We Are the Ashes, We Are the Fire

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We Are the Ashes, We Are the Fire Page 4

by Joy McCullough


  Translation: Have you applied for any of the ninety-three jobs I’ve suggested?

  “Working on it.” I squeeze around him in our tiny kitchen to pull the salad things from the fridge. “Where’s Mom? I thought she wasn’t teaching any evening classes this semester.”

  “She’s covering an American Lit class. Margaret’s baby came earlier than expected.”

  My brain snags on Margaret and I’m back on the bus, just for a second. All the things I’ve missed.

  But Margaret is not Marguerite—she’s Mom’s office mate. I glance at the calendar. I thought her baby wasn’t due until mid-July. But I don’t really know what’s early and what’s too early, with babies. What’s nerve-racking and what’s world-ending. The line seems scary thin.

  All the lines are scary thin, turns out.

  “The receptionist job is still open at the gym, but Carlos can’t hold it for long,” Papi says.

  I nod. It would be pretty mind-numbing swiping hard-bodies into a gym all summer, but mind-numbing might not be a bad thing. “Yeah, I’ll call him.”

  “Marianne,” Papi begins, the rare utterance of my actual name from his lips, the r tripping like a pebble over water. But then his phone rings. He lunges, the same way I used to lunge, back when I thought Nor might call. Which she won’t.

  “Lo siento,” Papi says when he gets off the phone. “Me tengo que ir. Burst pipe in Belltown.” He’s already in emergency mode, off to save the hipsters of Seattle from clogged drains and spilled sewage. “The jocón is ready, and there should be enough tortillas already made.”

  “I’m fine, Papi. Go.”

  Then it’s just me. And Chester, who comes padding into the kitchen as soon as Papi’s gone. He knows I won’t order him out, even if he gets underfoot. In fact, odds are good I’ll take two bites, then set my bowl on the ground for the galumphing furball to have his way with.

  I don’t call Carlos. Papi’s soccer buddy is a good guy, but he wouldn’t be able to shield me from the sweaty bros I’d have to deal with all day long, working at a gym.

  Instead I find myself searching online for Marguerite whatever-it-was, who Jess mentioned on the bus. Someone Summer was emulating when she expressed her desire to eviscerate some dudes. I have to try a few times to land on the spelling—the last name on Jess’s tongue was something like Bress-you. Finally I find it: Marguerite de Bressieux.

  I feel less ignorant for never having heard of her, because the internet doesn’t know much more than I do. But what it knows is intriguing. It makes me itch for the Moleskine that’s been sitting on my desk since I dug it out of my closet.

  * * *

  —

  I’m passed out on the couch with Chester when Mom gets home.

  “Hey, sweetie.” She sinks into the tattered armchair, its scratched-up sides a memorial to Elinor’s dearly departed feline. “Where’s Papi? Did you get dinner? You fed Chester?”

  “Plumbing emergency. Yes, and yes.” I sit up slowly. “I’m going to bed.”

  She frowns. “It’s only nine. You okay?”

  None of us are okay.

  Then her face brightens, her eyes light on the notebook in my lap. “I haven’t seen that in forever! Are you journaling again?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  She always called it a journal, like I was writing to my dear diary about crushes and heartbreak and hopes and dreams. Maybe I was, in my way. But the specific word choice always irked me. I grab the not-journal and head for the stairs, Chester padding along behind me. “There’s jocón and salad in the fridge, if you’re hungry.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Because I have not suffered enough, Jess is on my bus the next morning.

  “You are totally on the paper,” they say, sliding into the seat next to me and holding their phone up to my face. “In fact, you’re the editor next year. What are you doing here?”

  Ms. Lim needs to update the website. “Going to school, like you I assume.”

  “School’s out.” They grin, flipping glossy black hair out of their eyes. “Ever the devoted, helpful student, I might also be hoping to score brownie points with Ms. Federighi by helping clean out the theater for the summer, and thereby increase my chances of being cast as Puck in the fall. How about you?”

