Darkest Fear

  There was room on the step next to Aly and I sat down. My feelings seemed so important, so huge and heavy—it was unsettling to think they were just a typical pattern that everyone felt.

  “People I talk to here seem so thrilled to be haguari,” I said glumly. “Tink said it was like finding out that he was a superhero. Am I the only one who was horrified?”

  “I’ve wondered if that’s why thirteen is the magic age when a kid finds out,” Aly said. “Because you’re still kid enough to think, oh, awesome, cool! Without being grown-up enough to foresee the not-always-positive consequences of it.”

  “But just about everyone I’ve ever talked to about it has run into problems somewhere in their lives,” Matéo said. “Like anything else, there are pluses and minuses. Sometimes it seems like all pluses, and sometimes like all minuses.”

  “But the keeping-the-secret part of it,” I said. “That must take such an effort, forever.”

  Aly shrugged. “It becomes second nature, something you do without thinking. The more you do it, the easier it is. But . . . that’s also why most haguari seem to hang out with and have relationships only with other haguari. Because it’s easier, and you don’t have to hide.”

  Rafael came to mind: his dark attraction, the feel of his mouth on mine . . .

  “Do we ever have relationships with non-haguari?” I asked.

  “Of course,” said Aly. “My mom knows someone who is married to a pelado. For like thirty-eight years and counting.”

  “And she’s never told him?” I couldn’t see how that was possible.

  “I don’t think so,” said Aly, shrugging.

  “What about kids?”

  “Haguaro plus haguara, cute little haguari,” said Matéo. “Haguaro or haguara plus pelado or pelada, cute little peladi.”

  “So their kids aren’t haguari?” I frowned. “They’re just regular?”

  “They’re usually really good athletes,” said Matéo. “Good-looking. Charismatic.”

  Aly laughed and kicked his shin with her bare foot. “Not that you’re prejudiced or anything.”

  Laughing too, he reached over and smoothed her dark hair behind her ear. They planned to get married someday and wanted to have kids. Had they really been set up as a couple when they were teenagers? It seemed too personal to ask.

  “So basically the answer is to not be close to any peladi?” I could hear the put-upon childishness in my voice and I hated it.

  Aly looked at me, and I felt embarrassed. “I think we each find our own answers,” she said mildly.

  Biting my lip, I nodded. “I guess I’ll go decorate the altar.”

  Aly handed me the box and I tried to smile, managing only a closed-lip grimace. They didn’t say anything as I headed into the front parlor, the one I’d sat in the first night I’d come here. I set the box down and glanced at my watch—I’d offered to make some spice cookies and a pumpkin cake, but I still had plenty of time.

  The night I’d come here, the room hadn’t been well lit and I’d been so exhausted and discombobulated that I hadn’t even noticed the altar on the side wall. I’d seen it since then, of course. This room was where we sometimes had game night or just hung out, and I’d often dusted in here as part of my self-given chore list.

  Like my parents’ altar, this was made of carved wood and looked quite old. Matéo had told me it had belonged to his parents. It must have been so difficult for Donella, to be cut off from her family. I imagined her setting up this altar in this house, knowing she would probably never share holidays with her first family again. My parents’ figures of our gods were finely carved and inlaid with semiprecious stones. This Tzechuro and Tzechura were painted wood, simpler than ours, as if handmade by a primitive artisan.

  Beneath the altar was a small bookcase, maybe three feet high. On the top shelf were framed pictures of Donella and Patrick and of Matéo as a small child. Donella of course looked like my family, and Patrick looked about as Irish as you could get: very pale, freckled, green eyes, bright red hair. They were smiling happily, their arms around each other.

  On the next shelf were framed pictures of Matéo and Aly. One picture looked quite recent and one looked several years old—Matéo was thinner and they were both obviously younger, younger than I was now. And already life partners.

  On the bottom shelf were several red and orange candles and a small brass incense holder. Kneeling, I opened the cardboard box and saw folded red velvet, some dried branches tied in small bundles by brown ribbon, two narrow wine glasses, some gold beads, and several other small brass figurines. Looking at them more closely, I saw that they were like that poster of evolving hominids that starts with apelike creatures and ends with Chris Hemsworth. This set had a plain jaguar and a plain human, and then other figures that were bits of both—a person with a jaguar head, a jaguar with human hands and a human smile, a sphinxlike cat with a woman’s face. I’d never seen anything like them and I was still looking at them when Aly came in.

