“No groceries today,” she said.
“Lazy?”
“Bomb.”
“Oh. Right.”
Leak was still there, his orange skin already starting to sweat in the sun. “Good to see you,” he said to Beckan. His voice was slimy against the top of his mouth. She didn’t know much about gnomes, then, but she knew that they didn’t have to talk that way.
She looked at the gnome’s teeth, as big and sharp as cleavers, and at Scrap’s leg easily within his reach. But she was the one who took a step back.
Scrap chose to go down there, after all. And she didn’t ask why. The truth, she realized later, wasn’t that she was afraid of what she would find out, but just that she hadn’t really cared, and that was a realization that would make it hard for her to sleep sometimes.
They had been friends, once. They played together as children, but never as enthusiastically as she and Josha did a few years later. He went on for more school and she didn’t, and neither of them judged the other or thought much of each other or wondered or worried. Scrap kissed a few of the fairy girls with missing feet and Beckan practiced her welding. They had plenty of time.
But now Beckan wanted to read and her neighbor who agreed to help threw up her hands after a few lessons and told her that she should probably ask Scrap, and she remembered the tiny fairy boy in the tiny house all of its hundreds and hundreds of steps away, and she rang his doorbell one day and that was that.
“Ready to go?” she said. She tried not to look at the gnome. The gnome was looking at her.
Scrap rubbed his nose and sneezed at his glitter. Beckan tried not to laugh, but Scrap didn’t. His smile was the same as when he was a child. “I’m exhausted,” he said. “Clearly.”
“Really clearly.”
Another smile from him, this one a little sad, and a word, not for the first time, flashed in Beckan’s head: disarmed. She once told Josha that when she was around Scrap, she felt disarmed, both in the sense of being overwhelmed and of surrendering shields and weapons.
This, not the bomb site, was where the war first affected Beckan. She was a little fairy who could barely read and the war wormed its way into her words. (This is what history is, Becks.)
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Scrap told the gnome.
His grin stretched across his face. “Yeah, have fun off with your chubby little empty.”
She stared at him.
“Whoa,” Scrap said. “Whoa, hey.” He took Beckan’s arm and tugged her back. Away. The gnome couldn’t grab her and eat her and she couldn’t grab him and strangle him.
The first one to ever call Beckan an empty was a fairy boy on the playground by the mall, the one with the two-story slide and the drained swimming pool filled with foam blocks. She didn’t know what the word meant, but the tone of his voice made her hit him with her jump rope. Josha finally told her what it meant, after her father refused. He’d learned the slur from his sister, before she left to go live somewhere without gnome girls and traveling girls and lost girls and wandering girls and nymph girls, all of them drifting through the city with their full, kicking bellies.
Beckan wanted to kick the gnome in his horrible teeth.
But she’d been trained out of that harder than she’d been trained to hate the name.
She’d seen this gnome a hundred times. They’d never talked. He’d never called her that.
The war was in their words.
“Get out of here,” Scrap said to Leak.
Leak gave him a long look and stepped back into the elevator, and Beckan heard the echoes of his laugh for a long time.
She walked with her arms crossed over her chest. When they got to 7th and Fremont, she crossed the street over the tram tracks and hurried down the sidewalk. A pretty fairy lady she didn’t know bumped shoulders with her and didn’t pause to apologize.
Beckan breathed out. She dragged her hand over the plate-glass window of a jewelry store she passed and felt a little calmer.
Gradually, she heard Scrap’s long strides catch up with her. She knew he would eventually.
“Becks. You okay?”
She shrugged.
“I don’t know why you let them bother you.”
“Yeah, because the problem is that I’m letting them insult me. This is my fault. You’re so smart.”
He lowered his voice. “Are you crying?”
“Screw you.”
“Beckan.”
“No. It’s fine.” She wiped her cheeks off, hard. “Don’t let it bother you or anything.”
“I would have beaten him up, but I like my work. And my limbs.”
“I don’t need you to beat up anyone for me. I can beat up my own assholes.”
She felt him smile more than she saw it. “That too,” he said.
They crossed the bridge over the bay, trams swerving past them on their tracks, and hiked up the hill until the apartment buildings and the offices faded out and they reached the rim of houses at the top of the hills. The stone walls stretched behind Scrap’s house like they were trying to hug the cottages in, make them really a part of the city.
“No tightropes up here yet,” Beckan said. She wasn’t crying anymore.
“Yeah,” Scrap said. “Everyone always forgets we’re here.”
Beckan eventually pauses in her painting long enough to send Scrap home. She blames it all on the half arm, and that makes him agree, but truly it shakes her seeing him out of the house when he’s still weak. Most days he seems, physically, almost like his old self, and she can accept him as a little frailer than he should be when they were only at home, but here, out in the open, whenever he’s tired it’s so clear that if for whatever reason he needed to fight, he could only make one fist.
