“Okay, now you have to tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“Why you wish you’d met me a long time ago.”
Ezra covers his face with his arm, laughing softly. “You’re entirely too tenacious,” he says through his jacket sleeve.
“Well?”
“I don’t think I can.”
“That’s not fair.”
“I’m not sure what I meant.”
Without thinking, I sit up, pull his arm away from his face, and stare hard into his eyes. “You like me.”
“I do.”
“No. I mean … you like me. More than friends.”
He somehow manages to both laugh and frown. “You’re crazy.”
A strand of hair sticks to his lip, so I brush it away. When I touch him, he flinches, and I know I’m right. My chest feels tight knowing it so concretely.
“Stop staring,” he whispers. “You’re worse than my moth …”
I kiss him before he can finish. Ezra’s lips sting my own, and the sudden connection sends a shock down my throat that lodges in my stomach. When he realizes what I’m doing, he tries pushing me away. But I push back, refusing to budge until he admits how he feels. If I’m wrong, I’ll be completely humiliated. Either way, I’m going to find out.
Ezra shoots up abruptly, knocking me to the ground. “What the hell are you doing?”
Suddenly the dirt is my ally. I stare at it as though divining my future.
“Ruby!”
Ezra sounds confused, maybe hurt. I look up at the stars, then force myself to meet his eyes, just like I’d expect him to do if the tables were turned. “I thought … well, I guess it doesn’t matter what I thought. I like you, Ezra. I mean, I really do.”
“How?” he asks, dumbfounded.
“I guess because you’re you,” I whisper.
He presses his fingers against his forehead. “Ruby, it’s not that easy.”
What stands out isn’t what he says, but that he doesn’t deny he likes me or argue that I shouldn’t like him. It leaves me the opening I need. “Why? We’re together now, aren’t we?”
“You need to look in the mirror for real because I think you’ve forgotten who you are.”
“I know who I am. At least I do when I’m with you. And I couldn’t care less what people think. They don’t know you. They don’t know how I feel about you.”
Ezra looks so perplexed I think his head might literally whirl into a tailspin. I use the moment to pick myself up off the ground and corner him. “If you don’t want me, that’s a different story. Then just tell me, please. No matter what, we’re friends, right? But don’t tell me you don’t if you do.”
He opens his mouth to say something, then grabs the collar of my jacket instead, roughly pulling me forward by the lapels. When our lips meet, he kisses me back, softly at first, then with an insistence that makes me crazy. I topple him over and lie on his body, pinning him while we kiss, worried he may change his mind.
After an eternity, I roll beside him, snuggling into the side of his down-clad chest. Ezra doesn’t speak. He just stares up at the sky with eyes that never waver.
“What are you thinking?” I ask.
“I don’t know.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really.”
“Are you mad at me?”
I feel him laugh, though he does it silently. “No, I’m not. I’d say I’m more, like, happy. And maybe confused. A little frustrated with myself. Not mad at you.” He rolls on his side and runs a finger across my cheek. “Take it back if you don’t mean it, Ruby. Just do it now, okay? I’m not very good with heartbreak.”
“I don’t know how to say it any plainer, Ezra. I really, really like you.”
“It’s hard for me to understand.”
“Maybe you should look in the mirror again. Because whoever you think you were, if you ever were, you’re just not anymore. You don’t need a perfect face. You’re beautiful here.” I touch his chest over his heart. “And you get me. And I trust you. You aren’t decent to me because you have something to prove or because you want to get me in bed … err, well, at least I’m pretty sure that’s not it.”
Ezra laughs. “I’m with you because you basically hog-tied me that first time we went to Pecos. I never had much of a chance, did I?”
“You know you did.” I swat him playfully. “You didn’t have to invite me out here. Look, this may sound terrible, but it’s partly because of your face that I trust you. And it’s because of your face that you let yourself trust me. It may not be as perfect as you’d like, but I don’t see what you do. And I don’t wonder who you are beneath it either.”
“I wouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket, Ruby.”
“Ezra.” I shake my head. “Don’t be so cynical.”
