So why is my heart racing?
I could walk away. I could walk away and step inside the first shop, or strike up a conversation with a passerby, or run to catch the next bus that stops half a block from here.
But that seems more dangerous than staying. What happens the next time he sees me?
“You take it.” He shoves the umbrella into my arms. I don’t want it, but I take it, and my anger boils. “Show me your thrust.”
I am not performing in the middle of the sidewalk for this asshole.
“You shy?”
He takes a step toward me and I thrust the umbrella into his gut. Instead of getting pissed though, he laughs. “Right, so you proved my point! Because when you tried to thrust, your . . . anatomy got in the way and I barely felt it.”
My anatomy.
“Here, let me show you.”
In an instant, he’s behind me, arms pinning mine to my side as he reaches around to hold the umbrella, like in a rom-com when the girl’s mini-golf date helps her improve her swing, but this is no rom-com and the blood is pounding in my head, and I struggle against his scrawny arms, which are much stronger than they should be.
“Get off me!”
“You want to learn, don’t you?”
I struggle harder, he holds on tighter.
I catch a blur of movement on the church steps out of the corner of my eye and hope the instructor’s arrived, but then Isaac howls and I’m suddenly free.
“You bitch!” he screams, but not at me, and from where I’ve staggered a few feet away, I turn to see not a guy after all, but a woman of indeterminate age, so weathered by whatever put her on the streets she could be twenty or sixty. She wields a box cutter and a steely gaze.
Isaac clutches his upper arm like he’s got a grievous battle wound. “Cunt!”
She says nothing, but keeps her weapon ready.
His gaze turns on me, but then flips back to her. “Fucking cunts, both of you!” Then he turns and runs down the street.
The woman snorts, then moseys back up the steps to her nest of belongings on the church stoop.
“I . . . thank you.”
She ignores me, climbing into her sleeping bag.
I grab my backpack and search through the pockets, cursing myself for never carrying cash. “Is there something I can do for you? Some way to thank you?” I find my metro card and hold it out. It’s newly loaded. “You can have this?”
She turns her flinty gaze on me. “Fuck off. Can’t a body get some sleep around here?”
I consider leaving the card where she’ll find it. But she doesn’t want it. She made that clear. I tuck it back in its pocket and head in the opposite direction from where Isaac ran. I don’t know where I’m going. It doesn’t even matter.
When I was Lady Guinevere back in middle school, I was so angry at the notion that I needed to be saved, that we kept telling this story where damsels are in distress and only saved when some brave knight appears to rescue them. I wanted the damsels to use their brains and cunning and save themselves.
And even though my rescuer today was a lady knight, it still feels hollow. I don’t want to have needed a rescuer.
Except I did.
And so did Nor. But no one came for her.
Sometimes rescue is necessary. It doesn’t mean the damsel’s weak. It means the monster is monstrous.
Maybe we tell these stories of peril and rescue not to point out how strong and valiant the knights are, how honorable for happening upon a scene and displaying the very basic human decency of doing what they can to ease someone’s suffering. Maybe it’s more about how messed up it is that the damsels can’t walk through the world without encountering a dragon at every turn.
Traveling alone
I
Nothing even happened why am I still shaking
CHAPTER TWENTY
Lady Snowblood: a 1973 Japanese film about a woman conceived for no other reason than to seek gory revenge on the gang who raped her mother and killed her family. Written, directed, and produced by men.
Kill Bill: a 2003 film about a woman seeking revenge on the assassins who tried to kill her at her wedding. Despite asking for a stunt driver, the lead actor (who was sexually assaulted by the producer) was forced to do a dangerous driving scene and crashed, leaving her with a permanently damaged neck. Written, directed, and produced by men.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Maybe we go back to the root, tell the stories we refused to tell the first time around, the stories where those without power have swords and those with power are accountable, where it’s not just damsels and dragons, but villagers and nuns and parents and wolves and herbwives and hedge-priests and everyone forming a society where taking what’s not yours had consequences.
Maybe then I’ll stop feeling his hands on me.
I tense up
the instant
I sense
I’m not alone.
I tense up
the instant
I sense
I’m not alone.
Distant hoofbeats draw nearer
but I’ve exhausted Minuit;
we cannot run. I urge him farther
into the woods, into the twisting paths
that may not lead us to a village
but I hope will be enough
to hide us from sight.
When birdcalls and
wind rustling through leaves
replace the distant hoofbeats
I reward Minuit
with a rest by the stream.
I collapse on the grass nearby,
legs sore, heart pounding
desperate to will away the horrors
Mother
Father
the captain of the guard
Mother’s lady’s maid
the footmen
stable boys
all slaughtered.
