Blanca & Roja

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  It took a while, but I got big enough to look out for Liam at school the way he’d always looked out for me, the way I’d learned to look out for Page Ashby. The time Liam misspelled February in front of his whole class, and some guy made fun of him for the rest of the damn day, I slammed him into the lockers. He went into them at an angle, messing up his shoulder enough that he was out of team practices for the rest of the season. My father could’ve killed me. He said Holt sons did not act like that.

  I guess my father had already forgotten the fights he and my uncle used to get in. The teachers still told the stories. Once a blond boy from a visiting baseball team called Grandma Tess white trash. That fight ended with a broken trophy case.

  But now that they had money, they pretended they always had.

  My father’s form of punishment was leaving me off at the Lindley cranberry farm, where Olive needed extra hands for the wet harvest. It killed him that I liked it, that Olive liked me, that I stayed on. The day the cranberries got knocked off their vines became my favorite day of the year.

  That was before I knew everything I knew now.

  “Barclay?” Page stopped at the same floorboard I couldn’t move from. He came up on my right side, already adjusting, without comment, to how my vision had changed.

  I felt pinned there, stuck in this one spot in the del Cisne house where I’d seen Liam out the window.

  “Hey, Barclay.” Page set his hand on my back. “Stay with me, okay?”

  I flinched knowing how much he saw. I never wanted to get rattled in front of Page. He didn’t need it, not after everything I’d already done to him.

  “I’m fine,” I said, shaking my head at the floor. “Really. I’m good.”

  PART THREE

  Woods, Feathers, Frost

  BLANCA

  Roja held an apple in my face. “Just a bite, my pretty,” she said in her best evil-queen voice.

  I shrugged her away. But the hope that maybe things with us were ordinary and good filled me. She shoved apples at me each fall. I did the same thing to her during chayote season, holding the green rind out to her.

  Under the distant sound of the swans’ wings, this glimmer of us felt so bright I wanted to string it on a cord and fasten it around Roja’s neck. We were the sisters who looked for the late-autumn icicles we could crack between our teeth. We were the ones who agreed that white cats, not black, brought bad luck when they crossed your path. We were the girls who went out with wet hair in winter, snapping off frozen pieces. That was the Blanca and Roja I wanted to remember, the version of us I wanted to take with me when I grew wings.

  Later, when the kitchen emptied out, Page asked me, “What was that about?”

  “Nothing.” I set the tejolote back in its molcajete. The basalt of the pestle scraped lightly against the mortar. “I just don’t eat apples.”

  “Allergic?” Page asked.

  “No,” I said, careful. I’d hated apples since I first bit into the red skin and pale flesh when I was five. But to say it like that, hard and blunt, felt like an insult to the Ashbys. “I just don’t eat them.”

  “Why not?”

  “I tried one once and I didn’t like it, so I told my mother and she never made me eat one again.”

  “What didn’t you like about it?”

  “It tasted”—I winced at the memory of that first bite, flat and bitter on my tongue. It gave me the same shiver as having chalk dust under my fingernails—“grainy. And too sweet. And the skin seemed rubbery to me.”

  “Maybe we just haven’t found you the right one.”

  “An apple’s an apple, isn’t it?”

  “No, not really.” Page’s laugh was kind, allowing, like I’d stumbled trying to say something in another language. “A baking apple’s not the same as a cider apple. And an apple you eat right away is different from one you store through the winter.”

  “What kind does your family grow?” I asked.

  “All kinds,” Page said. “Autumn Berry. Snow. Scarlet. Moonglow. Apricot Apple. Maiden Blush. Blue Pearmain.”

  They sounded like the names of jewels or the colors of paints. Apples were as unknown to me as the bluebead lily our abuela told us not to touch, its berries as deep as midnight marbles.

  “Those are all apples?” I asked.

  “Best for a hundred miles around.” The pride in her face and voice reminded me of how Roja talked about our father. At school she’d thrown the facts of him at our classmates like spitting orange seeds, telling them he owned three hundred books and had read them all twice, that he could hold a thousand numbers in his head at the same time.

  “I’ve never heard of those,” I said.

  Page cocked her head, considering me. I felt the blush of wondering what she saw.

  “I bet I could find you an apple you’d like,” Page said.

  “Then you don’t know how much I hate apples,” I said.

  Yearling stopped in the doorway. “You know any Ashby will take that as a challenge, right?”

  Page’s smile broadened. “He’s right.”

  I wavered with the unease of feeling caught. I needed to stay away from the boy I wanted if I was ever going to get the boy I had to win.

  But if I said no to something as simple as apples, and I did it in front of Yearling, all Yearling would see was me brushing away his friend.

  Either answer trapped me.

  “So what do you say?” Page asked.

  YEARLING

  Ever since that day in the hall, the first and only punch I ever saw Page throw, I could always tell when he’d decided on something. He got that same look, the air coming off him a little charged.

  I saw it now, in the del Cisnes’ house. I knew by the set to Page’s shoulders that he was going out. Not to pull carrots Blanca wanted from the back garden. Not even for air. Page was going out, past the line of the del Cisnes’ stained-wood fence.