  I sigh and tuck my notebook into my bag. “Basically same. The paper staff is cleaning up the newsroom.” Only difference is I’m way past scoring brownie points.

  “See! You are on the paper!”

  “Not next year. Don’t believe everything you read.”

  “Oh.” By some miracle, they’re quiet for a minute. “I never read the Oracle before you started writing those profiles.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s just, like, sports, ugh. We’d read when the plays got reviewed. But that was it. One day, though, Summer couldn’t put it down and I could tell it really mattered to her . . . Anyway, you did a good thing. Writing those. Your sister—”

  “Thanks.” It’s nice of them to say, but not nice enough that I want to talk about Nor. “What do you know about Marguerite de Bressieux?”

  Jess blinks long, glittery lashes slowly. “Um . . .”

  “On the bus yesterday? With Summer? You said—”

  “I remember.” They study me in silence while the bus stops. People get on, people get off. “I get it if you don’t want to talk about Nor. Sorry.”

  Only her closest friends call her Nor. I’ve been acquainted with Jess for years, but they were never in Nor’s inner circle.

  “So about our lady knight,” they say. “Eavesdrop much?”

  My cheeks flame.

  “Kidding! I like to think everyone’s always hanging on my every word. Marguerite was pretty badass. I mean, there’s not much actual history about her—”

  “Yeah, I looked.”

  “Then you probably know as much as I do. Are you into medieval shit? I’ve been wanting to start a club forever, but Mr. Lopez says a club needs at least three members to be official. I’ve only got Summer.”

  “I’m . . . no.” Their disappointment is so palpable I muster some sort of interest. “What would you even do in a medieval club?”

  They brighten. “Well, the obvious is Dungeons and Dragons. I’m not so into that. I’m more into real history. Which, it would be awesome if dragons were historical, but not a lot of paleontology to support that. But we could research things—like de Bressieux!—and make foods and costumes. I’m trying to get a cosplay together for the medieval faire in the summer, out on the peninsula.”

  I am less interested in making costumes with a medieval history club than assisting my dad on his next toilet explosion. I shouldn’t have even brought Marguerite up; I only wanted them to stop asking about my sister. Elinor. Which is how they should have referred to her because nobody else is taking anything of Nor’s unless she has expressly handed it to them.

  That’s when Summer gets on the bus, exasperated when she sees there’s no seat next to Jess.

  “Oh yay!” Jess says. “I won’t be the only suck-up in the theater!”

  “Go sit with her,” I say.

  Their face falls a little, but then they jump up and dive into the row Summer occupied. “Summer, my love!”

  Someone across the aisle snickers and mutters something rude. I don’t even have to hear the words to know the gist. They might think they’re judging how Jess looks, or how Jess is different, but what they’re really judging is the fact that Jess cares. About everything. With their whole heart.

  Like I used to.

  * * *

  —

  At school, Jess and Summer split off for the theater, where at least treachery and plot twists are expected. Inside the main building, Fremont High feels like a foreign land. School’s been out less than a day and suddenly it’s a ghost town.

  As I draw
closer to the newsroom, though, Sam’s familiar cackle floats toward me. Nothing’s changed for my friends. They texted their support, tweeted their outrage at the sentencing, cussed out the judge for a few days. It’s not that they weren’t genuinely upset. They were. But now they’re off to Denver to geek out with other student journalists all summer. They’ll come back and keep putting out the Oracle, like it matters. They’ll go off to college. Some might even become journalists. Whatever that means.

  I pause in the doorway, taking it in. I’ve spent more hours in this room than I can possibly remember. Even before I was in high school, Nor was on the paper. I used to walk over from the middle school and hang out on the slouchy couches in the corner while I waited for Nor to be finished and ready to walk home together.

  Come freshman year, I already felt like I belonged and I made myself a permanent fixture until Ms. Lim put me on staff.

