Dark and Deepest Red(8)

Emil locked the door behind him. Tonight he’d hand the key back to Aidan. Among the four of them allowed into the lab closet, they’d voted him keeper of the single key they shared. Aidan was so organized that he alphabetized his family’s breakfast cereals, and he never lost anything, unless you counted titration bets with Luke.

The back of Emil’s neck bristled with the sense that someone was in the hall other than Victor, his and his friends’ favorite school janitor. (After Ben Jacobs tried to stuff Eddie into a cabinet in the music room, Victor had helped Luke overwax the floor in front of Ben’s locker. They resined the spot before anyone could draw any conclusion but that Ben had, wildly and spectacularly, tripped over his own feet.)

The sound of shifting ice came from the machine around the corner.

Emil took slow steps down the hall.

The noises stopped a second before Rosella Oliva appeared.

Emil jumped, almost dropping the copper chloride.

Rosella looked at his hands.

Emil got his grip back. “I’m not stealing,” he said, halting over each word.

It was a reflex, one sharpened by years of classmates looking at him sideways and their parents pretending not to. By the number of times he felt compelled to clarify Yes, this is my locker.

By how easily gadje turned the word Romani into the word gypsy, with all the suspicions they tacked onto those two syllables.

“I know,” Rosella said, in a way that was level and soft, like she both knew it was true and didn’t blame him for thinking he had to say it. She probably understood the impulse better than just about anyone else in Briar Meadow. For one November show-and-tell, she’d brought in that painting of skeletons dancing and throwing marigolds into a fountain, and it had only taken until lunch for the whispers to start about her trying to talk to the dead.

Rosella adjusted the coffee can in her arms. “I know you’re one of Ellern’s chosen students.” She held up the coffee can, condensation dampening the metal. “I’m just here for ice.”

“Ice?” Emil asked.

“Yeah, it’s the best. It’s all fluffy and crunchy.”

“You”—he looked at the coffee can—“actually eat that?”

“What?” she asked. “It makes the best Diet Coke fizz.”

“That’s the department ice machine. Do you have any idea how many trace chemicals end up in there?”

“This is a high school lab, not CERN. I think it’s fine.”

CERN? If he wasn’t already a little in love with Rosella Oliva, that would’ve done it.

“Okay,” he said. “But don’t blame me when you glow in the dark by the time we graduate.”

Their eyes met again, and he thought he felt some shared memory pass between them. How they used to see how long they could get lizards to sit on the backs of their hands before either they or the lizards flinched. Or when Rosella brought Gerta a stuffed mouse she’d made just to see her tear it to fabric shreds and quilt batting within a few minutes (she found this far more hilarious than upsetting).

Or the first time he told her about Sara la Kali, and she told him about la Virgen de Guadalupe, these dark, sacred figures who both allowed reverence toward that which was so often despised.

It could have been any of these things, but it also could’ve been nothing. Emil didn’t want to ask. He didn’t want to get it wrong.

Rosella and Emil had been friends once, in the way girls and boys were only ever friends before middle school. She had spent so much time at his house, she’d heard his mother’s fairy tales more than he had, asking for them after he’d long grown bored. The ones she liked best were ones about dancing, or cursed or enchanted shoes. Go figure. She was an Oliva.

She loved all those stories, even the bloody ones. The little mermaid on land, feeling like there were knives beneath her feet as she danced. Cinderella’s glass slippers cracking under her. A girl in red shoes that made her dance until she died.

Rosella looked at his hands again, and Emil wondered if she could see them going clammy against the glass vials.

“So what are you doing with … whatever you’re not stealing?” she asked.

“Flame tests mostly,” Emil said.

“You keep a Bunsen burner in your room?”

“I have a sort-of lab that lives in my mother’s gardening shed?” he said, and it turned out as a question. He set the vials in his backpack. “You can come over and see it sometime if you want.”

He cringed, instantly.

If there was a worse way to ask out a girl, he couldn’t think of it.

“Maybe,” she said. “If I’m not too busy eating all the ice in this machine.”

She said it in a way that was such a confusing mix of familiarity and flirting that it made him dizzy. He’d barely shrugged it off by the time he got home.

The second he was through the door, his father shoved a piece of paper in his hand.

Emil stared at the printout of a photo, a square of frayed blue cloth on a wooden table. “What am I looking at?”

“What are you looking at?” his father asked. Almost exclaimed. “Do you listen to anything I say?”

“No, not really.”

His father frowned and knocked the spine of an academic journal into Emil’s forearm. “That”—he jabbed a finger into the paper—“is the exact kind of woad blue your ancestors dyed in the sixteenth century.”