Wild Beauty

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  “Let’s get this over with.” Calla charged into the ballroom. She passed under the swaths of bright silk draping the ceiling, pinned at the corners of the room and then gathered at the chandelier.

  Estrella passed a boy who stood out more because of his stance than his clothes, or his hair, or even how his skin was the same brown as her grandmother’s. He did not stand straight and tall like the men in their black-and-white clothes.

  He watched the polished floor like he was looking for the ground underneath it.

  She did not register him as Fel until she caught his reflection in a gilt-framed mirror. He wore the black pants, dark green shirt, and black vest Reid had decided would make him blend in with the guests without being mistaken for one.

  The feeling of touching him came back to her. She tried to stop the memory from spinning forward, but it got away from her, like the wind taking a spray of leaves.

  His fingers brushed hers, an echo of the night before. It was so slight she couldn’t tell if he’d done it on purpose.

  This time, he did not apologize.

  He leaned down to her, his mouth so close to her ear she could feel the warmth on her neck.

  “Don’t do that again,” he said.

  She tilted her head so he had to look at her. His breath and hers met, heating the space between their lips.

  “Don’t do what again?” She let the challenge sharpen her voice.

  Until now, she had protected him like he was as young as Calla and only half as smart. She had handled him more carefully than her grandmother and her cousins’ grandmothers. But men could not tell her family what to do. Not the ones in town who asked Azalea didn’t she know how pretty she was, or who told Gloria to smile for them. Not the wealthy men they tricked into buying seeds and bulbs as though they were made of gold. Not even this boy who might mean so many things that they both loved him and feared him.

  Estrella could demand his silence about the things Bay had told them on the fire escape. She could threaten him into staying quiet about what only he and Dalia knew, that she had tried to run, and La Pradera had taken rough hold of her for it. She could leave him in the paling blue before dawn.

  Men and boys had no claim on their secrets or their bodies. La Pradera was a world in which women did not listen to men just because they were men.

  But in making him look at her, she saw it, how the hard shine on his eyes was not the force of him trying to rule her.

  It was fear. Worry flickered over his eyes like light.

  “Don’t run,” he said. “If that’s what the gardens do if you run, then don’t run.”

  The feeling of holding on to him, her unfiled nails cutting into his shoulder, rose from last night. They turned from dreams to things real enough that they lived in her fingers, true as the possibility of flowers.

  “I’ll look for you,” he said. “And your family will look for you. But don’t make them see you like that. They love you and it will break them.”

  The certainty in his voice buckled, and she heard the words he left in silence. How her lips had been stained red with pollen and her own blood.

  “Please,” he said.

  She felt his stare on her skin. It was a ribbon of water, tracing along each bead of her necklace. It was such bright contrast to the heat of his fingertips that she looked away first.

  Letting her gaze fall gave Reid the chance to catch her eyes. He stood outside the French doors and nodded to her, and her stomach tightened even more than it had under the cinch of the dress.

  Her repayment for the torched car.

  She held to the possibility that Bay would get together enough Briar secrets to drive him off the land. But until she did, Estrella had to bring Reid the weighted-down obedience of a girl mourning Bay.

  “Young lady.” Reid’s voice rushed through the doors and into the ballroom, loud enough that everyone turned their faces toward him.

  He had warned her he would do this, call her something other than her name.

  But the words sounded too old for Reid’s voice. Young lady. Those were words for men twice his age.

  Estrella had thought she had gotten so much for so little, Reid forgiving his car turned to ash for nothing but a demure smile and a few flowers. Now, though, with Reid calling her by something other than her name, this seemed strange, wrong, like he had crossed the threshold of her room. She hadn’t expected it to feel like a kind of invasion.

  Reid stretched a hand into the sugar- and champagne-scented air, and she understood. He had wanted to give himself the air of a showman or circus ringleader. The words matched the gesture of his arm, his pale wrist showing at the sleeve of his fine suit as he swept his hand from the doors toward an open lawn.

  “Come here,” Reid said, more voices going quiet with each word, “and make me an ocean.”

  This was how she would pay him back. How she would make Reid forget any thoughts of forcing them off La Pradera. He would demand something so impossible it drew gasps from the rich men and women whose steps brought up the smell of lemon and wax and shoe polish. When Reid had first told her what he wanted, it had sounded so easy and small. But now he summoned her with words he might call any of her cousins.

  This way, he could put them all on display at once.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Young lady?

  Had Reid really said that? Like he was Estrella’s mother, correcting her posture or saying her skirt was too short?

  The music had faded and stopped so suddenly Fel wondered if the violinists and cello players had thought the words were as ridiculous as he had. Then he realized Reid had nodded at them to still their bows.

  The start of a laugh vibrated in Fel’s chest.

  Estrella grabbed the back of his arm and pinched him. Hard. Under the small shock of pain, he wondered if this was what it would be like to be part of this family. It was such a gesture between brother and sister that he felt almost ashamed of setting his hands on the small of her back the night before.

  It felt like a kind of betrayal, an impossibility, to both want her and want her family.

  She pinched him harder.

