Lore

by Alexandra Bracken

  She fluttered them now, but her face ached from the hits she had taken, and the swelling likely didn’t help much, either.

  Miles opened his mouth to say something else, but changed his mind.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” he said, glancing up at the cloudy sky. “Should we go before we get the shower that only one of us needs?”

  The air dripped with humidity and was scented with the bagged garbage piled up for collection the next morning. A taxi blazed by, kicking up a wave of gutter water. It had been raining on and off for days, and Lore knew there was more to come.

  “I’m wearing a perfume of the finest lo mein and BO,” Lore said. “There’s no accounting for taste with you.”

  That, of course, wasn’t true at all. Miles treated his body like a piece of art, letting it speak for him—his moods, his interests, and the people he carried in his heart. His skin was colored by an array of tattoos, from gorgeous florals and vines that wrapped around his torso, to modern art faces he’d designed himself, to mountains, eyes, and bands of shapes only he knew the meaning of. Lore had always loved the simple hangul tattoos on his neck best because of the story behind them. The phrase was something his grandmother used to say to him when he called her and his parents at home in Florida on Sundays: I love you more with every sunrise. When he’d shown them to her, she’d chided him for yet another tattoo, licking her finger and pretending to try to wipe them away with her finger, but she’d glowed with pride the rest of the night.

  They walked to the Canal Street subway station to take the A train up to 125th Street. Lore was halfway down the stairs when she heard the approaching train and felt the telltale gust of air whip through the station. She ran, sliding her MetroCard out of her back pocket and through the reader. Miles, never ready, let out a strangled sound and fumbled with his wallet.

  “Wait, no—ack—” Miles swiped his card again, getting an error message.

  It was half past three o’clock in the morning, but subway service slowed in the off-hours, leaving the car full. She caught the closing door with her forearm just as Miles all but dove through.

  He smacked her shoulder as the train lurched forward.

  “Martha’s,” she said. “Hungry.”

  “Taxi,” he said. “Easy.”

  “Money,” she said. “Wasteful.”

  The car emptied at Columbus Circle, freeing the seats in front of them. Miles sat down and immediately pulled out his phone. Lore took a deep breath, rubbing a hand against her forehead. With her body still, there was only the chaos of her thoughts.

  He’s looking for something, and I don’t know if it’s you.

  Lore had been unsettled by seeing the hunters in the city. She’d known to be afraid of Aristos Kadmou—or whoever he was as a god—finding her. She would be even more careful now and leave the city later that day, steering clear of the fighting and of him. Of all of them.

  But the overriding feeling in her wasn’t terror. Lore knew she could hide because she had successfully done it these last three years. Instead, there was a restlessness in her body she couldn’t purge, an unwelcome tightness in her chest every time her mind conjured Castor’s face.

  Alive, she thought, still feeling strangely dazed at the thought.

  Miles made a noise of dismay beside her. Lore glanced over just as he closed one of his dating apps.

  “What happened to the guy you went out with on Friday?” Lore asked, welcoming the distraction. “I thought he had potential. Nick?”

  “Noah,” Miles said, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath, as if for strength. “I went back to his apartment and met all four of his hamsters.”

  Lore turned to him. “No.”

  “He named them after his favorite First Ladies,” Miles continued, sounding pained. “Jackie had a pillbox hat made out of felt and nail polish. He made me feed them. With tiny strips of lettuce. Lettuce, Lore. Lettuce.”

  “Please stop saying lettuce,” Lore said. “You could take a break from dating, you know.”

  “You could try,” he pointed out. He shifted a little in his seat. “I’ve never asked you this before, because I didn’t want to pry.”

  “But . . . ?” she filled in.

  “But,” he began. “It’s just that one guy, and the way you reacted to him . . .”

  Her hand tightened around her backpack strap.

  “How was I supposed to act when he came at me like that?” Lore asked. “He deserved to have his face rearranged. Maybe he’ll think twice about doing that to girls.”