Helene lives
and that is something
though is she any better off
alive?
When the hoofbeats
return, relentless,
there’s no time to hide.
My heart thuds as I throw on
my hood, cower between
Minuit and the stream,
hope somehow these riders
will not see me
will not wonder at
the horse alone.
All my childhood
wanting to be seen
and now I cower.
But childhood’s over now.
Marguerite?
Only by grasping
Minuit’s bridle
do I keep from toppling
into the stream.
I peek out to see
Emilde and Helene
on our tawny mare,
Zahra astride another horse.
What are you doing here?
Zahra gives me a look
that requires no words.
It’s an absurd question,
coming from me.
I fling my arm
toward Zahra’s mount.
You stole from the nuns?
You didn’t leave us much choice.
Mother would slap Emilde
for her insolence.
Or rather,
Helene didn’t.
Zahra recounts
how Helene woke them
in a panic well before dawn,
showed them my empty
spot in the bed, then
headed for the stables
saddled a horse
and seemed intent
on taking off alone
in search of me.
Though she is the elder
I am not sure Helene
has ever been the one
to come to my rescue.
Not that I need rescuing.
I nearly sob with relief.
I am no longer alone
and yet
I flood with fury.
Do they have
any idea
what I intend
to do?
Emilde helps Helene
off the horse,
leads her to me,
the horse to water.
I reach out and
tug my sister down
to join me on the grass.
She leans her head
on my shoulder.
I rest my head
gently on hers.
So fragile and yet there is a core
of steel inside somewhere.
Do you want
to go back?
She grips my hand
and there’s the steel.
No. We can never go back.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Jess’s house is glass and steel and modern art and money. Lavish flower arrangements on every surface are the only indication people might actually live here.
“Did someone die?” I touch my finger to the stamen of a lily and rub the orange residue between my fingers.
“My parents’ marriage.” Jess leads me through the common living areas, which look as though no one has lived communally in them since the house was bought, leads me past art worth more than the car my parents share, a sculpture that could probably finance my college education.
That month we had cold showers because my parents simply couldn’t afford to replace the broken water heater, I looked with longing at houses like these, all money and excess, cold showers only as part of some detox-cleanse-fitness regimen. But now that I’m inside a house like this? I wouldn’t want to live here.
Jess’s room is another planet. There’s not an inch of wall space, between the inspiration boards for medieval costume designs, snapshots of Jess and Summer and other theater kids, show posters I recognize from the school’s drama department, band posters that mean nothing to me, a large case displaying swords, and a prominent plaque for winning the district-wide spelling bee in middle school.
Jess beams at the plaque. “I won with eudaemonic. You should have seen the look on Marissa Solomon’s face.”
Even the high ceiling is covered, but it’s covered with an abstract mural, all swirling eddies and black holes, northern lights, a shimmering abyss. It makes our underwater mural in Nor’s room look like preschool finger painting.
“You like?” Jess says. “That took me an entire summer.”
I can’t even picture how they did it—it was hard enough for Nor and me to paint her regular ceiling—unless they rigged up some Sistine Chapel setup. “How did you . . . ?”
“I have my ways.” They flop on the bed and a framed photo on the nightstand clatters over. I reach to set it upright but: “Leave it,” they say. “Serves Summer right for abandoning me.”
I have to look now. Jess and Summer are a few years younger, at the giant fountain in Seattle Center. It might be Bumbershoot or Folklife. There are a ton of people in the background, but Jess and Summer have eyes only for each other.
“She’s your best friend, isn’t she?”
Jess rolls their face into a pillow and mumbles something.
“You’re lucky. To have a friend like that.”
They sit up and take the frame from me. “Shut up. I know. I’m such a baby. I just really wish I weren’t home all summer.”
I try to ignore the twinge of hurt. If they’d gone to theater camp, they wouldn’t have gotten to know me, wouldn’t be working with me on Marguerite’s story. But that’s me being selfish—again. If they were away at camp, they also wouldn’t have had to listen to their parents argue all summer.
“It’s hard to describe,” Jess says, “but this camp is the greatest place in the world.”
I laugh. “Is that all?”
“It’s this bubble where we’re not the theater weirdos, or we are, but we’re all theater weirdos, and the weirder you are, it’s almost like the higher your status is, because there’s still status or whatever, but it works completely differently.”
“And yours is high?”
“Obviously. I mean, (a) because I’m amazing. But also because I’ve been going there since sixth grade, so everyone knows me and the counselors all love me and it feels more like home than home.”
