that only twisted the rage I had for her. It wove it into something else instead of dispelling it. The hate I held for her, kept against my chest like a locket under a shirt, condensed around how much she’d kept from me.
Blanca was willing to become the swan so I wouldn’t have to. She meant to give herself to los cisnes.
All this made the rage in me rise and bloom. It was worse, her giving herself up without ever warning me, than to let the swans take me.
My sister was in the house, paused in the hall next to our father’s study, as though she’d forgotten where she was going. In that stillness, she was the girl who used to crawl into my bed when the power went out, because even though she was older she was the one more afraid of the dark.
I meant to tell her all these things at once. But only one word came.
“Why?” I asked, the question more breathed than spoken.
She turned around, and the broken look on her face, the horror held in her eyes, told me she knew what I was asking.
She knew how much I knew.
“I wanted to tell you,” she said, wavering on the first syllables.
“Why didn’t you?” I asked, my voice coming back to me. “We always told each other everything.”
“But I couldn’t tell you this.” She strained to bring her voice up to my same volume. “I wanted to protect you.”
“And how did that go?” I asked. “Is this what you wanted? Each of us doing this alone?”
“Do you know what keeping this was like?” She lifted her hand toward her chest, her fingers hovering near her sternum. “Do you have any idea how many times I wanted to tell you everything?”
“Then why didn’t you?”
“I couldn’t.”
“Because you didn’t trust me.”
“Because I didn’t want you to think you were marked, Roja.” In those words, her voice rose into a yell.
I stepped back without meaning to, a floorboard creaking under me.
It was nothing I hadn’t thought my whole life, that I was the one the swans would take. But to hear it in my sister’s voice, to know she knew it, too, left a mirrored ache in my own body.
“Our whole lives,” Blanca said, “I had to convince you that you ha
d a chance. And the only way I could do that is to promise you we’d fight back. I spent my life trying to tell you this wasn’t over. I couldn’t let you down.”
“Lying to me was letting me down.”
“You were ready to give up as soon as the swans came. I thought me telling you would just break you apart.”
“I did break apart. We broke apart. You broke us when you decided to keep me in the dark.”
“What would it have done to you if you thought the señoras were on my side?”
“Everyone is on your side. You pretend they’re not. You pretend we’re the same. But people look at us differently. Boys. Teachers. Our own cousins. Even people who look more like me look at you like you’re better.”
Blanca shut her eyes. “All I wanted was to save you from this.”
“All you did was make me think you abandoned me,” I said. “You should’ve told me. You should’ve trusted me enough to tell me.”
“I didn’t want you to have to carry this.”
“And I was just supposed to know that? You stopped talking to me. It stopped being about us facing this together and started being about you taking care of everything by yourself.”
“I thought if you knew, you’d think you had no chance.”
If I’d ever had a chance, it was by what my father made me.
I understood it now with the halting feeling of stopping short before falling into water.
Our father had taught me to fight hard enough that I could never be kept inside a snow-fair body and a pair of white wings. Our mother had taught Blanca to be so lovely, so much like a swan already, that the swans could not bear to alter her.
My mother had taught Blanca to be one with grace enough that the swans might let her be.
My father had taught me to be the willful daughter, so los cisnes would see my fierce heart and leave it in my girl-body.
We were trapped in this. Blanca and me. Mamá and Papá. Even Page and Yearling. We were as caught in the possibility of wings as if we were all becoming swans.
Blanca and I stood here, in an emptied house, with our own hollowed-out hearts.
“I—” I fought for each word, choking it out. “I am so tired.” My try to keep the crying out of my voice only put cracks in the words. “I am so tired of fighting you.”
“You never had to.”
“Of course I did.” My voice thickened. “Look at you. Look at me.”
She shook her head, studying the floor. “It’s not like that.”
“You don’t get to decide that.” I was yelling now. “Everyone else did. The world did. You’re blond and I’m—” I gestured toward my own body, unable to say the words red and brown.
Red. It was my name. It was my bloodstained hair. It was the petals Blanca set on her tongue, even when there weren’t enough roses in the world to save me.
And brown. Brown had been my favorite color for so long, shared with my mother and father. But I couldn’t say it now, not in the face of this girl whose hair was the deepest yellow and whose skin was the fairest gold.
Brown was now a color I picked up like a lost stone, reexamining it.
Once, brown was trees in October. It was the flyleaves of my father’s books. It was copper cosmos flowers. It was the earth that grew everything. But now it turned both sharper and duller, a twist of metal, a tarnished version of my sister’s gold.
“The colors I am and the colors you are,” I said, “everyone looks at us and they think they know everything about us.”
Maybe Blanca would never be mistaken for the pastel-wearing girls at school; her eyes were too brown, her skin touched with a little too much gold. But the straw-yellow of her hair made people trust her. It made them like her. It made them think she was worthy of a little more consideration.
I wasn’t just fighting her to survive the swans.
I had been fighting her my whole life to be seen.