  “Oh, no, he definitely deserved it,” Miles said quickly. “He probably deserved at least another solid thirty seconds of it. I was actually talking about the other one.”

  “The other one,” she repeated. Her heart gave a hard kick.

  “The guy who looked like he’d been molded out of every single one of my boyhood fantasies,” Miles clarified helpfully.

  Castor’s voice was warm in her mind. You still fight like a Fury.

  “What about him?” Lore asked.

  “You seemed to know him,” Miles said.

  “I don’t,” she said sharply. Not anymore.

  To stop any other questions, she leaned her head against Miles’s shoulder, letting the rocking of the train soothe her until she was able to take her first deep breath of the night.

  The train barreled on to 125th Street, falling into its usual rhythm of jerking starts and stops in each station. But she was too afraid to close her eyes on the chance Castor’s face, bright and hopeful, would be there to lead her into the memories of the world she’d left behind.

  It was quiet uptown when they finally emerged from the subway and turned toward Martha’s Diner.

  Harlem had felt like a foreign land when Lore moved into Gil’s cozy brownstone on 120th Street; her family had always lived in Hell’s Kitchen, and she’d never had a reason to go north of 96th. But at that point, her family had been dead for four years, and she’d spent much of that time living abroad. Coming back to the city had felt like being handed old clothes she’d given away to someone else. Nothing fit. Everything was the same, and yet somehow different.

  But Lore had treasured the three years that followed, right up until that fateful moment six months ago, when Gil died—hit by a car as he crossed the street, of all things. After, her first instinct had been to pack up and go, only to find that it wasn’t that simple. Gil had left her the brownstone and everything inside it.

  Lore could have sold the house in a heartbeat and gone anywhere. Miles would have been fine, even if finding a new place in the city was a headache. But each time she thought seriously about it, the streets seemed to wrap around her. The familiar storefronts, the kids playing out on the stoop two doors down, Mrs. Marks hosing down the sidewalk every Monday morning at ten o’clock . . . it calmed her. It stopped the feeling that her chest might cave in on itself from the weight of the shock and grief.

  So Lore had stayed. For all its exhausting complications and crowding, the city had always been her home. She understood its difficult personality and was grateful it had given her one of her own, because in the darkest moments of her life, that resilience alone had saved her.

  In a way, she felt that her new neighborhood had chosen her and not the other way around, and she’d wanted to be claimed by something. And, really, that was New York for you. It always got a say, and, if you were patient enough, it led you where you needed to go.

  It was four o’clock in the morning, but Lore wasn’t surprised to see another person enjoying an early meal at Martha’s, even in a month as quiet as August.

  “Hey, Mr. Herrera,” she called, wiping her feet on the old mat.

  “Hey yourself, Lauren Pertho,” he said, around a mouthful of his breakfast sandwich.

  Lore had used that name for years, but it still had the tendency to catch her off guard. “How are you, Mel?”

  “Dry, at least,” Mel said from behind the diner’s counter. She looked
up from where she’d been counting out the register. “You both want your usuals to go?”

  “Creatures of habit,” Miles confirmed. “Do you have any decaf brewing?”

  “I’ll put a pot on for you,” she said. “Whipped cream?”

  Miles had the palate of a kid who ate dessert for every meal. “Chocolate sprinkles?”

  “You got it, sweetheart,” Mel said, ducking into the kitchen to start on their order. One Triple Lumberjack platter for Lore, and chocolate chip Mickey Mouse pancakes with extra whipped cream and maple syrup for Miles.

  “What?” Miles said. “No comment? No joke about my sugar intake?”

  It took a moment for Lore to realize he was talking to her. She looked up from where her gaze had fallen to the floor.

  “I’m going to get a stomachache just from watching you,” Lore said, leaning back against the side of one of the vinyl-covered booths. Her pulse had jumped, as if she’d been caught doing something she wasn’t supposed to.

  Miles stared at her for a moment, but kept his voice light. “Rich coming from someone who eats a meal meant for three people.”