“I like you a lot, obviously. But I am still me.”
Ezra can be so intense. But his reticence isn’t hard to understand. Still, the attraction is perceptible, fixed to my body like my own skin. Somehow, he’s already integral to who I’m becoming, even if I haven’t quite figured it out yet.
“Ezra, I’m tired of talking. Just come back here and kiss me. Whatever you decide, I know where I stand with it. If you change your mind after you wake up and realize what a dopey idiot I’ve been, wearing my heart on my sleeve, you’ll tell me.”
Ezra pulls off his jacket and winds his arm under my back. He throws the jacket on top off us and arranges it to cover the top half of our bodies. Underneath, we fit together like a custom lock and key. His body feels strong and soft all at the same time as I explore it tentatively with my fingers, moving my hand lightly over his scratchy shirt and blue jeans.
For the longest time, he just lies there, rigid and wound tight, stroking my hair while he holds me. I move my hand under his shirt, over his warm chest and stomach, and he swallows or shifts but never halts my journey. We kiss, and I close my eyes. When I open them again, it’s light outside, and Ezra is still sleeping beside me.
Fourteen
The Trick Is to Open Your Eyes
“Hiya.” Angel smiles, tossing a library book on the chair next to me just a little too casually. “What are you up to?”
“It’s Thursday. We’re in a library. What do you think I’m doing?”
“Studying?”
“Bingo,” I laugh, pointing to my physics book. “What else?”
He sits down, crossing his strong arms over his starched khaki button up. “Maybe trying to avoid everyone?”
“Angel …”
“Maybe,” he places a finger on his lips, “maybe all that talk I’ve been hearing around town is true.” He sits back in the chair, folding his arms across his chest again like a general.
“Talk?” I whisper innocently.
“Lots of talk. Everywhere I go.”
“Angel, I wanted to tell you myself. I just thought … I don’t know. That you’d be hurt, or angry, or that you wouldn’t understand.”
He shakes his head. “I am hurt. And I don’t understand.”
I run a fingernail back and forth in a groove in the wood table, stalling. “I’m sorry. I really am. I knew you’d have something to say about it.”
“Here’s a tip, Ruby. Soon enough, all of La Luna’s going to have something to say about it.”
“I don’t care what everyone else says. I care what you think, Angel.”
“There’s not one cell in that boy’s body that deserves you,” he says through his teeth. “It’s beyond me what you see in him. Why would you settle?”
“I haven’t settled. Ezra isn’t his face. He’s a good person.”
Angel fiddles with my physics book, flicking a page back and forth between his fingers. “A good person? He’d have to have done one hell of a turnaround.”
“You know, sometimes you act like he broke your heart!”
He squints at me. “How do you know he didn’t?”
“Angel,” I squawk. “Are you serious?”
&nbs
p; “As a bullet. He had a bad habit of homing in on whoever I dated in high school. Ezra stole my ex Caroline right out from under my nose.” He tips back in the chair, looking half pissed, half smug.
“Oh. I’m sorry. You never told me.”
Caroline. The girl Ezra followed to Boston, who turned around and broke his heart. Ezra’s words ring in my head. Guess you might call it poetic justice. I stare down at the table, resigning myself to the fact that I’m going to be defending Ezra for a good long while.
“I really do think he’s changed,” I say softly. “He knows who he was before. And he doesn’t like it. He wants to be different.”
Angel drops back on all four chair legs and leans forward, pushing his forearms against the table. “Anything’s possible, I suppose. But I doubt it.”
I bite my lip. “I’m sorry if I hurt you.”
“Are you?”
I bat my lashes at him a little more strenuously than usual, hating that I’ve reverted to Mom’s tricks to soothe him. “Yes.”
“I really don’t get it.” He scrubs the short hairs on the back of his head with both hands before dropping them heavily on the table. “All that I’m-not-ready crap, was it a lie?”
“No. I do like you, Angel. And I’m not ready. I just, I feel like myself around him. And I haven’t felt like myself since my mom died.”
