Jess is right, though. When we walk into the dimly lit room, no one immediately jumps out as someone you’d pick for your trivia team because of their extensive Sondheim knowledge. A couple of young, heavily tattooed white women in expensive yoga clothes are having an intense conversation in one corner. A diverse trio of middle-aged men stretch in another corner, one wearing a SEAHAWKS T-shirt and another wearing a ratty shirt that says VISUALIZE WHIRLED PEAS.
A guy in his mid-twenties is standing too close to a beefy guy in a kilt who’s unpacking equipment from storage bins.
“Come on, man,” the young guy wheedles. “I’m ready. You’ve got to let me—”
“Nope.” Kilt Guy isn’t having it. He keeps putting a storage bin between them, but then Personal Space Guy moves around to get too close again. It’s uncomfortable to watch. The other one could probably strangle him with one hand. From the look on his face, he might.
“I could be teaching this class! You’re on such a power trip, dude—”
Kilt Guy shakes his head and walks away, continuing to set up.
Privilege: being able to turn one’s back on an angry white dude without worrying about consequences.
“Okay, so this is an ongoing thing,” Jess whispers. “Mack’s the teacher”—they chin-point at Kilt Guy—“and honestly I don’t know how he hasn’t run that asshole through with a sword yet.”
“What does the asshole want?”
“Isaac? He wants to learn super-advanced techniques no one here is anywhere near ready to use. Including him. He gets here early and stays late, just to fondle the swords.” Jess waggles their perfect eyebrows at me.
“Hello.” Suddenly Mack is in front of us. “Who’s this? You bring a friend, Jess? Oh, and did you check out that book on mounted combat I told you about?”
“Yes, ohmigod!” Jess turns on their fanperson voice. “It was exactly what I needed to finish my cosplay. Thank you! This is Marianne.”
I stick my hand out to shake. “Em.”
“Any experience with swords, Em?”
“Uh, no.”
“She’s a writer. She’s writing a book set in medieval France—”
I stop Jess before they bore this guy with the entire plot of my story. “I was hoping I could observe the class.”
“Nope.” Mack uses the same final tone he used with the asshole from before. “No one observes. You participate or you hit the road.”
“Told you,” Jess says.
“Circle up, warriors!”
Isaac the Overconfident is the first one to the circle, letting out a loud battle cry. He’s ready to defend Seattle against the forces invading to . . . pillage our coffee? Lay siege to the Amazon Spheres?
Mack gives him a withering look. “Today we’re going to work on a strike from above and a wrath strike.” He points a sword at me. “You in or out?”
I feel like learning how to use a fucking sword.
“I’m in.”
KNOW MY NAME
The bells that beckon
to morning prayers
do not awaken me;
I never slept.
Zahra stirs, peaceful
until her eyes open
and she remembers.
Her gaze falls on my face
as tears slip down her own.
I long to comfort her
for all the times she’s
held my hand
dressed my wounds
scrubbed my stains
but there is comfort
in the roles we know.
She slips from bed,
retrieves the stack of garments
left by the door in the night
and sets two shapeless shifts
upon the bed where Helene lies
safe, wrapped in Emilde’s arms.
We could stay here until
my brother returns.
Or if he doesn’t, until
the horrors beyond these walls
fade. Or if they don’t
perhaps we simply stay.
I cannot stay here
with my softest parts
exposed.
Even the modest garments
provided by women
betrothed to Christ
cannot contain
cannot keep out
the ugliness.
I require
armor.
If someone else
should slay the monsters
it will be in the name
of land and power and wealth
not Marguerite de Bressieux.
Not in the name of Helene
or Zahra, Emilde, Betsy.
They must know our names.
At breakfast
I tell the women
who have given their lives
in servitude to my family
they are free to return
to their homes.
This pronouncement
is met with fear, tears.
They have nowhere to go.
Restless, I walk the grounds.
Through massive windows
morning light illuminates
the sisters, anonymous,
hunched over gilded pages.
Beyond the scriptorium,
the chapel, and then
a small stone outbuilding
jutting from its side.
A flash of movement
from within
catches my eye.
It could be any of the sisters
attending to their many tasks
but I’m reminded of the anchoress
Father told us of years ago.
Religious recluse walled into a cell
with no way out, not betrothed
to Christ, but divorced from the world.
