The Radical Element by Jessica Spotswood (6)

The first time Grace saw the cover of Photoplay, she knew. It had been Clara Kimball Young on the front, pink roses and sage-green leaves crowning her braided hair. Her eyes looked out, glinting but bored, like she knew everyone in the world loved her, but she barely cared.

Every issue Grace could save the twenty-five cents for, every cover girl staring out from the front, just made her more certain. Lila Lee carrying a basket of lilacs, the wind swirling her hair and the blue ribbons on her cream dress. Constance Talmadge holding a strand of peach pearls, two parakeets fluttering above her. Katherine MacDonald gazing off the page, her painted blue eyes catching the candlelight.

What Grace wanted was to be one of those girls, pin-curled and dripping with ribbons. What she wanted was to be a star.

That was before she’d gotten cast as one. Star No. 7 — she didn’t get a name in this picture — out of twenty stars in all, in A Night in the Heavens. The director wasn’t even trying to pretend it wasn’t a flat-out copy of Le Voyage dans la Lune. He had such ideas about being the new Georges Méliès, he even thought he could get the studio to pay for coloring the film, thousands of frames painted by hand.

Grace and the other star girls were little more than living, sparkling set decoration, a backdrop for the lead actress. Costumers pinned and basting-stitched them into dresses that shimmered with copper beads, glittering and heavy as new pennies.

Grace’s Hollywood wasn’t quite the chandelier-lit parties of the magazine pages. Not yet. Hers was more cold-water flat and five-cent Hershey bar dinners. She was a long way off from the starlets who sprinkled themselves with Guerlain perfume every morning. Grace had saved for months for two tiny bottles of l’Heure Bleue, one for her and one for her mother. She’d tried it out at Macy’s, and that scent, the swirl of jasmine and heavy vanilla, was the smell of Hollywood.

Even this early in the morning, Grace’s breasts ached. When she got her first part, the other girls had shown her how to flatten them down so the strands of beads on her costume would drop straight. That was one of Grace’s first lessons about Hollywood. Lines ruled over curves, so she’d have to straighten hers out.

A scene painter walked by, carrying a white moon. The crisp, sharp smell of the paint reminded Grace of her father and brother coating the almond trees.

Up close like this, the moon looked no more real than a child’s crayon drawing. But by now Grace knew that so much of what was dazzling on film looked a little bit off in real life, the way things looked in dreams. The chandeliers were made of cut paper. Blossoms on trees were the same kind of tissue that came in dress boxes. Mansions and pillars that seemed like honest-to-God brick and marble were plywood painted trompe l’oeil, which as far as Grace knew was French for fake.

Before that moon got its second coat of paint, Grace and Star No. 12 had tried, laughing, to lift it. Drunk on a flask Star No. 12 kept tucked into her garter, they’d been aiming to get it up to the overhead grid. It’d be a riot, everyone coming in the next day and seeing that crescent over their heads, stuck in the grid above the pulleys and cables. Thank goodness the same flask that gave them the bright idea left them too sloppy to carry it out. They both would’ve been replaced faster than the click of a clapperboard.

The quicker that scene painter went, the more Grace noticed his gait, like the off-kilter rhythm of rain dripping off a roof. He had a limp. The middle of the inner crescent sat against the boy’s shoulder, his fingers splayed over the outer edge. Grace couldn’t see his face or hair. But the shape of him clawed at her. His hands, his walk. He was short, the same height as a boy she’d kissed a few months ago. In trousers, suspenders, and cuffed-up sleeves, he seemed fourteen or fifteen instead of the eighteen or nineteen he probably was.

He set down the moon. Its shadow slid off him, giving her a clear view of his face.

The face of the boy she knew.

No. The word rang in Grace so loud, she kept her lips together to be sure she didn’t say it.

No. Sawyer could not be here.

Grace had gone out for this part to avoid him. She’d heard he’d been hired onto some picture about Cleopatra.

His back was to Grace, so Grace turned her back to him, hoping he wouldn’t see her. Maybe she could hide out in the dressing room. Maybe she could avoid him for the whole picture.

Or maybe she was being ridiculous, and he wouldn’t even remember her.

That last thought left a bitter taste on her tongue, like the bite of orange pith.

The crew hurried all twenty star girls into their flying harnesses. They clipped them in, checking the lobster clasps as Evelyn Farwell swept onto the set. Her curls haloed her like whirls of lemon meringue, and she’d painted her lips the deep red of Valentine’s Day roses. She had the straight lines of a magazine girl. No curves that needed flattening.

“Evelyn Farwell,” the head costumer snapped.