  “Should I even ask?” I said as Page reached for the door.

  Page turned his head.

  “If someone sees you, it’ll get back to your parents,” I said.

  The Ashbys didn’t know how to just let him be Page. They approached with a caution that came off both respectful and distant, like Page wasn’t their son but a handful of metal pins or a static-shocked doorknob.

  I didn’t want them in his head. I didn’t want him remembering that look they gave him, the awful, frightened, evaluating look like they’d never seen anything quite like a Page Ashby before. It was the world’s job to take Page as he was. Forget anyone who couldn’t.

  “No one’s going to see us,” Page said.

  “Us?” I asked, in time to hear the creak of the stairs, and see the flash of Blanca’s blond hair. She had a gray coat draped over her arm.

  “Oh,” I said.

  Good for Page. I thought he was just going out to sneak apples from the Ashby orchard, but he’d managed to turn it into a date.

  “Don’t worry,” Page told me as Blanca put on her coat. “We’re sticking to my grandmother’s side. You know her hours. Up with the sun.”

  “And asleep with it, too,” I finished. “Yeah, I know.”

  Blanca handed Page a worn duck-cloth jacket, something that was probably her grandfather’s.

  “Page?” I said.

  “Yeah?” Page slipped into the sleeves.

  The words were on my tongue. All I had to do was say them.

  Good-bye.

  Don’t worry about me.

  I love you.

  Any of those would’ve worked. I could’ve given Page something to hold in his hands when he came back and I was gone again.

  But it all caught in my throat, and Page was still waiting. So I gave him the only words I had.

  “Be careful, okay?”

  ROJA

  My mother’s stories of nahuales made a bear turning into a boy no more astonishing than the first kaleidoscope of butterflies in spring. But a sudden sweep of brown coming into a blue eye? That didn’t just
happen. Nothing remarkable ever just happened. There were reasons girls became swans. There were explanations for brown appearing out of blue.

  I sifted through every article I could find from earlier that fall. The pictures of the missing boy showed a sameness to his eyes, clear even in the black-and-white of yearbook photos.

  The grainy reproductions stood in for memories I didn’t have. Even in a town this small, you still had people you never talked to, and Barclay Holt was one of mine. Even before he was a yearling bear, fur matted with tree sap, Barclay Holt and I had never said enough words to each other for me to look right at him.

  I went to my father’s books, the ones about anatomy and medicine that he pulled down when I wanted to know why my bisabuela had died, or how twins happened. I paged through for why a sliver of brown might show up in a blue eye, sudden as the first flowers after a wildfire.

  The best answer I landed on was a word I didn’t quite know how to pronounce, an explanation of how a blue iris could deepen to brown.

  I wasn’t getting anywhere being sweet. Maybe I’d get somewhere if Yearling knew I was smart enough to ask questions.

  Yearling must have felt me wondering about him. He stood near the door of my father’s study, where I sat in one of the worn chairs, book in my lap.

  “You really don’t know what happened to your eye?” I asked, looking up from the pages.

  “No idea,” he said.

  I closed the book. “Siderosis.”

  “Sorry?”

  “The brown showing up,” I said. “The only answer that makes sense is siderosis.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Iron getting in your eye.”

  His smile was sad but proud, like he was enjoying how wrong I was. “That wasn’t it. I promise.”

  I’d already gotten that far. A shard of iron catching in his eye, slowly shifting the color of the outer edge, could have happened. It wasn’t impossible. But it was less likely than me pulling up a cabbage from our back garden and finding a vein of polished rose quartz underneath.

  I thought of my mother reading newspaper statistics at the breakfast table, my favorite part of the morning when Blanca and I were little.

  Even when they had no relevance to us: It’s safer to travel by air than by car. (Blanca and I had never been on a plane.)

  Even ones that made me a little sad: The odds of any single clover being four-leafed are one in ten thousand. (My sister and I had borne this one out with a hundred afternoons spent looking.)

  Even ones that left my fingertips feeling cold as on December mornings: You’re twice as likely to be killed by someone you know than a stranger.

  I got up from the chair, my sweater sleeves catching static.

  “But there’s another kind,” I told Yearling. “Hemosiderosis. That’s the iron in your own body doing the same thing. That can happen. Getting hit really hard in the right place, then all the iron in your blood builds up and that’s how the brown gets in.”

  He still didn’t say anything. But I could see him tensing.

  The muscles just below my stomach ached, but I ignored it.

  “So what happened?” I asked.

  “I told you,” he said. “I don’t know.”

  The ache grew. “How’d you get hit that hard?”

  “I said I don’t know.”

  The ache bloomed into pain.

  I tried to get out of the room before I doubled over.

  “You okay?” Yearling called after me.

  I stumbled to the kitchen window.

  A thick slice of moon hung in the sky, the outer edge hard and solid, the inner light translucent, like an orange segment. Halfway between last quarter and crescent.

  Es la luna, mija, my grandmother said every month when this happened. It pulls at you.

  “What’s wrong?” Yearling asked.

  “Nothing.” I kept my back to him. “Where’s my sister?”