  “Healthy appetite,” Mr. Herrera said as he paid his bill, “healthy girl.”

  “Exactly,” Lore said, fighting to focus on him. “How’s my Handsome Bo doing?”

  Bo the Bodega Cat had shown up two years ago, claimed Mr. Herrera’s shop for its kingdom, and never left. The first time she’d seen him, Lore had mistaken him for an extremely large rat, and seriously wondered if he hadn’t clawed up from the Underworld. Now, her favorite late-Sunday-morning activity was sitting on the bench outside the store and sharing the lox from her bagel with her foul-tempered buddy.

  “He ate twelve chocolate bars, vomited on the produce, and destroyed a shelf of paper towels,” Mr. Herrera said, heading toward the door. “And now I have to take the demon to the vet.”

  “Do you need me to watch the shop for you?” Lore asked. She enjoyed doing it, especially after the morning rush-hour customers came for their coffee, and she could sit and read a book until the lunchers arrived to decimate the stock of premade sandwiches and sushi.

  “Not this time,” Mr. Herrera said. “My nephew is here. Maybe you’d like to meet him? He’s a year younger than you, smart boy—”

  “Can he do laundry?” Miles asked seriously. “Or cook? She needs someone to fill the gaps in her important life skills.”

  Mr. Herrera laughed, waving him off as he left to open his store.

  Lore wasn’t sure why she had offered, knowing that she was more than likely leaving town today. Castor’s presence, never mind his warning, should have sent her running immediately, with or without supplies.

  She rubbed her arms at the place he had gripped them, and was surprised to find her skin was warm despite the chill passing through her. She just hadn’t expected . . . him. The whole of him. Those familiar soft eyes. His height. The strength of his body.

  The way he had smiled at her.

  “Lore—Lore,” Miles said again, this time with more force.

  She looked up again. “What?”

  “I said, is it about money?”

  Lore stared at him, confused. “Is what about money?”

  Miles gave her a look. “If it is, I can start paying you rent. But I thought Gilbert had left you money, too . . . ?”

  True to his exasperatingly kind form and his love of surprises, Gil had left both of his “honorary grandchildren” a generous sum of money, but Lore still hadn’t touched it, except to do maintenance on the brownstone. It didn’t feel right to use it for anything else.

  “It’s Gil’s money,” Lore said.

  Miles seemed to understand. “Well, you could get a part-time barista job like everyone else. It’s basically a rite of passage. You could even charge for the self-defense classes.”

  She shook her head, trying to focus her exhausted web of feelings and thoughts onto the single thread of their conversation.

  “I’m not going to charge anyone who wants to learn how to protect themselves,” Lore said, keeping her voice low. The gym owner on 125th let her use some of his equipment when it was too cold to run outside in exchange for teaching the free lessons, and that was more than enough for her. “And it’s not about the money.”

  “Are you sure? Because you’ve been reusing the same three gross Ziploc bags for the last year,” Miles said.

  She held up a finger. “They aren’t gross, because I wash them out every time. What are you doing to save the environment?”

  His eyebrows rose. He was interning that summer with the City Council and studying sustainable urban development at Columbia.

  “Don’t answer that,” Lore said.

  Miles was doing that thing she hated where he waited for her to talk while looking extremely compassionate and understanding.

  “Besides,” she said, “I do have a job. I’m the super, remember?”

  Lore had originally come to work for Gil as a live-in caretaker, but her role had expanded after she changed out the batteries in the smoke detectors—which said everything about the threshold of tech-savviness in their building at the time.

  “By the way, Super, can you maybe come up and fix my window before winter?”

  Lore scowled, smoothing a hand back over the mass of frizz the rain had gifted to her.

  “Okay, it’s a little about the money,” she admitted, “but it’s about other things, too.”

  “Gil things?” Miles pressed.