The woman’s voice came so shrill the gaffer almost dropped a Fresnel lantern. The metal barn doors flanking the light rattled.

“You take that color off this instant,” the costumer said.

“It keeps my lips from disappearing,” Evelyn said.

“I don’t care,” the costumer called across the set. “Wash it off. You look like a Mexican.”

The words cut into Grace like the leather straps of the harness.

She gritted her teeth into a smile as flying cables hoisted each star girl up. She fanned out her arms, shifting her weight so the strands of copper beads would glimmer on film.

Evelyn Farwell, her cupid’s bow now brightened with a Bourjois pink, her straight hips in her velvet-covered harness, rode the crescent moon into the air. Her dress flowed out behind her, smooth as a Brandy Alexander. So many glass beads had been sewn in that Grace could see Evelyn tensing to keep the train from pulling her backward.

Grace was a single star in a constellation of silver and copper dresses.

Less than that. She was something so terrible Evelyn Farwell couldn’t even wear a lip color that suggested it.

Grace blotted off her camera makeup. The blue greasepaint rimming her eyes. The sweeps of lavender powder contouring her cheeks and brow bone. The yellow lipstick that made her look sick but came out soft on black-and-white film; everyone but the lead girl had to wear it.

By now, the other girls had skittered off for the holiday. The nice ones asked was she going home; the chatty ones wanted to know where home was. Grace always said Bakersfield. Her hometown, a few miles outside, was small enough that she never named it. There were only so many families in Almendro, and they all knew one another.

Grace sat alone in the dressing room, lights clicking off outside.

Those Photoplay covers had promised the things Hollywood held, waiting in the shadows of the blue hills. The sureness that she could become a girl with a smile as light as a spritz of perfume. A girl with laughter ready on her lips. And the ease of knowing she was wanted, and that being wanted let her belong not just somewhere but anywhere.

It promised more than that Grace could become someone beautiful.

It promised that she could become someone who could take a full breath in this world.

She slumped forward, elbows on the dressing table. Her forehead settled on the backs of her wrists.

You look like a Mexican.

She should have understood that the girl she’d been born was worth no more in this town than the tin canister holding a film reel. The words shouldn’t have landed this hard. By now, she should have been used to them.

The snickers from the cameramen. You ever go down to Tijuana? Those girls down there — then, always, a whistle of wonder — they’re ready whenever you are.

The chatter in the dressing room. Did I get too much sun over the weekend? I’m starting to look like a wetback.

An investor bringing his fur-coated wife to the set on their way to Café Montmartre. A lament from her. I want plums — don’t you all keep any fruit around this godforsaken place? His laugh before he said, Darling, if it’s plums you want, I’ll hire a dozen Mexicans to go out right now and pick you some.

To them, Grace and her family would have been nothing but these words, these names. The cameramen did not have to fear being beaten and arrested if they lost their way at night and wandered too close to strangers’ farms. The talcum-pale girls in the dressing room mirrors had never been barred from town shops or turned away from doctors. The producers’ sons had never endured what her brother had, strangers assuming he was not a soldier but a criminal, that he had lost half his leg not in the war but by robbing a bank or stealing a horse.

Grace sobbed onto the backs of her hands, the hard, gasping breaths alternating between sounding soaked and parched. Her fist hit the dressing table. She didn’t realize she was doing it until the pain rattled her wrist.

Every day, it was harder to stay Grace Moran. Every evening, she collapsed into bed, wrung out with the effort of draining the color from herself. When she let herself give into what she was, it rushed back into her so fast it felt liquid. It was a pond flooding her bed, and she had to tip her head back to keep enough of her face above water.

The color glamour was borrowed magic, an heirloom her great-grandmother had handed down like a wedding quilt. But Bisabuela had warned her that the longer she kept it up, the more it would exhaust her. It would be worse than wearing shoes that pinched or a necklace with a clasp that bit the back of her neck.

She’d almost let the glamour slip that night with Sawyer. Both of them had gotten drunk on brick wine the crew had smuggled from Amador County. Without even changing out of her costume corset and petticoat, Grace had taken hold of Sawyer’s suspenders and tugged him into the lead actress’s green room. The woman was literal about it: green damask settee, green brocade fainting couch, green drapes framing the mirror. Bits of her producer boyfriend’s tobacco were ground into the green tufted rugs, filling the air with a smell like liquor and vanilla.

By then the lead actress was off to her wrap parties, so Grace pulled Sawyer down onto that fainting couch, his fingers following the laces of her corset.

When Sawyer had set his mouth against her neck, she’d felt the glamour giving. Her focus, her will, flinched enough to weaken that inherited magic.

