A History of Glitter and Blood (4 page)

She picks a hole in the quilt. “Because we're afraid you'll eat us.”

“I don't eat you, do I?”

“No.” Never. Not any of her, and she doesn't fully understand why, and every day when she gets home she sees the fear in Josha's eyes that he might have harmed her, but no. Scrap comes home with nibbles out of him sometimes, deep teeth marks in his shoulders that will never fully fade away. It's not at all the same as the day they came home without half of his arm. (There are no longer four fairies who haven't been maimed.)

“No word on Cricket?” Tier says.

She shakes her head.

“I've been poking around down here. I can't find anything of him. Or Scrap's arm. I'm not giving up, okay?”

“We don't care about the arm.” Scrap must be able to feel it, but he never mentions it, doesn't want to talk about it. So they talk about Cricket. They're used to some discomfort of that, after all;
as children they learned very quickly not to cry when someone trampled over their glitter. Beckan's currently ignoring the crawling feeling of Tier scraping a speck of glitter off his jeans. It doesn't surprise them, anymore, what they can learn to ignore.

“How's it healing?” Tier says, without any real worry.

So she says, “He's fine.”

She looks at his bookshelves, twice as tall as Tier and stacked with books so thick they scare her. At the bottom, level with her chest and below, are the books she's read and the ones Tier has decided she's ready for. She still doesn't read well.

“Anyway,” she says. “Who cares if we make you feel welcome? It's not like we have much say.” Beckan's inkling that the fairies might somehow be influential has been squeezed out of her. “And it was an amicable ending to the war, yeah?”

“Amicable.”

“You taught me that word.”

“I may have taught you too many things.”

But before the war, the gnomes frequently were aboveground. They were behind the scenes, always—unloading trucks into their stores, digging ditches for their buildings, scraping muck off their streets. She learned from a young age not to look at gnomes.

And then the tightropers came, and they told the fairies that they were there to rescue them from the tyrannical rule of Crate and his hungry gnomes. The fairies in their shiny apartments found out that the rest of the world thought that, metaphorically speaking, the gnomes were on top.

What I'm saying is, before the tightropers came, no one in Ferrum had any idea that the fairies needed to be rescued.

When really, you don't stare at the gnomes because it's rude to stare at the help.

And sure, maybe especially so if the help eats you from time to time.

Ferrum is a stupid, beautiful, unsimple city.

Tier helps Beckan into her jacket. “Josha still has one of my books,” he says. “Thick brown one. Smear of blood on the cover. Not real blood. It's part of the picture.”

“The love story.”

“Yeah.”

“He's not going to read it. I'll get it from him.”

He says, “You can keep it longer if you want.”

“Scrap won't read it. He doesn't like fiction, just history. No love stories.”

“You?”

“I read it before, remember? It was the first one you gave me.”

“Josha
should
read it. Maybe it will help.”

She shakes her head. “He shouldn't. Leave it.” He's never even met Josha.

Tier leaves it. Beckan feels the coins in her pocket and wonders who is in charge here.

Then Tier says, “What do you think you'll do? When our girls come back.”

When we don't need you
.

Because the traumatized girls aren't going to be immediately ready to jump into bed with them, presumably, but Beckan doesn't know exactly how that works down here, how much say the girls have.

They might still need Scrap, but they will not need her. They'll have their own girls. Fairy girls are sort of worthless, is the thing.

She says, “The city needs to be rebuilt. I've been welding some again. I could help.” This seems unstupid, uncomplicated.

“You could fix some of our tunnels,” Tier says. “If you wanted to keep working for us.”

She doesn't say anything.

“You've been working for us for a year,” he says.

“I've been working for
you
, and I didn't exactly do it out of choice, anyway. If the tightropers had been looking for prostitutes, maybe things would have been different.”

“You'd rather have worked for them?”

They've had this conversation a hundred times. “You eat us,” she says.

She's said it a hundred times.

It's not that simple
, she'd like for Tier to say. Just this once.

But he's just quiet. “Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

She stands to leave, and he kisses her. He catches her halfway out the door, asks her to wait. For some reason, this is when she realizes that he hasn't complained about the glitter the whole time she's been here. Didn't gripe that he'd have to throw out the sheets.

Didn't worry about what Rig would say when she came home and found glitter all over his floor.

But then he says, “About Rig,” and takes a deep breath. “I've changed,” he says, very slowly, like he thinks he's speaking a language Beckan won't understand.

She thinks for one terrible moment that he is about to say that he is in love with her.

And then she wonders if that really would be so terrible.

And she thinks about the money in her skirt.

And about how small Scrap's hands are.

When was it that she realized that Scrap had the smallest hands of anyone she's ever seen? There was a moment. She feels the moment, somewhere in the nape of her neck, gnawing on her brain, begging to be remembered.

It was a moment.

But she doesn't know when it was.