She’s worried about him. Scrap, with all his darkness and messed-up hair, sometimes calls their little family his pack. Beckan has learned a lot about wolves now from Scrap’s books—he loves wolves—and she knows that Scrap is the smallest and the quietest but easily their alpha wolf, with his paws in everything: the dirty dishes in the sink, Josha’s hair after a nightmare, the clogged drain in the bathroom, the switchblades, the books. Beckan feels warm and comfortable in her place in the pack, but that doesn’t stop her from looking at her wounded alpha and worrying about him now that he’s missing a paw.
He’s also looking a little sick.
She keeps painting, and the streets flood and fill with more bodies and paintbrushes and voices as tightroper after tightroper drops to the ground. It’s still mostly tightroper soldiers in the city with their husbands or wives and small kids. Maybe now their civilians are going to come. She tries to figure out whether or not that would be okay with her and comes up with nothing.
She wonders what it’s like up in the tightropes.
She tilts her head back and squints to see the threads more clearly, and at that moment a body drops from a rope and hangs right in front of her, his face suspended inches away. She smells tightroper bread on his breath and cannot look away from his purple, flat, unsparkly eyes.
The tightroper boy smiles like he knows a secret, a nice secret, that she doesn’t, and that he might tell her if she smiles back in just the right way, and he says, “Curious?”
Beckan tries a few smiles but doesn’t feel like she finds the right one.
“Is it nice?” she says eventually. “Being so high up?”
“You’d like it,” he says, and he zooms back up his rope and into the netting, so fast that he’s halfway back to their web before she realizes that that didn’t really answer her question.
And that she doesn’t really know what just happened.
But her mind clicks, once, and she decides that she’s going to find out his name and get him to take her up. Just to do something.
It is so, so exhausting, her whole life being the pack.
No wonder Scrap has screwed up so often. (What kind of alpha loses one of his dogs?)
The day after the first bomb, when Scrap still had t
wo arms and Beckan’s reading was still mostly sounding-out, he gave her a lesson at his kitchen table. She was learning quite quickly; a few weeks before she’d fluently read her first sentence, one Scrap had once jotted down at the bottom of an old soup recipe: A long time ago, maybe fairies did have wings.
Since then she had worked her way through a few of Scrap’s stories, but that day after the bomb was the first time she’d read one of Scrap’s stories and actually liked it. That had less to do with her taste and more with the fact that most of Scrap’s stories were not very good. Dry histories.
“This one is romantic,” she’d said, when it was over, and she rested her head on her arm and stretched her fingers out on the kitchen table.
Scrap was lingering by the refrigerator. “That wasn’t exactly what I was going for. It’s supposed to be . . . realistic.” Every few words, he slid his eyes over to the wobbling pile of dishes in the sink.
“I don’t like realistic. Just do the dishes if they’re bothering you so much.”
“It’s a waste.”
“How?”
“You thought it was romantic?”
“They’re in love, aren’t they? It’s a story and all these terrible things are happening and they’re in love the whole time. Why don’t you do your dishes?”
“Waste of time.”
“They’re gross.”
“I’ll do them later.”
Scrap’s cousin, rooting through the fridge, said, “He does them in his sleep.”
“What?”
Scrap said, “Cricket, bite me a little, why don’t you.”
Even though Beckan was only a tooth, an eye, and an ear away from living alone, Scrap and Cricket’s parentless house felt lawless to her in a way hers never did. Maybe that one eye was enough to make her feel watched—though she had to admit that more and more often, she was leaving her father tucked away in corners or stuffed, as he was now, at the bottom of her tote bag—or maybe it was that her father’s apartment could somehow never feel small and bright and reckless in the way of this cottage, where every corner felt filled with something easy and significant, like family.
She could never fill her sink with dishes the way Scrap and Cricket could. There weren’t enough dishes in the house. There wasn’t enough food in her fridge.
“There’s no food at my house,” she realized. “I couldn’t get groceries.”
“Stay here,” Cricket said. “I made pasta.”
Scrap said, “We cook together. But he does dinner usually. Cricket makes a very good sidekick.”
Cricket said, “Too bad you’re a shitty superhero. Beckan. Want to be my superhero?”
“I don’t know what that is.”
Scrap ran his hand over his head. “Like in a book.”
“Yes,” she said, and she wrote her name and over and over again in the top margin of Scrap’s notebook. “Yes.”
Scrap took the book away and disappeared to hide it, and Beckan perched on the counter while Cricket warmed up pasta. He sang, to himself, but not as if he cared if she heard. His voice was deep and thick.
“A gnome called me an empty today,” she said. She didn’t know why.
Cricket set the bowl down.
He said, “How do you feel?”
She watched her feet where they swung back and forth and scraped an itchy bit of glitter off her thigh. “I feel like I shouldn’t give a shit.”
“I can’t have a baby either, you know?” Cricket said, with a smile that Beckan appreciated but didn’t quite respect. At least Cricket could give someone else a baby. At least Cricket could make pasta. And sing. All she could do was melt things and dream about flying.