Grace had shoved Sawyer off her and run out of the green room. She hadn’t even glanced back, not wanting to see whatever pained look, whatever wondering, showed on his face.

She’d never let him close enough to smell her perfume again. She couldn’t afford to. One kiss, one blush or grazing of fingers that caught her off-guard, and Grace Moran might vanish like a curl of smoke off a cigarette.

The glamour was hollowing her out. Her one hope was the cascarones, and the rumor about wishes made on an Easter full moon. If the cascarones granted her this wish, she could become a girl who belonged in Photoplay, laughing and lovely. The knowledge that the world would make room for her would feel so thick and soft she could revel in it as though it were a fine coat.

“Are you okay?” Sawyer’s voice broke through the quiet in the dressing room.

Grace startled, sitting up.

Before she could look for Sawyer, the mirror in front of her caught her, stilled her. It showed a girl Grace knew but had never seen in this glass, in this dressing room.

In place of Grace Moran’s fair pin curls, a color between dark blond and very light brown, there were Graciela Morena’s brown-black waves, full and unbrushed. Instead of Grace’s cream complexion, her skin was tan as the shells of the almonds her family grew. Where a minute ago there had been eyes blue as the ocean off the pier, a pair as brown as magnolia bark blinked back.

Grace touched her face. Graciela mimicked the gesture.

Out of the corner of her eye, farther down the mirror, she found Sawyer’s reflection. And he was staring.

Everything she’d been afraid he’d see when she was kissing him. Everything she worried would show when his breath fell against her neck. This mirror showed it all, how badly she’d let the color glamour slip.

She met his eyes in the glass. “Get out.”

His reflection stayed, blinking at her, as if this mirrored boy did not know how to make the real Sawyer do anything.

“Get out,” she said, yelling now.

This time he flinched. He left the dressing room fast enough that even as she watched Graciela Morena in the mirror, she caught his limp.

Grace slowed and steadied her breathing until the color glamour settled back over her. It bleached her hair. It lightened her skin. It spun the brown of her eyes back to the shimmering blue of the whole Pacific Ocean.

She drove Graciela Morena and all her shades of brown out of her.

Grace caught up with Sawyer halfway across the studio lot. She had to play nice now. She could not be wild-eyed and worried.

“Look,” she said, but any next words turned to a breath.

He gave a slow nod. “Sawyer.”

His smile, both sad and resigned, prickled. He really thought she hadn’t remembered his name?

“I know it doesn’t roll off the tongue quite like ‘the kid with the gimp leg,’” he said, “but at least it’s shorter.”

She felt the flush rise to her cheeks, a flush that would show more in the cream of Grace’s skin than the brown of Graciela’s. She’d never called him that, but it wasn’t as though she’d never heard it around the lot. That first picture they were on together, rumor was he’d managed to get himself hired by a director whose brother had lost his left arm in the war. But that didn’t stop the director from looking the other way when the grips mimicked Sawyer’s walk.

“For what it’s worth” — Sawyer slid his hands into his pockets — “I think you’re better the way you were.”

She wanted to tell him no one but the painted moon and backdrops cared what he thought, that he didn’t know from nothing.

Sawyer shrugged his good-bye and kept on across the set.

She wished her next impulse had to do with being kind. She wished it had to do with anything except getting on the good side of a boy who had seen Graciela Morena.

A boy she’d already been cruel to three pictures and all those months ago.

“Sawyer,” she said.

He turned around.

“You have somewhere to go this weekend?” she asked.

“Pobrecito.” Her mother took Sawyer’s face in her hands.

Sawyer hadn’t even put down his bag, or Grace’s, which he’d insisted on carrying. He looked a little worried. Grace wished she could tell him the pity in her mother’s face had nothing to do with his limp. To her mother, Sawyer’s presence here meant he either had no family or that he couldn’t see them for Easter, and this, not his walk, was worth her sympathy.

Grace took the suitcases while her mother was talking at him. He was too distracted to notice.

Graciela. She was with her family, and she was Graciela now. She had let the color glamour fall. For this weekend, she was cotton dresses and almond blossoms, not beaded gowns and pressed powder. She could let her breasts loose instead of flattening them.

Being Graciela Morena took so much less work than making herself look like Grace Moran. Without the effort weighing her down, the suitcases felt light as baby chicks.

Her mother swept Sawyer outside into the almond orchard, saying they would go find Graciela’s father.

Graciela left her suitcase in her old bedroom, the bed covered with Bisabuela’s rose-embroidered wedding quilt, and Sawyer’s in the room at the end of the hall. She hadn’t bothered packing clothes. Graciela Morena’s soft cotton skirts were all waiting for her, in the room she’d told her parents they could clear and rent out. But they hadn’t.