  We didn’t only put out a school paper in this room, either. We spent lunches here, gossiped, stressed, debated politics, railed against our parents, all of it. Ms. Lim always struck the right balance of being a presence we could rely on but also giving us a space where we didn’t have to think about adults.

  “Em!” Sadiqa looks over from where she’s wiping down the white boards. “Hey, we missed you at Roxy’s yesterday.”

  “Get over here, you!” Francie’s personality has always been huge, but now it grates on me. When I don’t bound over to where she and Sam are pulling things off the bulletin board, she comes to me, throwing her arms around me like we didn’t have Spanish together less than twenty-four hours ago. “I was worried you weren’t coming!”

  “You would have survived.” The room actually looks pretty good. Marco gives me a silent wave from the counter where he’s washing out the coffee maker. “Where’s Ms. Lim?”

  “Ran to the office.” Sam hands me a file box, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with it.

  I set the box down and drift past the wall covered in framed photos of each year’s newspaper staff, stopping at the one where I’m a freshman and Nor’s a senior. The first freshman on staff, and her sister, the lead photographer.

  “Marianne, hey.” Ms. Lim bumps my shoulder as she scoots past me toward her office, arms full, as always. She flips on the lights, dumps her stuff on her desk, and motions me in. “How are you, hon?”

  Enraged. Helpless. Consumed by guilt. “Fine.”

  “Yeah? I’m glad you came by today. I thought we might not see you.”

  “It’s required to finish the class.”

  She stops what she’s doing and sits, motioning for me to sit too. I don’t. “You’re upset about Summer Intensive.”

  “No.”

  “Look, I get it. You worked hard for it all year. Harder than anyone would have asked you to, and you earned it. Right up until you posted that unauthorized article on the paper’s website.”

  I don’t want to rehash this again. I don’t even want to go to Denver.

  I’m also not sorry about the op-ed I posted on the Oracle site. Ms. Lim wouldn’t let me write about my own sister’s case because of conflict of interest and journalistic ethics or whatever. I get it, in theory. But nobody lacks conflict of interest when it comes to sexual violence. You’re either biased by a constant awareness it could happen to you at any moment or you’re biased by your privilege. Not to mention everyone knows someone who’s been sexually assaulted.

  So does that mean no one should write about it ever? That seems like a good way to maintain the status quo.

  “You’ve had a nightmare year. And you’ve done amazing work throughout. That piece on sexual violence against trans people? I’m so proud of you. I hope we can move forward and have a great final year together, even if you’re not editor. Quite frankly, that decision wasn’t mine. The administration . . . But you’ll still have loads of freedom to pursue the stories you want—”

  “I’m quitting the paper.”

  Her movement stutters for a moment, and then she begins sorting through the pens in the mug on her desk, checking them for ink. “No, you’re not,” she says, calm as anything.

  I clear my throat, try to remember the speech I planned. “I’ve given this a lot of thought. Journalism isn’t what I want anymore. I need to take this year to . . . explore other things. Regroup. Figure out what I want to do in college. If I even want to go to college.”

  Ms. Lim’s eyes flash as she struggles to maintain her composure. “You’re not a quitter. I’ve been so impressed with you from the moment I met you, this indignant middle schooler invading my newsroom. But especially this last year, your fight has been extraordinary—”

  “And it’s amounted to nothing! There was no point to any of it!”

  “I understand how you feel.”

  “I fucking doubt it, Ms. Lim.”

  “Marianne?” There’s a harsh edge to her voice, more ragged than I’ve ever heard in three years of working on her paper. “Hear me when I say I understand how you feel.”

  Fact: One in three women in the United States experience sexual violence.

  “Then you can understand why I’m done with the paper.”

  “I can’t, actually. If you need to take a leave of absence—”

  “I’m done.”

  It’s not like it doesn’t hurt, like I’m not flayed open here. But I’ve been flaying myself open all year long and it hasn’t accomplished anything. At a certain point, quitting is mercy.