  “No wonder our grandmothers keep trying to feed you,” she whispered.

  “What?” he asked, matching her volume. “Why?”

  “You’re hard to pinch,” she said.

  “Then why are you pinching me?”

  “Because I need you to be quiet,” she said, both their voices becoming taut whispers.

  “Then why didn’t you just tell me to be quiet?”

  Reid gestured to the grass in front of him, not forbidding, not yet. But with the widening eyes of impatience.

  Estrella let go of Fel. She descended the few stone steps, the light from inside clinging to her skirt and turning it the same searing blue as the sky reflected in water. Clear glass beads winked near the hem. A strand of yellow ones crossed her hair.

  She walked with the stares of all these men and women on her. Her cousins watched, but she did not find them over her shoulder. She did not kiss her hand and blow air over her fingertips. She kept her path straight through the open doors.

  Outside, the fountain glowed like there was a small sun under the water. Candles floated between water lilies. The trees’ boughs and branches reached out and intertwined.

  The breezes swept petals into the air. Estrella crossed beneath the canopy of purple and white and pink.

  Make me an ocean. Reid didn’t look drunk. He didn’t stagger. His words did not blur together. But that strange command made Fel wonder if he had a flask in his inner pocket, already halfway down.

  A few guests whispered to one another, Reid’s order holding them in the same wondering place. How could a girl make an ocean?

  Estrella knelt alongside a tall hedge. The blue of her skirt, light on the dark grass, filled with air and then settled. Reid’s shadow darkened the hem. She lowered her eyes, and slid her hands into the dirt. Fel could almost see the current from her palms stirring buds out
of the earth.

  The horror drifting off her family was a silent language Fel understood. Her mother—he found her in her pale yellow dress—watched, knowing she could not stop this. But her fingers were laced in front of her, and Fel understood that if Reid touched her, Estrella’s mother would scratch his neck open.

  Fel would help. One worried nod from any Nomeolvides mother or grandmother, and Fel would shove Reid against the fountain like the stone was a brick alley, and Reid was a man calling a boy Nancy, Molly, anything cruel and unanswerable.

  Estrella tipped her chin up, as though she felt these thoughts. Her gaze found him, and her look was almost a glare.

  He read the warning in her face.

  Don’t you dare.

  Do not intervene.

  If you try, you will make this worse for me.

  If you try, I will make you regret it.

  She slid her hands deeper into the ground. She held it until it sprouted borraja. They were blue flames catching and spreading.

  Fel shuddered between rage at Reid and wanting to protect this girl and the things she grew. He had held these petals on his tongue. He had opened his eyes to them covering the ceiling of her room. When they fell, he had caught them between his hands and her back, her shoulder, her hip.

  And now Reid was turning them into a show.

  Estrella gripped the soil, stirring new growth. Her palms cradled handfuls of ground until the next stems rustled the leaves. Green pushed up through the dark blue. Buds dotted the curled stems, turning paler green, then white, then lilac-colored. They grew and fattened, darkening from purple into blue. Then each fluttered open, five tiny petals around a yellow center. Their blue was the same as the after-sunset sky.

  Forget-me-nots. Estrella drew her hands through the borraja and grass, bringing up her family’s name. She freckled the leaf-covered ground with blue and violet. Forget-me-nots clustered between the borraja. The dark and lighter blue mixed together, giving the shades of a sea. The borraja and the forget-me-nots became one sheet of blue. They crawled along the grass like spilled water.

  With fists clenched around the soil, Estrella made vine after vine of forget-me-nots, the curling green bursting with lilac buds and then blue flowers.

  She knifed her hands into the soil. Forget-me-nots and borraja crowded the ground, blooms rustling among leaves. She drove her hands down, telling the earth this was what it would give her. Petals like coins of sky. The purple of buds so soft it looked watercolored. Borraja that looked like brushstrokes of night.

  She had nothing left. She was forcing it.

  The men and women gasped and laughed their delight. This girl whose name they did not care to know had done it. She had grown a blue sea in the middle of La Pradera. The little ocean of borraja and forget-me-not filled in full and bright. The bed opened up as round and wide as a pond. She kept her hands in the earth for so long, and the blue flowers grew in so thick that the bed looked like wind-flicked water.

  They applauded like she was an attraction, a fascination.

  Reid offered his hand, and Estrella took it. She knew, like her family knew, that these were the men who would advise Reid what to do with these strange, perfect gardens. If she defied them, offended them, they would tell him to level it and sell the land.

  She let him help her to her feet. She curtsied when he gestured at her, like a performer at a carnival.

  Reid’s joy made him look half his age. He took this as a triumph, his show starting off the night, the guests leaning into one another and wondering if all the brown-skinned girls were as entertaining. He glowed with the satisfaction of seeing how festive Estrella’s trick had made them. When the music started again, they paired together and spun across the gleaming floor inside. Some swept out onto the flat stones around the fountain.

  Estrella brushed off her dress. She looked as wrung out as when he’d found her in the grass.

  A flash of her ankle, and he remembered the story she’d told him. Something about red shoes. How her family had to make these flowers because they couldn’t help letting their gifts stream from their hands, but how forcing it hurt.

