Blanca & Roja Read online

  That was a trick Liam had taught me. Good of him, too, since he was usually the one I was trying to punch through.

  Page charged his fist into the air in front of him, slow, but I could see him imagining it.

  “Throw from your shoulder, not your arm,” I said. “If you think too much about your hand, you end up bending your wrist.”

  He squared up his stance, unrounding his shoulders.

  I stood in front of him. “Feel like trying again?”

  “You want me to hit you in the face again?” he asked.

  “How about you go for my arm?”

  “What if I hurt you?”

  That was a nice change from two minutes earlier. If Liam and I could have shut down our fights this fast, we would’ve both had time to learn the violin.

  I touched my sleeve halfway between my shoulder and elbow. “You won’t.”

  He did it. It hurt, the pain spreading out through the muscle in my arm.

  “Better,” I said.

  He heard it in my voice, that pain I held at the back of my throat and the pride of knowing I’d taught him to do that.

  “The next guy you sucker punch doesn’t stand a chance,” I said.

  His face brightened into a smile.

  “I’m Barclay,” I said.

  Page set his mouth like this was some kind of test. “I know.”

  ROJA

  I surfaced to the sound outside, gasping awake. “They’re here.”

  In the space of those two words, Blanca was up and out of her bed. It made me wonder if she’d fallen asleep at all.

  “They’re not,” she said.

  I sat up, my hands propped behind me. “I heard them.” I tried to tune in to the sound that had reached through my dreams, a clicking and stirring like wings. But now I couldn’t find it. “Didn’t you hear it?”

  Blanca turned on the lamp and sat on the edge of my bed. “It’s just the trees.”

  She picked up the cream ribbon that had fallen onto my pillow. We slept with each other’s colors in our hair, a white ribbon tying off the end of my braid, a red one nestled into her blond hair like a headband. It was one more way we tried to make ourselves so much the same that los cisnes could never choose one of us. It was the same reason Blanca sprinkled gardenia perfume under my pillow and the lightest dusting of chili powder under hers.

  That feathery sound kicked up again. I sat up straighter, listening.

  “It’s the wind.” Blanca tied a bow in the ribbon like when we were little. “It’s nothing.”

  At the sureness in her voice, my breath evened, my heart steadying.

  The brush of her fingers in my hair was as warm and familiar as the smell of pan dulce or the feel of my father’s books.

  When the swans wedged their way into my nightmares, it was not the thought of losing my own body that pinched the breath out of me. It was not even how much I imagined it would hurt, my skin growing feathers, my neck thinning and stretching.

  It was the loss of Blanca, of being her sister. I could count the ways I loved her like charms in a jewelry box, how they weighed against the reasons I might have hated her.

  The way anything more than a thimbleful of Tía Verónica’s xtabentún left her dream-eyed and stumbling made it impossible for me to begrudge how our mother looked at her and not at me.

  How she’d taught me to loop twinned cherries over my ears in summer, our earrings before our parents let us get piercings, left me unable to envy the candle-gold of her skin.

  Her certainty that, together, we would survive the swans made me forgive her for having had the luck to be born with yellow hair.

  She slipped back to bed, clicking off the light.

  “Blanca?” I asked through the dark.

  “Yeah?”

  “What if the swans still come?”

  “They won’t,” she said.

  “How do you know?”

  “You’ve been fifteen for months,” she said. That had always been the moment del Cisne girls dreaded, the day the youngest sister turned fifteen. The swans never waited long after that. “If they haven’t come yet, they won’t.”

  “But what if they do?” I set my fingertips against the cold glass, reaching toward the charge in the air, that bristling cold like before the first snow. “Something’s happening out there.”

  “Not everything is about us, Roja.” Only Blanca could say such words without any tint of meanness.

  The soft certainty in her voice was so familiar to me that I knew its meaning on the first syllable, how she meant it as comfort, not reprimand.

  Stop swatting at the air. The bee’s not going to sting you unless you bother it, Roja.

  Don’t you think a ghost would have something better to do than move around the bowls in our cupboard?

  The coyotes are more afraid of you than you are of them, Roja.

  Blanca settled back onto her pillow, the red ribbon bright in her hair.

  Just before she closed her eyes, she said, “Not everything that happens out there has to do with you and me.”

  PAGE

  The day Barclay went into the woods, I saw him. He didn’t know it, but I did.

  Barclay stood at the edge of the orchard, holding one hand in the other, then switching.

  Blood striped the left side of his face and covered his knuckles.

  He took a step forward, then took it back. He shifted his weight between his feet.

  Then his shoulders dropped, a giving-up look.

  He turned, bloody and shaking, and went into the woods.

  It’d been three years since that first punch, since the strange result of Barclay and me becoming friends, and I knew more than he liked to think I did. I knew he wore the bruises and split lips he got fighting Liam like things he’d won, but that they were leaving marks on him he couldn’t see.

  I knew his father and his uncle encouraged it. The way every fight turned out meant whoever won got a little more of his father’s pride, and whoever didn’t lost it.

