Half.
Half a chance at living a normal life, growing up and falling in love and getting married and having kids, or maybe not getting married, maybe just collecting a few broken hearts for the book, but either way living to tell the tale.
Half a chance at death. A slow and painful fading away. The long good-bye.
I looked at my feet sticking out of the blanket, toes glowing in the sun that streamed through the window. My nails were painted bright green and blue, and they looked like the little mint candies that came with the check at restaurants. I wriggled them, curled and uncurled them, felt every one, and in that moment it was all decided.
No. I wouldn’t go out with a long good-bye, turn into some pale and tattered paper moon. If Papi’s demon was my legacy, I’d fight that bastard all the way, breath for breath, memory for memory, fire with fire.
I sat up fast, put my feet on the floor. Starting now, Juju.
Tonight was the Alice in Wonderland preview. I plucked the tickets Zoe’d given me from my bulletin board and rubbed my thumbs along the edges.
If things had gone according to plan, I would’ve tried out for Alice. I would’ve spent the past few weeks rehearsing with Zoe and the other cast members, practicing lines with Christina at Witch’s Brew, reading monologues to Pancake as I wolfed down breakfast before dashing to the theater.
Instead, the demon reared its ugly head, sank its venomous fangs into our lives. And I’d spent most of those weeks in the barn learning how to rebuild a Harley, all my fragile hope pinned on that machine.
On Emilio Vargas.
On my father.
I would’ve made a perfect Alice, tumbling ass over teakettle down the rabbit hole, drugged and dreaming and wondering what—if anything—was real.
Real. Here was real. I still knew my name and I could still paint my toes and wriggle them in the sun and hug my dog, and no matter what some genetic test might say about the end of days, that’s what I had.
I grabbed my phone and scrolled to Emilio’s number, pressed the device to my ear. Please pick up . . .
“I knew you couldn’t resist seeing me again,” Emilio said. He’d accepted my apology easily, no grudge attached, and now he was standing by his bike in my driveway, all dimples and clean-soap smell, and for once I didn’t argue. He was right—I couldn’t resist.
“I’ll drive,” he said.
I looked down at my denim skirt and the pink wedges Mari had lent me. I was pretty sure she still felt bad about how we’d left things yesterday—the fight, and then all the bad news—because all she said as I was blow-drying my hair in the bathroom was that the shoes would look really cute on me and to tell Zoe to break a leg tonight.
No warnings about Emilio, no cautions against the perils of love. Just a pair of pink shoes and a smile. And after that, a headband, because I’d lost my silk flower clip at the Bowl that night, which totally sucked because it was my favorite and it would’ve gone perfect with Mari’s pink shoes and Emilio liked it.
“I’m not getting on a bike in this,” I said now. “I’ll drive.”
“I meant—” Emilio plucked the keys from my hand and jangled them in front of my face. “You promised me another lesson.”
I rubbed my neck in protest, but he was already climbing into the driver’s side of the truck. I climbed in, buckled up, and took a deep breath. “Okay. Push in the—”
“Clutch. Got it.” He started the engine smoothly and shifted us into reverse, backing us all the way down the driveway after only one stall.
“You’ve been practicing,” I said.
“Samuel let me drive his Jeep. Which he never does. I had to drop your name a few times.” Emilio laughed, and despite one more stall at an uphill stop sign, he got us to town in one piece.
We found our seats easily. A handful of people from school dotted the auditorium, but the audience was mostly parents and grandparents. I was grateful Emilio had accepted my invitation, and I smiled and thanked him again and then the lights dimmed and the curtain rose and everyone cheered as the show began.
The play was amazing. Zoe shone as the maniacal Queen, and my heart swelled with pride and admiration, and I took about five hundred pictures. She’d obviously worked really hard this year; her acting and singing skills had grown exponentially. The girl who played Alice could’ve been better, not that I was biased or anything, but Zoe’s friends from the Bowl—Tweedledum and the Mad Hatter—rocked the stage too.