Not imprisonment, but choice
to spend one’s days in isolation, prayer.
Philippe had laughed.
A witch!
Father’s rebuke
was instant.
Philippe’s cheek flamed
where Father dealt the blow.
The anchoress is
to be respected.
Could the flash in the window
be the anchoress we learned of
all those years ago?
Still living out her days
with stones for company?
How long
can one endure
such solitude?
I draw nearer.
The opening in the wall
is less window than
slightest gap allowing
air and a glimpse of sky.
Perhaps exhaustion birthed
the movement, my brain
creating a world in which
a woman could choose
There are no doors;
no one could ever
storm this castle.
I peek in the gap.
Blessings upon you, child.
She is perhaps my mother’s age,
long hair tied back
shift loose upon her frame.
Blessings to you.
How does one greet a person
who’s chosen isolation?
Have I intruded?
May I pray for you, my child?
I stumble back.
I couldn’t fathom it
when Father told us
but now I see why
she might choose a life
where no one can ever touch
her.
But if she was driven here by fear,
doesn’t she live with it every day,
the walls a constant reminder?
Or maybe fear is a constant
no matter the walls.
And did she truly choose it
or was it chosen for her by a man
she inconvenienced by existing?
So many questions but all I say is
I have to go.
I have to go.
Even if
four walls of stone
could keep me safe
I cannot hide
while men
who gutted my life
so many lives
are free
to ravage
all of France.
The second night
the others sleep more quickly,
endless weight upon the scales
pressed down until there’s no more give.
I drop a kiss on Zahra’s head
and then Helene’s. A silent thanks
to Emilde, my sister’s constant
no matter my fate.
I slip out into the night.
The convent is quiet and dark
as I lead Minuit to the gate,
save for a flickering
at the anchoress’s window.
Does she see me go?
Would she stop me
if she could?
Does she envy the freedom
of a girl with a horse
or has she found
the freedom she sought
in locking herself away
from the world of men?
As I ease it open
the gate’s protest
metal on metal
awakens not what’s past
but what’s to come.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The apartment building is a long way from campus, with some sort of clinic on one side, sketchy-looking people camped out on the sidewalk, and a boarded-up building on the other. I can totally see why Nor would rather live here than with her family at home.
I clamp down on my inner snark. Nor reached out. She invited me over. I’m not going to screw this up.
I text to let her know I’ve arrived, since something crusty is growing on the buzzer panel, which looks like it hasn’t been touched in about half a century anyway. The door clicks and I step inside.
It smells like weed and rat poison.
My breath starts coming faster. My palms are sweaty. I’m nervous—to see my sister. My best friend. I take in the slowest breath I can manage considering I feel like I’m about to be shoved into a coliseum to face some underfed, abused beast.
“Up here!” A head appears over the railing a few floors up. “I’m Tonika! Nor’s roommate. Come on up!”
Roommates. I knew they existed, but I’ve been so focused on seeing Nor again that I didn’t think about meeting her roommates.
Tonika pulls me in for a hug the moment I reach the third-floor landing. Then she pulls back and holds me at arm’s length, like our great-aunt Phyllis does when we haven’t seen her in a few years.
“You look so much like Nor!” she says. “She talks about you constantly. Come in! She’s in the shower. She left her phone out for me to buzz you in if you texted.”
We used to think it was funny, how sometimes growing up people didn’t even believe we were sisters. I was always fair, with thin, light brown hair and light brown eyes. When we visited Guatemala, Papi’s family would call me canchita and I was confused because Spanish class taught me that meant blond. I’m not blond.
Nor’s always been darker, morena, especially in the summer, with thick, glossy waves of nearly black hair and eyes to match. The nicknames weren’t good or bad, only facts, so commonplace and neutral to comment on appearance. Mom wasn’t thrilled when they called her gordita, but Papi insisted it was loving. Most of his family members call him cabezón—big head—so all things considered, gordita wasn’t bad.
Maybe because our tíos and tías and primos are all much more moreno than canche, I’ve always felt like Nor belongs with Papi’s family in a way I don’t and never will.
Tonika says we look alike, and we do, in our bone structure, the shape of our noses, our smiles. For someone passing by, though, we look worlds apart.
I follow Tonika into the apartment, which smells more like freshly baked chocolate chips cookies than the patchouli incense I was expecting. To be clear: The apartment is most certainly a shithole. But it’s the shit-hole of poor college students using milk crates as end tables. They’re not cooking meth.
