“But doesn’t she get you called girl and young lady?” I asked.
“Maybe,” Page said. “It shouldn’t, though. Him and her, I kinda like getting called both. It’s like all of me gets seen then. Doesn’t usually happen, though. Most people can’t get their head around boy and she at the same time, I guess.”
“Do you want me to?” I asked. “Call you she, I mean.”
“If you want to, go ahead. It’d be kind of novel to be called she by someone who gets that I’m a boy.”
The sense that Page Ashby was trusting me with this, something as small as a few letters but as bright as the whole sky, made my cheeks feel like matches flaring.
“It shouldn’t be,” I said.
“What shouldn’t be what?” Page asked.
“It shouldn’t be novel. I’m sorry it is.”
Page tossed her head, flicking her hair off her face. “Thanks.”
An unsettling warmth filled me. All the ways I’d gotten Page Ashby wrong trailed off me like the ribbons Roja and I tied onto trees, but at least this I had gotten right. I braided the words together, weaving them into what else I knew of Page Ashby. Brown-gray eyes. The sugar-and-leaf smell of apples. A science fair project about the effect of centripetal force on seedling growth. (Page had repurposed Lynn Ashby’s barely working record turntable.)
“Blanca?” Page asked.
“Yes?”
“Thanks for asking.”
“You didn’t mind?” I asked.
“I don’t mind questions,” Page said. “Most people never bother asking.”
ROJA
How completely Blanca had forgotten me, forgotten everything but keeping her own skin and teeth, needled into me. But she was my sister. After years of counting out lightning during storms, I had to give her one more chance to tell me the truth.
The next time I caught Blanca alone, I took hold of her elbow and pulled her toward our room. “What are we going to do?”
She breathed out. “I don’t know yet.”
I tried not to look toward the window. “But they’re here,” I whispered. “And he’s here. And eventually someone’s going to realize he’s here and—”
She cut me off by lifting her hand. “Roja.” I could see her taking a long breath to steady herself.
Like I was a child she had to deal with.
“I need you to trust me,” she said. “Do you still trust me?”
“Of course I do.” I felt the sharp edges of the trap I was setting. I didn’t plan it. The lie just happened. “Is there any reason I shouldn’t?”
It was fast, flashing over her face like the sun through leaves. But I caught her doubt, her hesitation.
Her guilt at everything she was hiding.
“I will figure this out,” she said. “I promise you, I will.”
I?
It had always been the two of us holding off the swans. Now it was I?
The word burrowed into me, sharp and barbed.
We were not Blanca and Roja anymore.
She was Blanca, the blessed del Cisne girl.
And I was the other one.
If you can get a blue-eyed boy, you will save yourself. When the prize was a heart, Blanca would never lose. Not with her lips, the color of tea roses. Not with the gold of her hair and the honey-amber of her eyes. Not with the demure way she looked down, her eyelashes casting feathery shadows on the apples of her cheeks.
I was alone now.
The floorboards shifted downstairs.
Blanca’s eyes flashed in the direction of the noise. “There’s something else I should probably explain.”
I rushed down the stairs ahead of her.
“Roja,” she called after me.
I might have thought the fair-haired shape in Yearling’s arms was Blanca. I even recognized her least-worn pair of jeans.
But Blanca was behind me. And this was a boy in Yearling’s arms, one who stood a little shorter than Blanca.
If I didn’t register this fast enough, I registered it when I saw how they hugged each other. This was something passing between boys. They hugged each other like boys did, forearms across each other’s upper backs in a way halfway between patting and hitting.
There was the rush of questions. There was the shaking of the blond boy’s head so his hair got in his eyes. There was Yearling putting his hand on the pale boy’s upper back and taking him aside as they kept talking.
“You came back,” Yearling said. “You didn’t…” He grasped for the next word, avoiding the fair-haired boy’s eyes.
“I’m okay,” the fair-haired boy said. “I’m all right.”
“I’m so sorry, I never would’ve … I didn’t know you were…” Again, Yearling struggled to finish a sentence.
“I’m fine,” the fair-haired boy said. “Really.”
“But you … what happened?”
The fair-haired boy’s laugh was slight, but sad. “Same thing that happened to you.”
This boy’s features resolved into a name, lost but then picked up again like a found coin.
“Page?” I asked.
But they didn’t hear me.
So I stood there, staring, caught in the wonder of how this town’s second lost son had come back to us.
Blanca’s stare struck my back so hard I could feel the heat of it.
But when I tried to meet her eyes, she wasn’t looking at me.
She was staring at Page Ashby. Blanca looked like her body was untethered from the floor, floating underwater.
My sister—my sister, who the señoras had told to get a blue-eyed boy—wanted clay-eyed Page Ashby.
It was the first favor the swans had ever done me.
They had given me a chance.
If my sister could get a blue-eyed boy, so could I. If she thought she could save herself by going behind my back, I could go behind hers. Barclay Holt was nothing to me. He was some rich boy from a family who’d made their fortune buying and selling land hundreds of miles from here. If him falling in love with me could save me, I’d make him.
“Page,” I said, my voice sweet as my mother’s aguas frescas. “Why don’t you stay with us for now?”