After the curtain closed, Emilio and I wove through the crowd in search of Zoe. I found her near the dressing room with the other cast members collecting roses and kisses and accolades, which was perfect, since I’d finally brought her the birthday scrapbook. I stood on tiptoe and called over the sea of heads and shoulders that separated us, and soon she was right in front of me, one of her arms wrapped around a bouquet of red and white roses. The sugar-sweet smell made my throat itch.
Zoe was glowing beneath her stage makeup, her shoulders high and proud as I snapped a few more pictures.
“Thanks for coming! Did you bring Mari?” When she noticed Emilio leaning against the opposite wall, her eyebrows rose.
“We’re together,” I said. “I mean, we came together. Mari’s home playing Scrabble with my parents. Oh, she said break a leg, which you obviously did. Not literally—”
“Are you and Emilio, like, a thing now? Even after that stuff with Celi and Lourdes?”
A chill rose between us. “We’re . . . friends.”
“Dark hearts, every one,” she said, just like that day at my house when she’d first seen Emilio. Just like we used to whisper to each other in the dark, flashlights throwing shadows on the tent wall as we pondered the otherworldly origins of the Vargas brothers. Zoe was smiling now, but I couldn’t tell whether she was joking or being cruel. Her pinched red lips were painted on, her eyebrows blackened into severe arches.
I almost laughed at the memory of our childhood campouts, all that elaborate speculation. The Vargas brothers weren’t vampires or angels or dark things that went bump in the night.
It was a lot more complicated and frightening than that.
“We’re friends,” I said again.
“I saw you with him at the Bowl. After you ditched us.”
“I didn’t ditch you, I just . . . I ran into him there. We hung out after my family left.”
“Hey, Jude!” Christina waved from across the hall. She was draped around Tweedledum, and the two of them whooshed by and melded into a crowd of parents before I could return the greeting. Clearly, Christina had been fully adopted by the play people.
Zoe watched me a moment longer, maybe waiting for me to offer up a few more details about Emilio, some explanation for tonight’s date.
“You did awesome out there,” I said.
“Thanks.” Her red-paint smile didn’t falter. “It was so fun. There’s great new people at the Crow this year. Christina’s been a big help too. She did a lot of the backdrop paintings.”
I wondered again whether she’d meant it as a jab or just a fact, and with a rush of sadness I realized that one day I might not care what she meant. I might not remember this night, all the times I’d counted her freckles, the fact that we’d ever been friends at all.
My chest hurt and I wanted to hug her, to spill all the details about this summer, to tell her I missed her already and didn’t want things to change between us. But it was too late. Things had changed, and here in the hallway where everyone else cheered and hugged, silence enveloped my best friend and me in a suffocating bubble. It wasn’t the time to admit what I’d learned last night; it wasn’t the place to talk about Emilio. I couldn’t think of anything else to say about her performance. She didn’t ask about my parents, Papi’s health, the motorcycle.
After years of friendship, sleepovers, study sessions, clothes swapping, shopping trips, summers, winters, crushes and french fries and movies and plays, we’d run out of things to say. In a flash I saw us hand in hand on the dinosaur
path behind the Bowl, walking barefoot through the red dust, and then we let go. She went left, I went right. Neither of us looked back.
“Happy birthday,” I finally said, handing over the gift bag. “Sorry it’s so late. It’s a scrapbook.” I fumbled to explain, to fill up the awkward silence with words I no longer had. “I made it from some of our old pictures. Mostly plays and summer—”
“Off with their heads!” A crowd of still-costumed heart cards cheered from the doorway to the parking lot.
“Off with their heads!” she roared back, jabbing her finger in the air like the Queen. The handle on my gift bag tore. It hit the ground with a thud, and she was still waving to her friends as if she hadn’t noticed. I picked up the bag and waited.
“Sorry,” she said. “Play stuff. What were you saying?”
Play stuff! Like I didn’t know what that meant. Like I hadn’t been a part of it for her last play and every single one before it.
For the second time, I passed her the bag. “Happy belated birthday.”
“Zoe, come on!” The white rabbit waved from the doorway. “We’re late! We’re late! And we’re totally leaving without you, dude.”
