Dark and Deepest Red(59)

But I had laughed because his mother’s story didn’t sound real. It sounded like something meant to be laughed at. The prince in the story sounded so boring—so beside the point, like the whole fairy tale could have happened without him—that to imagine the stepsisters giving up parts of their bodies for him seemed like a joke. A test. Like Emil’s mother wanted to know how gullible we were.

When I laughed, some of the boys and two other girls did too.

But I was the only one the teacher told to sit on the bench during recess the next day.

Emil sat with me. He didn’t say anything or cast me any kind of sympathetic look. He didn’t look at me at all. I would have thought he was waiting for a bus, or about to read a book, but no buses ran on that side of the school, and he didn’t have anything with him. He just sat with me, quiet, hands folded together like he was in a church pew.

When the teacher came over, wanting to object somehow, Emil just looked up at her. His face showed polite attention, but also dared her to find fault with him and me sitting in silence on opposite sides of a wooden bench.

That was the start of Emil and me, a gruesome fairy tale. He had been raised on them.

And now he had just told me another one, one even I couldn’t laugh at.

An awful fairy tale that was worse for being true.

A small anger spun and grew in me.

“You knew,” I said, more clarifying than accusing. “This whole time, you knew.”

Emil opened his mouth, but hesitated.

I waited for my anger to wear down, like a rock tumbled through an ocean. But it just got slicker, harder to hold on to. It slipped from my hands and sank so deep I couldn’t have brought it back up if I wanted to. I couldn’t even see it anymore. I couldn’t place the center of my rage. I just felt the weight of it, somewhere down in those depths.

I had spent this week wondering what in me was so dangerous, so thick with dark magic, that my family’s own work turned against me. I had wondered what made me the one girl who transformed the shimmering spell of red shoes into something terrifying.

Now I caught the edge of it, that anger I couldn’t place.

Realizing that Emil had held all this back, I saw every difference between his family and mine.

His parents were both professors, and my family was two generations away from the maquiladoras. My great-grandparents had worked shifts soldering circuit boards. At my age, my abuela had lost two of her fingertips in punch presses. She had been born in a village whose air and water was so thick with styrene that sometimes her sisters could not remember their own names. They whispered the chemical’s name—estireno—with the dread of mentioning some fierce demon or vengeful saint. My great-grandfather would get headaches so bad he would bang his head on the wall. My great-aunt had died when she was nineteen, selling hairpins and chewing gum because she couldn’t work fast enough for the factories.

I had worried that I had wrecked everything they had worked for, that I had disgraced all they had survived, with nothing but my own hands.

I never considered that maybe it wasn’t just me, and my hands.

Because Emil hadn’t told me.

He had seen me dancing along the rocks above the reservoir, and he hadn’t told me. He had pulled me out of the water, and he hadn’t told me.

“And you didn’t think maybe this was something you should’ve mentioned earlier,” I said, more statement than question.

“What if I had?” he asked. “What could you have done? It was five hundred years ago. What would telling you have done other than scare you?”

“I spent this whole time thinking you wouldn’t believe me. But if you’d said something…” I faltered. I scrambled to find what I was saying again. “You didn’t even need to tell me it was your family. You could have just told me this was something that happened.”

“But it is my family.” His voice rose again. “You wanted me to tell you like it was just facts out of a book? Guess what? I can’t. Because five hundred years ago, my relatives lived this. Telling you meant telling you something about us, about me, about what’s in my blood. Do you even get that?”

Our breathing went hard enough that I could hear both mine and his, a little off rhythm.

My anger now felt like something I was closing, like one of Emil’s reactions burning itself out.

“You wanted us to stay away from each other?” I said. “Done.”





Strasbourg, 1518


She waits until Tante Dorenia is asleep, then she opens the wooden trunk.

She lifts out a blue dress, deep as an autumn sky, and a clean shift. The underdress is plain, but so new it is nearly ivory. It looks as clouds against the blue.

Lala remembers dyeing the cloth, the batch coming out such a perfect shade that Tante could not bear to part with it. She told Lala she would wear it on her wedding day.

The feeling of a stone in Lala’s stomach warns her that she may not live to see her wedding day, so she will wear this today, this perfect blue.

If Strasbourg demands a show, she must costume herself.

Next, she ties two pouches to her waist.

They weigh against her bare thighs, hidden by her skirt. In their depths, she hides a few things that will fit.

A small amount of money. A handful of dried sphagnum for the next time she bleeds. The tincture of safflower Tante gave her, so she may pretty her lips and cheeks should she need to charm a man. A pot of fine woad powder, blue as the deepest stretch of the Rhein. A jar of good iron gall ink.