  “She went out with Page.”

  “They went out?” I clutched at my stomach. “And you let them?”

  He shrugged.

  I wanted to pull back the words. Any worry over Blanca belonged in a time before the swans came. Now I should have celebrated her going out into the dark with Page Ashby. She probably thought she could have both, the boy she wanted and the boy she needed to want her.

  She thought of me as so little of a threat that she’d leave me alone with Yearling. She didn’t know I would grab at every chance I got.

  Or I would’ve, if my body had let me. But now I gripped the windowsill to keep myself up straight.

  “Really,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s not nothing.”

  “It’s my period, okay?” The words came before I could stop them. But I needed him not to see me like this, the way I’d be for the next few hours, and if that didn’t scare him off, nothing would.

  He stood there, blinking at me.

  My next wince was for both pain and my own bad luck. Yearling had to be the one boy who didn’t run at the mention of blood between a girl’s legs. I bit back the way Blanca’s absence had left me like a feral cat, injured and wanting to hiss at strangers who got too close.

  “Do you mind?” I said, trying to get him to leave.

  But I didn’t wait to see if he would. I gritted my teeth and slid my hand along the walls. I followed the doorframes and banisters up to my room. With each step, each clenching between my hips, my guide was the bright memory of the sister I wished I still had. How she stayed upright and gliding even through headaches or fevers or ankle sprains, her own will spun into grace. And I hoped I looked more like her, more like a girl touching the grain of the wall paint than one barely holding herself up.

  YEARLING

  I shut my eyes to everything around me. I let there be nothing but the shadows cast by the trees, and the memory of giving up my body to these woods, and the hope that maybe they would take me again.

  I thought of how it felt, the woods making me into something other than what I was, that sense that my heart was unraveling out of my body.

  They could do whatever they wanted with me.

  Before I could fall deeper into that feeling of losing myself, the smell of the birch trees got into me. It was as familiar as Grandma Tess’s hands on my shoulders, her sure voice, her laugh that never took on a mean edge even when it was a little at your expense.

  The trees’ scent came on like vanilla or cinnamon, a sugary smell Grandma Tess said was from the sun heating a chemical in the sap.

  But something else cut through it, harsh and bitter, like metal, or road-salt runoff after a storm.

  I opened my eyes and caught the shine of sap. It ran down the bark in drops, like the amber of the only earrings my grandmother ever wore.

  I took a step toward one of the trees, not realizing I was pulling closer until the light shifted.

  The sap’s color darkened. The metal smell hardened. The bitter salt scent grew so thick in the air I choked on it.

  It was just that second, long enough to let me believe that the sap was blood and the birch trees were a body I shared a name with. Enough that I lost the solid, leaf-bristling feeling of the ground under me. That flash of remembering my own blood, the smell of it on my skin, dragged me back into that day, the hours before the trees took me, everything I did.

  Everything I thought I could get away with.

  I always put my father and uncle’s offices back the way I found them. If my mother noticed anything, she took it as my interest in our family’s business.

  Every time I had the chance, I scrambled to get the file cabinets open, take what I needed, make it all look like it had before. But rushing means mistakes. It means I must have disturbed other files or left the pages in the wrong order, or put the keys back under my father’s stapler when they should have gone under his glass paperweight.

  When Liam threw open the door I saw the look that said he knew.

  He h
it me. His right fist, my left temple.

  This wasn’t the kind we swapped during our usual fights. It held a blunt edge that even our worst rounds didn’t carry. The pain felt hard enough to crack my skull open. This was his rage, the force and rush of it.

  He held the collar of my undershirt so I couldn’t go with the impact. “What did you do?”

  Liam wasn’t even supposed to be around that weekend. He had a paper due Tuesday. Hadn’t even started it. Aunt Ava had sworn if she saw Liam out anywhere except the library, she’d cut the fuel lines in his car.

  That meant I had my guard down until my father came home. He worked every weekend now. He didn’t even keep up the front of going to church anymore; Grandma Tess took me instead. And my mother was at one of her afternoons out with her friends, some kind of planning event for some kind of fund-raiser I’d be expected to put on a suit and tie for, but honestly, I couldn’t tell one from the next. They were always more about who fit into what size dress, whose necklace had bigger stones in it, than they were about whatever they were raising funds for. My mother’s friends shamed women out of hotel ballrooms by calling their dresses interesting, or their houses quaint.

  I hadn’t heard the low engine of Liam’s car—fuel lines intact.

  Now, with him on me like this, I held my forearm in front of me, trying to throw off his next hit.

  “I didn’t do anything,” I said.

  He got me in the stomach while I was trying to block his next try for my face.

  “You think I don’t know you?” He gripped my shirt so my body couldn’t double over.

  I wasn’t fighting back. Not now.

  “How many copies did you make?” Liam held on to my hair.

  I tried to shake my head, but my cheek just fell to my shoulder.

  Liam grabbed so much of my shirt the bottom hem rode up my stomach. “What did you do with them?”

  I pressed my hands to the wall to try to get my footing. He hit me in the jaw, and I stumbled.

  “Where are they?” he asked.