“Be right out.” She flashed them a fake gang sign that I was pretty sure didn’t exist in Wonderland and turned back to me, her forced smile creasing the white paint around her mouth. From our seats in the auditorium, she was treacherous and beautiful, a perfect Queen of Hearts. But up close her lips were clownish and uneven, black hair dye bleeding onto her forehead.
“Jude?” I’d lost track of Emilio, and now he was right there, right behind me. He slipped his hand beneath my hair and squeezed my neck, leaned in and kissed my cheek. “Ready to head out?”
I glared at him. “Five minutes.”
He retreated to the wall he’d been holding up. When I turned back to Zoe, she was staring at me in disbelief.
“Looks like ‘just friends’ to me,” she said. “Right.”
Another pack of cards interrupted, four boisterous club-and diamond-boys, all of them urging Zoe to jet over to the party.
“Are you guys going to Emma’s?” I asked. Emma Scully always had the Crow parties because she had a pool with a swim-up bar and her land overlooked the whole river valley. Her parents were pretty don’t-ask-don’t-tell about the whole thing too.
It seemed stupid and inconsequential now—the post-play giddiness, all of us squealing and dunking one another in the pool like kids and then acting grown up with our syrupy rum drinks, little paper umbrellas sticking out of the cups.
“You could come if . . . I mean, I guess you’re with Emilio tonight, so . . .”
“Thanks,” I said. “I should probably . . . I should head home.”
“Yeah. Okay.” Zoe was already inching toward the exit. Something flickered in her eyes—Regret? Discomfort? Sadness?—and I wondered if we were sharing the same memories. Was it even possible that a year ago I would’ve been the first name on that party list? The first one in the pool, jumping in before any of the boys got a chance to toss me over the edge? I looked to the floor and back up again, and it was gone, that look in her eyes, and after another silent moment she leaned in for a one-armed hug that barely reached around my shoulders.
“Thanks for coming,” she said. “And for the books.”
“Scrapbook,” I said, but too much time had passed and she was already halfway down the hall, my gift bag buried in the crook of her arm with her backpack and the too-sweet roses and a brand-new zip-up hoodie from the Crow.
“Why did you do that?” I asked Emilio. We were back in my driveway, the truck ticking and cooling with the windows down, crickets and frogs singing their hearts out.
“I thought you needed a wingman,” he said. “Look, you were totally edgy, and Zoe was bein’ a bitch. Sorry, I know she’s your best friend, but she was.”
I didn’t know if that last part meant she was being a bitch or she was—past tense—my best friend. I turned toward him to say he was right on both counts, but as the last bit of sunlight leaked into the earth, the dusk cast a spell on everything it touched, and silence grew between us again. Outside, the crickets buzzed and sang, drowning the TV-track laughter that wafted through the open windows of the house. I looked to the living room, the blue-white flicker throwing rickety shadows on the grass.
“Well, you can’t just go around kissing people whenever you feel like it.” I turned to face him again, but he was staring out the windshield, quiet and still, hands gripping the steering wheel like we were on some vast gray road to nowhere.
“Why are you so nice to me?” I whispered. Another moment of silence passed, and I turned to open my door, but then his hand was on my arm, my name passing delicately from his lips. I thought of the breeze, the quaking silver aspens in the woods, and I turned back expecting to see the playful dimples I’d grown so used to this summer.
Instead, there was fire. Fire on his breath, suddenly shallow. Fire in his touch, warming my skin by degrees. Fire in his eyes, where it burned with an intensity so fierce it sent my heart into a somersault.
“You ask me why I’m nice to you,” he said. “Why, why, why. But you don’t ask me stuff that matters. Who I am or where I been. What I see when I look at you. What I want.” His fingers brushed my jaw and stopped at my chin, tilting my face toward his. His breath was hot, the words urgent. “I promise you this, Jude Hernandez. You think you know something about me? Lo siento, mi princesa. You don’t know shit.”
