All Out--The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens throughout the Ages

by Saundra Mitchell

  “And now,” said Mr. Dubois, “prepare to witness...the Inferno!”

  The hoist released its hold and I plummeted into the box. The lid slammed shut over my head, snuffing out the flames. The heat was unbearable and the smoke burned my eyes. In my chest, my heart became a cornered beast, terrified and erratic. My lungs shriveled as the if the air and moisture had been drawn from them. All our careful preparation fled my mind, and I began to panic. I became disoriented in the thick clouds of smoke and sucked in a breath that contained no air, only death. I slipped the ropes easily, even in my confused state, and felt around the box for the back, but couldn’t find it.

  I grew light-headed and faint. My movements sluggish. As if cursed with a premonition, I felt with certainty that I was not going to escape the box. This was where I was going to die.

  My last memory of my mother flashed through my mind. She lay dying in the single room we’d called home. The vomiting and diarrhea had ceased but she refused all water and food, and was so weak she could barely move. I was barely five but I’d remained by her side for days, ignoring my own hunger. She loved me, she’d said before she’d taken her final breath, and that was the last time I’d believed anyone could truly care for me. It was the last time I’d believed myself truly worthy of care. Until Wilhelm.

  And I was going to die without him knowing I felt the same for him.

  The growing shouts from the audience as they realized something was wrong were distant in my ears as my consciousness began to flee. I imagined Mr. Dubois struggling to decide whether to free me and risk his career and life or wait until the last possible moment to see if I could escape. My life meant nothing to him if it did not serve his purpose.

  As I closed my eyes, believing it to be for the last time, I felt a familiar tug in the center of my chest and then the chill of air. Real air. I involuntarily breathed, filling my lungs with life as the audience cheered and applauded.

  “The Inferno!” shouted the Mystic Mycroft beside me.

  The audience roared their approval, believing I had escaped on my own, though I knew I had not. My eyes watered, and I blinked to see clearly, searching the back of the auditorium until I found the face I sought. Wilhelm, in the suit he wore for the Butterfly, stood near the back. When I caught his eye, he bowed his head slightly before he vanished.

  I ran from the stage—the Mystic Mycroft was too busy drinking in the adoration of his audience to notice—and fled out the back exit into the street. I made my way to the theater where the Virtuoso was, even then, performing, and sneaked inside. No one stopped me as I made my way to the stage and down the stairs that led under it. I waited in the dark while above the Virtuoso danced madly and chanted gibberish, the audience enthralled.

  And then Wilhelm appeared. Not in a cloud of smoke or a flash of light, but in the moment where the heart skips a beat. Not there and then there.

  He exhaled, his eyes closed, and I watched him smile and gracefully bow as the audience applauded and cheered, even though he couldn’t see them nor they him. Wilhelm was the one who truly deserved their love and adoration, though they were, and would remain, ignorant of that fact.

  When he opened his eyes and saw me, his smile faded and he said, “Alfie, you shouldn’t be here.”

  I stepped forward, determined, and said, “I’m asking, Wilhelm. I’m asking now.”

  “It’s too late,” he said.

  “You saved me. I would have died, but you saved me.”

  Wilhelm’s lips parted in a smile, and I might have tried to memorize it, but I planned to never live a day without seeing them again.

  “And I would save you every night if necessary.”

  “But it’s not,” I said. “It won’t be. I’m leaving. We’re leaving together.”

  “I’m cursed,” Wilhelm said.

  “Then we’ll be cursed together.”

  Wilhelm’s hands trembled. “I’ll only bring you misery.”

  “I’ll take a lifetime of misery with you over a day of love from Mr. Dubois.”

  “Without their greatest acts, both our masters will be ruined.”

  “Then let’s ruin them,” I said. “Will you come with me, Wilhelm? I’m asking.”

  Wilhelm crossed the space between us and kissed me. He kissed me as easily as breathing. I wrapped my arms around his waist and we vanished, leaving only his chains behind.

