He drew back, worried he’d offended her. But then her smile glinted, first in her eyes before curving the corner of her mouth.
She was making fun of him. She liked making fun of him. Of how the colors of things shocked him. Of how his face always showed his wonder at the grandmothers turning tortillas over blue flames, fingers so close the fire almost touched them. Of how he did not understand the cousins running barefoot over wet grass when they all had shoes.
He didn’t mind. It didn’t bother him to be something Estrella batted at to see what he would do, like a cat at a feather. She was more curious than cruel.
“I might have told Reid we all needed more money to look pretty for his little party,” Estrella said.
That let Fel laugh. “I don’t think you said it like that.”
“You’re right. I was much more persuasive.”
Her pride was so sure he could almost taste it on the air, like sugar mixed with the bite of chili powder. She was both shameless and soft, openhearted and vicious. He wondered how she remembered to be all these things at once, how there was any space left in her to lure flowers from the earth.
Estrella handed the man money. Fel didn’t want to know where she’d hidden it, if she’d slipped it out of the band of her underwear or from between her breasts when both his and the cashier’s backs were turned.
The man at the counter gave her back two paper bags. She thanked him and handed one to Fel.
“Let your education begin,” she said.
Even through the paper, he could feel the soft fluff of the spun sugar, the thing she called cotton candy. It gave under his hands like gathered cloth.
He thought of how he would pass these things to the Nomeolvides women, grandmothers and mothers and daughters, like a bright communion.
At night, with Estrella, this town was all lights and water-slicked cobblestone. Lampposts lined the sidewalks. White lights wrapped the trees, making everything look covered in snow.
They passed a bulb-signed theater and a tall-windowed hotel.
A man’s voice spilled out of the space between buildings. “You out here looking for a new boyfriend, Nancy?”
Fel heard the hard taunting in the man’s voice.
The words struck Fel hard enough that for a second he thought the man was talking to him.
Fel looked down the brick-lined alley, the ground wet with runoff.
A boy who looked younger than Fel leaned against a wall, the brim of a dark felt hat shading his face. Suspenders showed against his pin-striped shirt. Two men stood across from him, trying to needle him into looking up.
The boy did not speak.
“Hey,” the other man said, and kicked at the wall close to the boy’s knee. “You’re too good to talk to us, Nancy?”
Nancy. That one word, said as an insult not a name, made others rush back to Fel.
Uphill gardener.
Molly.
Backgammon player.
Fel’s thoughts caught on each of those words, and the memory, the cutting pain of how he’d heard them thrown at someone he loved.
His body acted for him. He threw the man who’d kicked at the boy up against the damp brick. Then he was hitting him, and when the other man went at him he hit him next.
He was hitting them because a long time ago, in the gray world he had lived in, he had heard someone he loved called these kinds of names and he had been too small to do anything. The memory of the rage and the helpless feeling, the sense that he had been too young to stop it, charged his hands.
The one who took care of him. The one who kept them both from freezing or starving. He had been a man who liked men, and so everyone felt it was their right to judge him, to call him names.
His brother.
Fel had had an older brother. The man he had hunted mushrooms with, picked dandelion greens with, the man who had bargained for manteca and day-old bread, this man had been his brother.
He knew this. He knew this the way he knew the weight of the wooden horses. And because he could not weep for this true thing, not here, it fed the rage in his hands. He could not defend his brother from the words, from the names Nancy and Molly.
But he could quiet these men. If he could not protect his brother, he could protect the boy in this alley. He could hit these men hard enough that fine cuts split open the backs of his hands.
Estrella dug her fingers into Fel’s upper arm, pulling on him, yelling at him to stop.
The boy cut between them all, trying to block the men from hitting Fel or Estrella.
“Hey,” another unknown voice sliced through the air. “What’s the problem here?”
They all broke away from one another, turning toward the mouth of the alley.
A man stood at the edge, wearing the fine suit and bearing of someone who worked for the hotel and could throw anyone out of it. Or out of the alley next to it.
He wasn’t looking at the men, or Fel, or even Estrella.
He was looking at the boy. But not with the hard-jawed judgment of deciding he’d been the start of the trouble. He was looking at the boy with the deference he might give a wealthy man.
The boy stepped back, holding out his hands. “Everyone’s okay here, right?”
Fel still didn’t recognize the boy. Not his shape. Not his face, still shadowed by his hat brim.
But that voice stilled Fel. He knew it, even though it was lower now, dropped with effort. That voice was the only one he had heard at the long wooden table that was not the similar, braiding sounds of the Nomeolvides women.
“Nobody’s hurt here,” the boy said. “We’re all gonna go home, okay?” He patted the air with flat palms, calming them all.
The men backed toward the street, stunned either by the fine-suited man or the unexpected power of a boy they had thought nothing of.
The suited man followed them, nodding at the boy as he left the mouth of the alley. The boy nodded back, the last sign Fel needed that they knew each other.
The men’s shadows faded, Fel’s knuckles sore and throbbing.
Estrella’s fingers shielded her mouth, her gasp so soft it sounded like a breath in. Fel wondered if she was short enough to see the boy’s face, or if that same voice had caught her.
Estrella and the boy in the felt hat passed a startled look between them, like they were two mirrors reflecting it back over and over.
The boy’s hair was darker, shorter. But Fel recognized the features.
“Bay,” Estrella said.
Bay shook her head, jaw held tight. “Not here.”
“Fine.” Estrella went around to the other side of the building.
They followed her. Of course they followed her, Fel because he had learned to follow the Nomeolvides women when they told him to, and Bay out of a worry so heavy it struck Fel like hot air.
The brick sill of a first-floor window gave Estrella enough height to pull on a rusted fire escape ladder. Her steps rattled the metal frame as she climbed to the first landing.
She stared down at both of them with a look partway between invitation and threat. “Then how about up here?”