“How about me with what?” Roja asked. “What are we doing?”
I laughed. It sounded slight and worn out, but she was still the girl who made me laugh, even now.
“I guess we’re bringing down the Holts.” I looked at her, and her eyes settled, staying on me. “You in?”
Her smile caught like a candlewick. “Oh, I’m in.”
BLANCA
Page and Barclay were back with their grandmothers now. And I already felt the loss of Page in this house. The sound of her in the shower, the rush of steam lifting the linen curtain as I brought her clothes, her hair dark gold from the water. How she stood under the shower, eyes closed, her head forward so her chin nearly touched the middle curve of her collarbone.
In ninth grade, I heard Natalia Brae telling Anissa Maldanado that that was how to know. If a girl tilted her head back, smoothing her hair away from her face as it got wet, she liked boys. But anyone who stood under the shower with their head forward, the water beating their hair down against their face, those were the ones who liked girls. You knew, Natalia told Anissa, because that was how boys did it.
This was how Page, a boy, did it. Natalia got that much right.
Roja didn’t make it to our room. She flopped down on the sofa, saying something into the cushion about how she was too tired to go all the way upstairs.
In those mumbled words, the pieces of last night settled into place.
Yearling liked her. I realized it now, how he couldn’t meet her eye for more than a few seconds. How his laugh sounded a little different with her, freer, less controlled. In how he got between her and his own grandmother.
And my sister liked him back. It was there in how she rolled her eyes at him. In how she looked at him when she thought he wasn’t paying attention. In how she was on this sofa because she wanted to be where he’d slept.
They wanted each other.
My sister and the blue-eyed boy wanted each other.
The memory of the señora’s hands seared into me—the blue flame, the two locks of hair, one twisting into a feather and the other back into a ribbon of blond. The señora’s insistence that it was me, only me, who could be spared by the love of a blue-eyed boy.
That was the cruelest thing about the señora’s words, the truth it had left us: In my hands, the blue-eyed boy’s heart was currency enough to buy my survival. In Roja’s, it was worth nothing. And now she was the one who held it.
But I had my own truth, held in my pocket like a polished stone: In our family, no señora’s word was law. In our family, the swans’ marble-black stare, the cut of their pale wings, held more weight than any flame or spell.
If the swans gave my sister this chance, if I could tether this blue-eyed boy to her fate instead of mine, Roja’s body was as good as hers, and my arms were as good as wings.
As my sister slept, I took my father’s sharpest scissors and clipped a piece of her hair. Then I cut a lock of my own.
I lit a candle off my mother’s pilot light, the closest we had in our house to a blessed and sacred flame.
As the light fell, I went out to the pond.
They weren’t there. No flash of white wings. No long, curving necks.
I spoke to the water anyway.
“She can get him,” I said to the dark mirror in front of me. “And when she does, you’ll take me. Okay?”
All this time, I’d wanted to guard my sister from this game. I didn’t want her giving herself to a boy who’d come out of these woods.
But she’d taken to him, our bear-boy, and he wanted her.
I waited for the swans to appear in a flurry of snow-white feathers.
“Do you hear me?” I asked.
The candle’s glass heated my hands. The locks of hair in my pocket felt heavier than their weight.
“She’s going to do this,” I called into the dark. “And you’re going to let her go.”
I waited.
I knew they could hear me. They just wanted to make me stand out here.
I crouched next to the pond, setting down the candle. I lifted the locks of hair from my pocket and lit them the way the señora had. They caught and fluttered into the air, two unmoored flames. They drifted and spun like leaves. And when they flitted down to the surface of the pond, it was not in a sprinkling of ash. It was not in a single feather and a lock of my hair.
It was two feathers, identical except for their color, one white as frost flowers, one black as the rarest swan. They floated on the pond, the water making reflected copies.
Relief came with my next breath.
These two feathers, made out of flame and locks of our hair, were proof: Either of us could follow the map drawn by the señora’s words. They now belonged as much to Roja as to me.
Roja could win the heart of a blue-eyed boy who’d once been a bear. That small ember between them would brighten and bloom.
She would get the blue-eyed boy. She would save herself.
The swans would leave her and take me.
I lifted my face to the pond, imagining los cisnes in the shadows beyond. “Thank you.”
A bristling sound like a thousand feathers rose up through the woods.
I startled to my feet, leaves crackling under me. I looked for swans’ wings cutting through the dark.
A thin shape emerged from the trees. I looked for wings or a long white throat.
But the shape resolved into Page.
I reached for something normal to say. What are you doing here? Or, Are you okay? Or, failing everything else, Hello.
But all I thought of was Page in the spray of the shower. How I’d imagined the heat loosening the muscles between her shoulder blades. How I thought the steam would bead into drops on her eyelashes. How I pictured water pausing in the curve of her lower back.
I imagined what I had not seen. My hands tracing where the light crossed her skin. The triangle of fine hair between her legs. All of her body at once.
She stopped in front of me, her breath its own sound under the settling leaves. “The way you look at me, do you mean it?”
My own breath stilled in my throat. I tried to ask, What? but the sound didn’t come.
