Blanca & Roja

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  Julieta straightened. I saw her pulling back the sadness.

  “Don’t give up, Roja.” Her smile was in one moment encouraging, the next wry, coming with a lift of an eyebrow. “You’re not a swan yet.”

  PAGE

  I wanted more of her. Blanca, the girl who always laughed like she was a little nervous but who’d stood out in the night rain like there was nothing to be afraid of in the whole world.

  I wanted to drink her, like the scent of Pink Pearl apples. I wanted to learn the shape of her collarbone and how it would taste if I set my lips against the back of her hand. I wanted as much of her as she’d give me. I’d keep all of it. I’d lay each detail between peach and sea-foam-green tissue paper like my grandmother stored her old dresses.

  These things, and the careful way I had of keeping them, was all Blanca left me.

  She did it gently, in her soft voice, her hands worrying the buttons of her dress. You’re perfect, and I want this. I wish I could explain, but I can’t.

  I can’t, her warning that she would both pull back from me and not tell me why.

  I can’t be with you right now.

  She didn’t know that I saw past the thin clouding of the words right now. Right now was forever. If a forest made of feathers and frost didn’t make right now a time worth being with me, there would never be one.

  With those words, the air around us turned. It shifted from the kind of fall that grew the best apples, the wind coming right, to the kind of sudden winter that brought the cold too fast, frost silvering the still-fruited branches.

  The fairy tales should have taught me. I should have learned from Grandma Lynn’s books, the clover-greened, mist-softened stories about Celtic princes and woodland princesses. I was no prince, and it was always the prince whose kiss woke the sleeping girl or who found the enchanted tree. It was the prince who wielded the sword with a blade turned to fire, or that drew the arcs of rainbows, or that held the strength of the sea.

  Instead I was an apple farmer’s son, the kind of boy who vanished into the background of these stories.

  Barclay could have been that prince. And he would have given the chance to me if he could, the possibility of being a prince in my own story. But he didn’t have it to give, no more than I could make him someone else.

  I wished I had told Blanca the true story of the ugly duckling, to make sure she knew. I wondered if she remembered the part about the ugly duckling throwing himself at the flock of swans.

  I wondered if she realized the force of her was more than all those wings.

  If she didn’t want me, that was one thing. But if she thought she couldn’t have me, couldn’t take me, I wanted her to understand the magnitude of her own heart, fierce and terrifyingly beautiful as those swans. That was the strength of her. She pretended to be delicate, a girl dainty as fine lace, and I didn’t want her to pretend it for so long that one day she believed it.

  Now I carried an understanding of what turned in the ugly duckling’s heart, how he would have rather surrendered himself to that which might destroy him than never touch it at all.

  I would have rather had Blanca wreck me than leave me as I was, my skin echoing with the memory of her hands, my lips prickling with what I had not told her.

  But it was her choice, not mine.

  ROJA

  The moment I knew Blanca had broken her own heart was the moment I knew she’d do anything to win.

  My sister came inside, tears jeweling her eyelashes. She held her lips tight, like she might start sobbing if she parted them.

  Our second cousins had convinced her to give up the boy she loved. And she had done it.

  Part of me reached out to the pain in her, the same part that remembered us pressing leaves between pieces of wax paper and setting miniature pumpkins on our windowsills.

  “Blanca,” I said, her name soft on my tongue.

  She cut me off with “I’m fine” and went upstairs to our room.

  The sharpness in her voice brought me back, hard as the swans’ call.

  The sound of her footsteps left me hollow. Then they faded, the quiet hardening the air.

  I breathed into the stillness falling over the house. I still had one weapon left I hadn’t used. It lay smooth and hidden as a knife in a boot, a way to learn more about Barclay Holt than my sister knew.

  That night, while everyone else slept, I woke. Blanca’s soft snores came from her bed.

