A young man was pacing in front of her, talking and gesturing.
“I just don’t understand how long I have to wait for the world to catch up,” he was saying.
Alice came in and motioned for the two of us to take a seat. Vivie led me over to two chairs in the corner.
“These things take time, Hem,” Gertrude was saying. She smiled at us. She didn’t look like a woman who smiled much, but when she did it was like a glorious secret. As if maybe you were the only person she had ever smiled for.
“Anderson says I’m a genius.” The young man was sweating. He hadn’t noticed us enter. “Scott says it, you say it, so why can’t I sell any books?”
“Yes, Hem, I told you that you were a genius and you’ve never let me forget it,” Gertrude said. “Now, if you don’t mind, I have some other guests to entertain.”
The man stopped pacing and looked around the room as if he didn’t believe her.
“Oh,” he said when he saw us.
“Come back tomorrow and you can tell me more about your genius,” Gertrude said, waving him away with her hand.
“I can’t stay?”
Gertrude shook her head.
“Definitely not, genius. Ladies only.”
He stood there for a moment, not quite believing that he was being told to leave, then turned around and walked out of the room.
“Sorry about that,” Gertrude said, turning to us. “Ernest is a sweet kid, but he doesn’t know when to just shut up and listen.”
Vivie nodded, as if she understood.
“So,” Gertrude said. “This is Amandine?”
“Dean,” I said.
“Vivie has told us a lot about you,” Gertrude said.
Alice settled down in a chair across the room and began knitting. These women were different from the girls holding hands that I saw in the cafés. Gertrude and Alice seemed to exude a sense of living history with their black clothes and severe expressions. In her corner, Alice was weaving something into her knitting that looked like feathers.
“I’ve heard about you, too,” I said to Gertrude. “I mean, everyone knows about you.” This seemed like the wrong thing to say and I found myself blushing.
“Have you read my work?” Gertrude asked me.
I looked to Vivie, not sure if I should tell the truth.
“A little,” I said.
“Well, it’s not really meant for the layman,” Gertrude said. “So I wouldn’t blame you if you hadn’t read it. It’ll become much clearer...after.” She smiled again, and even in this somber room, with Alice knitting her mysterious feathers, I found myself wanting to trust Gertrude Stein completely. I saw why Vivie spent so much time here. Gertrude’s attention felt like an honor that was not given lightly.
“Vivie tells us that you’ve developed some unusual symptoms,” Gertrude said, all business now.
“I get foggy,” I said. “That’s what we call it. It’s better some days.”
“With the moon,” Alice piped up from the corner.
Gertrude waved away the suggestion.
“They will determine,” Gertrude said to her. “Do you know when it started?” she asked, turning back to me.
“About a year ago,” I said.
“Around the time that your brother did not come back from the front lines,” Gertrude said.
I looked at Vivie. Evidently she had told them everything.
“Yes,” I said.
Gertrude got up and went over to a desk. She took out a piece of paper and wrote something down on it.
“Vivie, are you able to get her to the eleventh arrondissement this Friday at midnight?”
Vivie looked at me.
“Yes,” she said. “We’ll have to sneak out, but we can do it.”
She looked so sure of herself, so excited for us to be the ones receiving instructions from this formidable woman.
“What will we be doing there?” I asked.
Gertrude walked over to us and handed Vivie a piece of paper with an address on it.
“Meeting the coven, of course,” she said.
* * *
Vivie met me in the alley next to my apartment building at eleven thirty that Friday. My mother and father had been asleep for hours. I tiptoed past the cat and simply locked the door behind me. I ran down the stairs, feeling free of the fog for now, my mind actually clear for the first time in days. The stairs below me were just stairs, contained in their own shape. The street outside looked only like itself.
Vivie was leaning up against a wall, her hat tipped down over her eyes. I was breathless when I got to her, but seeing her silhouetted in the dark against this midnight street, I wasn’t sure if it was from exertion or excitement.
She looked up when she heard me. She looked worried for a moment, then she smiled.
“I thought you might not come,” she said.
“How could I miss the coven?”
And then for a second I thought that maybe this was it, this was the moment when Vivie would kiss me. Or when I would be bold enough to kiss her. Now, in this darkness, and with the promise of more magic to come.
But she just took my hand again.
“You ready?” she asked.
I nodded.
* * *
Vivie had brought money for a taxi, knowing that the metro wasn’t safe for two girls traveling alone at night, and that any fogginess might slow us down. I didn’t ask her where she got the money. Probably the same place she got her hat. Her older brother, who indulged this mini version of himself with whatever she asked for. Her brother, whose bad eyesight would always protect him from having to fight. Even if he had wanted to go to war, he had to stay home, safe, with his family.
Vivie hailed a taxi and when we got in I could already feel the fog returning. I had been naive to think that the excitement of this night might banish it. The glow of the streetlamps outside the taxi window took on colors and expanded, refusing to stay in place.