That wouldn’t be hard, though. To feel more like home than this museum.
“Thank god you’re here for the summer,” they say, pulling me down onto the bed. “I’m going to do something amazing with your hair.”
They reach to grab a hairbrush off the nightstand and my heart speeds up, someone bigger and stronger, arms wrapping around me from behind.
If that woman hadn’t been there on the steps—
“You okay?”
But this is Jess. “Yeah. Go for it.” I take a steadying breath and try to breathe away the hands gripping me tighter even as I said get off. It’s so stupid, nothing compared to Nor.
I focus on the hands in my hair, soothing on my scalp. I let Jess’s chatter roll over me like a lullaby, something about the last show they did at drama camp. By the time they’re done, my breathing is normal and I’ve almost forgotten those other hands. Almost. A French braid wraps like a crown around my head.
“Whoa . . .”
Jess shrugs and jumps off the bed. “Okay, so, I had an ulterior motive for inviting you over.”
I figured, since we’ve been hanging out for weeks, and anytime I mention going to their house, they have a reason it isn’t the right time.
“My parents are splitting up their assets or whatever. Selling stuff off to pay for legal fees, they say, but mostly to piss each other off. And these”—Jess gestures toward the display case of swords like a game-show host—“are worth some serious cash.”
I approach the case. It’s filled with weapons I’ve learned about in my research. Not blunt-tipped reproductions, but the real thing. These weapons have spilled blood. Longswords and spears, a falchion, a flail.
My eye is drawn to something smaller, but still deadly looking. The blade is around a foot long, tapering into a sharp point that could puncture chain mail.
“You like the rondel dagger?” Jess opens the case and pulls it out. “Rondel because of the rounded hand guard and the pommel on the end, see?”
Jess points out the beautifully carved and rounded grip, and my hand reaches out, greedy. I have to hold it. It fits my palm perfectly, and unlike the massive swords at Mack’s class that I can barely lift, this was made for me.
“Would Marguerite have used something like this?”
“Sure,” Jess says, eyes bright. “They were carried into battle all the time, a standard sidearm by Marguerite’s day. Richard the Third’s postmortem showed a rondel wound to the head!”
I hold it out in front of me, feel it like an extension of my own body. “It wouldn’t be a match for a sword, though.”
Jess shrugs. “Different uses is all. By the time you’re fighting with a rondel, you’re too close for a sword to be practical. Also a lot easier to land a surprise blow with a smaller weapon. Works for Arya Stark.”
“And your parents are selling them?” There are a lot more valuable things in this house than some old swords.
Jess takes the rondel from me and returns it to the case. “Most of them belonged to my dad’s brother, Alistair. Who my mom slept with.”
My eyes bug out.
“He’s dead and they never come in here, so out of sight, out of mind, but I think if either one of them
remembers I exist—I mean the swords exist—they would summon the auctioneer so fast someone could cut off a hand.”
I tug on the end of my braid. “How can I help?”
“I’m so glad you asked!” Jess grins. “We’re going to keep them at your house for a while.”
“My house? But your parents—”
Jess waves a breezy hand. “Won’t miss them if they don’t see them. That’s the point.”
How could anyone have something so valuable and not miss it when it’s taken away? It feels like stealing, if they’re really worth so much money. Maybe it feels wrong because now that it’s a possibility, I want them like I want Nor to come back home. I want a whole armory; I want a dagger at my side that’s an extension of my fury.
“Sure,” I say. “If it’ll help.”
* * *
—
Through the magic of a supremely uncurious Lyft driver, we manage to transport the weapons. Less than a mile separates our houses, but they’re sets from completely different films.
The gleam of wealth so bright it hurts the eyes, but no amount of priceless art can save the marriage. Major studio production, total Oscar bait.
The ramshackle home so cozy it attracts all strays, but the family at its center cannot hold themselves together. Quirky indie starring that one guy from the show you used to love.
Mom talks about the Seattle of her teens, when Fremont was filled with blue-collar dockworkers, when the fishmongers at Pike Place Market could actually afford to live in the city where they entertained tourists, when Nirvana was nirvana and even kids in thrift-store flannel could afford a concert ticket.
But things change, except for all the things that never do.
I have to haul some stuff out from under my bed, but once it’s clear, the whole case fits neatly underneath. A bit unceremonious for valuable antiques, but we’re keeping them safe. And even if Mom or Papi happen upon them, Jess insists my parents love them and their eccentricities so explaining why I’m storing their weapons should be no problem.
We Are the Ashes, We Are the Fire Page 14