The main street ended. The space between lampposts grew. The last ones led Fel and Estrella to a green-flanked road.
Estrella was eating tiny rounds of sugar off a strip of paper, scraping them off with her teeth. When he’d seen the bright rows—candy buttons, she’d called them—he would not have thought this kind of rage could be brought to eating them.
He tried not to stare, both so she would not feel strange and so she would not think they had to talk. He was grateful for the quiet.
The understanding that he’d had a brother let in the first sliver of light. Then, the scent of the sugar fruit Estrella had bought him opened that crack, wide enough that the light from the moon and the stars flooded it.
He and his brother had lived somewhere else before coming to the gray world. No matter how he grasped at it, he still could not remember the shape of the gray world, but now he remembered so much else.
The smell of the painted fruit, the sweetness of the sugar and drunk bitter scent of the almonds, it made him remember things shared on holidays when he and his brother were children. The perfume of rosewater. The spice of anise. The carmín that dyed rock candy, and how his brother loved telling him that the red came from crushed insects.
These memories took root, turning to rows of uncountable trees. They became the orchard Fel had once run through. They bloomed into almond and cherry blossoms, fluffy as the cotton candy Estrella had set in his palms. They splintered into the thin leaves of olive trees.
All these things pressed into him, and his heart felt as though it might give and break like a bone.
The sound of ripping paper drew his eyes to the girl walking next to him.
She bit off a candy button so hard she took a scrap of white with it.
“You’re eating paper,” he said. “Do you know you’re eating paper?”
She swallowed and looked at him. He still wanted the distraction of her. But speaking had been a mistake. He saw in her face that she took it as an invitation to ask questions.
“What happened back there?” she asked.
He could say these words. They were true, and if he did not speak them when he had the chance maybe they would stop being true.
“I had a brother,” he said.
She tilted her head, waiting for the rest.
“A brother who liked men,” he said.
“Liked men as in…”
“As in the way you and your cousins like Bay.”
Her eyes widened. She tried hiding it with a few blinks.
“It’s hard not to notice,” he said.
“And that doesn’t bother you?” Estrella asked. “You don’t think we’re all damned?”
He felt like he should say yes. He felt as though this was another test, and the angels would strike him down on this road if he gave the wrong answer.
But lying was just as much of a sin. There was nothing to tell her but the truth.
“No,” he said. “I don’t believe that.”
He didn’t believe anything that his brother was could be wrong. Even if he could not remember his brother’s name, or his face, or anything more than his hands, he knew those were hands that had cared for him. Hands that were smart, and even more callused than Fel’s, and that made so little into enough to live on.
And now Fel remembered those hands on another man’s back, fingers slipping under his suspenders. The warmth of Fel’s slight shame covered him, like this was something he might have seen when he wasn’t supposed to.
“Maybe if my brother hadn’t loved like that I’d believe something else,” Fel said, and with saying this came the deeper breath of confessing something. “But I don’t think it’s anyone else’s to judge.”
Estrella laughed softly. “You’re not from a hundred years ago.”
That deeper breath turned to a worn-out sigh. “I don’t know.” He shut his eyes, still walking. “I remember where I lived when I was little.”
That was the place where he’d learned to pick dandelion greens, heaping them into esparto grass baskets. A world and a whole life before he and his brother had gone to the gray world, where sometimes those same dandelion greens were all they could find to eat. When he was small, the sharp, bitter taste of the greens had been the taste of early spring to him, not the taste of being hungry.
“What do you remember?” Estrella asked.
He opened his eyes. “The trees raining petals. When they were in bloom and the winds came. Just all those petals. A whole snow of them.” He remembered those trees planted in wide, deep beds, each a little higher than the one before, so the snow thickened as it fell. “All that pink and white snowing down over everything.”
Estrella bit her lip, like she was trying not to smile. Her fingers softened the edge of the candy dot paper. The colors of the buttons had stained the pads of her fingers.