Instead she’d stuffed her suitcase full of candy bars that were easy to find in Los Angeles but that her family had to go to Bakersfield to get. Mounds for her mother, Heath bars for her father. And in the inner pockets, money they would never accept. She would have to slip it into the coffee can when they weren’t looking.

One day Graciela wanted to be a big enough star to buy her mother a pair of the two-tone Chanel heels all the girls on set went mad over. She wanted to buy her family one of the new refrigerators, so her father didn’t have to worry about whether the iceman would come out this far.

She wanted to get Miguel to doctors who could help him stop having dreams that he had all the parts of himself he’d had before the war.

A life as Grace Moran promised more than a little place carved out in this world that loved fair-haired, sea-eyed girls. It promised the things she could give her family that they could not give themselves.

“Hermana,” her brother’s voice called from a half-open door.

She dashed into the room so fast, she almost slipped on the tile. She threw her arms around her brother. “You’re here!”

“Where’d you think I’d be?” he asked, ruffling her hair.

“Married with a hundred babies.” She pulled back to look at him. “That girl is in love with you.”

“Well.” Miguel gestured at his face and body. “Can you blame her?”

Graciela punched his shoulder and went back across the hall.

“If you keep her waiting” — Graciela called from the open door, digging through her suitcase — “I’ll strangle you with your Easter Sunday necktie.”

Miguel’s shadow crossed the sun cast through the linen curtains. “You’d attack a man who doesn’t have two legs to run away?”

The fact that Miguel could joke meant he was healing in places she could not see. He had fewer nightmares, Mamá had written her. He went out walking with the crutch instead of shutting himself up in his room, no sky but his ceiling.

“I’d smother a man in his sleep with his own pillow if he broke that girl’s heart,” Graciela said.

When Miguel had come off the bus with his trouser pant pinned under where his leg now ended, Dolores hadn’t flinched. She’d thrown herself onto him like he was strong enough for all of her, her wide hips and eager hands and her mouth that had no shame kissing him in full daylight. That was good for both Dolores and Graciela, because if she’d left him, Graciela would’ve gone after her with her father’s Winchester.

Graciela handed Miguel a Butterfinger bar and threw a dozen more onto his bed.

He ripped open the orange-and-blue package. “I had to save up for a good ring for her.” He bit into the bar. “Viejo Garcia’ll be done sizing it tomorrow, and if you don’t think it’s perfect, I’ll eat this wrapper.”

Miguel sat on his bed, holding the candy bar in one hand and parting the curtains with the other. “You taking in strays now?”

“He couldn’t go home for Easter,” Graciela said. “So I invited him here.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m a kind and generous person.”

Miguel started laughing.

Graciela nodded at the candy bars on his bed. “Keep laughing, and I’ll crush those to dust.”

“Then I’ll eat them over toast.” Miguel’s hand dropped the curtain, and the panel fell back into place. “If he’s here, he must already know about you, right?”

Graciela gave a slow, wincing nod.

“Did you tell him?” Miguel asked.

Graciela studied a band of light on the floor. “He saw me.”

Miguel whistled softly. “What are you gonna do?”

“Get him drunk and see if Bruja Licha can make him forget,” Graciela said, wanting to hear her brother laugh again. “Wanna help?”

“For you, you know I would.” Miguel clucked his tongue. “But it’s Easter. The Lord frowns on drunkenness during la Semana Santa.”

La Semana Santa. For a minute, she’d forgotten it was Holy Week. In two days, she would fold all her hopes into the glitter of a cascarón.

“Easter’s a full moon.” She leaned against the door frame. “I’m gonna make my wish.”

Miguel’s smile fell away. “Graciela,” he said, with the sad look he had when he’d told her that la llorona was not some fairy whistling on the wind but the spirit of a grieving mother. “It’s just a story.”

Graciela pushed herself off the door frame. “Not to me.”

She kicked out of her shoes and walked barefoot, the sound of her mother’s laughter pulling her down the hall.

She stopped in the doorway to the kitchen.

Sawyer stood at the sink, washing his hands. The afternoon sun came in from the orchard, filling the sink, and water left the fine hairs on the back of his wrists glistening.

“And we’ll teach you all about the cascarones,” her mother told him. “It’s a full moon, and Easter, so if you’re lucky, they can grant you wishes.”

A ribbon of worry snaked down the back of Graciela’s neck.

