“Don’t think for one second you can hide anything from this place,” Estrella said. “No one ever has.”
His guilt slid through him again. But he still didn’t know what he’d done, so there was still no confessing it.
“I think it’s my fault,” he said.
“What is?” she asked.
“That your family’s worried.”
“That’s not true.”
“But they’re worried about you,” he said. “And I think that is my fault. Because I’m here.”
“No.” Estrella set her hand on his upper arm, like she could pull him back from what he was thinking. “They like you. Even Azalea likes you, and she doesn’t like anyone.”
He could see her trying to laugh at her own joke, to get him to laugh.
It didn’t work on either of them.
“That’s your cousins,” he said. “I’m talking about your mothers and your grandmothers. They don’t like how I just showed up.”
“You know that’s not true.”
“Fine,” he said. “Then your mother.”
He felt the small breath of her putting a little more space between them. She dropped her hand away from him. Her face showed what she now realized, that Fel understood more than just the shared whispers of grandmothers. He caught the warnings of mothers to daughters, ones neither thought anyone else had heard.
“I don’t think she wants me around you,” he said.
“It’s not like that,” she said. “It’s more that she doesn’t want me around you.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
His own guilt threaded together with the thought of his scars, the memory searing across his skin.
“Your family,” he said. “They’ve been good to me.” They had been good to him even when they had seen his crimes written on his back. “I don’t want to do anything they wouldn’t like. Especially your mother.”
Something in her eyes shifted, like the glint of a polished stone.
“You want to talk about my mother?” Estrella asked. “She thinks she understands everything. But she doesn’t understand me.”
There was both relief and disappointment in how fast Fel knew what she was talking about. She wasn’t talking about this, the small stirring of night air between them. It was a thing he sometimes thought he’d imagined and that sometimes seemed real enough that he could see it growing feathers.
Estrella was talking about Bay. She was talking about her own heart, and how it loved in a way her mother would judge without turning it over and learning the shape of it.
“Today I solved a problem my mother knew nothing about,” Estrella said. Her words twisted, each one sounding harder, like a knot tightening. “She still doesn’t. I fixed it, and she had no idea. My mother, all our mothers, they think they’re holding everything up, but we have it too. It’s ours too. So forget what my mother thinks I should or shouldn’t be doing because we’re going and getting some damn cotton candy, okay?”
He backed up. Whatever cotton candy was, he was now afraid of it. But when she took his hand, he didn’t dare resist.
Fel had seen the Nomeolvides girls away from La Pradera. He had seen them being measured for dresses in town, none of them falling ill or turning to dust. But now he wondered if their mothers and grandmothers being with them had been a kind of blessing, their presence protecting Estrella and her cousins. Now he and Estrella were slipping through the night without anyone’s permission.
Estrella held on to his hand and guided him through the dark. She led him around fallen trees and over thick roots. She warned him about jagged rocks and ruts in the earth.
She had done this before. But he still shuddered wondering if, by letting her do this, he would lose her. La Pradera would grasp at this girl fleeing its borders. The grandmothers hadn’t said anything about what the land did to girls who ran, so that left him imagining her heart giving out in her rib cage, or her fingers turning to petals even as she clasped his hands.
“Stop,” she said.
He halted his steps.
“No,” she said. The fingers of her other hand brushed his so that, for a second, both their hands were touching. “I mean stop worrying.”
Now he wondered if she was a witch. He hadn’t when she found him in the valley made of flowers, or when he saw her drawing petals up from the earth. But now he wondered about this girl, beautiful and smelling of wood betony and knowing things he did not want her to know. “How did you…?”
“I can feel your heartbeat in your palms.” She set her hands against each of his, and the feeling of her fingers in the dark made him quiet. “Stop worrying.”
“You really believe the land will know?” he asked.
She dropped one of his hands and took tighter hold of the other. “I know it will.”
She turned, and the flick of her hair was a wing spreading through the dark. She pulled him through trees and across barren land and brush fields. The air around her had been vibrating, but now it slowed and stilled. When she spoke, it was with a laugh under her voice again.
“The back way to town,” she said.
A little farther, and the dark opened into the spilling light of the town’s streets. The storefront she led him to was all wooden barrels and glass jars. Jagged sticks of rock candy stood bright as La Pradera’s flowers. Sugar pumpkins were capped with bright green stems. Hard candies dyed red with thin white stripes shone like marbles. None of it looked real. They seemed more like things to put under glass than to eat.
Estrella grabbed bags of spun sugar in the same pale pink and blue as her dress and slip. Off a wide wooden spool, she measured out a length of paper covered in neat rows of sugar dots—pink, yellow, and blue.
“Pick something out,” she said. “Something you’ve never had before. We have to educate you.”
The only thing he could look at without making himself dizzy was a small box of some kind of sugar molded in the shape of fruits, then painted. The colors were so much softer than the wrapped candies, and it drew toward him something he could not quite recognize. Something almost remembered.
“We’re buying that too,” Estrella said to the man at the counter, throwing her hand toward the box Fel was holding.
“We can’t eat all this,” Fel said, his unease worsened by the fact that he did not have money to give her.
“Oh, don’t worry,” Estrella said. “We’ll have help. There’s a saying in my family. The meaner the girl, the bigger the sweet tooth.”
He thought of Azalea showing him how she made her favorite potatoes from those strange flakes that looked like snow. He remembered the sternest of the grandmothers putting him under the spray of warm water and telling him he was not lost, only misplaced.
“I don’t think anyone in your family’s mean,” he said.
He felt her glance slide over him, picking up the worry he didn’t want her to catch.
“It’s not my money anyway,” she said. “It’s Reid’s.”
“You stole money from Reid?” he asked.
A hand fluttered to her chest. “I’m wounded that you think I’m a girl of such low moral character.”