  At that moment, it was the only thing keeping me from hating her, the way she never lay still like some sleeping beauty. Her hair tangled and fluffed. She slept with her mouth open, and on really good nights, I could catch her drooling, the sheen of it on her cheek.

  A faint shape crossed the window.

  First, I wrote it off as Blanca’s sleeping reflection.

  But Blanca lay still, while the reflection shivered.

  A swan, perched on a branch, quickened my heartbeat to match the flutter of its wings.

  It watched through the window, pale head turned, but one eye fixed on me.

  In its shining glare, I saw the warning that one day I would have my own wings.

  Julieta’s words were cold water to me, keeping me awake. They all thought the swans would take me.

  I stared back, meeting those ink-drop eyes. I’m not yours yet.

  I went downstairs.

  Liam Holt picked up on the second ring.

  “What do I need to know about your cousin?” I asked. I almost called him Yearling, but stopped myself. To Liam, he was Barclay. I said it over in my head. Barclay, not Yearling. Barclay, not Yearling.

  “What are you talking about?” Liam asked.

  “I don’t know him,” I said. And it was almost true. We’d never spoken in the halls at school or when we passed each other on the sidewalk. “If you want me to find him, you need to tell me about him. I can’t look for someone I know nothing about.”

  “You believe me?” Liam asked, a window opening in his voice. “You believe I saw him out there?”

  I forced a patient sigh. “I don’t know, Liam.” The lie spun in front of me. “But if it was Blanca I’d want someone to believe me.”

  My own words landed back on me, the truth of them stinging.

  Either way, I would lose Blanca. I feared the watered-down story we would become to our former classmates and the women who saw our mother buying bread at the market. We would be a fairy tale whispered in spring or a ghost story told in the early dark of October. They would forget that we were not two sisters in a fable but real girls, with real hearts that lay broken in our chests.

  “What do you want to know?” Liam asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Just tell me about him.”

  I kept polite silence through Liam listing off Barclay’s favorite color (green, same as their grandfather’s), his favorite food (apple pie and cheddar cheese, the same as Tess’s), the way he was afraid of raccoons until he was thirteen.

  I felt the pinch of what a mistake this had been. How far could I get with the fact that, between November and March, he wore the same thing almost every day? (Long-sleeved shirt, jeans, his father’s old jacket that he took from a hall closet and that his father never noticed missing.)

  A question I did not want to ask crawled over my skin.

  “Liam?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you talking to Blanca, too?” I asked. “About finding him?”

  “What?” Liam’s shock sounded so true and startled, I believed it. “No.”

  “Why did you ask me instead of her?”

  His laugh was soft, fuzzing over the line. I cringed at how identical it was to Barclay’s.

  “Tess always used to tell us these stories,” Liam said. “You know, before we started thinking of them as girl stories and didn’t want to hear them anymore. And Barclay was always a lot more interested in the witches than the princesses. He’d want to hear about the nixie of the mill-pond over the little mermaid every time.”

 
“I don’t get it,” I said. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “I just always remembered that,” he said. “You want something done, you go to the witch, not the princess. Not that you and your sister … you know what I mean.”

  Oh, I knew what he meant.

  “It’s supposed to be a compliment,” he said. “It probably didn’t sound that way, but it was.”

  “I know,” I said.

  I hadn’t read “The Nixie of the Mill-Pond,” but I’d flipped past it in Tess’s book, the same one that had “Snow-White and Rose-Red.” I saw the picture of the woman with pondweed in her hair, luring a young man to his death in the water.

  I knew enough about the nixie of the mill-pond to know that she killed, while the little mermaid saved. The little mermaid became sea-foam for love of a prince, while the nixie just stole what she wanted.

  Blanca had started this. She had made us enemies, and still, she would be the yielding, beautiful mermaid, and I would be the girl smelling of blood and pond water, with marsh lights for eyes.

  I didn’t care. If the nixie was the one who survived, she was the one I would become.

  An idea caught and flared in me.