“The way you look at me,” she said again. “Do you mean it?”
There was no accusation in it, no objection. Just that question, laid bare between us.
I nodded.
I waited for the glint in Page’s stare or the flicker of motion in her hands. Something to tell me that yes, this was happening, now.
But Page stayed still. And it was only in the quiet falling between us that I realized.
Page was waiting for me to say yes or no.
I nodded again, because I could not steady my breath long enough to form the word yes.
Page half closed the distance between us, then hesitated, like she was wondering if my nod was just a carryover from the nod before.
If I couldn’t figure out how to say yes with my lips, I had to do it with my hands.
I hooked my fingers through the belt loops on her jeans, lightly enough that I wasn’t pulling on her. I wasn’t touching her skin or even her shirt. It was borrowed flirtation, something I’d seen girls do at the locker banks at school, their thumbs and forefingers grazing the worn denim, their boyfriends or girlfriends talking to them in voices low enough that I could never make out the words.
It was a gesture small enough that either of us could pretend it hadn’t happened. Page could step back, and I would drop my hands. Or I could loosen my hold and turn back to the house.
But Page set her palms on my waist.
The warmth of her hands made me open mine.
My grip spread over Page’s hip bones. Then it was the blur of me pulling her and her pushing me until we were up against the smooth trunk of a birch tree, Page’s palm on the back of my neck.
Her body covered mine. I could feel the slight contour of her chest beneath the layered shirts.
For everything my body did, Page’s had a response.
Newton’s third law. The recoil of a shotgun against the hollow of my shoulder.
The heat of Page’s back against my hands.
The press of her mouth against mine.
PAGE
Grandma Lynn had this way of reading me fairy tales, like she was telling me secrets I’d need one day. She leaned a little forward, meeting my eye when the knight discovered the trick of lulling the dragon to sleep, or when the shepherd boy found the secret door.
I lowered my head to hide my blush when I thought of the witches and princesses in those stories, of catching my fingers in hair as bright as red wheat or rich as threads of black silk. I thought of those magic-blooded girls taking me by my shirt collar to kiss me, the film of their skirts floating around us like curls of bright smoke.
Grandma Lynn probably knew that. She knew in the same way she knew I would not grow out of wearing pants and collared shirts to church instead of my cousins’ passed-down dresses. She knew the same way she knew to call me young man, those words like fairy-tale jewels. They were crowns I had found in a mist-veiled palace, while the words young lady were a queen’s apple or a spindle—things that might turn out to poison me, but that I was expected to take.
Fairy tales were a world I thought I knew. But the one I needed to know most was the one that took me the longest to understand.
It wasn’t until Blanca kissed me that I realized why the woods made me into a cygnet. It wasn’t because Blanca and Roja’s family came from swans.
It was because a story chose me, even when I’d gotten it all wrong.
I thought I knew the story of the ugly duckling, the cygnet who endures taunting and winter cold and being driven out of everywhere before discovering he is a swan.
I thought it was all about the ugly duckling looking into the pond and discovering a magnificent bird.
But it didn’t happen that way.
The way it happened was that the ugly duckling was so tired, and cold, and lonely, that he’d been emptied out. He’d run from cats and children and mother ducks. He’d frozen in caves and ponds. So when he saw a flock of swans, wings shimmering like snow, he threw himself at them, deciding he would rather be destroyed by them than keep his distance.
I did not want to be killed. I did not want to throw myself at that which would destroy me.
But in that moment, I wanted Blanca del Cisne, and the frightening certainty of her hands, to annihilate me. I gave myself over to her pulling at my shirt and my jeans as I unhooked the eyelet clasps of her dress. Her hands were quick as wings, and in the space between my thighs they felt as light and numerous as feathers.
That was the effect of her, as great as a flock of swans, and I was the cygnet flying toward her, this girl who was as terrifying as she was spectacular.
The ugly duckling’s great surprise was not the moment he saw himself in the pond. That came later. The moment of his greatest shock was when the swans embraced him, took him into their flutter of wings. It was the moment they made themselves his family. It was when they recognized him before he recognized himself.
I had always made a sorry imitation of a girl. Awkward and miserable in dresses and shined-white shoes.
But with the shift of changing into jeans and a plain shirt, with letting go of trying to make myself fit the words girl and young lady, I came to understand that I was not a girl who was terrible at being a girl. I was a boy who hadn’t realized it yet.
Now this girl was in my arms. This girl, letting me hold the weight of her breasts and hips in my hands. This girl had never asked me to name myself, to declare myself duckling or swan. The second I was ready to throw myself across the water, she took me into her. She tasted like the pond, and new frost, and the marigolds she drew from the back garden. White and midnight blue and deepest gold.
She was the girl I wanted, and the girl who knew me. She was the girl who let me choose, because she demanded no choices of me.
This was what I learned, in that second of distance closing between us:
The story of the ugly duckling was never about the cygnet discovering he is lovely. It is not a story about realizing you have become beautiful.
It is about the sudden understanding that you are something other than what you thought you were, and that what you are is more beautiful than what you once thought you had to be.