Everything inside me begged for his kiss. I wanted it, no matter who might be watching from inside the house, no matter which sister might find out, no matter how many oaths I was breaking or when he was leaving. . . .
But I knew he wouldn’t kiss me. Not tonight. Not like this. There was too much between us now, all the words and near misses. All the potential, the alternate futures that would stretch out before us in an unending spiral, all built on what happened in this moment. I held his fiery gaze and remembered the five-oh, the half-and-half, the promises I’d whispered to myself in the dawn light.
I might lose all my memories one day, but that wouldn’t keep me from making them.
Think you can take me without a fight, Demonio? Bring it.
Adrenaline shot through my veins, electrified every nerve and blood vessel and cell. With a rush of desire I wanted to experience everything at once, all of it, life and death and sex and love and every crazy, reckless, ferocious dream my heart could imagine.
Emilio was still breathless, half smiling, dimples flashing in the dark like a dare. I took it.
“So what do you want, Emilio Vargas? Will you tell me?” I leaned in close, rested my hand on his thigh. His skin was warm through his shorts, and when I pressed my lips to his earlobe, he gasped. “Or do I have to force you to talk?”
Emilio swallowed hard. I was still so close, and he’d run out of things to say.
“I know what you want,” I whispered. “Take me out on your motorcycle.”
“Take . . . I . . . what?” His voice came out all wobbly, but I didn’t respond, and we sat like that for seconds, minutes maybe, neither of us speaking, neither of us calling the other out.
“Good night, Jude,” Emilio finally said. I couldn’t keep the disappointment from my face. He slipped out of the truck soundlessly, but seconds later he was outside my passenger door, fingers on the frame.
“Tomorrow morning,” he said. His flirty grin was back. “Ten o’clock, outside, dressed for the road.”
Chapter 21
“Swing your leg up and over,” Emilio said.
I stared at the rumbling machine in our driveway as if it were some wild, living thing.
“Like a horse?” I asked. It was ten in the morning, the helmet felt like a bowling ball on my head, and sweat trickled down my back.
“More like a pony. With wheels.” Emilio grinned from his perch on the black beast. “You don’t have to do this, princesa. If you’re scared—”
“Don’t play reverse p
sychology on me.”
He cocked an eyebrow, a trick he was getting a lot better at since we’d started hanging out.
“I’m not scared,” I said. “I’ve never done this before. It’s like when you drove the truck that first time.”
“I was trying to impress you,” Emilio said. “It was our first date.”
“You normally impress girls by trying to break their necks?”
“Ah, no. You were my one and only at that.” He winked and stuck out his arm. “Use me to balance and get on. We’re burnin’ daylight, girl.”
“Dios mío. You totally stole that line from one of Papi’s movies!”
“What? No way. I don’t watch westerns.”
“If the Duke was alive, he’d kick your ass for swiping his line.”
“Duke’s alive. Saw him this morning.”
“Not that Duke. The Duke. John—”
“Jude?”
“I’m just saying—”
“Quit stallin’ and get on this horse before I change my mind.”
I threw myself at the bike. That’s how it felt, a great helpless flinging of arms and legs. Luckily, Emilio kept her steady and didn’t try any funny stuff as I adjusted my limbs and torso and other seemingly disconnected body parts behind him. He’d started her up before I got on, and beneath my legs, everything shook.
I tried holding on to the seat, but I couldn’t get a grip. Nothing behind me either. I crossed my arms over my chest and hoped for the best.
Emilio laughed. “Better hold on.”
“There’s nowhere—”
“To me.” Emilio looked at me over his shoulder. “Put your arms around me and hold on or you’ll face plant on the first turn.”
I slipped my arms around his waist. It wouldn’t do me any good if I died before we’d even gotten this beast up to speed. That wouldn’t show El Demonio a damn thing.
“You okay back there?”
I gave him the thumbs-up. Only one, though. Double thumbs would immediately disqualify me as authentic biker-babe material. It was bad enough I was wearing a pair of Mom’s old button-fly jeans from the nineties. And a bra. Two strikes against my motorcycle street cred already.