by Holly Black
The temperature dropped forty degrees. Peony woke up growling and pushed against my side, baring her teeth at Rory. “Don’t go there, Max,” he said, voice like icicles breaking, and stood up.
Peony coughed and bayed and struggled while I held her back, me shocked, babbling, “I’m sorry, Rory! I’m sorry!”
“Fucker. Just don’t go there.”
Peony stayed with me when Rory stalked away. She howled once, like a broken wolf, and then snuggled up close to tell me I was safe with her.
Just a goddamn minute. That never happened.
The afternoon before the solstice party on the community beach, I was nervous like you’d expect. It wasn’t just the other kids, Rory’s old friends who he’d want to have fun with instead of me. It was the grownups, who I’d been introduced to, most of them, but didn’t know, and if they thought Little Dad was Big Dad’s fag-spic little jumped-up friend, what did that make me? Little Dad warned me he planned to get drunk and he wanted both me and Big Dad watching him like hawks. Big Dad said nobody would say anything and we’d head home right after the fireworks, and then he said, “I’m sorry, Max, Stevie. We can’t skip it, really we can’t. I wish we could.” It was Ackles Lake and he was the only Ackles left.
Then Rory came by and said he wanted to show me something. So pretty—he was so pretty and cheerful and nice, so I pretended to myself again that the time he scared his own dog into protecting me never happened. We went to his house, his and his mom’s, which was smaller than ours but newer and decorated (scare quotes). We went upstairs to his bedroom. I hadn’t seen it before but it was just a bedroom and Rory slept on a twin bed like me except he hadn’t made his up again this morning. (Group-home discipline.) He sat on the bed, beckoned me to sit beside him, and pulled his laptop out from under a pillow, flipped up the lid. It had been sleeping.
“Oh, that’s not it,” Rory said, x-ing out the browser window, but I knew he’d meant me to see it. “Just a second.”
I’d seen it. I’d seen the Boston Globe On-Line Archive logo and the big, black, bold headline of the old article he’d paid to access. Hub teen not to be charged in death.
“Here we go.”
He’d brought up his picture viewer. I didn’t know what I was seeing right away as he flipped from one photo to the next to the next, because it wasn’t possible. Me. In my private clearing in the woods. All my clothes off and my dick hard. My dick in my blurred hand. Me watching my hard dick shoot white stuff four feet across the clearing, my mouth making an O and my eyes stupid. Me fallen to my knees, staring at the goop on my fingers, putting them in my mouth, my eyes still stupid.
“Hot,” Rory said.
He closed the laptop and put it away. He put his hands on me. He put his mouth on mine. There wasn’t time to feel sick. I wasn’t even there until he brought his hard dick out and put my hand on it. Then I was. Oh, I was. So very there for just a little while.
Way back. Way way back.
The group home.
Esteban and Stuart, the little guy and the big guy, had been visiting me for a while. They’d taken me shopping, bought me things I begged them not to make me take back to the home, clothes and books and a video-game system, because the other kids would steal or break them. They’d taken me for excursions—the Museum of Science, the Arnold Arboretum, a water park in New Hampshire (most fun I’d ever had in all my life ever). They’d had me overnight to their apartment where there was a bedroom they said was mine, just mine, only mine, and I could ask them not to come in and they wouldn’t.
“Those fags aren’t going to adopt you, fag,” my roommate said. “Precious little orphan fag. They’ll read your file. They’ll never adopt you.”
I wanted to beat him up because I believed him, I wanted to kill him because he was right, but I didn’t. I didn’t. I didn’t. I was evil—evil—but I didn’t kill my stinking turd of a roommate.
The group-home Mom (scare quotes) said, “Don’t get your hopes up, Aaron. It looks good but I’ve seen ’em back out before.” I didn’t kill her either.
My case-worker, who was the only one I ever liked, said, “I shouldn’t tell you but I know you and you need to be prepared. I think today’s going to be the day.”
My dads forever and ever said, “Aaron, we’ve come to love you so much. Will you be our son?”
Wait. What.
