“Basically a big pancake.” Yearling broke a few eggs and fluffed a fork through. The fork chimed against the bowl. He gave me an apologetic look that told me he hadn’t meant to be that noisy about it.
“A pancake’s supposed to impress me?”
“I didn’t say it’d be as pretty as all that,” he said, gesturing at the pan dulce. “But it’ll be edible.”
I shoved his upper arm.
“Hey,” he said, laughing and stepping back.
His hand knocked the milk carton over. I caught it before it hit the counter.
He grabbed a dishcloth and checked that none had spilled, swearing under his breath.
I handed him the carton. “It’s closed.”
“Sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t kidding. I don’t see so good off my left side.” He added milk to the eggs. “Got a really heavy skillet?”
I found it in one of the other cabinets. “What’s wrong with it?”
He took the handle and turned it over. “Seems fine to me.”
“I meant your eye. What happened to it?”
He handed me the batter to fold. “I don’t know.”
The lie was so flat I almost believed it.
“Can you see out of it?” I asked.
“Not much,” he said, shrugging, but I heard the faint catch in his voice. “But the other one works, so I see fine.”
I held my hand on his left side. “How many fingers am I holding up?”
He turned his head to look at my hand straight on. “Three.”
“That’s cheating.”
He cut me a look laced with more anger than I’d seen in the short time he’d been in this house. “No.” He moved the pan in front of me so I could pour the batter into it. “It’s adapting.”
I watched the batter spread over the pan, the back of my neck hot. I hadn’t meant it that way. But now I could hear how it sounded. He was doing what he had to so he could make his way through the world with the eyes he had, and I’d called it cheating. My shoulder blades pinched as I realized there was little distance between this and the señoras wondering why I couldn’t be as sweet as Blanca. The straw-gold of her hair and the lighter brown of her eyes cast a glow I couldn’t match even if I went everywhere with a Bible in my hands and a sugar cube on my tongue. I did what I could with the colors I was, the same as Yearling did what he could with what he saw.
I grasped at a subject change, and came up with “You can’t make one huge pancake.” As though I knew anything about it. “It’ll burn before it cooks.”
“Don’t let my grandmother hear you say that. She taught me this.” He slid it in, the heat billowing out. “Can I ask you something?”
I picked up the box of baking powder. “If it’s about my prowess in the kitchen, I’m throwing this at you.”
“I wouldn’t dare,” he said. He looked right at me. “Why are you letting us stay here? You don’t even know me.”
“We went to the same school.” The school our mother took us out of when she feared the swans were coming. “I’ve seen you around.”
“Name one time we’ve ever spoken to each other.”
“And that’s my fault?” I asked. Barclay Holt had given off a don’t-talk-to-me sense so strong, the air around him prickled. Teachers didn’t even like having to tell him to tuck his shirt in. His cousin Liam had girls waiting to see who he’d ask to the spring dances, while Barclay rolled his eyes at the glitter-painted banners announcing each year’s theme.
“I never said it was. I’m just saying you don’t know anything about me.”
If I knew nothing about Barclay Holt, that was his problem. He had always walked through the halls like he did not want to be known, and I believed him enough to avoid him.
“I know you were a lot cuter as a bear,” I said.
If the swans broke through our kitchen window and started pecking at me to shut me up, I wouldn’t have blamed them.
“Fair,” he said. “And that made sense, you helping an animal. But you know better now. You know who I am. Why does any of this matter to you?”
“I can’t just be nice?”
“Why? I’m not the kind of guy you should be nice to.”
“Oh, are we answering questions now?” I asked. “Because I have one. Why aren’t you at least telling your grandmother you’re okay? Don’t you think she’d want to know? This whole town thinks you took off because you don’t care about anyone here. Is that what you want her to believe?”
This wasn’t how I’d wanted to do it. I’d wanted to be Blanca, my words sliding into the air like honey into tea. But my words were not clean, squared-off sugar cubes. They were broken piloncillo, jagged and hard even when they were sweet.
The anger came back into his face, but it wasn’t so undiluted this time. Fear ran underneath it.
“Just leave it,” he said, tapping the back of his hand against the oven door. “I’ll be back to take it out.”
Perfect, Roja. My cringing understanding of my mistake took on its own voice, echoed by the swans’ calls. This boy is your one chance to stay a girl, and you just picked a fight with him.
BLANCA
It wore at me, the secret I kept from my sister. It wore at me as Roja and I made our beds, and I remembered dreams of blue flames and locks of hair. As we put away the schoolwork we were supposed to be doing to keep up with the curriculum, but knew we would never finish as long as the swans were here. As Page and Yearling stood at the kitchen sink, washing and drying dishes like brothers who’d grown up doing this.
In the kitchen doorway, I passed within a few inches of Page. The fine hairs on the back of my wrist stirred. But I kept my eyes off this boy I’d once seen through falling aspen leaves. This boy who’d grown up surrounded by apple trees that wore pink blossoms in spring and jewel-heavy fruit in the fall.
