Roses and Rot (13 page)

Proud of you.
I played the words in my head over and over again as I walked back home. It wasn’t the first time I’d been complimented on my writing. I’d sold stories, gotten good reviews. Hell, I’d gotten into Melete. I knew that I had achieved a certain level of competence, enough to know I wasn’t wasting my time with my work.

If I had been asked, I could have said that I was proud of myself, because I had worked hard to make all of those things happen.

But, growing up, writing had been something I had to keep secret. My mother didn’t want me hiding in my room and “making up lies,” and there had been consequences when I did. So this was the first time that I had been told that someone was proud of me because of something I wrote. For those words to come from Beth,
whose own work meant so much to me, made it matter even more.

I wanted to write her words down, tape them above my desk, make them a talisman against the days when my own words didn’t come, or were facile and flat. To hold them as a shield against bad reviews and rejection letters. I held the charm around my neck hard, hard, until the metal embossed itself on my skin.

Once I got home I braced myself, then knocked on Helena’s door. She let it open only the thinnest sliver. “What?”

This was going well already. “I need to talk to you.”

“About what? I’m not really in the mood for another lecture on believing in my art.”

“I saw Janet today.”

“Why would you do that?” Horror in her voice.

I could only see part of her face through the door, but she looked worried. No, not worried. Like she was braced for a blow. My stomach clenched.

“I was worried. So I told her about your notebooks. The fire. She asked me to come and speak to her. It . . . it was strange, so I thought I should tell”—warn—“you.”

Helena closed her eyes, whispered, “No.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m so sorry. I wish I had never said anything.”

“Me too.” She leaned her head into the door frame. “Is there something else?”

“Look, Helena, if you need anything—”

“You mean beyond what you’ve already done? Yeah, thanks, I’ll remember that.” She shut the door.

When I was halfway down the hall, I heard something crash and shatter. I paused, and then kept walking. She had made clear that I had done more than enough already.

Marin was still in her practice clothes, face flushed, her hair a tangled knot at the back of her head, when she knocked on my door later that night. “Did you get an email from Mommy Dearest, too, or am I the only lucky one?”

I clicked on the icon for my email program, then loosed a breath in relief that there was no new mail. I’d learned not to read them, but just seeing her name in my inbox messed with my head, made me feel trapped, panicked. Like it was the start of a countdown that ended with her appearing. “Nope. Just you this time. Did you read it?”

“It was really informative. You see, I’m wasting my time—how did she put it?—‘languishing in obscurity’ out here in the middle of nowhere while my company is doing
Giselle
, and how I’ll never get to perform the role now, and everyone will have forgotten about me by June when the fellowship is over, plus I’ll be a year older, and we all know what time does to a dancer’s career, don’t we?” Marin paced the room as she spoke, striking exaggerated poses for emphasis.

“About the only thing she left out is her certainty that I’m getting fat, though she probably didn’t think it was worth mentioning this time, considering I’m going to be an old, obscure dancer without a career to go back to.”

“She was on a tear, even for her. Are you okay?” Our mother’s specialty was the poisoned paper cut, the wound that started out
as an annoyance but then lingered, festering. She had a knack for knowing exactly where they’d hurt the most, too.

“I’ll be fine. She is what she is, and I’ve long since stopped expecting anything different from her. I just—she’s not wrong, you know? I might not have a career to go back to at the end of this. I will be a year older and have spent a year away from the stage. Closer to a year and a half, actually, because of performance schedules. Which is basically forever, in dance terms. I’m glad I’m here, I am, but I also realize that I might have completely screwed myself.” She dropped backward onto my bed. “If I don’t find a job for when this fellowship is over, then I’ve already danced my last role.”

I flopped down next to her. “Have you asked Gavin what he thinks about your career prospects?”

“Gavin said he thinks NBT would hire me, especially if they see us dance together. Which would be a huge step up from where I was. A dream come true, actually. Logically, I agree with him—I’ve never danced this well in my life, and I can feel myself getting better. It’s just, you know. Her. It’s like she knew I was happy, and she had to put an end to it.” Marin pressed her fingers to her temples.

It was when she moved her arms back down that I saw the silver glint around her neck. “You have one, too,” I said, pulling my hourglass charm from under my shirt.

Marin’s hand pressed against her charm. “ ‘Too’? Oh, that’s great. I’d hoped you’d get the chance.

