“What are you angry about? We can make it better. We can shape history, because we can do it a little at a time, child. A heart here, a mind there, then another and another—around the world. Having a goal—that’s how you survive the years.”
“Seti likes to seduce community leaders and write angry blog posts,” Esmael said.
He was there behind me, faster than humanly possible.
“It works, you tax-paying stooge,” Seti snarled.
His hand gasped her throat and she released me. I scrambled away, but Esmael was smiling. “Socialist whore,” he hissed.
I grabbed a quilt from the foot of the bed and went up to the roof as their wrestling deteriorated into sex. It was frigid outside but oh so clear, and the pink in the east, past the rest of the city, wasn’t the color of blood at all.
* * *
I made a list for my mom of everything in the world that I’d change. It only had one line.
* * *
The fifth night of the ritual, Esmael came to the house, a bungalow from the 1920s two streets off from the millionaire tax bracket that surrounded my high school. I was in my bedroom smearing pastels to the light of a few candles that smelled variously of spruce, wassail, and orange juice. He wrinkled his nose in distaste.
“Did Grandma let you in?” I asked, handing him the heavy paper. Most people took my work by a corner, careful not to smear charcoal on their fingers, but Esmael took it like the gift it was.
“No, she is unaware I am here,” he said thoughtfully, studying the strokes of black and dark orange. It was a rough pomegranate, cut open in one ragged slash. It bled its thin juice, and five tiny pips lined the bottom of the page, little smears of red pressed there by my pinkie. If the light was better, maybe you could see the ghost of my fingerprints in it. I hoped so.
Esmael’s lips parted and he breathed in, smiling tenderly at me. “Very well, my Persephone, come for your next seed.”
I held out my hand and he lifted it, licked my palm, and drew a breath that tickled the fine hairs on my arm. He pulled me nearer and kissed my wrist, licking and sucking softly until my knees were weak and I dug my fingers into his hip bone. My art fluttered in his other hand as he settled it upon the bed and bit into me.
After, he held me in his lap as his blood swept through my system.
“You don’t have to say goodbye yet,” he murmured. “To any of them. Not until you want to. Or not until they do.”
That was nice, I thought, knowing I would say goodbye fast anyway. A lingering death sucked. A death you knew was coming—or a goodbye you knew was coming—sweetened everything to the point of pain. Waiting to say goodbye would be just like that. I ground my teeth together to stop thinking about it.
“Do you do this often?” I asked, eyes closed. We were both in my desk chair, and the candle nearest us on the desk smelled vividly like a fresh, unadorned Christmas tree.
“Yes.” His arms encircled me gently, supportive and cold. “Most don’t live past the first year, but those who do are nearly always young women. You need to live, I think, because of what’s been denied you. You’re already hungry, every young girl I’ve ever met has been hungry—that makes the transition easier. You know how to live with hunger. And anger—Seti is right about that. Not just any anger, not old masculine anger, sharpened with toxicity, but true anger, the kind that fills you up like a light.”
I said, “I don’t feel angry.”
“You are.”
* * *
I opened El Café the next morning and Sid came in to lean on the counter and flirt over Americanos and last-minute calculus.
When my shift ended, she drove me to school. That time of morning the lot was full, so we parked on a side street and crunched through slush to the main building. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
I shrugged. There were so many possible answers.
Sid had a knit cap pulled down over her ears so you couldn’t see any of her short hair. Her coat was long and her boots tall, but her bare knees were pink and chapped by the two-minute walk.
“Are you angry?” I asked her when we hit the wide sandstone staircase, stopping her with a gloved hand on her shoulder.