  * * * * *

  HEALING ROSA

  BY

  TEHLOR KAY MEJIA

  Luna County, New Mexico, 1933

  Rosa was a summer girl, and I was a winter girl, but that fall we made magic.

  It was the year we put my abuela’s whisper of a body into the ground. The year my mama told me to take her candles and feathers, her bound herbs and bones, and bury them at the edge of our land.

  I’d been a child the first time I watched my grandmother heal, and the memory came back so clearly as I gathered her things. The boy on the floor of her room, candles burning all around him. The room itself, hot even through the glass of the window where my forehead was pressed. Her voice, low as she chanted into smoke sometimes too thick to see through.

  Mostly the unbearable brightness inside, as I stood alone in the dark.

  But into that brightness, something dark had been born. A shape, rising up from the boy’s chest as he thrashed and sweated beneath Abuela’s hands. It had chilled me to my bones just to look at it, the fear that had been haunting his bones made suddenly visible under her curandera’s eye.

  She’d shouted, at the end, just once, and preoccupied by the darkness I hadn’t been prepared for the shock. I didn’t step away in time. She chased the dark shape out the window with her herb broom wrapped in string, and for a half second it brushed against my cheek.

  Abuela’s face was pale when she saw me, mouth hanging open like I’d been marked.

  I was sick for a week afterward. I woke up sweating from dreams that weren’t mine. I couldn’t eat, could barely force down sips of milk steeped with herbs.

  “It’ll pass,” my abuela had said. “She needs quiet, and rest. Her spirit needs to find its way back home.”

  And it had. One night I drank a mug of hot water with a cinnamon stick and slept without dreaming. Then came the broth, and the tortillas still warm from the stove, and one day when my abuela cracked the egg into her tall glass she closed her eyes and smiled.

  “You’re strong,” she’d said, and for the first time in my life, I felt it.

  But now, in her empty room with nothing but sticks and stones to remind me of all she’d taught me, I felt anything but strong. “Mama, let me keep them,” I begged, wrapping my grandmother’s things in a large embroidered handkerchief. “What if you get sick? Or papa? What if...”

  “No,” my mother interrupted, her voice sharp as the knife she used to take the heads off chickens in the yard. “Whatever she was mixed up in, it’s done. She’s your father’s mother and I won’t disrespect her memory, but it goes. Tonight. We don’t need any mal de ojo on this house, and you’ll be a teacher, m’ija, not some kind of witch.” She crossed herself, and went back to stirring the big pot on the stove.

  Barefoot, twin braids flying behind me, I headed for the property line just as she’d asked. It never occurred to her that I would disobey the rest. But it was the end of my sixteenth summer, my abuela was gone and I needed whatever magic she’d left behind.

  When I reached the edge of our land, the line I’d been warned never to cross again, I could smell Rosa like it was last fall all over again. Rosemary like the green needles we’d used as perfume. Dry earth. Marigolds. The smell of the sun on her skin before she got sick. The smell that clung to my hair when we’d let our heads touch too long in the grass.

  Rosa had been my neighbor since her father carried her over the border in his arms, a child that deserved better than perpetual war. But she was
more than a neighbor.

  More than even a friend.

  She was with me when I cleared the shallow-rooted grass from the cracked ground, with me when I salted the earth so it would remain bare as a tabletop. I set the candles out one by one, wicks pointed skyward, and I whispered her name into the wind until the tears came. For my abuela, who was gone, and my mother who was scared, and Rosa, Rosa, Rosa, whose papa would never let her come.

  When the storm of my grief had passed, I closed my eyes. I felt Abuela’s papery hands on mine, heard the brush fire of her whisper as it stirred the air to combustion. It was her arranging the bones to ground me, the stones to focus me, the herbs to calm me, but when I struck a match in the still air my eyes were open, and I was alone.

  “Rosa,” I whispered, and the wick caught in answer. “Rosa, Rosa, Rosa.”