“You made us enemies,” I said.
“No,” Blanca said. “I didn’t. You decided that.”
“You did it the second you started lying to me.”
Now my breathing was halting, stuttering. It broke against the back of my throat, like the noises I made when my cramps came each month.
But this was my heart, clenching in my chest until it wrung tears out of me.
Blanca was as much a part of me as my own teeth and blood. We were trees with intertwined roots, so tangled together that if we tried to rip apart from each other we would only destroy ourselves.
“I’m sorry,” Blanca said. The set to her teeth when she said it cut into me, like she was biting my shoulder. “I thought I was doing the right thing.”
I felt her sureness, her conviction, leaving her body.
Blanca and I had lived so far under the swans’ spell that we had never seen it from the outside. It was a house we’d tried to understand when we had lived our whole lives in a single bedroom.
We had each done the thing we were certain we had to do.
We had both been wrong.
“Just stop, okay?” I backed toward the door. “You’ve done enough.”
I felt no guilt over lying.
She’d lied trying to save me.
I could lie now to save her.
YEARLING
I was up on a ladder, scraping damp leaves from Lynn Ashby’s gutters with a garden spade, when Roja showed up.
She came up on my right side. I couldn’t even pretend I didn’t see her.
“Whatever this is,” I said without looking at her, “I don’t think I want to hear it.”
I kept my words hard. I wanted to line them up like rocks, build a seawall against everything Roja del Cisne had become to me. She was the second of finding the stars between tree boughs. She was the cut and shine of glass glitter. She was the feeling of coming back to life after my cousin had beaten me down so much I thought I was turning to crushed leaves.
“Me and Liam,” she said. “It wasn’t what you thought it was.”
“Then what was it?” I asked. She knew by now that my cousin was as much a Holt as my father and my uncle. All those towns, all those lies on paper maps.
Roja’s sigh was something I could almost feel, like the cold breath off the metal ladder. “It’s a long story.”
“Do you want to tell it?” I asked.
“Not really.”
“Good.” I cleared a stretch of gutter. “Because I don’t really feel like hearing it.”
She stood at the base of the ladder. “What are you doing?”
“The leaves can’t just stay up here. When the rain comes, the water won’t drain.”
“I don’t mean what are you doing up there.”
I dragged the spade through, hitting the edge of the gutter without meaning to.
“Talk to Tess,” she said. “She might know what to do with everything you found out.”
“Just let it go, okay?”
“You’re not alone in this. We’re all with you.”
The sight of Roja leaning against my cousin’s car struck up against everything else I knew about her.
“Are you?” I asked.
“Fine,” she said. “You don’t believe me? Believe Blanca. Believe Page. Believe Lynn and your own grandmother. They are all on your side. You can do something about all of this. Why aren’t you?”
“Because guys like Liam always win, Roja!”
I hadn’t meant to yell it. But now I heard my own voice ringing off the metal downpipe.
My temple throbbed, pain stinging along the line of a cut that was still healing.
The thought of carrying around my body, this body I had lived my whole life in, wore on me. It wasn’t just knowing I had to keep being Barclay Holt. It was all the little things added up, the spilled orange juice and the broken plates and things I’d trip over because I didn’t see them on my left side. It was how Grandma Tess told me that, even when I adjusted to having one good eye and one that missed things, there’d still be times I caught
myself, times I’d always have to pay closer attention than everyone else.
If you get riled up, she told me, if you’re tired, if you’re sick, if you’re drunk—not that you’re going to be drinking before you’re legal, right? Right?
She said all of it would come harder, slower, with more work. I asked her how long before I wouldn’t have to think about it anymore and she said something about patience, which was Tess Holt for forever.
“Why are you even here?” I studied the roofing instead of looking at Roja. “What do you want?”
“I need a favor,” she said.
Now I did look at her. “Oh, you have got to be kidding me.”
“Trust me, you’ll like this one. It involves you never having to see me again.”
I came down from the ladder, saying a prayer of thanks for muscle memory because right now I didn’t trust my ability to judge the depth to the rungs. “What, are you leaving town?”
“Something like that.”
I brushed my hands off on my jeans. “What’s going on?”
“I need you to tell me how you did it.”
“Did what?”
“Be a bear.”
“I was a lot of other things first.” Even through the ache of healing bruises, I could still remember the feeling of losing myself to water in a creek bed, or the roots of underbrush, or a left-behind blackbird.
“And how did you do that?” she asked. “How’d you become something else?”
“Why do you want to know?” I asked. What had happened was mine. It was my body and my losing it. Hiding was the one thing I’d done right, one single thing I could hold against everything else I’d screwed up.
I didn’t want her picking it apart.
“Do you want me out of your hair or not?” she asked. “Please. Just tell me how.”
“I can’t teach you how to do it,” I said. “It wasn’t something I did. I couldn’t even do it again. It just happened. I felt it happening and I let it happen.”
“How did you let it happen?” she asked.
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