He sighs, staring at my lip as I chew on it. “Do you even know who you are, Ruby? Maybe you feel okay with yourself around him because you don’t have to work at it. I bet that boy jumps on any scrap you throw him.” He sits back in the chair. “Definitely easier than letting yourself care about someone.”
Angel stares at me, and I meet his eyes, trying to conceal my anger. He’s my friend. But I’ve also never seen him act so purposefully hateful. “Ezra isn’t desperate. And neither am I.”
He looks at me askew. “So, what do we do now?”
“You said our friendship is important to you.” I smile as sweetly as I can, pretending I’m not furious with him. “You could try supporting me.”
“That’s all you want?” he asks sarcastically.
“Baby steps.”
Angel gets up and stands perfectly still, looking down at me. “All right,” he finally says. “Baby steps. Itty-bitty baby steps.”
“Still friends, then?” I ask, looking up at him.
He nods. “You’re gonna need one.”
I try smiling wider, but my insides hurt. I know Angel’s reaction is a preview, a portent of what’s to come around town once everyone knows Ezra and I are together.
“You still going to Marta’s party Saturday night?” he asks.
“Maybe?” I shrug. “I’m not sure I’ve talked Ezra into going yet.”
“Well, if I see you, I see you, I guess.” He repositions his hat. “If not, good luck.”
“Thanks. I hope I do see you,” I say, kind of not meaning it. Angel and Ezra in a room together is a disaster in the making. On the other hand, I could definitely use the luck. As soon as Las Gallinas found out about Ezra at lunch on Monday, Marta’s bad attitude kicked into overdrive. The school week so far, has been unbearable. If Marta could stop me from coming to her party without incurring Racine’s wrath, I know she'd have banned me already.
Angel swaggers out of the library, and I flip my physics book shut, feeling a little morose. He welcomed me into La Luna’s fold from the very beginning. I hate the thought of alienating him. But not an iota of me regrets being with Ezra.
Unable to concentrate on my physics homework, I open the book I found buried in the stacks earlier. Ezra’s stories about his family have been on my mind 24-7 since El Morro. I want to understand how his background shaped him.
Flipping Of the Pecos People to its table of contents, I briefly skim each chapter, but the book mostly just describes in greater detail the things Ezra already told me about Pecos’s history. Toward the back of the book, I find a chart mapping Pecos’s twenty-three clans. Connecting clan to clan with a finger, I look for Shiankya, zigzagging across the page. A few smooth strokes between headings, and I find his clan name. Beneath it, a short caption reads: “Watchers and Guardians of the Mountain.” Beneath that, a small picture stares up at me. The same picture Leo has tattooed on his arm.
A sigh escapes my lips, and my hand shakes as I close the book. Could Leo know Ezra? And didn’t Mom’s ghost, if it even was my mom, say something about a Watcher on the mountain last week?
“Not too many locals interested in Pecos these days. But once upon a time …”
Startled, I look up at the librarian standing over me. She smiles and points at the book. “Back in the day, Pecos was quite the mystery.”
Struggling to find my voice, I breathe out, “I was trying to learn more about Pecos folklore and why it was abandoned.”
She smiles wider, showing a few crooked teeth. “When I was a babe, town folk believed the Pecos were magic. Descendants of the Ancients, they called them.”
“Descendants of the Ancients?” I gulp.
“Before folks knew much about Pecos origins, common talk was that the Puebloan peoples descended from the Olmec, Aztec, Toltec, and Mayans down south—the Ancients. Until scholars started churning out their books, information people passed down stuck.”
Ancients. They’d been a part of Leo’s story about the ruin. Shivering, I wrap my arms around my chest, trying to remember everything he told me.
The librarian squints almost conspiratorially. “My grammy was Isleta. She said the Pecos guarded the entrance to the Otherworld, or what she called the Bone Closet. Not exactly a place you go to die, but some place you go to wait—like a recycling center. The Bone Closet keeps our secrets and souls while the Ancients decide where to send us next.” The librarian blinks, stepping back. “Still gives me the creeps when I think about it.”