ROJA
My sister was behind a closed door with Page Ashby.
The señoras had told her how to save herself, and she’d still done this.
Her defiance struck so deep I lost myself in the wonder of it. It was like opening a cupboard and finding a sparrow. It was light gathering like honey in the corner of a closet. It was a starfish appearing in the bathroom sink.
I stayed downstairs, falling into the lie that I’d get up in a minute, I was just shutting my eyes for a second.
When I woke up, the windowpanes weren’t morning-pale, or afternoon-bright, or dusk-blue. They were dark as the pond at night. I lifted my face from the sofa, throat scratchy from sleep.
The house had gone quiet, but the air inside still felt thick and shimmering, like the glitter-laced water in a snow globe.
I went outside to get a full breath, taking the glass jar with the candle in it. The rusted handle felt grainy as lichen against my palm.
A familiar silhouette wove through the trees. The moment I knew it was him was the same moment he noticed me watching.
“Can’t sleep,” Yearling said, answering the question before I could ask.
“And standing out in the dark helps?”
He looked up. “I like watching.”
“Watching what?”
He took my waist in his hands. His palms fell light as leaves as he moved me to where he was standing. “When it’s this dark you can’t really see the trees, so when they move it just looks like some of the stars are disappearing and other ones are coming back.”
I looked where he was looking. The candle’s light didn’t reach the tree branches.
Under this star-salted sky, I was in that snow globe again, but at night. The constellations could have been handfuls of flecked gold or crushed mica.
Yearling dropped his hands from my waist. “What are you doing up?”
I looked over my shoulder, toward a lit bedroom window.
“Got it,” he said.
I started to say something, then held back. But it turned to enough of a noise that Yearling asked, “What?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Oh, come on,” he said. “You can’t sigh like that and then say ‘nothing.’”
The same sigh, heavy and worried, came without me meaning it to.
“Do you think she really loves Page?” I asked.
“She better,” he said. “I don’t want Page getting hurt.”
A few days earlier, the act of Blanca and Page behind a bedroom door would have been enough for me. It would have given me the opening I needed. The lowest, most hidden layer of me, like the spongy moss at the bottom of the pond, would have thrilled to the idea of my sister getting out of my way. Whatever blessing and luck the señoras had offered her, this was my chance to take it for myself.
But now guilt pricked at me. It was sharp as thorns dragging against my skin. We had pulled these boys, both of them, so far into our world that I couldn’t tell whether the frightening magic of them had come from the woods or from us.
Now my sister, with her bright love for Page Ashby, held so much color I couldn’t imagine her as a swan. She was a hummingbird, each of her feathers holding every jewel in the world. She was a quetzal, with plumes as bright as blood and spring grass.
I was a hawk, knife-taloned, with eyes that caught any flicker of movement. But without my father’s voice, truing me like a flight call, I drifted. I felt the loss of his counsel and direction like a nutrient deficiency.
While Blanca flared like lamplight, I was a girl going into the woods to eat dirt, searching for some mineral my bones were missing.
&
nbsp; “What are you doing here?” I asked Yearling. “Aren’t there plenty of trees at Lynn’s?”
He fished a handful of small vials from his pocket. He held them in his palms, showing me.
The candle’s glow winked off the contents. Each vial held a different color. Sea-glass tints. Teal, turquoise. Vivid green and blue. And warmer colors. Copper. Red. A soft pink that reminded me of rose gold.
“What is this?” I asked.
“It’s glass glitter,” he said. “My grandmother had it around the house. Take it.”
“I can’t take something that belongs to Tess.”
“She’s the one who told me to give it to you. You really think she’s going to use it?”
I laughed. Tess Holt didn’t even trade in her pants for a dress on Easter Sunday.
“Are Tess and Lynn telling your families you’re back?” I asked.
Yearling tilted his head to one side, then the other. “They’re doing that thing where they try to get us to, but no. That was the thing about them. They never told us we had to be anything.”
Yearling held the vials a little closer to me, each stoppered with a tiny cork. “Take them. I saw them and they made me think of you.”
The glitter caught the stars, the glass cut so much finer than anything my family poured into cascarones. I thought of using it for Easter, filling hollowed-out Araucana shells.
Yearling set them in my hands.
The brush of his fingers made my skin feel dusted with glass glitter.
“I should get back,” he said. “I’m covering for Page.”
“Yearling,” I said.
He turned back. “Yeah?”
The words went tight in my throat.
Just tell him. The words came in the same rhythm as my heartbeat.
He deserved to know he was nothing but a prop. Blanca and I would tear him to pieces, because neither of us wanted him as much as we wanted to save ourselves. And Page would get broken in the process for no reason except that he was the one Blanca wanted instead.
Just tell him. The words echoed through me.
Maybe Yearling would hate me if I told him the truth, but at least someone else would know. I could tell him how my cousins had taken my mother and father from their own house. How my sister had lied to me at the first sign of the swans’ wings. How the weight of all this fell so fast it was its own meteor, and I was the hollow it left in the earth.
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