  She pulled the necklace out of her pocket, examining the place the gold chain had snapped. Her neck felt strange without it; Gil had given it to her three years ago, on her first birthday after returning to the city, and she had only taken it off once since then.

  A feather fallen from a wing is not lost, Gil had told her, but free.

  It had reminded her of that, of what she had gained when she’d offered to work for Gil, every day. She had been hired to help take care of him after he had a bad fall and it became clear he couldn’t keep living alone, but he had done so much more for her. He had been a friend, a mentor, and a reminder that not all men were as harsh and cruel as the ones she had grown up around.

  “It’s been a few months now . . .” Miles began.

  “It’s been six,” Lore said sharply.

  “Six,” he said, nodding. “We don’t really talk about it that often—” Lore opened her mouth to dismiss that, but he held up his hand. “All I want to say is that I’m here, and I always want to talk about him.”

  “Well, I don’t,” Lore said. Gil had told her that sometimes you had to push away the bad things until they left you alone for good. One day his loss wouldn’t hurt so bad.

  “You know . . .” Miles said in a familiar tone.

  “I’m not interested in school,” she told him, for the hundredth time. “You don’t even seem to like it.”

  “You don’t have to like something you need,” Miles pointed out.

  “You don’t need to do something you don’t enjoy,” Lore shot back.

  Miles blew out a sigh through his nose. “I just think . . . whatever happened to you, you have to start thinking about your future, otherwise your past is always going to hold you back.”

  Lore swallowed, but couldn’t clear the tightness in her throat. “How did you find out about the ring anyway? Did you follow me or something?”

  “I was out with my friend from school last night and he started talking about this super-crazy, super-secret fighting ring and mentioned a girl with a scar that ran from the outer corner of her eye down to her chin, and I said, wow, that sounds like my friend Lore. . . .”

  Without thinking, she rubbed that side of her face against her shoulder. The scar was thin, but it hadn’t faded with age.

  “Your friend wasn’t the guy I beat up, right?” she asked. “Just checking.”

  “No, but I have never been so simultaneously amazed and terrified in my whole life,” Miles said.

  His phone gave a shrill ring, making
them both jump.

  “Is that your alarm?” Lore asked, her hand still pressed to her chest. They’d lived in the same house for years and she’d never heard anything like it.

  “Sort of,” he said, then answered the call with “Ma, what are you doing up? It’s like four o’clock in the morning— You absolutely do not need to print out those forms now, write yourself a note to do it at a normal hour and— No, you go back to bed— Well, if I wasn’t up, you would have woken me up— Ma. Go back to bed!”

  Mrs. Yoon’s muffled words were filled with the kind of energy no one was supposed to have this early. Lore watched as Miles closed his eyes and breathed in for patience.

  “Augh. Fine. You checked all the cords, right?” he asked. “Made sure they didn’t come loose?”

  Miles sent Lore an apologetic look, but she didn’t mind at all. It was nice, actually. If nothing else, it gave her the opportunity to try to picture him growing up as a baby goth amidst the palm trees and bright pastels of Florida. He was an only child, and sometimes, like now, it really showed.

  Miles sucked in another deep breath. “Did you actually turn the printer on? The button should be glowing.”

  Lore heard Mrs. Yoon’s sheepish laughter in response and her loving “Thank you, Michael.”

  Miles pressed a hand to his face in exasperation, whether at her question or at his given name, which only his family ever used, and told her that he loved her in both Korean and English, and hung up the phone.

  “She made me change the ringtone when I went home last month,” Miles said. “She thought I wasn’t answering because the old one was too quiet, and now I feel too guilty to ever change it.”

  Lore smiled, even as something twisted deep in her chest. You never missed calls like that until they stopped coming. “She just wants to hear your voice.”

  She wants you to remember her, Lore thought. Her mind drifted, suddenly untethered. The world around her became haloed with darkness until she only saw Castor’s face, and the way the shadows had caressed it.

  “Hey,” Miles said suddenly. “You’re all right, aren’t you?”

  “I’m fine,” Lore insisted.