  * * *

  My mama watched me with patient eyes that first week, looking for the dirt of Abuela’s grave in the new lines around my eyes. I wasn’t sleeping enough, she said, and made me hot water with a cinnamon stick.

  I didn’t tell her it wasn’t the same, but maybe she could tell. She didn’t make it again.

  Every day when I left for the property line, I held my breath for the no I was sure would come. But every day she said: “Don’t get too much sun.”

  And that was that.

  I lit the tiny pink candles on the third day. Pink like the hearts Rosa had drawn with cactus flowers on the flat of my stomach. I burned rosemary until the oily smoke made my eyes water and sting. I sang songs to the cracks in the ground, and once I thought I felt my abuela’s hands in my hair, but Rosa didn’t come.

  That night, as I scuffed my bare feet in the dust on my way home, I thought if she didn’t come soon I’d brave her daddy’s liquor breath and easy swinging fists. I thought I’d march right up to that door and tell him it was time he let me help her.

  But even the thought of him kept me up all night. His bloodshot eyes when he told me never to come back. When he told me my abuela, with her beautiful curandera’s magic, was nothing more than a bruja. An evil woman who would cloud the eyes of God as he looked for Rosa’s suffering soul.

  My abuela said the war had turned him, that there was a darkness nesting at the ends of his nerves, making him fearful and sharp edged and angry. She could help him, but only if he wanted to heal. Until then it was best to stay clear of him.

  So I obeyed. I stayed clear. I sat at the edge of that property line day after day and called to Rosa in every language I knew.

  It was the sixth day when a breeze kicked up. I was lying flat on my back, toes teasing the line. The red dust beneath me gave my dress clues about the woman growing inside it. The first stars had just been born in the sky, and it was like my abuela had written Rosa’s name in their unearthly sparkle. It was finally time.

  On my feet, my heart got so warm and so full that it spilled out of my eyes and I blinked hard until I could see her, black against the blue, coming closer.

  “Rosa,” I whispered, and then I was running.

  Her body was too thin in my arms and her laugh was a mariposa’s wing beat, but she was here and alive and I felt so fiercely in that moment that I was meant to belong to her.

  “I dreamed of you,” she said.

  “It wasn’t a dream.”

  I didn’t kiss her then, not on those papery lips that were strangers to me. If I kissed her I’d be admitting I might never see her whole again, and I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. So I squeezed her hands like they were healthy, and her cheeks went pink and her eyes were the same and the candles around us danced to our heartbeats and I thought: Forever, forever, forever.

  “Papa will be back soon,” she said. “He won’t like this, but... I saw you, and you were bright as the moon, and I couldn’t stay away.”

  I buried my face in her hair, and for a while all we did was breathe.

  “Rosa,” I said when the silence broke. “My abuela is gone.”

  “I know.” There were tears in her eyes. “He says that’s why I’m getting sicker. He says she’s haunting us.”

  Her eyes were wide and calm, her lashes long. Her mouth was turned up at one corner, lifting her cheek into a half smile that said, “What can you do?”

  But I wouldn’t do nothing. Not this time.

  “I need you to tell me what’s wrong,” I said in a rush. “Everything.”

  The thick wings of her eyebrows disappeared into her flyaway hair. We had always pretended the sickness wasn’t real when we were together. Like if we didn’t mention it we could make it disappear. But Rosa had carried a darkness with her since she was a child. Since her father had taken her hand and together they’d run from the war. It had only grown as she did, that darkness, building a wall between her soul and its home until her body started to give up in pieces.

  A susto, my abuela had called it in a whisper, and the memory of fear’s creases beside her eyes haunted me still.

  We had been kidding ourselves, to think our silence would make it all disappear. The only thing that had disappeared was Rosa.

  “Please,” I said again. “Tell me.”

  “We don’t have to,” she said, a hand against my cheek. “We don’t have to talk about it. Not when we have so little time...”