“They said he killed himself,” Rory said afterwards, wiping his lips with one hand, his voice perfectly steady. “My dad. When he was fired, before they could arrest him. But it wasn’t him. You know. I got such a rush doing it.”
Now. Nownownow.
The fireworks buried under the bonfire on the beach exploded. People started screaming. I thought I heard Ms McDougall’s voice screaming. I thought I heard Peony yelp in pain, then bay, and my stomach knotted up. I thought I heard my big dad howl and my little dad shout, “Stuart! Stu! No! Stu, where’s Max? Where’s our boy?”
“Yeah,” Rory said.
“Where’s our son?” my big dad shouted. “Stevie, where’s Max?”
“Dammit,” Rory said. “Fuck. Bastards, bastards. Smug happy dad bastards.”
So cold. I felt so cold, so slow, while something fizzed like sparklers in my belly. He wasn’t my friend, he’d never really been my friend. Like handsome Ramiro wasn’t my friend, or handsome inside. Like my mom. “You don’t get to mess with my dads, Rory,” I said, real low. “I won’t let you hurt my dads anymore.” Then—I knew what I was doing now—I let the hurting sickness go. I didn’t have to touch him, he didn’t have to be hitting me like Ramiro, throwing me around my mom’s apartment, breaking my nose and my cheekbone and my arm and four ribs. I let the sick go and the pretty boy on the rowboat’s other bench who wasn’t pretty inside made a shocked little breathy noise. Like he hadn’t really figured it all out. When Rory stopped breathing, I didn’t feel a thing except flat, empty. It was a lie, another lie, about the rush. The oars slapped into the water.
Then I jumped into the lake and started swimming to shore, to that poor wounded loyal crying dog who needed a hug and my dads, who needed to hug me because I was so cold. My big and little dads. Forever and ever and ever.
The Queen of Knives
Georgina Bruce
Mother tied the crimson school tie at Eva’s throat, and turned her around to face the hallway mirror.
“There,” she said. She patted Eva’s shoulders. “Ready for big school.”
The mirror was too grand for the apartment: tall enough to reach the ceiling, and framed in tarnished gold. Eva knew that she must be careful not to smear the glass or chip the frame, as it had been passed down her family, from Mother to Daughter, and so it would belong to her one day. It reflected the bland hallway and Mother’s diffident, thin body; the scarlet and gold rug peeling from the floorboards; and everything else, faithful as a mirror should be. But it did not reflect Eva. In her place was someone else, someone who called herself the Other. The Other what, Eva did not know. The Other Eva, she supposed. So alike they were, almost identical. But the Other was not Eva. Around her form, a silver aura sparked and glinted with many shards of metal, and the flash of silver blades. There was metal in her eyes, too. She had no intention of going quietly to school dressed in that stiff uniform, to sit in a row with her hands folded and recite from a boring book of letters. She would think of something better for Eva to do.
“You look very smart,” said Mother, not quite managing a smile. “Shall we take a picture for Daddy?”
The Other smirked at Eva. They both knew Mother was pretending, playing at Happy Families. Father had not been home for days—the last time he had been there, he and Mother had screamed at one another for hours. Eva didn’t miss him. She barely thought of him at all, except to remember his penknife with the mother-of-pearl handle; the penknife he had let her play with once. Only once, and then never again. But she had made good use of it, made her first cut.
“Let’s take a picture of you, Mummy,” said Eva.
/> Eva watched her Mother flinch and turn away from the mirror. Mother didn’t like to look at herself anymore. Her pretty scar shone white; it had grown whiter, Eva noticed. It pulled the skin of her cheek tightly around it, dragging the eyelid down: a gouge from eye to lip.
The Other said, She’s scared.
Eva replied, “Mother is the Queen of Knives.”
“Oh no, Eva. We are not having this crap! You’re starting big school today! It’s a new start.” Mother pulled Eva away from the mirror, turned her bodily in the direction of the front door. “Let’s go.”
Mother kept a whole world hidden away from Eva. The Other knew it, and taunted Eva about it often.
Don’t you want to know about blood? The Other said.
But Mother had hidden all the knives and locked them away in a secret box, and she wore the key to the box around her neck all the time, even while she slept.