Page’s eyes crawled over to Blanca.
“You two are friends, right?” I asked, looking between Page and Yearling. “You’ll figure out what to do together.”
A twist of malice grew in me. First I let one boy stay so I wouldn’t owe him for the cuts on his back. Then a second boy whose presence would unsettle Blanca too much to let her win.
“You’re okay with that?” Page asked. His eyes swept in both me and my sister.
The muscles in Blanca’s neck tensed, her tell for when she was trying to stay still.
“Of course,” she said.
“Good.” I tried not to flash a smug grin as I pushed past Blanca on my way up the stairs.
Now the boy Blanca wanted instead of Yearling was in our house.
The chance the swans had given me was small. But I was taking it.
I shut the door to our room behind me, wondering what it was like to be her, torn into pieces. She was half the sweet, caring sister who tried to defy the swans, and half a ruthless girl who would do anything not to become one of them.
For a minute I sank into the perverse dream of her looking right at me and telling me, I’m not going to be the swan, they’re not going to take me. And imagining that, I couldn’t hate her. How could I blame her? She was perfect and beautiful, spun out of gold. Of course she wouldn’t let herself be remade into feathers.
It was her lie that rose and spread in me. It bloomed like the poison bells of my mother’s foxglove.
I stood in front of Blanca’s dresser and mirror, spreading my hands over the wood. I brushed on the petal-pink shimmer of her blush. I ran my ring finger across her rose lipstick and rubbed it onto my lips. The glass ball of her perfume bottle weighed heavy in my hands as I sprayed the powdery scent onto my shoulders.
I patted my wrists togethe
r, the way Blanca had taught me to spread perfume (rubbing them together destroyed the fragrance molecules, she’d read in a magazine).
I could be her if I needed to be.
Maybe Blanca was the blessed sister. But she would make a better swan than I would anyway. Fairer. More beautiful. Even when dust swirled in the air, her feathers would stay clean as new snow. The other swans would adore her. Her bevy would make her its white-feathered queen.
But me? I had never come in shades of white and gold. I was brown. All of me, brown. My hair, my eyes, my skin, all different shades of brown, none of them swan-pale. I would be the swan whose feathers were always damp from the wet earth or stained purple-red from blackberry brambles. Where the other swans would find Blanca pristine, they would decide I was odd, a detriment to their flock of perfect white.
I could not be the one the swans took.
Maybe the rose-pinks of Blanca’s makeup did not look the same on me. But I went to the pond smelling of her perfume and glinting with that same pink on my cheeks and lips. I would wear any colors I had to if it might make the swans reconsider me. Maybe the chance was as small and fragile as a blackbird’s egg. Maybe the swans were already taking me under, sure as if I was caught in a tangle of pondweed.
But I would not be my father’s daughter if I didn’t fight them pulling me down.
I took the kind of leveling breath I’d seen Blanca take. I drew back from the feeling that the swans might slice their feathers across my skin again.
I faced them, staring in their ink-drop eyes to show I wasn’t afraid.
And I said, “Thank you.”
PAGE
I’m sorry, Barclay said so many times I just wanted him to say anything else.
“I’m sorry,” he said, this time adding, “I didn’t know you were with me. I didn’t know you were there. How did I not know that?”
I’m sorry, as though me going into the woods after him had been something that just happened to me. I couldn’t figure out how to tell him I chose this, I followed you, I knew you were hiding something, and I still know that, without scaring him back out into the trees.
“Don’t ever do that again, got it?” Barclay said the minute the del Cisne girls were out of the room.
“Do what?” I asked.
“Come after me like that.” He sounded more shaken than angry.
“I was worried.”
“Yeah, well, don’t worry anymore.” He kept checking the window like something might come out of the woods. Something other than us. “I don’t want any of this touching you.”
“Any of what?” I asked.
He shook his head, dragging his gaze off the glass. “Forget it.”
“Barclay.” I took a step closer to him. “Any of what?”
He slid his hands into his pockets. “I’m glad you’re back.”
The day I followed Barclay into the woods, I knew there was something he’d never told me. And he still wouldn’t, even now. It didn’t matter how many hours we’d spent by the river looking for marbled salamanders, their tails so thick they looked like tiny dinosaurs. It didn’t matter how often we visited the rusted-out truck on the far side of the Lindley farm, the ridged steel bed filled with books Olive told us to read, or old radios we tried to fix.
“Look”—Barclay stood square in front of me—“stop trying to help me. All I do is drag you down.”
He went for the door.
“So you’re hiding out here forever?” I asked.
“No.” He shook his head at the wall, breathing in. “Just until I figure out what to do.”
I tried not to stare at his left iris, the edge darkened to red-brown.
But he was my friend, and I had to ask.
“What happened there?” I lifted my hand toward his left temple.
I didn’t know a shrug could look like a lie until the minute Barclay proved it.
“No idea,” he said.
ROJA
It wasn’t the first time I’d worn Blanca’s clothes. I’d been borrowing her cotton dresses in summer and wool skirts in winter since our bodies settled out at almost the same size. One smile, and she could always get the men at the secondhand store to lower the paper-tagged prices.