  I had tried to be Blanca, sweet, softhearted Blanca, when instead I needed to be everything Blanca didn’t know how to be.

  Yearling had never wanted the mermaid who would give her heart to a thankless prince and her body up to sea-foam.

  He’d wanted the mermaid who lured men to the shore because she could.

  So this time, when the woods called Yearling back to me, when the feathers and out-of-season blossoms drew him to our door, I crafted my own heart from the frost in the air.

  I didn’t look at him. When he tried talking to me, I studied my own fingernails, bitten down since the last time I’d seen my father.

  Yearling stepped back. “Are you okay?”

  I meant to seem bored and flirtatious. I meant to trace my fingers along a knot in a birch trunk, looking distracted. I wanted to give off the languorous effect of a merciless water sprite, patient, just waiting to take boys like him under.

  But the words I needed didn’t come.

  What drifted back, what found me instead, was the story he’d told me. Snow-White and Rose-Red, two sisters told apart by their colors.

  In the dark, my sister glowed, but in the dark, I was the dark itself. Blanca, bright and fair Blanca, was the moon and all its stars. I was just her background to shimmer against.

  I existed to make her more luminous.

  Without the glow off her, no one ever saw me. Without her, there was no me. Snow-White on her own was still a fairy tale, but Rose-Red, alone, was only half a story. I couldn’t hold the rage of that all on my own anymore.

  It spilled out of me.

  “I’m not my sister,” I said.

  “Okay,” Yearling said, taking the word slow. “I never said you were.”

  “We’re not the same.” I’d meant to use a voice I borrowed from a storybook, a witch who’d traded her heart to be beautiful and fearless. But my words turned out plain, hard, unadorned.

  “I never thought that,” he said.

  “You did,” I said. “Or you wouldn’t have made us part of your grandmother’s story.”

  “I didn’t mean to make you anything,” he said, anger pressing up under his words. “That’s not what that story means.” He stepped back, gauging the distance between us. “What’s going on?”

  “I’m not Blanca,” I said.

  “I know that.”

  “No, you don’t,” I said. “I’m not the soft one. If that’s what you wanted, you should’ve gone for her when you had the chance.”

  Yearling tensed at the sound of my voice, sharp and cold as the hoarfrost silvering the branches. A voice that told him I was not the girl on the floor, afraid of the moon, or the one holding his forearms to help him breathe.

  “What are you doing?” Yearling asked.

  “You like your grandmother’s stories,” I said, coming toward him. “How about the ones they tell about us? How we turn brides into birds. My father planting hearts in our backyard. My mother growing poison in our window boxes. You know those? They’re all true.”

  I kept at him, making him back up. He moved away from me slowly, eyes still on me, cautious.

  I couldn’t look at his brown-edged eye too long. Not because the clouding and blurring was ugly. He thought so—I could tell from how often he let his hair get in front of it—but it wasn’t. I couldn’t look at it too long because it looked like it hurt, and because the brown of it made me hope for things I could not have.

  Brown, the color that made Yearling and me a little bit the same.

  Brown, the color my father had taught me to love.

  “You’re so busy being afraid of your family,” I said, backing him against a tree. “You forgot to be afraid of mine.”

  Your family.

  Those were the words he flinched on.

  “You win,” he said.

  He broke our stare, wincing as he looked away.

  “I don’t know what you wanted here.” He set his hands in his pockets and turned back to the woods. “But whatever it is, you win, you can have it.”

  I laced my fingers together, so neither of my hands would stray into the dark.

  My hands prickled, wanting to reach out to every version of this boy I knew. The yearling bear with burr grass caught in his fur. The boy who’d been fearless in the face of the swans that ruled my nightmares. The one with glass glitter filling his palms.

  I thought I could lure him by showing him my cruelty, my fearless will. But I was neither the selfless mermaid nor the ruthless nixie. I was a girl who would never exist in a fairy tale, not just because of the brown of my body but because of my heart, neither pure enough to be good nor cruel enough to be evil. I was a girl lost in the deep, narrow space between the two forms girls were allowed to take. I was both too fearful and too selfish. I loved in a way that didn’t hold steady like moonlight but flickered like candle flame.