  “Aren’t those cool? They were my grandmother’s. Mom let me have them when I moved in with Téo.”

  “They’re awesome.”

  “I usually put them on the top shelf, with a candle on either end. I’ve never known whether to start with the person or start with the jaguar, so I alternate. And then I drape the velvet around the altar shelf. It would be nice to gather colorful leaves to symbolize autumn, but we might have to settle for some acorns or something.”

  I smiled. “I’ll look around outside.”

  Together we arranged the rest of the things, and for the first time in my life it seemed, well, joyous to celebrate these gods. Aly was clearly so into it, so comfortable with it—she made it seem fun. My folks had also been into it, obviously, and comfortable with it, but my fear and dismay had pretty much sucked the joy right out of our holidays.

  “Excellent,” Aly said, standing back to look at it. “A lovely Fécinte altar.”

  “Yep. Works for me,” I said. “Thanks for letting me help.”

  Aly looked at me in surprise, then hugged me. “You’re family, sweetie.”

  That meant so much more than I had realized, and I felt a warm glow in my chest. “I better start making cookies. Is the kitchen free now?”

  “The ovens are, or they were a few minutes ago. Dana is in there putting shrimp on skewers.”

  “I’ll get going, then.”

  It was relaxing to bake again. Whenever I did, I realized how much I missed it. Besides getting good grades, my baking had been the one thing that made my parents happy, that wasn’t fraught with tension and disappointment.

  The spice cookies I’d made many times and didn’t need a recipe for. The dough was really stiff and I really, really missed the big KitchenAid mixer that had been my sixteenth birthday present. When the dough was done, I covered it and put it in the fridge for an hour while I made the pumpkin cake.

  While the cake was baking, I quickly scooped out spoonfuls of cookie dough, rolled them into balls, and dipped each ball in a bowl of granulated sugar. When they baked, they spread out, their surfaces cracking, and the sugar made a beautiful pattern over their tops.

  The kitchen soon smelled like heaven, and I opened the windows and the door to let some of the heat out. The pumpkin cake came out perfectly, though it would have been prettier in one of my molded bundt pans.

  The cake was getting a sprinkling of confectioner’s sugar when Suzanne came in, her arms covered with small wreaths made of dried leaves. Like Florida, New Orleans didn’t have many trees whose leaves changed colors in autumn. The few deciduous trees’ leaves simply turned brown and dropped off, as if they didn’t care whether they put on a fall show.

  “Those are so pretty,” I said. “Where did you get them?”

  “I made them,” said Suzanne, and she took one off her arm and set it on my head. “I went home to Connecticut last fall and gathered these leaves, then pressed them in all my law books. James helped me sew them onto these frames.” She smiled,
and I blinked because she was usually so serious or in a hurry or overworked.

  “They’re beautiful.” I looked at myself in the glass door of the oven.

  “I have enough for all of us,” said Suzanne. “Now I’m going to go upstairs and get ready, unless you guys need me for anything.”

  “What are you going to wear?” Coco asked, coming in from the hallway.

  “I have a fabulous dress,” said Suzanne, putting a crown of leaves on Coco’s head. “And I’ll put my hair up and weave the wreath around it.” She looked pleased with the mental image.

  Coco and I exchanged glances. Of course neither one of us had even thought about what to wear or how to deal with our hair. The party was supposed to start in an hour, when the sun went down. Maybe I should try to get something together.

  “Oh, man,” Coco moaned, eating a cookie. “We need to hook you up with a restaurant or bakery or something. You can’t keep these from the populace.”

  Grinning, I bit a cookie too, and nodded my agreement. Yes, I was a rock star when it came to baking. I put the cookies and the cake on top of the fridge, where they would be out of the way, and followed Coco upstairs to get ready.