School was not interesting. Eva had wondered what it would be like, had guessed something much like this, and when it turned out she was right, she was immediately bored. Apparently she was expected to endure this for the next several years. Some of the other children cried when their mothers left them at the school gate, and some of the mothers cried too, and waited outside the railings, putting their faces against the bars to watch the children line up by the door. But Eva and her Mother had parted casually, like a pair of acquaintances leaving a party at the same time, and when Eva turned around in her line to wave at her, Mother had already driven away.
It might have been interesting, had there been something for Eva to do. She could read and write perfectly well, but there were no proper books in her classroom, only letters and pictures. There wasn’t anything to do at school, Eva quickly realised, except sit quietly and try not to pee your pants. That was the main thing the teachers talked about: how you had to raise your hand if you needed the toilet, not to hold on until it was too late. Probably the teachers were always cleaning up pee. Two children in her class wet themselves that morning.
At lunchtime, Eva sat alone. The dinner lady tried to coax her, telling her not to be shy, but Eva explained that she would rather sit by herself. Then she took a shiny green apple from her bag and, ever so politely, asked the dinner lady for a sharp knife with which to cut it.
The dinner lady laughed. “Daft child. What are your teeth for? Bite it!”
“But my teeth aren’t sharp,” said Eva, and she looked so sad that the dinner lady laughed again.
Eva made sure to sit at the back for all her classes. Because she was quiet and continent, it was easy to escape teacherly attention. Late in the afternoon, she finally managed to prise out the blade from her pencil sharpener, and used it to carve her name in her forearm. The best bit was the crimson blood beading on the silver edge, before it ran free. She cut lines down her chest too, and the teacher didn’t notice until it was time to go home and Eva stood up with the others, her school shirt ragged and red.
The Other said blood was her mother tongue. Eva wanted to learn. Every day, she sat in front of the mirror in the hallway, crossed her legs, and tried to understand what the Other was saying.
The Other said, But how can you understand without a knife?
Eva’s Mother should never have tried to hide the secret of the blood. She should not have locked away the knives, the blades, the razors. But Mother was so careful now, since Father had given Eva the penknife. It had been just the one time. (”Once was enough,” Mother had screamed at Father, and Father had screamed back, “It was an accident! She’s just a little girl!”)
Mother never forgot to put the knives away and lock the box. She never took the key from around her neck, and although Eva watched and waited with great patience, Mother was more vigilant than she.
I’ll tell you the stories. But their true telling is in blood. You must have a blade if you want to speak the language.
“Tell me anyway,” said Eva.
Father came home but it wasn’t for good. He came for his clothes and books, which he threw carelessly all together into one big suitcase on the floor. Eva stood in the doorway of her parents’ bedroom to watch. Mother sat on the bed, straining towards him, as if she wanted to grab him but was holding herself back. Her scar glowed white in the lamplight.
“You’ll come and live with me,” Father said to Eva. “As soon as I’ve got the place ready. There’s a bedroom for you. You can help me paint it. And we’ll visit Mummy a lot. If you want to.”
Mother said, “She can’t live with you. You’re not safe with her. You’re not responsible.”
“Don’t start on this again. She’s just a child. A little girl, for God’s sake.” Father threw some shirts into the suitcase.
Mother twisted her hands in her lap. “Let’s not have this conversation now.”
“Let’s not have it at all.” He flipped the suitcase lid over, and zipped it all around. “I’m done.”
“Take her, then,” said Mother, quietly. “Don’t leave me with her.”
He looked at her face, and flinched. (It was the scar, Eva thought. He didn’t like it.) “God. You really are messed up, aren’t you?” He opened his mouth to say something more, then closed it again. He looked at Eva.
Eva lowered her eyes and said, “Daddy, where are you going?”
Father ruffled Eva’s hair. “It’s just for a couple of days, sweetheart.”
That didn’t answer her question, but Eva knew better than to act smart in front of her Father. Her Father, who had once handed over the mother-of-pearl knife with its sharp, gleaming blade.