  “Rosa,” I said, needing her to understand. “My abuela isn’t haunting you. But I think...she can help me make you better.”

  Now her chin was trembling, and instead of the hope I needed to see in her eyes, her head was slowly shaking. “We’ve tried everything,” she said, the edges of her words too careful. “My papa says there’s nothing left to do. That if God wants me to live He’ll take the ghost away, that He has a plan and we can’t interfere...”

  “Your papa’s scared,” I said, pleading. “He doesn’t understand, but I do. Let me try.”

  “I can’t...” She was backing away. She was backing away and I was frozen. I thought getting her across the line would be the hardest part, but how could I have forgotten?

  She’d never been able to disobey him.

  Not then, when it meant keeping me.

  Not even now, when it meant saving herself.

  “Rosa, please.” I hated the smallness of my voice. My abuela would have been able to make her understand. “Don’t walk away again.”

  The pink candles at my feet went out.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I wanted to see you. I needed to. But I can’t... He’ll never understand.”

  “What does it matter if he understands? You’ll be alive! We’ll be together!”

  “I’m all he has,” she said, and her tone told me her decision had been made.

  “So you’ll die? You’ll die so he doesn’t have to face his own prejudice?”

  Her eyes filled with tears, and I hated myself for them. “He’s my father. I’m sorry.” She turned away. She ran. She didn’t look back.

  * * *

  Summer seeped out of the sky, leaked into fall’s still-dry ground. The cold brought no relief to the thirsty earth, or to the people walking on it.

  I’d always been a winter girl, at home in the cool nights, the comfort of warm tortillas on chilly fingers, the sharp brightness of the constellations. But there was no joy in it this year, not for me. I sat at my window for long hours, watching the sky change, watching the dark come earlier. I didn’t go back to the property line. There was nothing to find.

  When I slept, I dreamed of Rosa, of cold spirits sucking the last of the warmth from her body. Each time she died I tried to run to her, to save her, the knowledge of how I’d do it on fire in my heaving chest. But the harder I ran the farther away she grew, and eventually I’d wake up sweating, like I’d really run miles across the desert.

  Sometimes, when I woke, I’d go to the room that was still my abuela’s and curl up on the floor. My tears salted her floorboar
ds those nights, and if I turned my head just right in the days that followed, I could see the places where they paled the wood. It made me feel so close to her, and so terribly far away.

  “You look sick,” my mama said over the bean pot.

  It had been weeks, I thought. But they could have been days, or years.

  “You need rest, warm weather. Your grandmother’s spirit is haunting you.”

  “Spring will come,” I said, but my fingers felt cold.

  “Winter will come first. I’m sending you to live with Tío José until you’re feeling like yourself again.”

  Where I’d been empty, I turned to stone. “You aren’t sending me anywhere.”

  The lines of her face went hard and flat. There was no understanding, no pity. If it had been a normal fall, I would have accepted defeat—but there would be no surrender here today. I was alive, and Rosa was dying. If I left now, her last breath would be drawn in a place I used to live. When she died, she’d be a girl I used to know.

  The thought was unbearable. If I couldn’t help her, I deserved to feel it when she went.

  I stared at my mother with the eyes of a girl who had loved and lost. Eyes that had once belonged to a child, but had seen too much sadness. In the steam rising from that pot something changed between us, and she shrugged her shoulders.

  “Suit yourself. But no more moping. You’ll do your chores. You’ll pull your weight.”

  Instead of answering, I went back to my window. Night fell first over Rosa’s house; was it some kind of sign? I would have taken on her father, but if she didn’t want to heal there was nothing I could do. My abuela had made sure I understood that the moment she sensed the healing spirit in me.

  I’d kissed Rosa in every season, mapped every mountain beneath her skin. She’d made no secret of her love for me. Her father had turned a blind eye in those golden days, muttering about girls and friendship and how the world was changing before turning his boots toward the woodpile.