He knew what this was. She couldn’t have Bay, so she wanted whatever else was in reach. She had everything that had happened tonight knocking around in her, all that spite toward Bay and toward Dalia, and Fel was the ground she could bury it in.
She had found him in the valley made of flowers. Her family had looked after him. It wasn’t his place to ask her, please, please don’t do this. To tell her he felt for her what she would never feel for him, not when she’d given her heart to someone who was beautiful in braided hair and the bright colors of citrus fruits, and beautiful in men’s trousers and suspenders. There was no fighting that. He didn’t want to.
And he didn’t want to be what she played with in the meantime, not like this.
Estrella let go. She took her hand back with such sudden force that Fel opened his mouth to say he was sorry, again.
But then that hand was on the back of his neck. She caught his mouth as he opened it, ready to apologize, and her lips kept him from speaking. The dye and sugar of the candy buttons cut through the almond taste on his tongue.
For a second, her mouth shoved him back far and fast enough that he could barely hold on to something else remembered. It was slick and cold as an algae-covered stone, but he got a solid grasp on it, the last time someone had kissed him, in the gray world.
That time, another boy, assuming Fel was the same as his brother, had kissed him. How little Fel liked it had seemed like a failing. He did not like boys, at least not this one, he had thought with such collapsing disappointment. How could any difference in himself from his brother be good? He wanted to be his brother, smart and kind and unafraid to ask for what he wanted. If sliding his hands under another boy’s suspenders would make him more like his brother, he wanted that too.
The other boy had laughed at him, pushed him away. He told him how awful he was at it, how much worse he was than his brother. And that had seemed like another of Fel’s failings.
But this, Estrella kissing him, this brought him back to a time before the gray world, when there had been color, and he and his brother had lived in sunlight softened by olive trees. When he closed his eyes and kissed her back, Estrella brought him to the colors of a place he could almost touch.
With her mouth on his, the world was snow. Not ice. Not winter. The snow of countless almond and cherry blossoms, the storm of white and pink they had both thought of at the same moment.
This girl who had found him had turned him into an ember, glowing at the end of a candlewick. She could either pinch him out into nothing or light him into a flare.
But the feeling of a truth he did not know, awful and unnamed, hung wide and close as the clouds. And he could not stop wondering if this was the shadow of the thing he had done, the reason God had taken his memories. The reason he had his own crimes etched onto his back. This was the weight of his own sin, and he could not even remember it enough to confess it.
He could not give Estrella what she deserved, someone clean and true.
He broke the touch of their mouths, hard enough that he stumbled back.
A thread of cold air cut between them.
The white of her eyes shone in the dark. He couldn’t tell if that startled look, the flicker of her irises moving, was from what she’d done or because he’d stopped her.
Before his fingers could find her hand in the dark, she was running off the road and toward the trees.
He called her name. But she kept running, until the night and the tall grasses swallowed her.
The pads of her fingers had left the dye of candy buttons on his shirt and his hands. He touched his neck, and it came off on his fingers. The blue and yellow and pink were his proof she had touched him.
TWENTY-ONE
Estrella stood in the hall, the first time she could remember pausing in front of Dalia’s door.
The cousins all entered one another’s rooms without knocking. They never apologized if one walked in on another half-naked, or drying her hair, or scrubbing salt and baking soda over the red stains on their underwear at the same time every month. When Fel started sleeping in Estrella’s room, she had tied a green ribbon around the doorknob, a reminder to her cousins that she wasn’t in there, and not to walk in on this skittish boy changing his clothes or sweating through a nightmare.
But opening this door felt like holding her lungs still to go underwater.
At the sound of the hinges, Dalia looked up, pausing midstitch. She was sewing a fabric leaf back onto a nightgown. Calla’s.
Estrella had always recognized Dalia as beautiful in the way all her cousins were beautiful. But now, Estrella saw the woman Bay loved. Her black hair and dark eyes warmed against the fire colors she wore, the softened oranges and peaches, the butter yellows and chili reds. Her eyelashes were lush and curling as the center petals on her cream dinner plate dahlias.
But that lie. It spun and whirled and pulled Estrella down.
“You know, we had a great-great-aunt who wanted to be an actress,” Estrella said.
Dalia set down the nightgown, tucking the threaded needle into the gathered fabric. “Estrella.”
“Abuela Flor told me about her. She used to play in the chorus in the theater in town sometimes.” Estrella let the bitterness thicken in her voice. “If she was as good an actress as you, she could’ve been the star of every show.”
Dalia’s eyes shut. “Estrella.”
From her dress pocket, Estrella pulled a bag of strawberry vanilla drops, Dalia’s favorite. She threw them at her cousin.
Dalia caught the bag against her chest. She looked up from the sugar-sanded red and cream.
“I held you,” Estrella said, her back teeth set so hard the words sounded choked. “My heart broke when yours broke.”
She had thrown her arms around Dalia as she screamed and cried into the air. She had blinked at the ceiling in the half-empty bed, worrying about her cousin who slept even less than the boy down the hall.
But Estrella knew now. It hadn’t been grief keeping Dalia awake.
It had been the unfamiliar guilt of keeping a secret from her cousins.
Estrella shut the door behind her.
“You’re a liar,” she said, startled at how level the words came.
“Bay had to get out from under Reid and you know it,” Dalia said. “The best way to do that was for everyone to think she was gone. If you had a better idea, I’d love to hear it.”
“I don’t blame you for what you did. I blame you for keeping it from me. From all of us.”
“It was safer for everyone. I did this for us.”
“You did this for you,” Estrella said. “Because you wanted to be the only one she was still alive to. You wanted her to be yours.”
“That is not true.” Dalia got to her feet. “And even if I did, so what? We have to answer to each other for everything?”
“We don’t lie to each other. We don’t keep things from each other.”
“Oh, we don’t?” Dalia asked. “So you just forgot to tell us you were planning on torching Reid’s car?”
Estrella shoved her anger down. She tried to dull the whispering voice reminding her that she and Calla had kept their own secrets.