  Always, the Nomeolvides women looked like they were giving the ground flowers willingly, doing what their fingers would ache to do if they didn’t give them the chance. But they made a row or small bed at a time. They wore themselves out so they slept, dreaming of new gardens.

  They did not work themselves into this, how Estrella shivered even though the air had not yet grown cold.

  No stranger would have noticed. To them, there was only the sea of flowers. But Fel knew her, and her half-closed eyes were a sign not that she was demure but that she was tired. The way she tipped her head toward the flowers was not shyness, but the will going out of her.

  Reid had already been pulled aside by an interested couple, so Fel took his place in the hedge’s shadow.

  “You didn’t have to do what he told you,” Fel said.

  She shook her head, eyes on the ground between them.

  But when she spoke, she lifted her face and held his gaze. “Don’t try to save me from things you don’t understand.”

  There was no anger in her words, not even warning. Just advice wrung out of her.

  They had both stopped at the edge of the courtyard. A few guests looked up from their conversations, taking sips of their drinks to hide it. Dancing couples inclined their heads to catch glimpses of the girl who had grown a small sea.

  “And now people are staring,” she said. “So thank you.”

  He held out his hand. “Then let’s do something about it.”

  She shook her head, but her smile was there, enough to let him catch it.

  “Do you know how?” she asked.

  “Not at all.” He set a palm on her back before they got swept into the rush of all those skirts.

  She dug her hand into his shoulder, shifting them so they didn’t crash into another couple.

  Estrella looked him over.

  “You clean up well,” she said.

  “Thanks,” he said. “So do you.”

  She was kind enough to smile at the joke. The Nomeolvides women would always be beautiful, and he would always be hard to look at. He saw it in the grandmothers’ faces, how even now that he was filling out his clothes a little better they still stared at him more with pity than pride.

  The wind picked up, bringing a rain of blossoms. The moon and the garden lights blinked off the bronze wire and yellow beads in Estrella’s hair.

  She turned her head toward the lit-up fountain. Streams of glowing water fell from the stone.

  “Bay always loved this,” she said. “She always had some fantastic outfit. Satin. Pants of course.”

  “She’s not dead,” he said under his breath.

  “But she’s not here.”

  Fel put pressure on her back with his palm, moving her so she wouldn’t collide with a woman in a cream dress.

  Estrella laughed. When she laughed, she was the girl eating candy buttons off paper, one color at a time. She was the girl who’d turned his face to hers, her mouth finding his in the dark.

  Her eyes landed on the small ocean, the wide span of borraja and forget-me-nots. The men and women stood over it, bending close to look but afraid to touch it, as though it might be hot.

  He felt her fingers worrying on his shoulder.

  “Look at me,” Fel said.

  Her eyes moved back to him.

  He got a firmer grip on her right hand, and her left stilled on his shoulder.

  She knew what to do with him. She could hate him, or she could tear his shirt off his body and bare his back, and he would let her. But her own flowers were turning on her.

  “Don’t look at it,” he said. “Look at me.”

  She did, her stare all focus and intent.

  A flare of heat rushed through him, and then a second, like one flash of sheet lightning following another. This was the spell of Estrella Nomeolvides. Not the flowers grown by her fingers.
But the way she lured him toward things that made him feel as though his life before was knowable, even if only in glimpses. She showed him this world, the bright colors and green, the spiced powders and raw sugar, and in this world he found narrow paths to ones he had known before.

  He tried to keep space between his left hand and her right, hoping she wouldn’t feel how hot his palm had turned, but she kept her hold. He kept his right hand still on her back, her dress low enough that only three of his fingers lay against the fabric. His thumb and forefinger were on her bare skin.

  He took his right hand off her, and readjusted his hold, his hand now closer to her waist. All his fingers on her dress.

  They stumbled into a pair of Reid’s guests.

  “Sorry,” Fel said, both to them and to Estrella.

  The other couple widened their distance from them.

  “You’re awful at this,” Estrella said.

  “Thank you,” Fel said.

  “No, I mean it, you’re terrible.”

  This was not the deep, steady pulse of music he almost remembered. It was not the hard rhythm of boots on the dusty earth beneath olive trees. This was music as airy as the flowering branches, and he didn’t know what to do with it.

  “Here.” Estrella grabbed his shoulder harder. “I’m leading.”

  The force of her hands pulled them closer. The front of her dress brushed his shirt. A loose piece of her hair trailed across his neck.

  Fel lost the feeling of the flat stones under him. The blur of every color pulled back. The thread of flower nectar in the air dulled. There was just Estrella, with the blue of her skirt whirling around her.

  She didn’t let him keep still. She pulled on him, and they stayed in the current of dresses and suits.

  “How do you know how to do this?” he asked.

  “My cousins and I have been waltzing around our rooms together since we were four.” She gripped his hand. “I was the tallest girl for a couple of years, so I was the boy.”

  “How long did that last?” he asked.

  “It didn’t. Thanks for reminding me.” She pinched him again, other arm this time.