Tier says, “I'm not the same,” and snaps her back. “I can't . . . how could I even be the same after this? I don't even know how it looked up there.”

She nods a little. She tries to pretend a bit of her mind isn't still somewhere else.

“What if I don't know what to say to her?” he says.

“There isn't anything you can say. So say anything.”

“I'll say something wrong.”

“What if you don't?”

“Will you help me?” he says.

“What?”

“Just help me think of some things to say. How to connect to her. You know what I've been through. You were here. And you're, you know. A girl.”

A girl.

He called her a girl.

Not an empty-girl. Not a worthless, infertile, waste of space barren no baby little empty-girl.

Just a girl.

And then he says, “You owe me, you know?”

“What?”

“For looking for Cricket.”

Beckan breathes out. “I'm so fucking sick of looking for Cricket. We're not finding anything. How many nights do I have to comb through sidewalk cracks and not find anything?”

“Please?”

“Yeah, I'll help you. But I'm going now.” She always tells him. She is always the one to make the decision. To put one foot back into the hall.

“Thanks for coming,” Tier says, and he shrugs instead of saying goodbye. As soon as she steps into the hallway, she hears Tier brush glitter off his sheets and blow out the candles he lit for her.

She goes home without waiting for Scrap. Josha is puttering around the kitchen, opening and closing cupboards, boiling water.

At least he's out of bed. “You doing all right?” she says.

He gives her a smile that doesn't part his lips. “Fine. Need tea?”

“I'm fine. It's warm out.”

“You're always hot.”

You're always cold
. It's her default response to both her fairy boys, nowadays.

But the truth is, Josha isn't. There is nothing cold and will never be anything cold about Josha. The entire world can try to trap him and soak him and freeze him solid, and he will stand in the kitchen burning like a lantern.

His eyes rush up and down her body, checking for wounds. She casually covers the bite on her neck and doesn't think he notices.

“Good,” he says, and turns back to his cup. As if he needs his full attention, needs the strength of everything in him, to lift that cup and take a sip.

She comes up behind him and holds him for a while. Josha is the simplest part of her world, and has been for so long. He loves her and she loves him back, and it has been a long time since she realized she would never sleep with him, and even longer since she stopped wanting to, and now they are like two very different, very unequal halves of what might have been one very amazing fairy. Maybe even a pretty one.

She clears her throat. “Do you think Scrap would hate me forever if I stole his red notebook?”

“The war chronicle?
Here's what blew up today?
”

“Yeah.”

He shrugs. “There's nothing secret in there. He's all about that blue notebook lately anyway. It's in the basement, I think. On the shelf snuggled up with the real books.”

She kisses his cheek before she scampers downstairs. He gives her the same smile.

In the basement, she trails her fingers over the spines of Scrap's encyclopedias and history books. The novels they've borrowed from Tier are collapsed on top of themselves on the bottom shelf, because even now that Scrap reads them in guilty binges he later denies (because he is a pretentious fuck), he won't put them up with his
real books
, his
nonfiction
books. She mumbles to herself, maybe just reading the titles, probably something about him being a pretentious fuck.

She finds his red notebook and flicks it open. Each day is marked with its date, and each has a few bland sentences spelling out the events of the day. There are no feelings, no opinions. No fictions.

Beckan has seen this notebook a hundred times, and she knows she was stupid to hope that there might be something she hadn't seen. Something secret in here. Something to remind her of his small hands.

But this will do. She brings the notebook up to her room. She begins to read. She waits for something.

There is no narrative.

There is nothing about Scrap.

There is nothing about her.

There is dry, pointless, objective, timeless history. The kind fairies never thought they could write. Maybe she should be impressed that someone finally took the time to sit in one spot, to write, to record. Maybe this should enthrall her.

She falls asleep reading.

In the middle of the night, she wakes up and the notebook is gone. She finds Scrap in the kitchen, bent over it, writing in a blue book, folding over corners in a textbook, a pretentious fucking candle lighting his work. She is embarrassed and angry.

“I can't look at it?” she says.

“I need it right now. Reference.” He glances at the red notebook, moves his pen back to the blue, writes faster. He looks up at her face like he doesn't recognize her.

She says, “Scrap, what the fuck.”

She can hear Josha somewhere behind her in the hallway, pacing.

“You can have it back later,” Scrap says.

Something is very wrong about the way she feels, and about Scrap, and about everything, so she shakes her head a little and leaves
before it can scare her. She goes back to her room and digs under her bed until she finds Tier's book of poetry, the one with the very long poems, the very romantic ones, and she brings it out to the kitchen and throws it on the table. Scrap flinches.

“Read something not as fucking boring,” she says. She doesn't know why she's so angry.

Look at me
, she thinks.

Scrap picks it up.

“I have to write mine,” he says.

“Your new book's probably boring too. Read this. Maybe you'll learn something,” she says, and she leaves.
You're always cold
echoes in her head. He is always so cold, in the hot kitchen with his cold histories.