  My “getting ready” consisted of taking a shower, putting on clean clothes, and getting my brush impossibly tangled in my hair. Standing in front of the mirror, I turned the brush this way and that and ended up with a huge hunk of hair on the side of my head with a brush handle sticking out of it. I was near tears, staring at it, when I heard a ping on my computer. I flipped it open and answered the Skype call—Jennifer was the only person in the world I would let see this. But even Jennifer looked startled at my appearance.

  “Hi. My brush is stuck,” I said glumly. “I’ll need to cut it out. It might finally be time for that Mohawk you tried to talk me into in eighth grade.”

  I could tell when she was trying to smother laughter. “No, don’t cut it,” she said when she got a grip on herself.  “It’s still salvageable. Just take little bits of hair at a time and gently pull them away from the brush. Little tiny strands, tugging gently so you don’t break the hair.”

  Sighing, I climbed onto my bed and arranged the computer so she could see me. “So what’s up?” I asked, pinching a weensy strand of hair and gently tugging as instructed.

  “Amy did not pan out,” said Jennifer. “But I have a study date on Tuesday with a girl from my social services class.”

  “Oh, good,” I said. Amazingly, I managed to free a tiny bit of hair. If I could do that a thousand more times, I might be okay. I pinched another strand.

  “How’s everything with you? Does your aunt Juliana know you’re there yet?”

  I made a face, tugging another strand free. “No. I mean, I hate it—I want her to know. But I still don’t know the whole picture. Juliana was the youngest, so maybe they actually told her Donella was dead. I don’t know. In the meantime, my cousin is having a party here tonight. I’ve been helping them get ready. And as you can see, I’ve planned a special outfit.”

  Jennifer nodded agreeably at my white schoolgirl top and weird kitten skirt, no doubt thinking that at least it was better than usual. “Cool. That’ll be fun. You like their friends, right?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. I haven’t met all of them, but I’ve liked the ones I’ve met so far.”

  “There was a sorority party yesterday,” Jennifer said. “Lucy is pledging, so I went for a while.”

  We chatted about nothing in particular until all my hair was miraculously untangled, and then I had to go somehow flatten it out because I now looked like half a dandelion. We blew kisses at each other and I shut my computer, then dunked my head in the bathroom sink to start over from the beginning.

  As I carefully combed conditioner through my wet hair, I thought about the hundreds of nights that Jennifer and I had stayed up until dawn, talking about everything, listening to music very quietly so her mom wouldn’t come in, watching our favorite music videos over and over. Those days felt like a long time ago, and Jennifer and I both seemed so different. Was this how we would drift apart? Slowly but inevitably? I hated to think that.

  With my hair still wet, I put it into one long braid and set my leaf crown on top, then checked myself out in the mirror. Not too bad. A tap on my door made me call, “Yeah?”

  “It’s me,” said Aly. “Can I come in?”

  “Sure.”

  She opened the door and stood there, swirling so I could get the full effect of her dress.

  “Oh, awesome,” I said. “That is perfect.”

  “I made it,” Aly said, crossing the room to admire herself in the old armoire’s mirrors. The long framed mirror had been broken the night of the attack, but the armoire had mirrored insets in its doors. “This sundress used to be all white, but I spilled hot sauce on it and couldn’t get it out. So I dip-dyed it.”

  The straps that tied over her shoulders were still white, but the smocked bodice was a warm golden yellow at the top, shading to a deeper gold and then orange at the waist of the skirt. The orange blended into carnelian, then scarlet, and finally, at the bottom of the skirt, a rich blood red.

  My mom had always worn red, orange, or fuchsia on the equinox, formally welcoming autumn, as pointless as that was in Florida. I remembered a beautiful sleeveless orange silk dress, a slim sheath that made her look like a candle flame.

  “That is amazing,” I said sincerely. “You look like you’re on fire.”

  “Thank you.” She looked at my white top and kitten skirt and seemed unsure whether to say anything.

  “What? It’s a skirt,” I said.