I folded these details of Page Ashby into me like ribbons of sugar set on my tongue. I kept them there through that afternoon, when the trees shaded our garden so it looked like early twilight, and I picked the vegetables that would go into our dinner. Yellow carrots. Green-ribbed squash. A head of purple cauliflower. Late sun slipped its fingers through the trees, brushing gold onto the epazote leaves and orange nasturtium blossoms.
I knelt in the grass alongside the vegetable beds, choosing what Page would break into pieces. She could barely boil water, but the night before, I’d seen her chop vegetables and fruit like her fingers were knives. The blade flashed with the flick of her hands, oranges spiraling into lace-thin slices, white onions falling apart into translucent stars.
Every minute, every leaf and root I reached for, rang out with how much I was keeping from my sister. The potatoes cast their quiet judgment. The brush of silverbeet leaves whispered what a liar I was. The winter squash felt heavier in my hands.
But I had to guard her from this. If Roja knew what the señora had told me, only me, she would decide she’d been right all along, that she was the marked girl. She would lose what little faith she had left that we could survive this. And I couldn’t chance that, not when my own faith slipping had let the swans in.
A stretch of shadow deepened. I flinched to see whether it was Roja or whether one of our October boys had dared leave the house in daylight. But the sense came closer, and I felt it, bigger than my sister or Page or Yearling.
I looked up, and found them, their good shoes treading down the filmy cups of my mother’s Mexican poppies.
Boys we used to go to school with. The kind who were friends with Liam Holt. Boys with shirts that got sent out to be laundered and then were left on bedroom floors, picked up by someone else. Boys who, if they didn’t care for what their mothers decided on for dinner, went out with friends after and bought dinner again.
I stood up. “This is private property.”
One of them mimicked me, repeating the words in a high, mincing register I knew from how these boys imitated their own mothers.
The wind blew against my back, fluffing hair into my fac
e. I let it hide me.
“Come on,” another said. “I know you’ve got something for us.”
The first time this happened, I crossed my arms over my chest, worrying about whether they wanted me to do things I wouldn’t tell their girlfriends about. But then they’d pulled at the purple-edged white of the moonflowers, and the hanging bells of the angel’s trumpet, tucked among papery green leaves. They thought our garden grew things stronger than what they found in their fathers’ liquor cabinets.
“Get out of here,” I said.
They picked at the heavy stalks of gladiolus, the wine-brown cosmos, the blush flowers crowning the wild marjoram, as though they’d never seen oregano growing before.
“Just tell us which ones,” one boy said. “We’ll even pick it ourselves.”
“You got plenty,” another said. “Look at all this.”
Most of the time when this happened, I ran inside. I told my mother and father, who chased them off with the yelled threat that they knew their parents.
But neither of them was here.
If I wanted them gone, I had to do it.
Being a good girl did not mean letting the things we had grown be taken by anyone who wanted them.
One boy, the one coming farthest into the garden, trampled the thorn apples, splattering their spine-covered fruit.
“We’re not asking for a botany lecture.” He slouched to talk to me. “It’ll just take you a minute.”
I shoved him with the head of cauliflower. “I said go.”
The second it struck his shirt, his face shifted.
He grabbed my wrists so fast, I dropped the leaf-covered cauliflower.
My arms stiffened, but my body went slack, until he was holding most of my weight by my wrists.
I couldn’t look at him. I watched his hands tighten their grip.
With the pressure of his knuckles, large and pale, I understood that this was about more than me shoving him. In the slow second of my wrists throbbing, I studied his thin fingers, his trimmed cuticles, the ends of his nails smooth and squared-off, just long enough to dig into me.
To boys like this, the world was there to offer them things. But I had said this corner of the world was not his.
Girls like me were not allowed no, not by boys like this. Girls like me were allowed silence and yes, meant to be our whole language. But this was the garden Mamá and I had grown since I was five. Maybe los cisnes would take my body, but no one was taking this.
PAGE
We were boys hiding, Barclay and me. The world outside fogged the windows like cold, or brushed the walls like lemon leaves, and we pretended it wasn’t there. The things Barclay wouldn’t tell me. The family who wondered what happened to me or where I’d gone.
But when I saw Blanca through the kitchen window, I didn’t think about any of that.
Roja came down the stairs in time to see me grabbing Tess Holt’s shotgun. I didn’t even pause long enough to ask how it had gotten here. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
“What are you doing?” Roja asked, like she didn’t like the look on my face, and liked how I had a hundred-year-old Winchester in my hands even less.
I held the shotgun’s forearm and slipped out the back door.
“Page,” Roja said.
By the time I got behind a tree, one of Liam’s friends had Blanca by her wrists. Her body hung like a doll’s, her eyes wide and made darker by her spreading pupils.
So I did it.
BLANCA
A shot sounded. The blunt noise of it broke and opened, vibrating through me like the buzz of a passing plane.
The boy jumped back and dropped my wrists. I fell, catching myself on my hands.
There was no blood, on them or me. The boys all scrambled away, crushing the lavender and marigolds.
I caught a wisp of yellow hair at the edge of my vision. A gray shirt. Jeans that once belonged to me but looked so different on a body that wasn’t mine.
Page stood with her back against a birch tree, getting her breath, the shotgun butt against her hip.
