“I don’t want to aim at anything.”
“You’re not going to shoot. I’m just showing you how to hold it. And just so you know, a hundred-year-old shotgun isn’t a whole lot worse than a pistol of the same era.”
“But they’re bigger,” I said.
“Exactly. People wave old pistols around without thinking. That’s how they accidentally shoot themselves and other people. People do stupid things with old shotguns, but it takes a lot more stupid—or drunk—to throw this long of a barrel around. It’s easier to see where you’re aiming.” Page reached over my shoulder and pressed her fingers into the skin below my collarbone. “Feel this soft, squishy part?”
“Hey.”
“I didn’t mean it like that.” She moved her hand and settled the bottom corner of the shotgun butt where her fingers had been. “This is where you’ll plant.”
My sleeve fell off my shoulder.
“Sorry.” She slid it back over. “Never taught a girl to do this.”
I straightened my spine so I wouldn’t shiver at the brush of her fingers against my back.
“You need to be able to absorb the recoil,” she said.
I looked back at her. “The what?”
“The recoil. The gun’ll kick back when you fire. Newton’s third law.” She steadied my grip on the forearm. “You gotta plant before you fire. If you don’t, it hits you. At best you’ll get a bruise, worst you’ll break your collarbone. You want it right there while you’re aiming. And don’t touch the trigger unless you plan on shooting.”
Still, Page was talking. Still, with that steady charm I fell under like it was August rain.
This was what I had missed when I missed the boy I had only spoken to once. This was what I was afraid the tall señora could see when she looked into me.
“Okay.” I pressed my lips together to try not to smile, and I glanced over my shoulder. “I’m holding it.”
“You’re still wrong.” Page lowered the barrel. “Point at the ground for now. Pick a rock or something.” She put her cheek close to mine, her hair brushing my temple. “You line up the bead at the front with the grooves at the back. Aim for the bottom of what you’re shooting at.”
“Why?” I turned my head, but stopped before my mouth met her skin. “Don’t bullets fall?”
“Shotguns are slow-firing. When you shoot, they kick, and that lifts the top of the barrel.” She put her hands on my waist. “Plant your weight into the ground. Bend your knees.”
I dug my toes into the grass, a question blooming in me as I met Page’s stare.
Why couldn’t this boy have blue eyes? I wondered this even as I sank into the storm-brown of her gaze, the silt color of a river stirred by melting ice. Why couldn’t Page Ashby match the color the señora had told me? Why couldn’t this boy be the boy I was supposed to make love me? The question spun in my brain, growing louder the more I tried to quiet it. Why can’t you have blue eyes?
As the words rang through me, they brought the echo of another question, nearly identical. It was one I had asked myself every time I looked into the mirror, staring at the reflected brown of my own eyes. I had wondered it watching the light-eyed girls at school. I had asked it, silently, as many times as there were blond strands on my head.
Why can’t you have blue eyes?
As though having blue eyes was an act I could manage if I only willed myself hard enough. If I had been a blue-eyed girl, I would have passed so easily among the fair-headed girls at school. Put together, my blue eyes and blond hair would have made anyone who looked at me skim past the shape of my nose, the line of my brow bone, the set of my eyes, every small thing that gave me away as not quite gringa.
And now I had brought that same cold examining of features to looking at a boy I wanted.
I cut the question off, hard as snapping away a tree branch. I wasn’t letting the ways I’d picked myself apart touch Page. I would not let swans or señoras put cracks in the ways I found Page beautiful, especially the slate-brown of her eyes.
Page gripped the front of my right thigh. “You gotta widen your stance.”
I held my breath and moved my back leg until she dropped her hand.
She set her palms on my hips. “Hips ahead of your ankles. Shoulders ahead of your hips.”
I held the gun steady and let my eyes close, tilting my head down and toward her.
“Always act like it’s loaded.” Her voice was lower, softer. I could hear her breathing. “Never aim at anything you don’t want to shoot.”
My top lip brushed her bottom lip, but neither of us put enough of our weight into it, and we pulled away.
Page took the gun out of my hands. She propped it against the back step and held my forearms to look at my wrists. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”
“I’m okay.”
“You need ice or you’ll bruise.”
“I’m fine,” I said.
Page set the shotgun back in my grip. “Then hold this like you’re not afraid of it.”
I could have pretended I didn’t know what I would do until I did it. I could pretend it was instinct, or impulse. But I knew what I was doing when I kissed Page on the cheek, the blush of the apple against my lips.
For that second, I convinced myself that if I did this, it would be over. All I needed was this one touch of my mouth against her skin, and I could walk away. I could let this be enough.
Page shut her eyes, my eyelashes almost brushing hers.
I took a deep drag of Page’s scent. The pond water smell that stayed on her even now that she wasn’t a cygnet. Oiled wood. The wet starch of the purple potatoes she’d diced that morning. I took in as much of that smell as I could hold in me.
I imagined my mother standing in the garden we’d planted together, one curling squash vine and marigold at a time. I heard myself trying to explain why my lips were on Page Ashby’s cheek instead of Barclay Holt’s.