  I wasn’t enough of anything to win the heart of a blue-eyed boy and the right to keep my own skin.

  All I had was the faint, far-off clicking of wing feathers.

  YEARLING

  My hand hitting a banister. A coffee mug knocked off Lynn Ashby’s kitchen table. My shoulder bumping a wall because I didn’t gauge the distance right. Every time I got distracted, every time I was too much in a hurry to adjust for how my eyes were different now, it ended with me crashing into something, the sound of broken ceramic, a tipped-over jar of Grandma Tess’s straight pins.

  Right now it looked like spilled orange juice, missing the glass.

  Grandma Tess heard me swear under my breath.

  “Parallax,” she said, handing me a dishcloth.

  “What?” I asked, mopping up the spill.

  “You know how when you were a little kid you’d hold your thumb out in front of you and make it jump by blinking one eye closed and then the other? That’s parallax. It’s how astronomers measure the distance to the stars. They use the earth’s own orbiting to do it. The greater the parallax, the closer to Earth.”

  “Thanks for the science lesson.”

  “I wasn’t done, smart-ass,” she said. “It’s also part of how our eyes perceive the distance to things in front of us. And now your sense of it isn’t the same as it was.”

  “Yeah, great.”

  “You’ll get used to it.”

  I shoved the weight of my arm into the counter, soaking up the last of the orange juice.

  “That’s some elbow grease you got there,” Grandma Tess said, sitting back down at the kitchen table. “You in a mood?”

  I threw the cloth into the sink.

  “You hungry?” she asked.

  “Not really.”

  “You want apple pie and cheddar cheese?”

  “No.”

  “Hey, if you don’t like me, Lynn is somewhere out on the orchard,” she
said. “You got your pick of two old ladies.”

  I thought of them out there, my grandmother holding a ladder while Lynn twisted apples off the highest branches. I thought of them folding their clothes into the same dresser, forgetting whose mixing bowls were whose, slipping my grandmother’s worn paperbacks alongside Lynn Ashby’s photo albums.

  Something settled into place.

  This was why my family hadn’t wanted me and Liam around Grandma Tess for more than Sunday church.

  They hadn’t liked that she was with Lynn.

  I felt the space between me and my family widen. My grandmother had spent the year after my grandfather died gritting her teeth, trying to pretend the loss of him hadn’t broken her into pieces. She always looked one hard bump away from shattering.

  But they still held Lynn Ashby against her.

  My grandfather would have wanted it for her. Even from how little I knew him, I knew he loved her enough to want that for her. I had seen the pictures. No one caught those kinds of frames on film, those seconds right after laughing, without loving someone. He had loved her, and he wouldn’t have wanted her to be alone.

  “Oh, for God’s sake”—my grandmother’s voice broke into everything I was piecing together—“just go talk to her.”

  “Lynn?” I asked.

  “Roja.” Grandma Tess went to work taking apart her oldest gun, sliding open the action to make sure the magazine was empty. “You can’t even pour orange juice. Go get your head on straight.”

  “It’s nothing to do with her.” I handed her the cleaning oil. “You just said it. I got a bad eye now.”

  “Not bad. Just not like it was before.” She reengaged the action, and then racked it again. “And that girl’s got everything to do with all that orange juice, and you know it.”

  “No.” I tilted my head back, breathing in, trying to smooth down the frustration in my voice because I sure as hell didn’t want Tess being right, not about this. “I don’t. You know what I know? I know I can’t read for more than fifteen minutes without feeling like there’s a screwdriver in my forehead. I know that if I make the spectacular mistake of looking at anything too hard for too long, I feel it for the next couple of hours. I know that about half the time I reach for things, I miss. That is what I know, okay?”