Chapter Thirteen. Rory
Rory
The morning of the transition dawned bright and biting cold.
Wynne told Daye to lie down next to the flora Rory and Daye had assembled.
Baskets of flowers, chosen by Daye and divided by color and vibrancy.
Heaps of evergreen verdure, bristling with pines.
Fresh branches, arranged by tree and length.
Wynne whistled between her teeth. “You were busy.”
“We both were,” Rory said. Wynne’s gaze did the old skip rope, to Daye and back again. He tried to ignore it.
He cleared his throat. “Are you ready?” He wasn’t sure who he was asking—Daye or Wynne, or maybe himself.
“Go ahead,” Wynne said.
Daye closed her eyes.
He wasn’t ready, but it didn’t seem to matter. The opening incantation was already falling from his mouth, and it was starting, starting, and there was nothing to do about it but swallow down the hitch in his breath, and begin.
Here were the technicalities of it:
One: Taking off Daye’s dress. Rory wished he had asked Daye if she’d rather do it herself, but it was too late now. Daye’s eyes were fastened shut by the opening incantation, her limbs heavy and unresponsive.
I’m touching a girl, he thought as he tried to slide Daye’s shoulder out of the sleeve, the back of his hand accidentally dragging against a nipple. Though Daye’s chest was still childlike, it screamed nakedness. I shouldn’t be touching a girl like that. I shouldn’t be touching Daye like that.
He managed to get both her arms out of the sleeves, and was trying to fit the dress over Daye’s chin.
Wynne’s hands reached over his shoulder to help tug it all the way off.
It’s the first time I’m touching a girl, he thought—which was ridiculous, because he touched Daye dozens of times every day, but still …
It’s the first time I’m touching a girl, and I made her unconscious first. It made his skin crawl.
Two: Unweaving Daye. Saying the words that turned the smooth skin into bark and leaves. Reaching into Daye’s rib cage and unweaving vibrant-red trailing vines and curling ferns. Unpeeling her face.
He couldn’t linger on the horror of it, he couldn’t allow himself to think: I am taking Daye apart.
He intensely regretted asking Daye if she wanted to change anything, like her hair color or height.
She had asked him to match her height to his, and now he had to untangle her wrists, her ankles, her knobby knees—things he could otherwise have left untouched.
Three: The texture of it. How dry everything was.
No heart pumping, no blood welling. Not even sap.
He knew that if someone were to unwrap him, the mess of his insides would spill wet and soft—blood and tissue and dark, gurgling things.
He was never more aware of the inherent difference between him and Daye.
That he was flesh and blood, and she was flower and branch and words.
That he was a boy, and she was girl-shaped.
He had never thought about Daye this way before.
He hated himself for thinking of Daye like that.
He never wanted to think about her this way again.
But he couldn’t help it, couldn’t make it stop, not with his arms wrist-deep in what should have been her lungs.
Four: Putting Daye back together after he took her apart, his hands shaking with a mix of nerves and cold.
He knew that this image—the vaguely Daye-shaped frame of branches, his green-stained hands moving in and out—would haunt him for nights to come; that it’d join his gallery of night horrors, surpassing the years-old one of Daye’s fingernail gleaming in the grass, maybe even the newer one of Daye’s edges crumbling onto the sheets.
He didn’t want to see Daye like this. He had no choice but to see Daye like this, and not once but at the turn of every season.
The weight of this knowledge settled in his chest, a suffocating mass.
He really didn’t want to be the one doing this.
There was no one else to do it, no one to—
“Rory, watch out.” Wynne’s voice cut through his looping litany.
He looked down sharply and saw his fingers steadily braiding cyclamens and clematis through what would be Daye’s collarbone. He twisted to look over his shoulder. “What?” His voice sounded scratchy.
“Look, the balance of flowers and fruit to evergreen here is all wrong. And you forgot to say the incantation when you finished weaving the left hand.”
Rory froze. He couldn’t remember when he had stopped working on the hand and moved on to the collarbone. “Oh, no.”
His sister came to crouch beside him. “It’s okay, you can just go back and do it now.
” Her breath misted in the air between them, smelling of sour coffee and mint.
“And if you unweave the clematis and put ivy instead, it will be fine.” She surveyed his work closely, feet to shoulders.
“Also, I think you could do with more berries in the thighs and chest, maybe even upper arms and belly.”
“But wouldn’t the coloring be all wrong?”
“No, it would make the skin more skinlike. And areas like the groin, belly, and chest need that extra punch of vitality.”
Rory scooped up a handful of berries, blue and red and pink, and wove some into Daye’s inner thigh. “Like this?”
“Well, you could, but I think it would be more efficient to do it like this—”
And then his sister’s hands were buried in Daye’s frame, weaving and correcting, untangling knots and streamlining the flow of branches.
“I’ll never be able to do this by myself,” he said, failure curdling inside him.
“Sure you will,” Wynne said. “You just need to practice.” A comforting hand on his shoulder, stained green with crushed vines. “You’ll do fine next season, I promise. Now, look here, see what I did?”