I tap the book. “It says in the book that some Spaniards thought the Pecos were witches.”
“Not much information about it, that’s for sure. But there’s plenty of lore in New Mexico about witchery and shamanism. Every pueblo’s got theirs. Folks just don’t like talking about it.” She shakes her head. “There’s a story Grammy used to tell us, the ‘True Tale of the Demise of the Pecos Pueblo.’ Story goes, all but a handful of Pecos turned to witchery and evildoing by the mid-1800s. Because of it, rivals from other pueblos prayed to the Ancients to eradicate the pueblo. Soon after, all but a handful of Pecos drowned in a great flood. The few left abandoned Pecos for Jemez, letting the pueblo fall to ruin.”
Wide-eyed, I mentally add her story to my growing list of local lore.
“Working on a paper?” she asks.
“Sort of,” I lie.
“There’s a good book covering Pecos folklore dating back to just before the first relations between the Spaniards and the Pueblo. An anthropologist came out here in 1904 and spent a year digging up bones, and documents, and tall tales passed down from folk all over New Mexico. Not much interest in it locally, but I’m sure there’s a copy housed away in Albuquerque. If you’re interested, I’d be happy to check.”
“Yes, please.”
Still shaky, I thank her profusely, say goodbye and grab my stuff, shoving everything into my backpack. The sun is just starting to set, and as I step outside, debating whether to call Ezra or walk home so I have time to think, he pulls up in front of the library.
“Hey,” he calls out the passenger window. “Where you going?”
“Jeez, you have good timing.” I open the door and hop into the cab, kissing his cheek gently. “Home, do you mind?”
Ezra nods and pulls away from the curb, heading south out of La Luna proper. “Homework?” he asks, nodding back at the library.
“Yeah.” I squeeze his knee, leaving my fingers on his warm blue jeans. I’m dying to ask him about his clan, and maybe Leo. But I also want him to go to Marta’s party, and I know what his answer will be if I start picking his brain first. Getting him to open up also means arming myself for battle, and a batt
le definitely isn’t going to help my cause. “I was thinking about calling you when you pulled up. Weird, right? But I’m happy to see you. What were you doing in town?”
He nods toward the bed of his pickup. “Groceries.”
Outside, surrounded by scarlet twilight and fresh air, the idea that Leo and Ezra could be from the same clan and not know it, suddenly seems ridiculous. But I’m still itching to ask.
Ezra gives me a look but doesn’t say anything. After a moment, I wiggle his hand again. “Go with me to Marta’s party tomorrow night?” I ask coyly.
“The only reason you want to go to that party is to show Marta up.”
“That’s not the only reason.” I jokingly pretend I'm offended, holding a hand to my chest dramatically. “I also really want people to see us together.”
“They have seen us together. All week long. Haven’t you heard?” He grimaces.
“I mean my people. You know? My friends.”
“Marta’s party probably isn’t the best way to do it, Ruby.”
“It means a lot to me.”
Ezra glances at me, his expression stony. “I’m not particularly good in a crowd.”
“I’ll hold your hand the whole time.”
“It’s a bad idea.”
“You’ll have fun. I’ll never leave your side.”
“I’m not worried about having fun.” He sighs.
“Then what is it?”
“You really want to go?”
“I really want to go with you,” I correct him.
Ezra stops in my driveway and lets the car idle. “Let’s be clear, Ruby. Going is just asking for trouble.”
I scrunch my nose at him and lean over and kiss his scarred cheek. His hair, which I pull loose from its band, falls over his eyes. When I move to push it behind his ear, he flinches. “Ezra, can you please just trust me?”
“You give people too much credit.”
“You don’t give them enough.”
“Fine.” Grimacing, he sighs hard. “I’ll pick you up tomorrow evening.”
I wrap both arms around him and pull him as close as I can over the break. He hugs me back anemically, and I feel his turmoil. But I know if I mention it, it’ll only close him off. “Hey,” I throw out casually before climbing down, “I’ve been meaning to ask you, do you know a guy named Leo?”
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