Then I pulled away.
Page opened her eyes. This close, I could see the full color of them, how they were both brown and silvered enough to look gray in some light. They reminded me of the shallows near a riverbank, where the water got warm all the way to the bottom. They were both the sheen of a pond’s surface and the color underneath, muddied with earth that caught the sun.
“What was that for?” she asked.
“What you did,” I said, that scent thinning with the distance between us.
Page bent her head and let her hair fall in her eyes. “Don’t mention it.”
ROJA
Even Blanca’s clothes felt softer than mine, the patterned skirts and scarves like sweeps of warm water. I buttoned on her purple sage–patterned dress, her sweater the color of early lilacs.
I could be the gentle, caring girl with hands softened by flowerbed earth. All I had to do was stay out in the garden long enough for Yearling to see me among the yarrow and wild carrot seedlings.
I checked the bleeding hearts, cupping the delicate flowers in my hands and laughing in a high way that made even me shudder. But if that was who I needed to be, the soft princess in a fairy tale, I could do it.
At least until Liam Holt came up our front walk.
I froze next to the window boxes. Yearling’s cousin was about to ruin my perfect tableau.
One more reason I hated Liam Holt. Not that I needed it. His rolling laugh when he told me how fat I looked in my Christmas pageant dress still rang through my brain.
He was nine. I was six, and already good at holding grudges. I still remembered all of it. The tear-salt rage of looking down at my own stomach and thighs in poinsettia-red velvet. The seething feeling of knowing I had to just stand there and not say anything, because I was younger, and smaller, and darker, wearing pretty clothes my mother would hate me for messing up.
It all came back so clear, like the tones of the handbells that night.
I greeted Liam with “What do you want?”
He gave the withdrawing lurch of being taken aback. But i
t came with half a smile. “Is that how your mother taught you to talk to guests?”
“Talk about your own mother, not mine.” More than once, he and his friends had come around and bothered Blanca in the back garden, poking at the moonflowers and other plants they didn’t recognize and asking which ones could get them high.
“Look, I need your help, okay?” he said.
I felt my attention turn toward him, like datura opening to the night sky.
Liam Holt wanted something from me?
And thought I’d give it to him?
“You have one minute,” I said. And I was only giving him that much so I’d have the minute to think. This was my chance to order Liam Holt, and all his crisp angles and cologne, out of my front yard. However I told him off had to be as perfect as a flourish of my father’s fountain pen.
His face both softened and opened, like he was trying to force words that weren’t coming.
“I want you to get my cousin back,” he said.
I had to press my feet to the stone path to remind myself not to look over my shoulder. My eyes wanted to flash back to the house so much they stung. I stalled, asking “What are you talking about?” as I tried to guess whether he knew Yearling was there.
But he wouldn’t have said, I want you to get my cousin back. He would have said I want my cousin back. Or just Where is he?
“I want your help finding Barclay,” Liam said.
At least now I could ask the right questions.
“And what makes you think I can help you?” I asked.
“Your family,” he said. “You can do things.”
His voice was so earnest—he and Barclay had never looked or sounded more alike than they did that second—and I had to try not to laugh. I’d heard the whispers about us, the del Cisne girls who didn’t even go to school anymore. But did Liam think we could send out swans to find people, like they were hunting dogs? If so, he was as gullible as the boys who thought we could transform ourselves into birds and then back into girls, like slipping on different dresses.
“I don’t know what you’ve heard,” I said. “But I can’t make people appear.”
“I’m not asking you to make him appear,” he said. “I’m asking you to find him.”
“And how do you want me to do that?” I asked. “He could be anywhere.”
“He’s not,” Liam said, with the sudden force of arguing.
His shoulders dropped, his tone coming back down. “I saw him.” He looked toward the trees. “The other night. Around here. I saw him. One minute he was there, and the next he wasn’t.”
I wove my worry into pity. “Go home, Liam.”
“I know what it sounds like,” Liam said. “But I mean it. I saw him.”
“Get some sleep,” I said, with a shake of my head like he was all grief and illogic.
“I’m serious,” he said. Not the kind of Oh come on I heard through the windows when boys wanted Blanca to sneak out at midnight, or when they asked us to turn into swans like it was a card trick. This was a kind of pleading I didn’t think rich boys had in them. “Haven’t you ever seen anything you knew was real even if you knew no one else would believe you?”
I felt it. His frustration pressing down the words.
“He took off because he thinks I hate him,” Liam said. “But I don’t.”
“Why would he think that?”
Liam watched the ground between us. “We got into a fight before he left. A bad one. He messed me up enough that I was out of school for a while.”
A memory slid over my skin, the gossip my mother brought home and told Blanca. Sometimes I caught scraps of their conversations as they sat in the dim kitchen drinking manzanilla.
After Barclay went missing, Liam stayed home from school for so long that everyone whispered their theories. Liam had gone looking for his cousin and now they were both lost. Or Liam had vanished at the same time as Barclay, and the Holts were trying to keep it quiet. Or Liam had transferred to a boarding school two hundred miles away because he couldn’t stay somewhere that still held the echo of Barclay’s laugh, the soft imprints of his footsteps on the damp mulch, the bricks where they’d marked their heights with an old wax pencil.