She loved her family’s generous laughter, how they invited strangers to their table for tamales at Christmas and chiles en nogada in the fall. The warmth of masa and the dark sugar of pomegranates was the smell of their kindness.

But the cascarones, the story about making a wish when the full moon fell on Easter, this was her family’s magic. And her mother was telling their secrets to a boy who knew Graciela’s. She was giving this boy more power over Graciela, when he already had too much.

For a minute, Graciela wondered if this was a good thing, him warming to her family. One more reason for him not to turn on her. But watching him here, this boy from the world of trompe l’oeil sets, reminded her of all she’d bartered off. She’d kissed him once and then shoved him away, holding her own glamour closer than she held him or even her own family.

Sawyer stood as a reminder of all the cruelty she had to fold into herself to keep Grace Moran.

When she helped her mother with the cooking, Graciela was so distracted, she nicked her thumb slicing potatoes. Throughout dinner, she watched this boy, her mother’s mole rojo bitter on her tongue. She gave thanks that her father and Miguel were so loud and laughing, with their stories about winning fine watches off rich men playing cards, that Sawyer didn’t notice.

After they had cleaned up from dinner, after her father had shown Sawyer the new chickens Miguel had bought, ones who made blue and green eggs, that anger and fear still wove through her.

She had invited Sawyer here because she thought if she was nice to him, he wouldn’t squeal on her, tell the director she was really some wetback in a witch’s costume.

She hadn’t realized how odd it would feel to see this boy among everything she’d tried to hide. This world of her mother’s mole and so many white-blossoming trees only her father could count them all. As far from the blond and blue shape of Grace Moran as the stars were from the earth.

After everyone else had gone to bed, she waited outside his door. She waited until she heard the sounds of him changing. The soft, blunt landing of his shoes on the floorboards. The click of buttons as he threw a shirt over the back of the wooden chair.

She wanted him to know, just for a second, what she had felt. To feel that seen, laid bare.

This was who she was. Not Grace Moran, poised and polite. She was Graciela Morena, dark-haired and brown-skinned like her family, but as vindictive as her family was generous.

Before her mother’s voice could wedge its way in, urging her to show kindness to boys who could not go home to their families on Easter weekend, Graciela opened the door.

Sawyer froze, the glow from a lamp lighting half of him. It warmed the shade of his dark hair. It flashed off his eyes so they looked like the sun through a marble.

He was not naked. She was a little disappointed. Not because she had wanted to startle him, she realized. Because she wanted to know what he was like under his clothes, what she had missed the chance to learn when she threw him off her in the green room.

But as the room’s wood smell rushed at her, relief filled her. She did not want to be the girl she was in this moment. A girl who forced her way into this boy’s room just to catch him off-guard. The fact that she knew what it was like, that feeling of being seen when she didn’t want to, gave her less of a right to do this, not more.

Sawyer had his shoes off, but pants and socks on. He’d cast aside his collared shirt for a loose sweater, one so pilled and worn soft, he’d probably relegated it to an extra layer on cool nights. At the cuffs and collar, the cotton of a long-sleeve undershirt showed.

On the chair, next to his collared shirt, Sawyer had thrown a few wide ribbons of cloth and a thick swathe of all-cotton elastic.

She thought of his leg. He walked in a way that made him seem so used to himself that she’d always thought whatever happened had been a long time ago. Now she wondered if he’d been injured in a way he had to keep wrapping and tending to.

“Are you hurt?” she asked.

“No,” he said. A resigned laugh opened inside the word.

“If you are, we can get you help,” she said. She could put on Grace Moran’s colors, her best dress, and a coat of lipstick, and charm some doctor into seeing this boy.

“I’m not hurt,” he said. “But you’re afraid.”

Graciela tried to keep herself straight and tall, a star girl in a flying harness. “No, I’m not.”

“If you weren’t, you wouldn’t have invited me here,” he said.

“That’s not true,” she said, the lie dull on her tongue.

He held up a hand, a gesture that said he wouldn’t believe any arguments, but that it was okay, he didn’t blame her. “You’re afraid I’ll tell everyone something you don’t want them to know.”

He came forward, edging farther into the lamp’s light. At first it felt like a threat, a way of commanding the space between them. But his stance was more assurance than threat. He was neither scared nor trying to scare her.

She wouldn’t have caught it if he hadn’t let her, if he hadn’t moved this slowly and stood where she could see him. But when he stepped into the light, the lamp showed the shape and shadows of him. What was under the sweater and shirt he would sleep in.

“I’m not gonna tell your secrets, Graciela,” he said.

Her name, her real name, in his voice, brushed the back of her neck like feathers.