Tonika knocks on the bathroom door as we pass it and hollers, “Your baby sister’s here!”
She leads me into the living room–kitchen area, where chocolate chip cookies cool on the counter. “Help yourself,” she says. “We forgive your sister for turning the oven on in this heat because she is a culinary goddess. Want something to drink? Too hot for coffee, though. Wyatt’s home-brewed kombucha?”
I perch on a wobbly barstool and take a cookie. “Water would be great.”
She laughs. “I don’t blame you. He hasn’t killed us yet, but it’s always a gamble.” She sets a glass of water in front of me. “You’re a writer, yeah?”
I’m confused for a second. Nor doesn’t even know about Marguerite.
“Nor says you’re on the school paper?”
“Oh yeah. I was.” Loud electronic music drifts through the ceiling from the apartment upstairs. There’s a water stain on the ceiling that would give Papi a heart attack. “Who else lives here?”
“Right now? It’s me and Nor and Wyatt. My girl, Lola, went to Puerto Rico for the summer, so Nor’s in her room.”
“Who’s Wyatt?” When Nor said she was moving in with some people from her gender studies class, I’d assumed they were all women. Which was stupid of me, now that I think about it. It seems like lately I’m wrong about everything.
Tonika pulls a photo off the fridge and sets it in front of me. She’s at a concert with a short, round Latinx girl on one side, and a super-tall, gangly white guy on the other. “Lola, and this here’s Wyatt. I think he’s working today.”
The bathroom door opens and Nor comes out in the same faded green sweats she’s had forever, looking almost like my sister. Her hair is all wrapped up in a sort of turban thing on her head. But I catch a glimpse of the Fremont High Eagle.
“Are you wearing my T-shirt on your head?”
She reaches up and touches the makeshift turban. “It cuts down on the frizz,” she says. As she brings her hand down, I catch a glimpse of something on her wrist.
“Is that . . . did you get a tattoo?”
“Oh. Yeah.” She holds it out, shy.
I don’t grab her wrist the way I would have, before. Instead, I step closer and lean in to look. It’s a tiny line drawing of a butterfly. I almost miss the fact that the body is a semicolon.
“She was very brave,” Tonika says. “Except for the part where she was a total baby.”
“Hey!”
Tonika laughs as her phone buzzes. She waves it at us and heads to her room.
Nor sits down with me and grabs a cookie. “What do you think? I’m playing with the recipe.”
“They’re good. Something’s different. Sort of . . . herbal? Wait, these aren’t—”
Nor laughs, finally a familiar thing in a world where Nor has a tattoo and roommates she trusted more than me to go with her. “They are not pot cookies. But good call on the herbal—they’ve got thyme.”
For a second I think she means time. Like time is an ingredient we could bake into things, fold into the batter of our lives to give us the space we need to proce
ss and heal, move fluidly back to change things or forward to where the edges won’t feel so sharp.
“They’re really good. Can I take some home for Papi?”
“Sure.” She narrows her eyes at me. “But they better make it home to Papi.”
“I swear.”
“I wanted to talk to you about Mom. Her birthday’s next month.”
“Okay.”
“She turned fifty last year.”
I take another cookie to hide my surprise. I probably should have known that. But I can’t even remember her birthday last year. I can’t remember mine. The trial prep, the postponements, the media, the continuances.
Reading my mind, Nor says to the counter, “We just completely skipped over it. It was right when . . .”
“Right.”
“So I think we should do something special this year. To make up for the one we missed.”
“Like a party?”
“Ew, no. I mean, with our family, sure. But more like a special gift from the two of us.”
Lately I’ve spent all my money on longsword classes and obscure books about medieval warfare, but I can’t tell Nor that. It feels like a secret, for some reason. Maybe I don’t want anyone to think I’m actually training to avenge my sister.
“I was thinking like a scrapbook. We could gather old pictures and try to contact people she went to school with or whatever and get them to write cards. Make it pretty. It wouldn’t have to cost much, but I think it would mean a lot to her.”
“That would be nice.”
“I know the last year has been kind of shitty for all of you and it’s—”
“You better not say it’s your fault.”
She pauses. “You’re right. It’s not. But I don’t want everything to be about me. I was terrible to you that day at the house, packing my stuff.”