But I’d never done it like this, slipping into a rose-printed dress so early in the morning that the sky outside the windows was blue-black. Dabbing her perfume behind my ears and sweeping her blush onto my cheeks. I imagined the fabric and the scent putting a little of her into my skin, like our sweaters picking up the smell of the lavender we tucked into our drawers.
It was one small way I could become her.
The other was waiting downstairs in the kitchen.
Maybe I hadn’t learned to cook alongside my mother like Blanca had. But I could follow a recipe. I could be soft and nurturing, the kind of girl who smelled like vanilla and whose laugh made boys think of candle flames in December.
I yawned into my sleeve. If I wanted enough time for the dough to prove, I had to start now, hours before everyone else woke up.
I tipped each ingredient into the bowl, measuring and kneading the way my mother’s handwritten, water-stained recipe said to. I added rosewater and berry color to the sugar shell, slashing a pattern that would open into petals as it baked.
Yearling wandered into the kitchen, rubbing the heel of his hand against one eye. “What are you doing?” he asked, his voice hoarse with sleep.
“Why are you up?” I asked, glad I’d already made myself pretty.
“Me?” he asked. “Why are you up?”
“I’m making breakfast.”
“It’s dark out.”
“We have a small oven, I have to go in batches.” I pulled the first sheet out of the oven, silently thanking the swans. Maybe they were helping me even more than I thought. Maybe they’d sent a little of their spell through the air and woken him up in time to see me with my first batch of pan dulce.
If I tried to defy them, they’d slash their feathers across my skin. But if I played their game, maybe they were with me more than Blanca and Mamá could ever guess.
I set the pan on an unlit burner. They were the perfect rounded shape, just like I’d seen my mother and Blanca make. The deep-red sugar shell on the tops of the pale rounds looked like crushed rose petals.
Yearling leaned against the counter. “Ever heard of cold cereal? It’s great, done in thirty seconds.”
“The perfect pan dulce may take time”—I slid one onto a plate—“but it’s worth it.” I handed it to him. “Careful, it’s hot.”
“They’re pretty,” he said. “You’re really supposed to eat them?”
“I make them all the time,” I lied. I set another one on another plate, ready to crush a piece of the soft dough between my fingers. “I could do it in my sleep.”
Yearling crumbled a piece off, the red sugar shell turning to berry-colored dust, and set it on his tongue.
He winced, his jaw tightening.
I filled a water glass and handed it to him. “Too hot?”
“Yeah.” He choked the bite down. “That’s it.”
I knew that look. It was the same look my father had when he was working late in his study, and I snuck into our kitchen to make him midnight molletes. It was a look of applauding the effort but tolerating the result.
“No, really,” Yearling said. “It’s great.”
I broke off a piece and stuck it in my mouth.
It tasted like pure salt and syrup. Something had gone wrong with the yeast, or my measuring. They were beautiful, but awful.
I pressed my fingers into that pretty sugar top, the red breaking apart. The swans had given me a chance, and I had ruined it with the wrong measuring spoons.
“Please don’t take this the wrong way,” Yearling said.
“Shut up,” I said before he could finish.
I felt the prickle of wondering if I should go back upstairs. I may have known the chairs in my father’s study as well as my own bed, but here, at the sto
ve and oven, I was an intruder. Sometimes, on holidays, I would stir the cajeta for my mother. Sometimes Blanca gave my father slow, gentle directions, as though he were an old man who’d never handled a carnival squash.
But mostly my father and I kept to washing and drying the dishes after dinner. That was when he answered all the questions that had gathered in my head that day. Over lemon-scented water, he told me how cranberries grew. What imaginary numbers were. How rhodopsin purple helped you see in the dark.
The range, the spice jars, the sauce-stained recipes, to me, they were books of spells only my mother and sister could read.
I threw the pan dulce into a pretty, terrible-tasting heap. “I’d like to see you try.”
My mother hadn’t taught me baking, and my father had thought I’d be fine not learning. You can always buy bread, mija, he told me. But I will teach you courage, and that’s how you’ll make your way in the world.
“You serious?” Yearling asked.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Yearling was supposed to wake up to me wearing Blanca’s dress and perfume and holding conchas so perfect the taste would make him fall in love with me.
But now I was the kind of annoyed that slipped venom onto my tongue.
“Yeah.” I crossed my arms. “I am.”
Yearling looked around the kitchen. “Unless you want me ransacking this place looking for baking soda, you’ll have to help me.”
“Fine,” I said. “What else do you need?”
“Milk, butter, eggs, you know.”
I took it all from the fridge.
Yearling found the flour and salt before I could tell him where they were. I watched him take them down from the cabinets, his hand missing the salt jar on the first try, sliding over to find it.
He hit the side of his hand on the cabinet shelf.
“Dammit,” he said, more shrugging than frustrated, a laugh at the edge of the word.
He reached for the flour with a kind of slow caution, like he couldn’t be sure if it was closer or farther than it looked.
“What are you making?” If the answer was pan dulce, this gringo could leave my mother’s kitchen the same way he came in.
Blanca & Roja Page 8