“I know what it means to have things you want to make sure stay yours,” he said. “I would never tell what wasn’t mine to tell. I need you to know that.”

In that moment, Graciela was one of her family’s almond trees, and understanding landed on her like finches.

If Grace had reached for Sawyer’s belt when she was kissing him on that brocade fainting couch, he would have stopped her. He would not have let her unbuckle his belt and get her hand inside his trousers. He would not have let her find the shape of him with her fingers, no more than she would have chosen to let him see her with her glamour fallen away.

“I’m sorry,” Graciela said, the words as deep and true as confessing a sin. She was sorry for walking in on him. For pushing him away months ago. For thinking he was a boy who could never understand the fear and the loneliness of having truths no one else could know.

Her favorite tree was waiting for her, the stars above sharp as the glitter in a cascarón. The magnolia’s thick boughs formed a bowl she and Miguel had crouched in on summer nights, and now she sat with her back against the cool bark.

“Grace,” Sawyer called to her across the rows of flowering almonds. The fluffy branches shifted in the night breeze.

She slid down from the tree.

How awful she’d been to wait outside that door. How thoughtless to see him bear the taunts of the other men on set and still assume he did not know what it was to be out of place.

How petty to want vengeance against this boy for doing nothing but seeing her as she was.

He stopped at the tree’s base, again wearing his collared shirt. She’d thought walking out of the room was the polite thing. Now she cringed with how he’d had to get dressed again to come outside and find her. His shirt had been buttoned one off. His suspenders hung down against his thighs.

“So that’s it?” he asked. “Stalemate?” No worry in his voice. Just a question.

Graciela put a little of her weight down on the soft dirt, and then all of it. She brushed the magnolia bark dust off her hands, feeling the shame of how she’d acted. She’d walked in on him, and in the face of her doing this, he’d offered her even more of himself than he had months ago. Then she’d walked out on him.

A question swirled around her feet like dust.

“Is that what happened to your leg?” she asked.

She’d always thought it was polio. If he hadn’t been so young, she would’ve thought he’d been in the war like her brother.

“What are you talking about?” Sawyer asked.

“Did you make a bad bargain with some bruja?” She’d heard of that, women who pretended to be curanderas but who instead dealt in the trade of souls and hearts. She might have promised she could help him live as a man and not told him her price, that it would cost him the easy use of his leg.

Sawyer’s laugh was small and sad. “You want to know what happened to my leg?”

“Was it because someone found out?” she asked, her shoulders tight against the thought of it.

“No.” Again came that pained laugh. “I lived like this” — Sawyer looked down at his shirt and suspenders — “like I am, even before I came out to California. My mother” — now his smile was soft — “she’s never fought me on it.” Sawyer lowered his eyes. “She’s always been good to everybody. She even took in a boarder no one else would rent to. He’d served for most of the war and he wasn’t right, not after the things he’d seen. But he was nice to me. Called me ‘son’ and always wanted to give me advice about women.”

Beneath the nectar of almond blossoms and magnolia, the wind brought the bitter scent of almond bark.

“But on one of his bad days, he didn’t recognize me,” Sawyer said. “He thought I was someone else. Later he said I looked just like some kid in his division. He thought of me dying like that, I guess, and he wanted to save me. He wanted to make sure they could never call me up. So he did. He made sure of it.”

A well of protectiveness rose up in Graciela. Not because Sawyer belonged to her; he didn’t. But because there was already so little sense in how Miguel had lost his leg, and there was even less in this, how the war had done this to Sawyer even after it was over.

“He did that to you?” she asked.

Sawyer shifted his weight, heels scuffing the dirt. “He’d, uh, he’d helped out the medics over there, during the war.” He swallowed, hard. “So he knew which muscles to get at.”

Graciela tasted iron on the wind, Sawyer’s memory so strong it chilled the air.

“My mother got him to some people who could maybe help him,” Sawyer said.

“Help him?” Graciela asked. “She forgave him?”

“What good would it do to be mad at him?” Sawyer shook his head. “The whole history of the world, it’s kings and generals deciding where everybody goes. Not guys like him.”

Sawyer looked down at his thighs, noticing the suspenders.

“The whole town was talking about it.” He pulled the straps onto his shoulders. “I couldn’t get away from it. So my mother let me go out to California.”

Graciela pressed her palm against her stomach. She tried to stop imagining it. The hands of a man who considered wrecking a boy’s leg a kind of mercy, a way to save him from the things he’d seen. A town’s gossip driving the boy from his own home.

Sawyer looked down at his shirt, like that suggestion of what was underneath might be visible now. It wasn’t. He’d layered it over, bound it down as well as when he came to set.