  I knew Barclay’s and Liam’s mothers never asked about the bruises, the blood, the occasional ring finger taped to the third. That would’ve been something far too unpleasant for Liam’s mother to consider. And Barclay’s mother, famous around town for her twenty-two-inch waist and her eyes blue as alpine flowers, had better things to do.

  And I knew about the time Tess Holt came over to yell at Barclay’s father and uncle. Don’t you see what’s happening here? They’re your sons. They’re good kids, and look what you’re turning them into. And Barclay’s father saying that if she ever came into his house telling him how to raise his child again, it would be the last time she saw her grandsons.

  Tess loved Barclay in a way that was both hard enough for Barclay to push back against and soft enough for the way he was breaking inside. But the Holts didn’t let Tess see Barclay except to take him to church.

  Barclay didn’t know why.

  I did.

  I just never told him.

  There was a lot I hadn’t told Barclay that day I saw the woods take him. They folded him into their shadows and boughs like he had always been part of them. He walked into them willingly, like they were reaching out their branches for him. He slid into their whirl of leaves and their earth smell, and they made him theirs.

  The thing that bothered me most, the thing I never figured out how to tell Barclay, is how grateful I was for the questions he didn’t ask.

  My mother and father loved me. I knew that. I felt it in the patient, slow way they showed me how to check the trees for blight or peel apples all in one spiral. I warmed with it when, in response to my cousin asking But what is she? my father told him to take a long walk, in far less polite words. I heard it in their whispers when they thought I was asleep, their careful conferring on whether I had mentioned interest in a girl or asked to borrow one of my father’s ties, as though, given enough information, they could solve me.

  But the ways in which they tried to understand me always r
educed down too far, to them asking if I just liked wearing jeans and boys’ shirts, or if I was a boy who wanted to be called he.

  I tried saying yes and no, that it was both and neither one, and also more than these things. That I was a boy, but that it was not as simple as me wanting to be called he. That I liked being called he and him. But that I would’ve liked being called she and her sometimes, too, if it didn’t let everyone settle into the assumption that I was a girl. I had never been a girl, would never be a girl whether I lived here or a hundred towns away, whether I spent my whole life in a town this small or a city so full I’d never see the same faces twice. But here, to me, girl would have meant not only accepting a word that did not match me, but all the requirements folded into that word. Skirts that were neither too short nor too long. Makeup in flushed pastels. Swearing enough to be thought interesting but not enough to be considered vulgar.

  I didn’t know how girls here mapped all those rules, especially the girls who could not fit them or did not want to. Girls who only ever wore pants, or who wore heavier eyeliner than the dress code allowed, or who wore no makeup at all.

  Girls like the del Cisne sisters, who seemed to prefer each other’s company to anyone else’s, thereby offending the rest of the town. Who gathered the armfuls of purple sage that drooped onto the sidewalks before anyone could cut it back. Who lived in jeans and their mother’s old sweaters, or dresses that everyone else dismissed as befitting Sunday school teachers more than teen girls.

  As much as the adored girls called our town old-fashioned, no one made a move to change it. There was no room for me to ask to be called both him and her. There were already too many people who thought I was just a failure as a girl. They wouldn’t listen long enough for me to say that I had never been one. I was a boy who had to bear the same assumption so many girls endured, that I was simply the wrong kind of girl.

  All this, and my tries at explaining all this, made my parents nervous, and scared, like they didn’t know how to love me anymore. They wanted a guide to understanding me, something that could be memorized and applied as crisply as which trees fruited in which month. They wanted me to call myself a boy or call myself a girl and have that tell them everything, and if I could have done either one of those things, they could’ve stopped being scared.

  But I couldn’t answer their are-you-this-or-this questions.

  Barclay never asked those questions in the first place.

  So I followed him into those woods, those rustling, whispering trees that all seemed to breathe together. Their yellow leaves fluttered like eyelashes. I felt the sap flowing through their trunks like blood through one body.

  In the next moment of the wind turning, my own body became part of that. I couldn’t tell my skin from bark or moss. When I tried to tune in to the rhythm of my pulse, I felt it not in my own blood but in sap or water. The sense of my own limbs sank beneath the feeling of being branches or a buck’s antlers, and it was only in that last second that I understood.

  The trees I’d loved my whole life, the woods I’d grown up at the edge of, they had a price for everything.

  YEARLING

  Probably, I went into the woods because I didn’t know where else to go. Grandma Tess’s was out; I didn’t want her seeing me like this. So was Page’s; same reason. And there was no going back to my family. So I let my steps pull me into the trees’ shadows.

  The pain in my temple and my jaw and my ribs dulled and faded, and with it the feeling that my body was mine. I drifted more than I walked. I felt less like myself and more like rain left in the ground. I was the last of a tree’s warmth, held in its heartwood and the centers of acorns. I was a blackbird left by its flock for the winter, hungry and wondering which way they’d flown.

  Maybe the woods took me because they felt sorry for me. But I don’t think that was it. There wasn’t anything like pity in the October air, chilled and smelling like wood and ash.

  Maybe it was because of my name. If I believed the writing at the front of Grandma Tess’s Bible, it meant birch tree, or birch forest. It was a name whose meaning held how our family had come from hills wooded with those straight-trunked, pale-barked trees.