She hadn’t shot at anyone. She’d fired to scare them off.
The footsteps, crackling against the fallen leaves and the undergrowth, faded.
Page came out from behind the tree, the shotgun’s barrel down.
“Are you okay?” She offered her hand, pulling me up so hard I fell against her.
She caught my waist, keeping my chest from meeting hers.
“Sorry,” she said, the first time I’d ever seen her blush.
She felt bigger than I was, in a way I didn’t understand except when I was this close. Most of the time, she reminded me of a sapling, a younger oak, and I wanted to feed her until she became some stronger tree. But like this, her frame felt solid, grown, like it had roots.
Roja ran out the back door and into the garden, Yearling showing up behind her.
Page’s hands left my rib cage. The points where her fingers had touched me prickled, the loss of them so sudden it felt cold.
Roja’s eyes wavered between Page and the shotgun. “What is wrong with you?”
She looked back at Yearling, sweeping him into her glare.
“What did I do?” he asked.
“I’m betting he learned that move from you.” Roja tilted her head toward Page and then back at Yearling.
“Barclay didn’t teach me to shoot.” Page turned to my sister. “My grandma did.”
The pride in Page’s face came on like the flutter of swallows’ wings, bright and alive.
Roja shook her head at all three of us and went back in the house.
On his way to following her, Yearling gave us a look both guilty and amused, like he knew he was about to get talked at by Roja, but also like he was looking forward to it.
I had to grit my back teeth together to keep from yelling after him, You don’t get to do that, you don’t get to laugh at my sister getting riled up.
Another thing that made it harder to pretend I liked him.
Page was almost to the door by the time I got her name out.
“Page?”
She turned back. “Yeah?”
I studied the oiled wood of the shotgun.
“Don’t do that again,” I said.
“I wasn’t aiming at anything. I shot up.”
“You still could’ve killed yourself.”
“I was careful. I mean, I’m not saying it was the smartest move. But with a blank, I was willing to risk it.”
“They’re not blanks,” I said.
“I’ll bet you anything.”
“Tess said it was loaded. With birdshot.”
“She lied.” Page propped it against the side of the house. “It’s loaded with blanks.”
I watched it with the same prickle down my back that I watched a snake at rest. It was just a matter of time before it moved.
“She told you that so you’d be careful with it,” Page said. “Blanks are dangerous. People think they can’t do anything, but even blanks have gunpowder. They have a wad. Close range, they can kill people. Same as anything else.”
Page’s voice was level, both assured and assuring, like she was leading me through a dark room. This was a different Page than the one I’d found under the trees, trembling with the shock of realizing she was herself again.
This was the Page who’d smiled at me over her shoulder. She was that boy again, with that charm that glinted over my skin.
“Tess didn’t want you handling this like it couldn’t hurt you,” Page said. “All guns can hurt you. Or someone else.”
“I didn’t even want it in the house,” I said. “How do you know they’re blanks?”
“Never loaded anything but. Tess used it to scare crows off her property.”
“But that was before you…” I stopped. I couldn’t say it.
Vanished. Disappeared. Were gone from us. None of the words felt right in my mouth. It was cruel of me to point out that Page had missed enough of this fall that things might
have changed when she wasn’t looking.
“What if it’s full of birdshot now?” I asked. “You could’ve gotten hurt when it came down on you.”
“Birdshot BBs are really dangerous when they’re fired, just like anything else,” Page said. “But if they’ve lost all their initial speed and they’re just falling, take in air resistance and spin, it’ll probably feel more like bad hail. I mean, I don’t recommend it. It’s not harmless. Especially if someone doesn’t know it’s coming and they look up and take it in the eye, that’s a big problem. But I thought I had a good chance with the blanks. Tess rarely loads anything but. And I had to do something.”
“Oh,” I said, quieted by the most I’d ever heard Page’s voice.
She was talking to me. I had gotten this boy talking this much.
I stayed quiet, afraid that the wrong words might break whatever spell had fallen between us.
Page took up the shotgun. “Want to hold it?”
“It’s not a puppy. No, I don’t want to hold it.”
“Come here.” Page led me past the yard and into the woods near the pond. “You’re right-handed, aren’t you?”
I nodded.
“Same here. Barclay is a lefty. Teaching him was a bitch.”
I laughed, more from surprise than from anything funny. It was the first time I’d heard Page swear.
Page wrapped my right palm against the wood. “Dominant hand on the grip.” She set my left under the barrel. “Other one on the forearm.”
“The what?”
“The part that moves.” Page held her hands over mine. “Don’t choke it, but you gotta hold it firmly or you could end up dropping it when you fire. What eye do you see better out of?”
“I don’t know.”
“We’ll go with right,” she said. “You close one eye when you shoot, and generally speaking, you want to leave your better eye open. Barclay always went off his left, but he’ll go off his right now.”
“What?” I asked. “Why?”
She shook her head, and I registered the expression, another Page-look I’d hold on to. A look of saying too much and then backing away, leaving it alone. “Forget it.” She got behind me. “Pretend you’re aiming at that tree.”
Blanca & Roja Page 9