  “Thanks for everything, Ms. Lim.”

  I hurry through the newsroom, avoiding the curious eyes. They’ll have heard the raised voices. Sam and Francie will text before I’m out of the building. I’m barely out of the classroom when Ms. Lim calls out from the doorway, “Marianne? You do know how to use a sword.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  My music’s on so loud I almost don’t hear the phone. I’m chopping chives for the risotto, checking on the pot roast, making the salad dressing. I’m not the family cook, but apparently Nor isn’t, either. Not anymore. And we have to eat.

  I only see the call because I splash olive oil on my phone and Nor’s face appears right as I’m cleaning it off. Both of our faces, actually, on a boat crossing Lake Atitlán two years ago. I was terrified, the water choppy and the boat less than structurally sound. Nor was distracting me, telling stupid jokes and using her superior Spanish to flirt with some patojos behind us.

  “Hello?”

  As I fumble to turn down the music, I slip on a wet patch that means the kitchen sink is leaking again.

  “Em?”

  “Hey, sorry, I’m making dinner and I . . . How are you?”

  “Um, okay? Just got back from a swim.”

  Even the most mundane things are loaded. Nor’s a runner. Ran a marathon with Papi her senior year. Now she can barely do normal day-to-day activities without screaming pain all over her body. A physical manifestation of her trauma or some shit her naturopath told her. She suggested gentle swimming.

  “What are you making?”

  “What?”

  “For dinner.”

  “Oh. Risotto. And pot roast.”

  “Ambitious.”

  I consider inviting her to come over to eat, but she’ll only say no.

  There’s a pause. Then she says, “Have you talked to Mom?”

  “No. About what?”

  “Never mind.” Another pause.

  Talking to Nor never used to be awkward. When she went off to school, she was only across town, but we didn’t live together anymore, so suddenly we were texting all the time and talking every afternoon or evening when we were both done with classes. Meeting in the U District for phở when I got a free afternoon away from the paper.

  That lasted one semester. Until she went to a party at the SAE house after the Apple Cup.

  “Papi said you’re taking the job wit
h Carlos at the gym?”

  “I mean, maybe.” I remember the risotto with a start and go to stir it. “Hey, were you ever friendly with Jess Stevens?”

  “Who?”

  “They’re in my year. It’s not important.”

  “Wait, I remember Jess. Purple hair, right? At least, last I saw them. I wouldn’t say . . . friendly. But they helped me change a tire one day when I’d stayed late for layout and they were there for some theater thing. Why?”

  “Oh, just. I saw them. They said hey.” I want to ask her about school—about her oceanography program, her summer classes, her life. But everything leads back to Craig.

  “Look, I know it sucks that you’re not going to Denver. You kinda put Ms. Lim in a tough spot. But you’ll still have the paper—”

  “I quit the paper.” She was going to find out sooner or later.

  “Wait . . . what?”

  “There’s nothing to say, really. Just . . . I stepped down earlier today.”

  “What are you talking about? You’ve devoted yourself to the Oracle for three years! This doesn’t make any sense.”

  “What doesn’t make any sense is throwing all my energy into something pointless, that changes no minds and has no effect on the big picture.”

  She’s quiet for a minute. I think maybe she’s crying. “Is this about me?”

  Of course it is, Elinor, because every fucking thing has revolved around you for the last year.

  But I don’t say that. I can’t say that. She wouldn’t have gone through all the scrutiny if I hadn’t told her she should: She had to let them collect a rape kit; she had to agree to testify, convincing her there would be justice; she had to put herself in the spotlight for the good of womankind because if Craig had left her for dead behind the frat house, how many other girls would become his victims?

  “It was my choice. It’s what I want.”

  It’s a low blow. She won’t argue against my right to choose what I want. But suddenly I’m exhausted. And I’ve forgotten to stir the risotto again.

 

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