Empress of the World (11 page)

“This reminds me of the Indian Tree.”

Battle looks up at me from the lower branch where she’s sitting. “The Indian Tree?”

“It’s this giant, dead tree—it’s been dead for as long as I can remember. All the bark is stripped off so it’s just smooth, like a piece of furniture. I used to climb it all the time with Jamie—I mean James.”

“You said that name like it made you want to spit. An ex?”

“I don’t have any exes. You’re the—I mean, no. It’s like this. When James was Jamie, when we were little, we were best friends. We made potions. We deciphered signs that only we knew were important. When we were nine, he moved away. I missed him so much that I saved up all this money for a whole summer so I could go find him. I went on the bus for hours by myself. When I got there, to his new house, he was already friends with all these boys, and he was James, and he was awful. The End.”

“Ouch. What kind of signs?” Battle has to squint a little to look up at me since the sun is so bright this afternoon.

“Oh—like which way a branch was pointing would be the way we’d walk that day. And you know how when they’re doing work on sewers or power lines or something, they paint little squiggle things on the road and the sidewalk? We’d come up with all these crazy meanings for them. That kind of thing.”

“It sounds great. Sorry he turned out to be a jerk.”

I’m dangling my legs down from my branch, and Battle touches my calf briefly in sympathy. It sends a shock from my leg all the way up my spine.

“Who was your best friend, growing up?” I ask, to regain my composure. I can’t get used to this.

She sighs. “Nic.”

“I’m sorry, is it an awful story? You don’t have to—Oh. You mean Nick-with-a-K. Right?”

She nods. “We were just a really close family. Until we stopped.”

“Anyone besides him?”

It’s funny. Being here, up in the tree, sitting on different branches—it makes it easier to talk somehow. Is it because we can’t look directly at each other?

Battle sighs again. “I’m shy, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“I hadn’t.” How can she say she’s shy? She’s dated people. She’s the one who kissed me, the first time.

“If Katrina hadn’t made me come over the first day, I probably never would have talked to any of you.” She has a finger in her mouth as she says this.

“But—you’re so—” Beautiful. Brilliant. Amazing. “You seem so sure of yourself, the way you talk, just the way you are. I mean, you’re not like Katrina—you don’t talk a lot, but everything you say, it just feels . . . important.”

Battle’s finger is bleeding. “I don’t talk a lot because words don’t always work.”

Yes, they do, I want to say, but I can’t, for some reason.

Which means she’s right.

But I can’t let the silence hang, either—I ask something that’s been bothering me for a while.

“When he left, what did your parents do? I mean, did they try to find him?”

Battle says flatly, “They fought. Mom wanted to call the police, hire a private detective, the whole shebang. Dad said it was Nick’s choice to leave, and he’d get in touch with us when he was ready.”

“Who won?”

“No one.”

It’s another of her nonanswers. Doesn’t she want me to know anything about her? I try another approach.

“It’s so awful when parents fight. Mine almost divorced when I was nine. They didn’t yell, they just got cold and overly polite—like suddenly we were all living in some strange hotel. Do your parents yell?”

“No.”

All right, that didn’t work either. Third time’s the charm?

“Hey, this is totally off topic, but how long have you had Dante and Beatrice?”

Battle smiles up at me for the first time since we
started talking about
her brother.

“They came from the same litter—the mother belonged to one of the families from church. I got them . . .four years and thirty-seven days ago. They were eight weeks old. Mom and Dad weren’t sure I’d be able to take care of them, but I read every book in the library about dogs and took lots of notes. And I kept track of their growth. I measured them and weighed them every day—I paper-trained them and got them used to being on leashes—oh, I miss them!”

The ache in her voice makes me miss them, too, even though I’ve never seen them except in her pictures, and I’ve always hated dogs.

“Wow, you did all that? That’s really impressive. You’d make a great vet,” I say.

Battle looks so surprised it almost makes me laugh. “That’s exactly what I want to be,” she says softly.

Battle and I have been knocking on Katrina’s door for what seems like hours before she finally stumbles loudly across her room and opens it. “Well, if it isn’t my two favorite lesbians,” she says groggily. “Siddown while I get dressed.”

“I don’t know if that word fits,” I say. “Do you think we’re lesbians, Battle?”

, pulling a violently orange T-shirt out of her cardboard clothes box, “What the hell else would you be? Unless you’d prefer the word . . .oh, god, I can’t remember, it was in this weird old movie I saw . . .inverts, that was it.”

“It sounds like we’d have to stand on our heads all the time,” I say.

Battle promptly puts her hands on the floor and kicks her legs up into a beautiful headstand. I grab her ankles and hold her up, both of us giggling. “Wow, I can do this so much better now that I don’t have hair to get in my face!” she says. Fortunately—unfortunately? —her tank top is tight enough that it doesn’t ride up.

“Seriously though, what’s wrong with being lesbians?” Katrina zips up her jeans.

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it,” I say, holding Battle’s ankles as she walks a few steps on her hands, “I’m just not sure it describes us completely accurately. I mean, I’ve liked boys before. And Battle, didn’t you say that you had dated boys?” I turn my head sideways and peer down at her face, which is getting flushed. She nods.

Katrina says, “But wouldn’t that just be because you hadn’t found a girl yet who was, you know, willing? I mean, it seems like it’s a lot easier to find boys than it would be to find girls—not that I’m looking for a girl, mind you. And come on, Nic, Battle lives in the South. Ho-mo-sex-shuality is probably still, like, illegal there, right?”

Battle shakes her head. “No.”

“Yeah, but your dad’s a minister! Wouldn’t he shit bricks?” asks Katrina. “Come to think of it . . .aren’t they going to be really mad about the whole shaving your head thing, let alone what’s going on with you and Nic? They just didn’t look like free-expression types to me.”

Battle shakes her legs free of my hands, comes out of the headstand and stands up. “Breakfast is almost over,” she says. “Are you ready?”

This is a different kind of shy than I’ve ever felt before. Being shy was always about not knowing what to say to people, being afraid I’d say something stupid that would make them laugh at me.

Now—now it’s about not knowing what to do. If I sit on the bed, is that too forward, like I’m expecting that we’ll immediately start making out? If she wants a back rub, is it too much to kiss the back of her neck?

I’m sitting on the floor trying to do the reading for class tomorrow, and Battle’s sitting next to me. She’s finished her work for the evening, so she’s rereading this incredibly battered copy of All Creatures Great and Small.

“Your hair’s all tangled,” Battle says suddenly. She gets up, walks to her dresser and retrieves a large wooden brush. It still has some blonde hairs entwined in its bristles.

She sits directly behind me and brushes my hair with just the right amount of pressure, not so tentative that I can’t feel it or so hard that my scalp gets sore.

“That’s so nice,” I say, and my voice comes out deeper than I mean it to, almost in a purr.

“I’ve had a lot of practice.”

“I guess you must have; your hair was longer than mine’s ever been,” I say.

“There’s that—but also I brush Dante and Beatrice a lot.” She snickers.

I attempt to bark.

“Silly,” says Battle, putting down the brush and leaning in to kiss me.

Now I understand why so many songs talk about desire as electric.

If I could harness what I’m feeling now, I could power a city.