  When we were younger, Liam liked reminding me of that while he jabbed me with the branches, needling me into starting a fight with him. He laughed while he did it, some kind of stop-hitting-yourself joke.

  Whether the woods knew my name or not, they took me. So I became blackbirds, birch trees, water. I existed as whatever part of the woods would have me, rocks or crows or fallen leaves. I spent time in whatever creek or poison red-and-white mushrooms let me in.

  I was all of these things and none of these things. I never became them. They were still themselves. They just let me live in them for as long as they could take the deadweight of my heart.

  But eventually, I ended up in the body of a yearling bear. And even though I don’t know why the woods took me, this part I’m pretty sure I do know: I ended up as that yearling bear because of a story Grandma Tess used to tell Liam and me when we were little. A story about two sisters, and a prince who got turned into a bear, and all the ways magic can save you but also fuck you up.

  Grandma Tess told us a lot of stories. But for some reason that one stayed with me the longest. And I think the woods knew I had that story in me, enough that they made me into it.

  BLANCA

  The cygnet wandered into our back garden on a Thursday, under skies as pale gray as his fluff. With his beak, dark gray as washed stones, he pecked at the blackberries that hadn’t yet fallen away from their vines. He floated on the stone birdbath, flicking his stubby wings. He shivered, and each soft wisp of down shivered with him.

  Roja and I knew we shouldn’t have taken him. We were old enough by then to know better. But he was all on his own. Roja couldn’t find his mother or brothers and sisters around the garden or at the pond or the cranberry bog. And I had heard the story of the ugly duckling too many times not to think of cats and hens chasing him.

  I held out my hands, wondering if he would come. He flapped off the water and his wet feet dampened my palms. He shook droplets from his gray down, and I took him inside and fed him oats, halved grapes, the soft hearts of walnuts. The fluff of his down and the shape of his wings were so pure gray he looked drawn in pencil.

  Roja and I filled the bathtub, drawing the linen curtains to keep the heat in. The cygnet hopped off the edge of the tub, making little splashes as he flicked his wings.

  My sister watched him, the settling water bobbing him up and down.

  “Go on,” I told her.

  Roja reached out her hand to his gray down.

  The cygnet shuddered away, flitting to the other end of the bathtub.

  We were not small. I was sixteen, and Roja had just turned fifteen. But the way Roja’s shoulders fell made her look as small as when I brought her outside in her red wool coat.

  With our sweet and bitter berries and our red and white rose petals, we had held off los cisnes, even past Roja’s birthday. The swans had not come.

  But maybe they had sent this cygnet in their place, a way less showy than the flutter of white wings.

  A way they thought we might never notice.

  With a tiny one of them, they were trying to seed jealousy between us.

  But Roja shook off that small look. She lifted herself, straightening.

  “He likes you,” my sister said. Nothing jealous or bitter in her voice. She said it as though it were her hands the cygnet swam toward.

  That was when I knew we could win. We had already gotten past Roja’s birthday, and no swans had appeared. We were becoming enough the same girl that they could never take one of us. It would be as hard as pulling apart two trees with their roots intertwined.

  ROJA

  I could pretend it had all worked, the white rose petals and the overripe blackberries Blanca meant to make me sweet. I could pretend that was the reason I looked after the yearling bear that wandered near our house on
e night.

  But mostly, I wanted something soft to like me as much as the cygnet liked Blanca.

  I knew his mother could have charged out of the trees’ shadows and torn me to pieces. But he was rooting around like he was hungry and lost, and I knew bears his age were always hungry, so I gave him pieces of cooked pumpkin and potato my mother wouldn’t notice missing from the cazuela.

  At first he didn’t do anything. He stayed still, the only movement his wind-ruffled fur.

  I kept watch on his ears. My father had taught me that ears pricked back meant aggression, a warning sign. But the bear’s ears stayed forward, so I kept on, pushing everything a little more into his field of vision.

  The bear moved just enough so a crescent of white fur on his chest flashed into view.

  The pale shape seared into me. Other forests may have held countless bears with ink-dark coats and white moons on their chests. But here, in these woods, where the bears were brown, not black, I’d never seen one with a moon.

  It felt like the warning of something, the badge of the nahuales Blanca and I had been taught to fear. It would have been a small, bright way for a nahual to wear the moon on his coat, a piece of sky shown to anyone who dared look at him.

  I edged back, ready to get to my feet and run if I needed to. He may have been young, but he still had teeth. The muscles in his shoulders and back showed through his fur when he moved.

  He bit at a piece of pumpkin, nosing it first before taking it into his mouth. Then it was like that first bite reminded him he was hungry, and he ate the rest of what I’d brought him.

  So I kept feeding him every day after that. Handfuls of blueberries. Sunflower seeds and pepitas. Pan dulce my mother assumed I’d taken from the kitchen and eaten myself.

  Some nights I found him so still I could’ve mistaken him for rocks or fallen branches. Watergrass whipped at his fur and he didn’t flinch. I found him by listening for his slow breathing.