Take a journey through time and genres and discover a past where queer figures live, love and shape the world around them. Seventeen of the best young adult authors across the queer spectrum have come together to create a collection of beautifully written diverse historical fiction for teens.
From a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood set in war-torn 1870s Mexico featuring a transgender soldier, to two girls falling in love while mourning the death of Kurt Cobain, forbidden love in a sixteenth-century Spanish convent or an asexual girl discovering her identity amid the 1970s roller-disco scene, All Out tells a diverse range of stories across cultures, time periods and identities, shedding light on an area of history often ignored or forgotten.
ALL OUT
Edited By
Saundra Mitchell
ANNA-MARIE McLEMORE
NATALIE C. PARKER
NILAH MAGRUDER
MACKENZI LEE
ROBIN TALLEY
MALINDA LO
DAHLIA ADLER
KATE SCELSA
ELLIOT WAKE
SCOTT TRACEY
TESS SHARPE
ALEX SANCHEZ
KODY KEPLINGER
SARA FARIZAN
TESSA GRATTON
SHAUN DAVID HUTCHINSON
TEHLOR KAY MEJIA
For Jim McCarthy.
Thank you for trusting me with your baby.
Contents
Roja by Anna-Marie McLemore
El Bajío, México, 1870
Author’s Note
The Sweet Trade by Natalie C. Parker
Virginia Colony, 1717
And They Don’t Kiss at the End by Nilah Magruder
Maryland, 1976
Burnt Umber by Mackenzi Lee
Amsterdam, 1638
The Dresser & the Chambermaid by Robin Talley
Kensington Palace, September 1726
New Year by Malinda Lo
San Francisco—January 21, 1955
Author’s Note
Molly’s Lips by Dahlia Adler
Seattle—April 10, 1994
The Coven by Kate Scelsa
Paris, 1924
Every Shade of Red by Elliot Wake
England, Late Fourteenth Century
Willows by Scott Tracey
Southwyck Bay, Massachusetts, 1732
The Girl with the Blue Lantern by Tess Sharpe
Northern California, 1849
The Secret Life of a Teenage Boy by Alex Sanchez
Tidewater, Virginia, 1969
Walking After Midnight by Kody Keplinger
Upstate New York, 1952
The End of the World as We Know It by Sara Farizan
Massachusetts, 1999
Three Witches by Tessa Gratton
Kingdom of Castile, 1519
The Inferno & the Butterfly by Shaun David Hutchinson
London, 1839
Healing Rosa by Tehlor Kay Mejia
Luna County, New Mexico, 1933
About the Authors
ROJA
BY
ANNA-MARIE MCLEMORE
El Bajío, México, 1870
They all gave him different names. The authorities, who had been trying for months to catch him, called him El Lobo. The Wolf. La Légion called him Le Loup.
His mother, back in Alsace, had christened him with a girl’s name, though he had since forgiven her for that. It was a name he had trusted me with but that I knew never to speak. The sound of it was too much a reminder of when he’d been too young to fight the hands trying to turn him into a proper demoiselle, forbidding him from running outside because young ladies should not do that. His heart had been a boy’s heart, throwing itself against his rib cage with each set of white gloves for mass.
I called him his true name, Léon, the one he’d chosen himself. None of this was strange to me, a boy deciding his own name. The only strange thing was the fact that he knew mine.
No one outside our village called me or anyone else in my family by our real names. They worried that letting our names onto their tongues would leave them sick. The rumors said our hearts were dangerous as a coral snake’s bite. They carried the whisper that the women in my family could murder with nothing but our rage. They pointed to our hair, red as our skin was brown, and insisted el Diablo himself had dyed it with the juice of devil’s berries, to mark us as his.
Abuela had told me our rage was a thing we must tame. Though everyone else feared that our rage might kill them, the lives it more often took were ours. Poison slipped from our hearts and into our blood, she said. The venom spread to our fingers and the ends of our hair.
But even she found a little joy in it. She flaunted it. So we would have enough to eat, she taught me to crush red dye from the beetles that infested the nopales. They were pests, ravaging the cactus pads, but if caught they made a stain so deep red we could sell it. My grandmother even tied tiny woven baskets to the nopales, luring the insects to make nests.
That only added to the rumors. Las Rojas, the grandmother and granddaughter whose hearts blazed so red it showed in their hair, and who made the same color and sold it with stained fingertips. We heard whispers as we passed churches, families drawing back from us, afraid we could kill them with a glare.
Now, as I stood in front of Deputy Oropeza’s polished desk, I wished all the stories were true.
“You want El Lobo released?” Oropeza rested his boots on the smooth-finished wood.
The toes of his boots, long and pointed as a snake’s tongue, narrowed and curved up toward his shins. They had become the fashion of rich men, who now wore them not only for celebrations but in the streets, the forks nipping at anyone who got in their way.
“Tell me you’ve come here as a joke,” he said. “Tell me one of my friends sent you to see if I would be taken in. Was it Calvo?”