“You okay?” Vivie asked as the taxi started moving along the Boulevard Saint-Michael.
“I’m okay,” I said. I looked up at the sky. The moon was full.
* * *
The taxi stopped at a gate on a particularly deserted block and we got out. Ornate stonework crowned buildings that resisted the small amount of light that emanated from the wrought iron streetlamps. The shadows of cats stalking their prey moved among the cobblestones.
I had never been to this part of Paris before, and definitely not to this street, which seemed to stretch back in time hundreds of years.
We stood together in front of the large iron gate and looked at the oversize door knocker.
“Do you think they’re really witches?” I asked.
“Only one way to find out,” Vivie said.
She raised the knocker, then dropped it, letting it ring out across the small courtyard. The taxi had driven down the street and turned off at the corner. We were alone. No other cars. Only quiet and the watching cats. And then the gate opened.
* * *
A young woman in black mourning clothes like the ones that Gertrude had worn locked the gate behind us and led us through the courtyard. A stone arch brought us to another interior courtyard, surrounded by the large fortresslike building, a spot that couldn’t be seen from the outside.
I held tight to Vivie’s hand.
In the center of the interior courtyard there was a circle of women, also in black. They stood as another young woman walked in a formation around them, holding a burning bundle of twigs.
The girl who had led us this far turned to us.
“Wait here,” she said.
She went to the center of the circle, where a group of candles were set up on an altar, and began to light them.
I looked at Vivie. She stared wide-eyed at the circle o
f women. The light from the candles was illuminating something perfect and unrepeatable in each of their faces. A few wore cloaks with hoods pulled up around their heads, their faces hidden in shadow.
The one girl finished swirling smoke around the circle, the other finished lighting the candles and one woman began to speak.
“We thank the local spirits for allowing us to gather here tonight, to honor our moon and to purge ourselves of that which no longer serves us.”
Vivie and I watched from outside the circle as the witches conducted their ceremony. A wind kicked up as the hour moved past midnight, and I noticed, as if it were a faraway fact about someone else, that my fog from earlier had lifted. The candles flickered without auras. The breeze was made of air and not water.
Finally the woman who had spoken first turned to us.
“We have visitors tonight, sisters,” she said to the group. “Come forward.”
Vivie and I stepped toward the circle, and it opened to make space for us.
“You are in need of our help?” the woman asked.
“Dean needs you,” Vivie said. She seemed to want to say more, but something stopped her, perhaps the severe look on the woman’s face as she turned to me questioningly.
“Is that true?” she asked.
“I guess so,” I said.
The woman closed her eyes then, tilted her head up toward the full moon, which seemed to be getting closer somehow, as if it would like to join this unusual gathering.
“A rose is a rose is a rose,” the witch woman intoned. The wind was picking up around her. She opened her eyes. “On the full moon we give up that which no longer serves us,” she said, “so that we may clear a path for the energy of existence to move through us freely. This is not a cure, but a reclaiming of self.”
She took a step toward me.
“What do you need to rid yourself of?” she asked me.
I let go of Vivie’s hand and stood on my own then. The air stilled, and from somewhere nearby I could smell jasmine. Vivie had brought me here, and I may not have believed in magic before this night, but I wanted to now.
“Doubt,” I said. My voice was strong when I said it and it surprised me. I hadn’t known what I was going to say before it came out.
The witch smiled.
“Very good,” she said. She came over to me and handed me a piece of straw. “Here is your doubt,” she said. “Burn it.”
I took the straw and stepped forward toward the largest of the center candles, a white pillar of wax. I let it touch the flame. It started to burn and I dropped it into the light.
Your brother’s pain is not your own.
The words wrapped themselves around my ear, becoming my entire existence for just a moment. No one had spoken, but I heard the words as clearly as if I had said them myself.
Let go of that which cannot be held.
In that moment, something seemed to take off from me, as if a large bird had been perched on my shoulders and had now been released back into the heavens where it belonged. My body became so light I thought it might merge with the air and blow away.
I was light. Everything was light.
Then one of the witches was laughing, and then they were all laughing, and then they were running, one by one, away from the candlelight, back out of the courtyard.
I looked to Vivie, whose eyes were so bright with the reflection of the flame. I wondered if she had seen it, too. The thing that flew away from me. I wondered if she had heard those words.
“Where are they going?” I asked the one black-cloaked figure who remained.
“We purge through fire, then purify through water,” she said. She took down the hood of her cloak and revealed the unmistakable face of the Presence. Madame Stein herself.
“Follow me,” she said. “A swim under the moon binds the magic.” She looked at Vivie. “Although there are other ways to bind a magic spell.”
She smiled and walked toward the place where the others had gone, back out and under an archway. In the distance, I could hear splashing and laughing.
“Should we follow?” I asked and turned to Vivie, but I barely got the last word out before she was kissing me, a desperate, perfect kiss that caught me off balance and pushed me backward. She caught me and held me tightly to her, my body filling with moonlight, a cleansing fire that spread out from my heart and into every part of me.