  “Noooo,” she said slowly, looking me up and down. “With that shirt, you look like you just escaped from Sacred Heart. But I have just the thing.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  PEOPLE BEGAN TO ARRIVE JUST as the sun was setting. Matéo and Tink had made a fire pit in a treeless part of the yard and set up lawn chairs. We’d moved a long folding table outside as well, and now it held bowls of spicy nuts and roasted pumpkin and squash seeds. I’d set out my plates of spice cookies and the pumpkin cake and covered them with clean dish towels to keep bugs off. Other traditional Fécinte foods were apples, pumpkins, cider, mulled wine, and pomegranates—foods that symbolized autumn and the harvest. Frankly, it seemed awfully vegetarian to me, but I guess we couldn’t exactly have antelope haunches hanging from the trees and rabbits spread to dry on the azalea bushes.

  Back in my room, I looked at my image in the mirror doubtfully, wondering if I could really go downstairs like this. Aly had said she’d had the perfect thing, and I believed that this dress was perfect—for her. But I was five inches taller and much curvier than Aly, and I felt like I’d been forcibly poured into it.

  The dress itself was gorgeous, a deep crimson silk, heavy but not shiny. The fifties-style bodice was very fitted and left me unable to take a full breath, and the deep scoop neck made my boobs look like they were about to fall out. The small cap sleeves were okay, and a very full skirt swung and rustled with each step I took. The effect was retro and feminine, but not froufrou.

  Also,  Aly had dealt with the Hair  That Could Not Be Contained and given me some kind of magical updo, making a complicated bunlike thing on top of my head, circled gracefully by Suzanne’s wreath of leaves.

  I didn’t look at all like myself. I didn’t feel at all like myself either. I looked . . . not exactly like my mom and not exactly like my dad, but like a mixture of both. Which my eighth-grade biology class had totally explained. I looked older, tidier, more feminine. Really pretty.

  “I have outdone myself,” Aly said, nodding approvingly. “You’re going to knock them dead.”

  “I can’t breathe.”

  “Take little breaths and be glad it’s not an actual corset.”

  “My boobs are going to fall out.”

  Aly snickered. “So don’t lean over. But yes, you’re a brick house. You look amazing. Come on.” Correctly assuming that I was about to chicken out, she grab
bed my hand and pulled me out of my room. Since my feet, like everything else, were also bigger than Aly’s, none of her shoes worked. My shoe choices were flip-flops, Birkenstocks, or high-top Converse. So I was barefoot.

  At the top of the stairs I hesitated, breathing shallowly. It was darker and quieter up here; downstairs was full of lights and people talking and autumn scents. Maybe I should just hang out in my room, call Jennifer. Watch some TV on my computer.

  “Walk down these stairs or I will push you down them,” Aly whispered.

  “Nice,” I whispered back, but obeyed her. The foyer below was crowded. All the doors and French windows were open so people could go in and out easily, but the bar had been set up in the parlor, so it was seeing plenty of action.

  I felt horribly self-conscious, like I was wearing a bathing suit, and the heads turning and conversations quieting didn’t help any. A slow flush heated my cheeks, and if no one had been watching I would have scuttled back upstairs.

  A long, low whistle made Aly chuckle behind me, and Matéo stepped out of the crowd to reach up and give me a hug on the bottom step. He was wearing a light linen shirt of a deep pumpkin color—one would think it would clash with his hair, but it didn’t. “You look beautiful, prima,” he said. “Like a queen.”

  “Don’t hug me too tight,” I panted in alarm.

  “Come, meet some people. Have some wine,” my cousin said.

  Once again I started to remind him that I was only eighteen, but then thought, You know what? I’m eighteen, this is a private party, and I can have a glass of wine if I want.

  “Okay,” I said, following him into the parlor.

  “Holy frijoles, Vivi,” Tink said to me, his blond head towering over the crowd. “Who knew you had that hidden?”

  Was he talking about my chest? Oh, gods.

  Pushing slowly through the crowd, Tink said, “Vivi, this is my boyfriend, Peter.”

  The guy holding Tink’s hand was a couple of inches shorter than me, with beautifully cut fine dark hair—very good-looking in a nerdy way. He seemed like an odd match for Tink, who was so big and athletic, and with a little jolt I realized that he, like everyone else here, was haguari. This slender, well-groomed guy could turn into a jaguar, and though he wouldn’t weigh any more than he did now, ounce for ounce a jaguar’s muscles were many times stronger than a person’s.