His hand flashed through the air. I flinched, thinking he might strike me. But he was halting me from speaking.
“No, don’t tell me,” he said. “It was Acevedo, wasn’t it?” He clapped his hands. “I swear on the gospel, that man stops breathing if he isn’t trying to trick someone.”
If Oropeza attended church, if he worshipped anyone but himself, he’d know better than to swear on la Biblia. But I kept silent.
“How much did he pay you to do this?” Oropeza’s boots thudded on the tile floor. “Because I’ll double it if you help me play my own little trick on him.”
The rage in me shuddered and trembled. It felt like it was flickering off my eyelashes.
“No one sent me,” I said.
The richest men in El Bajío couldn’t have paid me to be here. But I had begged every official who would see me.
Most I found by stopping them in the street. The ones who listened bowed their heads to tell me there was nothing they could do, not for any Frenchman, least of all El Lobo.
The ones who didn’t want to hear me—Senator Ariel, Governor Quintanar—shoved me to make me move. They backed away from me like I was crafted out of mud, as though if they came too close I might dirty them.
I was not a girl who could ask for things. I was not powder and perfume and lace-trimmed fans. The kind of women who could wheedle favors from wealthy men wore dresses in the purples and deep pinks of cactus fruit. They wore silk and velvet ribbons tied as necklaces. The owners of
blue agave farms sent them sapphire and emerald rings.
They were not girls in plain huipils.
But Deputy Oropeza had agreed to see me. Hope had bloomed in the dark space beneath my heart. Yes, he wore the pointed boots of rich men, but he hadn’t gotten into the same competitions the others had, driving one another to have boots made with toes as long as I was tall. Maybe there was reason in him.
“Please,” I said now.
The war had ended. But the hills still lay scorched and barren, and Léon had been captured as an enemy Frenchman. Un francés. And now a blindfold and a bullet waited for him at dusk.
“He didn’t even want to fight with them,” I said. “He deserted.”
The things Léon had seen had driven him to betray his own country. I hated la Légion for what they had done to Léon. He hated them for letting their soldiers loose on this land. They raided villages, throwing women down on the earth floors of their homes, killing the men and keeping locks of their hair as trophies.
And those were only the things he had been willing to tell me, as though I myself had not known families killed or scarred by the French uniform. But he didn’t see the brown of my skin and consider me less than he was. He did not see the red of my hair and decide I was wicked. He saw me as something soft, a girl he did not want to plague with nightmares.
By the time Léon deserted, he had grown to hate not only la Légion but his own country, for starting this war in the name of unsettled debts, and for doing it while los Estados Unidos were too deep in their own civil war to intervene. So Léon had done the small but devastating things that earned him the name Le Loup. At night, he strolled into French camps wearing his stolen uniform. The blue coat with gold-fringed epaulettes. The red pants that tapered to cuffs at the ankles. The stiff yellow collar that rubbed against his neck when he nodded at the watchmen as though he belonged there.
He stole guns, throwing them into rivers. He set horses loose, driving them toward villages too poor to buy them. He pilfered maps and parchments, leaving them burning for the men to find. The rumors said he’d even called wolves from the hills, scattering the camps. But when I’d asked him about that, he only smiled.
Now the memory of Léon’s smile stung so hard I looked for the cut of it on my skin.
“He was working against them,” I told Oropeza.
Oropeza looked out through the silk curtains and onto the rows of curling grapevines.
“Then he is a traitor,” Oropeza said. “He is not even loyal to his own country. What would make you think he would be loyal to you?”
He turned his gaze to the square of tile where I stood in my huipil. In that moment, I saw myself as Oropeza must have seen me.
Men like Oropeza would never consider me worth looking at. I was short, wide hipped, a girl from the villages. I had only ever been told I was pretty by my abuela.
And Léon. My lobo.
Oropeza laughed. “The little campesina thinks el francés loves her?”
Campesina. I knew what that word meant to him, how he wielded it as both insult and fact. It was a word men like Oropeza kept ready on their tongues, a way to show their judgment both of where I had come from and the shape of my body. To them, my height and form marked me. A peasant’s shape, men like Oropeza called it, a shape made for work close to the ground.
“All he told you was lies,” Oropeza said. “He might have thought you were a little bit interesting.” He gestured at my hair. “A distraction.”
The salt of my own tears stung.
“One day you will thank me for what I’ve saved you from,” Oropeza said.
I set my back teeth together. He considered me and everyone like me a child. Men like him thought they had more of God in their hearts than we did, as though they held it in the lightness of their skin, or, for a few of them, in their eyes as blue as the seas their ancestors had crossed to claim this land.
Oropeza lurched forward, clutching his chest as though it had cramped. And then his stomach, as though he’d had a portion of bad wine.
I stepped back.
The venom in me, carried in my family’s blood, was spilling out. It had built in me, spun and strengthened by my rage. Then it had flowed into the air between me and Oropeza until he was sick with it.