Vivie pulled away and looked at me, her eyes searching for something.
“Okay?” she asked.
I smiled.
How could she not know how sure I was of her?
I took her hand and pulled her in the direction of the witches.
* * * * *
EVERY SHADE OF RED
BY
ELLIOT WAKE
England, Late Fourteenth Century
The first time we kissed, our bodies bronzed in the emberlight, our skin a mosaic of shadow and fire, Robin cupped my face and said against my lips, “I’m not like other boys, Will.”
It was the first kiss of many. I would remember his words, years later, before the last.
But I never actually heard his voice.
Speech was touch and sight was without sound after the illness: a pulse of air stirring my hackles, a glimmer of light playing over his mouth. My ears heard nothing, but the rest of my body learned new languages. For me Robin spoke concisely, carefully, so that I could read his lips. I treasured every word more than gold.
“Look at this, Will.”
He stood in the torch-thrown shadows of our forest hideout, surrounded by his stolen hoard. Coins spilled over the edge of a coffer when he lifted it. Robin laughed, his eyes fiery with a hundred mirrored suns. I felt his laughter like I did the doubloons clinking and rolling across the moss oak floor: golden sounds, bright and round, rumbling off into the shadows.
“We’re rich,” a boy said, and another, “We’re kings.”
“And queens,” Alix quipped.
They slung their arms around her, hoisted her to the rafters, crowing, “Long live the queens.”
Other words I couldn’t decipher swirled around me, a cloak of hot breath. My heart filled my whole chest.
We had done this: Robin’s lost boys and lost girls, the children society had thrown away. We’d woven together a family of orphans and outcasts and exiles. Not one of us shared blood. Not one of us would balk at spilling our own blood for a brother or sister.
“Fools,” Little John roared, slamming his staff against the planks. Coins leaped like molten droplets. A foot taller than the tallest of us, with his head swathed in brilliant white scarves and a pearl earring gleaming against rich brown skin, John seemed like African royalty. “Kings are weak men who think gold and gems give them power. Shiny bits of broken earth.” He picked up a coin, flashing its bright eye back and forth. “This is not power. We took it from them and it may be taken in turn from us. It is nothing, friends. Nothing compared to what we possess. With all the gold in the world they could not buy what we have. It makes us mightier than kings.”
“And how, pray tell, are we mightier than kings?” asked Alix.
Little John tossed the coin into the hearth fire. “We are free.”
A pensive silence spread through the room.
Robin’s eyes swept over us without seeing. In the honeyed light of the hearth his smooth face shone, hairless and fair. He’d laugh when I would nuzzle him, graze my coarse jaw against his soft throat. When I would hold his face and kiss him, hard, telling him everything with my mouth, yet without words. When I would press him down into the sweet straw that made our bed.
My beautiful boy, full of laughter and light. But not now.
His gaze pierced through me. He was whispering—no one else would hear, but I read his lips.
Again and again he repeated, We are free.
* * *<
br />
Smoky green haze drifted through Sherwood Forest, as if fire quickened in the leaves, licked from bough to bough and burned coolly, giving off a pale light. Here under the canopy, the sun dissolved into fog. Wraith shadows glided through the gloom, prowling.
Us. The forest gods.
Distantly, a horse nickered. I did not hear it; Alix signed to me from a tree across the path. I crouched on a branch high above the others. My eyes were sharpest.
There.
A furlong away, the white murk opened like a ghost’s mouth, and from it emerged dark shapes: carriage, beasts, riders.
I signaled the numbers and arms of the men. Alix slithered down the trunk.
My role was over.
I rubbed my thumb over the virgin yew of my bow, twanged the cord with my fingertip. Robin never forbade me from fighting but he may as well have. “I need those keen eyes of yours where they will do the most good,” he’d said, but what I heard was “where there is the least threat of harm.” Robin’s pet, the others mocked, good-naturedly. Pup. Pony. Broodmare.
“Say that word again,” he’d told the girl who voiced that last, “and I’ll cast you out. You can fend for yourself come winter.”
So she didn’t say it.
Not that he could hear.
But sometimes she would look at me—Rashida, her skin tawny from the desert sun of her people, her eyes rimmed with kohl—and her lips would make a silent oval: Whore.
You can hurt a boy like me without speaking a single word aloud. All you have to do is hold it in your mouth.
Road dust rose from the horses’ hooves, the riders’ black whips licking the air like snake tongues. They rode fast, knowing the stories about the forest. It wouldn’t matter.
First we took their horses.
Nets flew out of the brush, burlap sacks weighted with stones. Each one found a beast’s head. Blinded, the animals slowed and swayed, leaving their riders easy game. We disarmed the men with staff strikes and lassos on catchpoles as Little John rushed in to throw hoods over their helms. It was done in seconds. The carriage driver called his team to a halt, staring wide-eyed.
All Out--The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens throughout the Ages Page 13