“Still, right now, I’m not sure if I’m delighted, because getting one means I’m good, or if it makes things even more stressful, because that’s even more time away from the stage, if I decide to take it. Which—I want to. Mostly. I love training on my own, in my own headspace. I’ve even started working on developing some of my own choreography, which I never thought I would be able to
do, and would be a way to extend my career. But I can’t shake the feeling that there is a clock winding down on me.”

“Like you said, you know how she is—don’t let her take this from you,” I said. “Trust Gavin. If he thought being here would be a risk to your career, he’d tell you to leave. It doesn’t do his reputation any good if you study with him for a year and then can’t get work.”

“You’re right,” Marin said. “You’re right. I wish I didn’t let her get to me like that. I mean, I know there’s nothing she can actually do to me, but still.”

A phantom ache ghosted through my hand. “Still.”

She looked at the ceiling. “Hey. You really did put your stars up.”

“Of course I did,” I said.

“I thought maybe you just said so, to make me happy. I’m glad they’re really there,” she said. And we stayed there, together, watching the unmoving stars.

Once upon a time, there were two sisters. The older was dark, and sharp as a knife; the younger warm and golden as the sun.

The younger sister had been given a pair of magic shoes by their mother. When she put them on and danced, she was more beautiful than the stars in the sky. But, like all magic, the shoes came with a cost, and it was paid in the red salt of blood and the white salt of tears.

The mother told the younger sister that she was only beautiful when she danced. Her words dripped poison, but the girl wanted to be beautiful, and she loved her shoes, and did not wish to take them off.

And so. And so.

The older sister took her sharp edges and her knives and she turned them on herself, dissecting until she found her own truths. She spoke story after story until their mother, who had little time
for such things, beat her so that she would be silent. She was not. True stories will not abide silence, and they will speak, even though you bleed for it.

Red salt. White salt.

The younger sister danced and the older sister spoke stories for her, and in time, the shoes were no longer painful. And the younger sister danced the older sister’s stories into being, and they had already paid in salt, red and white, and so what remained was magic. With that magic, they escaped from their mother, and went where she no longer had power over them.

And they lived.

I set the pen down, pushed back from my desk, from the memories I was painting over with fiction.

I’ve never asked Marin what she told herself to stay sane, what her fairy tale ending to our lives growing up would have been.

Maybe I could have asked her, if I had stayed. Maybe I could have told her mine, if there hadn’t been the years of silence between us. But there are some truths that don’t just cut you when you speak them, they stab the person listening, too. Better to not open the wounds.

Survival was the only thing that mattered, for me. Happily ever after, the traditional close, those weren’t words that even came into it.

My fairy tale ending was to live.

The day was Bradburyesque and golden, late summer dropped into fall’s calendar. I packed a bag and went outside to write. There wouldn’t be that many more days when that was possible, and I wanted to take advantage of the time now.

I wandered through campus, away from the forest that I usually
ran in, and toward the Mourning River. Bracketed in bridges, it ran swift between its banks, sweeping the fallen leaves of autumn with it. Wind plucked at the trees, sending more leaves tumbling through the air.

Through the branches I could see a bridge less fanciful than the others. It seemed an ideal place to work, one where I’d be less likely to be interrupted than, say, the replica of the Kissing Bridge, where every couple at Melete felt obliged to visit and seal their love with kisses lipsticked onto the stones, or the replica of the Pont du Gard aqueducts, spanning the Mourning’s widest point. That one had been renamed the Wishing Bridge, because it was where residents went with their most secret desires written on paper boats, to be lit on fire and cast into the water below. Tradition held they would only come true if the boat burned completely before anyone saw you or it.

I walked along the Mourning’s banks, toward what looked like a stone ruin, heaping itself out of the ground. It was tucked at a bend in the river, set back in the shadows of the trees.

The old stones rose gently out of the bank of the river, as if they had grown there over some long-unwinding stretch of time. At what should have been its apex, the bridge stopped. Not cleanly—the edge was uneven, as if what had once been there had crumbled, but there were no ruins in the river beneath, no pieces of a fallen structure on the opposite shore. Just a stretch to halfway, and then a stop.

The wind picked up, whipping the river to white. Leaves tore from the trees, all of autumn’s fall happening at once. I shrugged into the sweatshirt I had stuffed in my bag, and for a second, shaking myself free of the hood, I thought I saw the other half of the bridge. An entire other forest at the end of it, the trees still dark
with green, instead of licked by the flames of autumn. My pulse quickened in recognition—they were a memory I hadn’t yet seen, those trees. The echoes of hoofbeats thundered in my head.