He knew she was imagining it. She couldn’t not. The air glimmering with confetti. Those petals, tiny and round. Weightless.
Beneath the memory of the falling blossoms, small flowers grew in the shadows of wide trees. A stalk that held petals the color of Estrella’s skin. The brown of blossoms matched her, the paler undersides of the petals like the paler undersides of her hands and feet.
But this was something he didn’t know how to tell her.
They left the lampposts behind. He couldn’t find the moon. In the dark, there was just the taste of almonds and sugar on his tongue, and the shape of Estrella against the grasses and trees.
Their fingers at their sides brushed.
“Sorry,” he said, drawing his hand back.
She held on. Her grasp stung his hand, sore from hitting the men in the brick alley, but he didn’t move. That brush of their fingers was a door cracked open, and she was widening the space, not letting it fall shut.
She stopped. She looked at him. And the feeling that her stare would not land, would not settle on his eyes or his mouth was so strong he felt it on his skin.
He knew what this was. She couldn’t have Bay, so she wanted whatever else was in reach. She had everything that had happened tonight knocking around in her, all that spite toward Bay and toward Dalia, and Fel was the ground she could bury it in.
She had found him in the valley made of flowers. Her family had looked after him. It wasn’t his place to ask her, please, please don’t do this. To tell her he felt for her what she would never feel for him, not when she’d given her heart to someone who was beautiful in braided hair and the bright colors of citrus fruits, and beautiful in men’s trousers and suspenders. There was no fighting that. He didn’t want to.
And he didn’t want to be what she played with in the meantime, not like this.
Estrella let go. She took her hand back with such sudden force that Fel opened his mouth to say he was sorry, again.
But then that hand was on the back of his neck. She caught his mouth as he opened it, ready to apologize, and her lips kept him from speaking. The dye and sugar of the candy buttons cut through the almond taste on his tongue.
For a second, her mouth shoved him back far and fast enough that he could barely hold on to something else remembered. It was slick and cold as an algae-covered stone, but he got a solid grasp on it, the last time someone had kissed him, in the gray world.
That time, another boy, assuming Fel was the same as his brother, had kissed him. How little Fel liked it had seemed like a failing. He did not like boys, at least not this one, he had thought with such collapsing disappointment. How could any difference in himself from his brother be good? He wanted to be his brother, smart and kind and unafraid to ask for what he wanted. If sliding his hands under another boy’s suspenders would make him more like his brother, he wanted that too.
The other boy had laughed at him, pushed him away. He told him how awful he was at it, how much worse he was than his brother. And that had seemed like another of Fel’s failings.
But this, Estrella kissing him, this brought him back to a time before the gray world, when there had been color, and he and his brother had lived in sunlight softened by olive trees. When he closed his eyes and kissed her back, Estrella brought him to the colors of a place he could almost touch.
With her mouth on his, the world was snow. Not ice. Not winter. The snow of countless almond and cherry blossoms, the storm of white and pink they had both thought of at the same moment.
This girl who had found him had turned him into an ember, glowing at the end of a candlewick. She could either pinch him out into nothing or light him into a flare.
But the feeling of a truth he did not know, awful and unnamed, hung wide and close as the clouds. And he could not stop wondering if this was the shadow of the thing he had done, the reason God had taken his memories. The reason he had his own crimes etched onto his back. This was the weight of his own sin, and he could not even remember it enough to confess it.
He could not give Estrella what she deserved, someone clean and true.
He broke the touch of their mouths, hard enough that he stumbled back.
A thread of cold air cut between them.
The white of her eyes shone in the dark. He couldn’t tell if that startled look, the flicker of her irises moving, was from what she’d done or because he’d stopped her.
Before his fingers could find her hand in the dark, she was running off the road and toward the trees.
He called her name. But she kept running, until the night and the tall grasses swallowed her.
The pads of her fingers had left the dye of candy buttons on his shirt and his hands. He touched his neck, and it came off on his fingers. The blue and yellow and pink were his proof she had touched him.