“That day in the dressing room,” she said.

The back of her throat felt tight, knowing that if she said it, he would understand. Of course he would. This boy given a girl’s name when he was born. This boy hurt in a way meant to ensure he would never go to war. This boy whose walk made the grips on set laugh at him even when — especially when — he could hear them.

But the explanations turned to ashes on her tongue.

“I just want to be a star,” she said. “It’s all I’ve wanted since I was a little girl.”

“And you want to do it by pretending you don’t have this family, and you’re not from this place.” He looked down the rows of almond trees, bowing their petaled branches. “I get it.”

“If everyone knows what I am, do you know what kind of roles I’ll get?” Graciela asked. “With what I look like? Maybe none. If I’m lucky, a girl in some whorehouse scene, or if I’m really lucky, a dancing girl in a Western saloon. Over and over until I’m too old and they throw me away.”

“Why do you want to work for people who would ever think about throwing you away?” Sawyer asked.

Graciela took in the magnolia’s perfume. It wasn’t the powder and violets of l’Heure Bleue, but it gave the air the smell of lemon cream.

She had never said the truth out loud. Not to her mother, who would’ve told that costumer to drop dead. Not to Miguel, who always said the girls in Photoplay looked like they’d been left out too long and bleached in the sun. Not to her father, who had blessed her leaving Almendro, but whose heart would crack like ceramic if he knew why.

She had told no one why she wanted to become Grace Moran: because the world left so little room for Graciela Morena.

“You heard my mother talking,” she said. “The full moon’s on Easter this year. I know my wish. You can make one too. Your leg, maybe.” Graciela had already tried talking Miguel into the same thing, but she doubted he believed enough to try. “Maybe it could be fixed.”

Sawyer shook his head. “I’m not broken. This is who I am. Everything that’s happened to me, it’s who I am.”

“So there’s nothing you want?” she asked.

He came toward her, so slowly he did not limp. “I didn’t say that.”

He slid his hand onto the back of her neck and kissed her. He tasted like the honey and first-harvest apricots they’d eaten after dinner. Amber sugar. Fireweed. It made her bite his lower lip just hard enough that the sound he made could have been either pain or him asking her to do it again.

For a second, that taste faded away, leaving behind the bitter tang of brick wine. For a second they were back on that brocade fainting couch, and she was flinching under the feeling that one more kiss would break down the girl she’d given everything to be.

But this was not some borrowed green room. This was the night air threading through her family’s almond trees. She was not laced into some costume corset, a petticoat rough against her legs. She wore a dress made by her mother, the skirt smooth as poured cream.

This was not some set where she had to stuff herself into a girl called Grace Moran.

There was as much room for Sawyer and Graciela as the whole shimmering sky.

She wanted to be both here and in that green room, so she could do something other than what she’d done. Pull him against her instead of shoving him off. Letting him tangle his hands in her hair instead of wishing her hair was cream-rinse blond and fine as a doll’s bangs.

Graciela knew more of Sawyer than she had in that green room. Now she wanted to touch him between his legs like she’d touched herself between her legs. She wanted his hands over her like his fingers had splayed over that white moon. She wanted to lick the little flecks of paint off his neck.

But they were not alone. Grace was there, hovering among the stars, reminding her that this was a boy who knew the distance between Grace Moran and Graciela Morena.

Graciela pulled away.

Sawyer stilled, lips parted. Then he pressed them together, nodding like he understood.

He took his hands off her.

She hadn’t meant it like that. It had nothing to do with his limp, or what was under his clothes. It was that he knew she was two different girls, one blue and blond and another in shades of brown.

“Sawyer,” she said.

But he was already walking away.

She stayed. Running after him seemed like rubbing in the fact that she had two good legs to catch him.

At breakfast, they did not speak. And later that day, there was no chance to.

Her father and Miguel were painting the almond tree trunks. All the farmers were saying this summer would be the hottest in years; the white paint would seal the wood from the scorch of the sun. When Sawyer offered his help, they handed him an extra brush.

Graciela spent the day at the kitchen table with her mother and aunts, hollowing out eggs. Washing and drying the fragile shells. Filling them with glass glitter and sealing them up. The eggs they’d poured out would go into empanadas and capirotada, the bread pudding they ate during Lent but that her mother made with chocolate for Easter Sunday.

She tried to laugh when they laughed, to shriek at their gossip, to tease Dolores about how many babies she and Miguel would have. But Graciela was choking on the hard knot of everything she wanted.

To become the girl on the moon.

To kiss the boy who had painted it.

To disappear into the pale colors of Grace Moran and every promise she held.