She knew that having a baby was no way to measure success. She knew that it wouldn’t make her a more fulfilled person and that lying awake wanting one makes her a useless, stupid cliché.
She also knew that she just wanted a fucking baby, okay?
She lived with that.
She said, “I feel like I don’t know what a good goal is. What I should be doing with my life.”
“Write a book like Scrap.”
“I don’t even know what a real book is like.”
He grinned. “Then write something stupid and romantic like he does.”
“Screw you!” Scrap called from the living room, and Cricket laughed and laughed.
“He’s trying to write a serious book,” Cricket said. “But he keeps writing love stories. Bad ones. I won’t read them. I don’t even think he’d let me. He writes them creepily in secret. But they’re bad. I can just tell.”
“Bad?”
“Substanceless.”
“He’s never been in love,” she guessed.
“Probably not. Have you?”
She nodded. She still was, because Josha was her world then.
“Scrap thinks it must be horrible,” he said. “You can tell from the stories.”
“It is.”
“I think it sounds nice.”
“No.” A thought edged its way out of her mouth. “You’re substanceless, a little, I think.”
And he was, but he smiled, and she decided she forgave him. That afternoon, the three of them ate pasta and the gnomes officially declared war.
And now Beckan has fixed the city enough for one day, she still smells like paint, her thoughts are still on the tightroper boy, but she’s riding the mines down to work and she remembers that day and that story and that sink full of dishes and that Scrap with his arms and that story.
That fucking day after the bomb, it was a love story.
And now he’s back to writing lists of dates. When before all of this, before he’d ever felt anything in his whole little life, he’d once written a love story.
She would grab Scrap and shake him, if touching in the elevator weren’t silently but very strictly forbidden nowadays. (More on that later.)
It was a love story.
Just a little one.
5
“Just . . . here.” Beckan picks up Tier’s hands and holds them on the sides of her neck. “Like you’re so happy you could just choke me. Like you can’t even help it. Except don’t actually choke me, come on.” She adjusts his fingers. “Here, one thumb up on my chin, casually, like my face is so pretty you want to touch it but you’re afraid to. Don’t laugh.” He doesn’t, but there isn’t anything complimentary about his seriousness; his heart just isn’t in it.
She says, “Now you say, I can’t believe it’s you.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“You’re so surprised to see her that you say things that don’t make sense.”
“We’re planning it out in advance, Beckan. We have time to figure out something that makes sense.”
“I’ve dreamed about this every night.”
“All right, something that isn’t horrible.”
She sits on the bed. “I’m thinking.”
They are quiet for a long time. Beckan hears something dripping. It sounds deep and distant.
“Maybe I should just say her name,” Tier says, after a while.
“Rig?”
“Not like that. Soft. Full of meaning and nuance and . . . all of that. Rig.”
“Rig.”
“Rig.”
“Riiiiig.”
Tier nods. “Yes.”
“No, that’s horrible.”
“It’s impossible. This. This is impossible.”
“You’ll see her and it’ll all come back. You’ll know exactly what to say as soon as she walks through the door. Any minute now.”
“I will?”
“It’ll be just like in the book.”
“Which one?”
“With the girl who couldn’t speak while he was gone. Thought she would die with no voice. And then he came back.”
“Don’t fall for that, Beckan, okay? You cannot just use the things those books tell you. Don’t ever stop talking because of a boy. A boy who makes you talk less is not the kind of boy you want anything
to do with.”
“Lectures from a boy with a prostitute.”
“Yeah.”
“You learned that from a book too, didn’t you?”
“I live in a hole. Where else do I learn anything.”
“The girl in the book, she didn’t do it on purpose.”
“That is my point exactly. That is my point times a hundred.”
“You should say something about her boobs.”
He ignores her, which she recognizes as probably his best option. “She grew up down the hall. My father betrothed us when we were groundgrubbers. Children,” he clarifies.
“I figured that out from context.” Scrap taught her that. Context.
“We read the same books and played the same games, Rig and I. We were the same creature. And now . . .” He sighs. “The problem is, the only honest thing I could say to her is, ‘Hi, how was your war?’ ”
“Yeah, don’t say that.”
“There you have the problem.”
“It’s just one thing. This war is the only thing you haven’t had in common. One thing.”
“I don’t know how to get past this.”
“Because you’ve never had to get past anything before. You’ll deal. She was up there, you were down here, bit by bit you’ll tell your stories to each other and you’ll forget the rest.”
“I don’t know what it was like up there.” He sits next to her. “What she knew about the war. If she could hear anything. Or see us. If they hurt her.”
“You’ll know soon.”
“She won’t understand,” he says, softly. “What it was like to be on the ground for this.”
You were underground, she doesn’t say. You barely ever come up. You felt the explosions and you lived with the cave-ins and maybe you were hungry, but you never had to see anything.
You didn’t see carnage and rotting organs.
You just waited for someone to feed them to you.