This was the poison of Las Rojas, the venom our rage could become.
I kept myself back, pressing my tongue behind my teeth to stop myself.
I could not let the poison in my blood make Oropeza sick. If he’d heard the stories about my family and realized they were more truth than superstition, he would have me dragged into the street and killed as a bruja.
One of Oropeza’s men showed me out. My steps led me over the polished tile, and then out into Oropeza’s front gardens.
Léon had stayed for me. He had kept himself here, caught between la Légion he’d deserted and this country that considered him an enemy. And he’d been taken for it.
He’d never had the stomach for la Légion. He’d told me the night I found him, once I’d given him enough water for him to speak and he’d come out of the fever enough to make sense with his words.
He’d only joined because it had given him a way out of Alsace. He’d been told that la Légion would never check on the name he’d been born with, the name that would give away more than he ever wanted anyone to know of the body he kept beneath his clothes. The chest he bound down. The shoulders and back he worked hard enough that they could take as much weight as any other man’s.
And la Légion hadn’t checked. They did not want to know. They preferred their légionnaires forget who they’d been.
He could take the fighting, and even the beatings they gave les légionnaires to harden their spirits. But he could not stand how his régiment let the men work out their rage on village women. How they killed brothers or husbands who protested.
Léon had spoken up enough that they considered it rebellion. So each night they beat him in a way they called les couleurs. Blood on one cheek, bruises on the other, the pale, untouched stripe of his nose and lips between. The colors of the French flag, meant to put the allegiance back in him.
The night I found Léon, he’d worn those colors. It was the first time he’d tried running, and they’d caught him. So they’d tied him to one of the acacia trees that bloomed yellow each spring. His back against the thin trunk. His wrists and ankles bound behind it so he could not stand. All he could do was kneel.
They had told him that they may or may not come back for him, and if they did, it would be because they were curious if the wolves had eaten him.
That night, una vieja from our village had sent me into the woods. She asked me to bring her an oyamel branch from the fir tree she always held a little of as she prayed. I only noticed Léon because, at the sound of brush crackling under my feet, he lifted his head. His forehead shone with sweat. And through his fever, the thing I would later come to know as his charm seemed a kind of delirium, a madness. He’d mumbled a few words in French before saying, “If I’d known a beautiful woman would be calling on me, I would have made myself presentable.”
I unbound him and brought him home not because I was kind. I brought him home, holding him up as his eyes opened and shut, because if it had not been for the mercy of the other families in our village, my abuela would not have had a proper burial. I could not have done it myself. My heart was so weighted with losing her I was sure it would pull me into whatever hollow in the ground I made for her.
So I brought home this tall, underfed boy with hair so blond the moon made it look white. I boiled water and made pozole, to show God I was grateful, and that there was mercy left in me.
But there was no mercy in men like Oropeza, and Ariel, and Quintanar.
I had failed Léon. I had lost him. And now, at dusk, when a shot rang through the air, I screamed into the sound.
I screamed in
to the wind bringing me the rattling laugh of the men who killed Léon. I sobbed into the silhouettes of mesquite and acacia, and into the darkening blue of the sky.
Still screaming, I crossed myself, saying a prayer for the soul of Léon Bellamy.
Léon, the boy who made me laugh when he tripped over rolling his r’s. Léon, who had startled the village with his eyes, so pale gray that at night they looked silver, and his hair, light as bleached linen. Léon, who had won them over with his wonder about armadillos, how the animal rolled itself into a ball of plate armor.
Léon, the boy who had put his mouth to my ear and told me the brown of my skin made him think of wild deer roaming the woods where he was born.
Even in this moment, opening under me like a break in the earth, Abuela would have told me to find some small thing to thank God for. There was one, just one, I could get my fingers around.
No one, not la Légion, not Oropeza, ever knew Léon as anything but a boy. They did not know that his mother had christened him with a girl’s name. They did not know that he had joined la Légion less out of patriotism and more for the chance to live as who he was. If they had, Oropeza would have thrown it at me, mocked me for it. He would have made clear what he thought of us, Léon living among the other soldiers with his bound-down chest, me lifting my chin in the street as though I were the equal of the powder-pale women in their escaramuza dresses.
But even this small mercy broke in me. All of it broke.
First I had lost my grandmother, made sick from her rage over what this war had taken. She always warned me not to let my rage kill me, but in the end her own had spread its venom through her.
They said this war was over, even as women wept over their stoves and into their sewing. Even now when an Alsatian boy had just been blindfolded and shot.
My rage felt so hot it would singe away my smallest veins. There were so many empty places where everything I had lost once fit. Now there were only the dustless, unfaded patches where all I loved had been.
There was nothing left. Yes, there were the women who had loved me and my abuela; my abuela had fed them when they were sick and prayed over them when they bore children. There were even the ones who had taken to Léon like he was a stray. But now they only reminded me of those empty places.
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All Out--The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens throughout the Ages Page 1