The best one—the one borne out when Liam showed up again, slump-shouldered and distracted—was that his cousin vanishing had broken him open. It had left him so hollow it was weeks before he looked anyone in the eye. We all believed it. I’d never thought there was more to it than that.
I had to force what Liam had just said into what I knew of Yearling. I had to weave it in among the soft fur of the young bear he had been, and the low laugh of the boy he was now.
But this was the truth about Yearling. And of course, it only made the possibility of him being with Blanca more perfect, more beautiful. Didn’t a dozen fairy tales go that way, some brutal, angry boy transformed by the love of a gentle, golden-haired girl?
“I forgive him,” Liam said. “And I need him to know that. We’ll never be a family again if he doesn’t know that. I know if we could see him it could be different. They think he’s never coming back. But I think you know how to find him.”
To him, I was the witch who could grant him whatever he wanted. And a stupid one. He thought I cared about putting his family back together? On parent-teacher days at school, I could have chilled a glass of agua de fresa with Mrs. Holt’s stare. She lifted her chin at my mother as though not just the rusting lockers and worn linoleum but our whole family was beneath her.
I knew what Liam either wouldn’t say or didn’t understand: The Holts didn’t want a runaway on their hands. Boys like Yearling were dangerous. They drew attention. They caused problems. They made people talk.
“Even if I could find him, why would I?” I asked. I didn’t mean to say it. It came to my lips faster than I could bite it back. Rich boys thought the whole world was waiting around to do them favors.
No anger or offense showed in Liam’s face.
He shrugged, the same shrug I’d seen on his cousin.
“I’m a good person to have owe you a favor,” he said. “Trust me.”
It was more offer than threat.
Then, like I’d dismissed him, he turned back toward the front gate.
Just before the last stone set in the grass, he looked over his shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“For what?” I asked.
“I don’t know why you don’t like me,” Liam said. “But there’s probably a reason, so whatever it is, I’m sorry.”
I wanted him to say something about the Christmas pageant, about my red velvet dress, about the words I’d never forgotten. Proof that he remembered.
But rich gringos don’t remember, as least not as well as brown girls in dresses their mothers picked out.
This was as good an apology as I’d get.
“School,” I said.
He turned back. “What?”
“You were”—I reached for the right word, and it came breathless as snow—“awful to me in school.”
The red Christmas dress had only been the first time.
The favorite prank of his friends was stealing dust-and-dirt-covered broom heads from the janitors’ closets and cramming them into my locker, some joke about me and my mother being witches. When I opened the door, the bristles knocked into me. The worst part was me having to look for Martín’s blue uniform and black-gray hair in the hall after school, so I could return it, both of us hanging our heads because we could do nothing about the pieces of ourselves we’d lost to laughing boys.
They never did any of this to Blanca. On a girl like her, rumors that she was a witch made her dreamy and alluring, like gray pumpkins and fairy lights and worn, white lace dresses.
“I believe it,” Liam said. “I was a lot of things before…”
I wanted to hear the end of that sentence.
Before we lost Barclay.
Before Barclay disappeared.
Before. Just, before.
<
br /> Liam was the kind of boy who looked the whole world in the eye, but his stare had fallen a little. Not much, just to the road in front of his feet instead of straight ahead. I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been looking so closely.
“Is that why you left school?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“Then why?”
“We needed more time to stir cauldrons and cast spells.”
He laughed lightly. “I deserved that.”
This time he did leave. I knew because I watched, and I didn’t touch the front doorknob until I saw him reach the road.
When I came back inside, Yearling’s eyes were on the thin lace of our curtain linings. He had his back to the far wall, out of view of the windows. He looked like he wanted to hide behind our sofa.
I could see him working to keep himself still.
“Thank you,” he said, not quite meeting my eyes.
I didn’t ask for what. I didn’t need to.
But I could tell from how he held his shoulders, the way he forced himself not to fidget or pace, how much he wasn’t telling.
Yearling had as many secrets as my sister and I did.
YEARLING
The first time they caught us, we were eight. Liam was shoving my head into a bookshelf. I was biting his upper arm. And when we saw my aunt and uncle standing in the doorway of Liam’s room, we thought we’d be in trouble forever.
But Aunt Ava laughed it off. You two have fun. No emergency room visits, okay?
Grandma Tess always wanted to know if I ever felt scared of my cousin, since I was smaller than he was. I didn’t.
At least not then.
It was just something we did.
Liam won every time. He was always bigger, and he was as mean with me in a fight as he was protective of me at school. When a boy two years older threw my biology book under the locker room shower, Liam hit him in the stomach so hard he didn’t look at either of us for the rest of the year.
But I got stronger, and faster, until we started taking turns losing, no hard feelings. Sometimes, after, we ended up on the floor, sprawled out next to each other, laughing and swearing under our breath because we were already sore. That kind of fight was worth a couple four-letter words and a moment of recognition.
Blanca & Roja Page 10