She started to cry. “I don’t want you to go, Daddy.” He leaned down to her and she flung her arms around his neck and said, “Can I have your penknife, Daddy? I need it so I won’t forget you.”
“You see?” Mother said. She rose up from the bed and pushed past them, into the hallway. “You see?”
Apparently the other children had been very upset. There had been phone calls to the school, and phone calls to Mother and Father, too. Instead of going back to school, Eva stayed at home with her Mother. Mostly, Mother stayed in her bedroom, watching television and talking on the phone. Sometimes she raised her voice, and then Eva knew she was talking to her Father, or to the school. “Take her,” she would say. “You have to take her.” After the shouting, she would cry.
Eva sat in front of the hallway mirror.
“Tell me a story,” she said.
The Queen of Knives had many fine scars.
Eva pulled at the scabs on her arms and chest. Would they become fine scars?
The Queen of Knives had so many scars that her skin was shiny. She even had scars on her tongue, lots of them, all crisscrossed, because her words themselves were razor sharp. She knew everything about blood, and her own blood was full of stories. If you spilled her blood, you would know all the stories too.
A thin red trickle oozed from one of Eva’s scabs. “What about the princess?”
The princess doesn’t know anything yet. She won’t know anything until she is the Queen. It passes from Mother to Daughter, in the blood.
There were many stories. Eva began to sit in the hallway all day, from morning until night, and even to sleep there. The first time she lay down to sleep on the rug, she knew that she would wake up in her own bed in the morning. She could almost feel her Mother’s arms lifting her, and carrying her to bed in the middle of the night. But the next morning she woke, cold and stiff, in the hallway.
After that, Eva ignored her Mother completely. Mother told her to move, to dress, to get up and wash and go out to play, but Eva simply would not obey. Mother seemed more nervous now that Father was gone. She would stand at the end of the hallway, watching Eva, holding the key around her neck and twisting it round and round, so much so that Eva would look up and wait for the key to twist right off its chain and into her hands, though it never did.
Father didn’t come back. He called Eva, explained it was better if she stayed with Mother for now. Too much change would
be difficult for both of them.
He means you’ll find the knives in his apartment. He’s scared.
“I don’t care anyway,” Eva said. But she did care about the knives at her Father’s apartment, and wondered if she would ever get to see them. She wished she could live with her Father. He would let her have the knives, like he let her have his penknife, that one time.
Mother stayed in her bedroom every day. When Eva pressed her ear to the door, she heard nothing. She might have wanted to go in and put a hand on her Mother’s face, to comfort her—but since the scar, she was not allowed to touch Mother’s face, or to touch her Mother at all. Before, there had even been kisses sometimes, Eva remembered, but she didn’t miss those so much. She just wished she could touch the scar, even once, to trace the cut she’d made.
The Other was contemptuous.
She is a weak Queen. Weak, blunt, and bloodless. A Queen ought to be strong. A Queen ought to be like a steel blade.
“Am I weak?”
Almost as useless as your Mother.
“How can I be strong, like a steel blade?”
Blood makes you strong.
“Mother is really the Queen?”
Mother has forgotten what it is to be Queen.
Eva knew it was true, because she had heard the singing in her own blood. Blood was power, and it made you strong. Mother had forgotten, and she was weak.
Make her remember.
But how could she remember without a knife?
Mother must not have heard the mirror break, because when Eva crept into her bedroom, she was still asleep on the bed, curled up like a baby.
Everything was in the blood. The past, the future, the Queen’s power: all secrets of the blood. Even love was there, a mother’s love, vibrant as a jewel. Eva saw it, pulsing under Mother’s skin; saw it, and speared it with the glittering point of mirror shard. She pushed her small fingers into the wound in Mother’s neck, and scooped out trails of scarlet. Like her Mother had done before her, and her Mother before that, and on and on, through time: she painted a crown of blood over her head.
Eva held up the shard of mirror, and for the first time she saw herself reflected as she truly was. Around her form, a silver aura sparked and glinted with metal, and the flash of silver blades. There was metal in her eyes, too. She wore a cloak of blood, and her hair stood high and stiff, and red like rubies.
