Bay climbed up three more flights of the fire escape and then disappeared onto the roof.
Estrella leaned against a stretch of brick and shut her eyes, the feeling of Bay’s mouth left on her forehead. Estrella had never felt more like Bay’s little sister. Dalia was her beautiful cousin, fire-eyed and straight-backed, her hair sweeping behind her like a cape, and Estrella was still more girl than woman.
When she opened her eyes, Fel was holding out the little box of marzipan fruit to her.
She shook her head and gave him as much of a smile as she had. She felt how forced it must have looked on her closed lips. But she didn’t want to hold a soft round of marzipan on her tongue.
She wanted to rip things apart with her teeth.
TWENTY
The main street ended. The space between lampposts grew. The last ones led Fel and Estrella to a green-flanked road.
Estrella was eating tiny rounds of sugar off a strip of paper, scraping them off with her teeth. When he’d seen the bright rows—candy buttons, she’d called them—he would not have thought this kind of rage could be brought to eating them.
He tried not to stare, both so she would not feel strange and so she would not think they had to talk. He was grateful for the quiet.
The understanding that he’d had a brother let in the first sliver of light. Then, the scent of the sugar fruit Estrella had bought him opened that crack, wide enough that the light from the moon and the stars flooded it.
He and his brother had lived somewhere else before coming to the gray world. No matter how he grasped at it, he still could not remember the shape of the gray world, but now he remembered so much else.
The smell of the painted fruit, the sweetness of the sugar and drunk bitter scent of the almonds, it made him remember things shared on holidays when he and his brother were children. The perfume of rosewater. The spice of anise. The carmín that dyed rock candy, and how his brother loved telling him that the red came from crushed insects.
These memories took root, turning to rows of uncountable trees. They became the orchard Fel had once run through. They bloomed into almond and cherry blossoms, fluffy as the cotton candy Estrella had set in his palms. They splintered into the thin leaves of olive trees.
All these things pressed into him, and his heart felt as though it might give and break like a bone.
The sound of ripping paper drew his eyes to the girl walking next to him.
She bit off a candy button so hard she took a scrap of white with it.
“You’re eating paper,” he said. “Do you know you’re eating paper?”
She swallowed and looked at him. He still wanted the distraction of her. But speaking had been a mistake. He saw in her face that she took it as an invitation to ask questions.
“What happened back there?” she asked.
He could say these words. They were true, and if he did not speak them when he had the chance maybe they would stop being true.
“I had a brother,” he said.
She tilted her head, waiting for the rest.
“A brother who liked men,” he said.
“Liked men as in…”
“As in the way you and your cousins like Bay.”
Her eyes widened. She tried hiding it with a few blinks.
“It’s hard not to notice,” he said.
“And that doesn’t bother you?” Estrella asked. “You don’t think we’re all damned?”
He felt like he should say yes. He felt as though this was another test, and the angels would strike him down on this road if he gave the wrong answer.
But lying was just as much of a sin. There was nothing to tell her but the truth.
“No,” he said. “I don’t believe that.”
He didn’t believe anything that his brother was could be wrong. Even if he could not remember his brother’s name, or his face, or anything more than his hands, he knew those were hands that had cared for him. Hands that were smart, and even more callused than Fel’s, and that made so little into enough to live on.
And now Fel remembered those hands on another man’s back, fingers slipping under his suspenders. The warmth of Fel’s slight shame covered him, like this was something he might have seen when he wasn’t supposed to.
“Maybe if my brother hadn’t loved like that I’d believe something else,” Fel said, and with saying this came the deeper breath of confessing something. “But I don’t think it’s anyone else’s to judge.”
Estrella laughed softly. “You’re not from a hundred years ago.”
That deeper breath turned to a worn-out sigh. “I don’t know.” He shut his eyes, still walking. “I remember where I lived when I was little.”
That was the place where he’d learned to pick dandelion greens, heaping them into esparto grass baskets. A world and a whole life before he and his brother had gone to the gray world, where sometimes those same dandelion greens were all they could find to eat. When he was small, the sharp, bitter taste of the greens had been the taste of early spring to him, not the taste of being hungry.
“What do you remember?” Estrella asked.
He opened his eyes. “The trees raining petals. When they were in bloom and the winds came. Just all those petals. A whole snow of them.” He remembered those trees planted in wide, deep beds, each a little higher than the one before, so the snow thickened as it fell. “All that pink and white snowing down over everything.”
Estrella bit her lip, like she was trying not to smile. Her fingers softened the edge of the candy dot paper. The colors of the buttons had stained the pads of her fingers.
He knew she was imagining it. She couldn’t not. The air glimmering with confetti. Those petals, tiny and round. Weightless.
Beneath the memory of the falling blossoms, small flowers grew in the shadows of wide trees. A stalk that held petals the color of Estrella’s skin. The brown of blossoms matched her, the paler undersides of the petals like the paler undersides of her hands and feet.
But this was something he didn’t know how to tell her.
They left the lampposts behind. He couldn’t find the moon. In the dark, there was just the taste of almonds and sugar on his tongue, and the shape of Estrella against the grasses and trees.
Their fingers at their sides brushed.
“Sorry,” he said, drawing his hand back.
She held on. Her grasp stung his hand, sore from hitting the men in the brick alley, but he didn’t move. That brush of their fingers was a door cracked open, and she was widening the space, not letting it fall shut.
She stopped. She looked at him. And the feeling that her stare would not land, would not settle on his eyes or his mouth was so strong he felt it on his skin.