To keep her family and never miss a Pascua with them.

All of it wrung her out so much that after dinner she was a starling scared out of a tree. She was running through her father’s fields, her skirt filling with night air. The almond rows opened up in front of her, branches so thick with blossoms, they looked like a hundred thousand sticks of rock candy.

She wanted to run fast enough down these rows that she would break from the earth. She wanted to spin out into the sky and turn to constellations. She wanted to become a shimmering thing children would make wishes on, instead of a girl whose own unmade wish blazed inside her.

It was Holy Saturday, the moment of la Semana Santa she hated most. It was not Good Friday, the day of grief they all knew so well. It was not the Sunday of glorious resurrection. This was el Sábado Santo, the in-between day, and it stretched in front of her, a Holy Saturday as long as her whole life.

Miguel had warned her that if she made her wish at the Easter full moon, it might not work. But it might. She might become Grace Moran, and she would never again look like a Morena. She would not have her mother’s hair and her father’s eyes.

But if she didn’t make that wish, she would never be the girl in the moon.

The price of getting everything she wanted would be everything she was.

She slowed, breathing hard. Almond blossoms clung to her hair and stuck to her damp forehead. Their perfume mixed with the sharp smell of drying paint.

The color glamour was wearing her out. It had never been meant to be used this way, to become someone else. It had always been so a Morena daughter could go places too dangerous for a brown-skinned girl. It had been to buy medicine or seeds, candles or wedding rings, things that some doctors and merchants would not sell to families who looked like the Morenas.

But she had used it to pretend this was not her family. She had traded being her mother and father’s one daughter to be one of twenty identical stars.

A hand rested on her back.

“Hey,” Sawyer said.

Graciela turned.

The wind was sticking petals to him too. They caught in his hair, and Graciela couldn’t tell which flicks of white were blossoms and which were paint.

“Come with me, okay?” he asked.

He led her down the rows, and they came out from under the flowering branches.

Graciela stopped, a breath rising out of her, spinning into a gasp.

Sawyer hadn’t just painted the almond trees.

He’d painted the dark trunk of her magnolia.

But not all of it.

“I wanted to paint enough of it so it’d be okay out here, when it gets hot,” Sawyer said. “But not so much that it didn’t look like your tree anymore.”

On the widest stretches of bark, and up into the boughs, he’d painted patches of white, just where the sun would hit hardest. Where the heat might weaken or split the bark. If she took a few steps one way, the white broke into ribbons. A few steps the other way, and the patches almost vanished, like a trick of the light, the moon’s glow on the boughs.

“I know sometimes you’ve gotta wear colors that aren’t yours,” Sawyer said. “But if you wear too much of somebody else’s colors, there’s none of you left.”

Graciela looked at him. The way he licked his lower lip seemed more like a nervous gesture than a sign he wanted to kiss her. But she wanted to know in what measures he was recklessness and fear, hesitation and certainty, and where he’d gotten his faith that he was worth more than what other people decided. She wanted to know what all those things tasted like on his tongue.

“Wait here,” she said.

Graciela snuck back inside, stealing cascarones from the dark kitchen. She and her mother and aunts had made so many, no one would miss a few.

She brought them outside and asked Sawyer to help her get them up into the magnolia tree. She did not ask if his leg would stop him, and when she did not ask this, his face lit up like stars. It made her wonder about all the things he had been denied because someone else assumed he could not do them.

They climbed the boughs, handing the delicate eggs back and forth.

Tomorrow, at the moment of the Easter full moon, her family would be out here. Laughing. Celebrating the ring Miguel had slid onto Dolores’s fourth finger. Breaking cascarones over one another’s heads until they were all covered in glitter.

There were so many things to wish for.

Children for her brother and Dolores, and the health to run after them even if Miguel needed a crutch to do it.

Years for their mother and father to watch over the orchard they’d built, and to see their children make their own homes.

Safe nights for sons and daughters whose lives were shades of brown more beautiful than they knew.

Full breaths for boys who walked with crutches, or limps, or with the fear of anyone else deciding who they were.

For this boy climbing the magnolia with her to know his eyes were the brown-gold of the water in her father’s irrigation ditches, and that to her this was a color more beautiful than any blue.

There were so many wishes she wanted more than to erase the girl her mother and father had made her.

Graciela and Sawyer settled in the magnolia’s boughs, the almost-full moon above them. They broke cascarones over each other, the grain of glitter on their skin and between their lips.

They gave themselves to el Sábado Santo, this in-between night, letting the wind carry the glass glitter to anyone who needed the shimmer and hope of wishes yet to be made.