Chapter 14 Naive, Utopian, Laughable
Naive, Utopian, Laughable
The candles have been blown out, the cake sliced and served.
Sascia stuffs her mouth as much as she can. An infallible tactic: the fuller your mouth, the less you’re expected to participate in conversation. It’s an almond cake drizzled with sugar syrup called amygdalopita, a staple of Greek pastry cuisine and Aunt Rania’s—Danny’s mom’s—special.
Sascia hates almonds. No, that’s not fair.
She can tolerate a roasted and, most importantly, salted almond as a snack.
But she hates it when nuts are peppered in places they don’t belong, like pastries and salads and, god forbid, soups.
It feels like you’re casually enjoying your lunch, then suddenly, you’re biting into a piece of tree bark.
And so she has collected a small mountain of almonds on her napkin.
It’s getting hard to spit them out discreetly, to be honest, which is why she extracts herself from where she’s been sandwiched between her godmother and great-uncle in the back corner of the restaurant and sneaks off to the bathroom.
She stuffs her napkin and paper plate in the bin and sits on the toilet seat. Across from her, the mirror reflects a wraith of a girl with her nose scrunched up like a mouse. She smooths her expression and tucks her hair behind her ears. It’s freshly cut, barely to her chin, a soft sandy brown.
Her fingers trace a line from her jaw to her ear. If we had met before, Nugau said, lips grazing Sascia’s ear, rest assured, little Ariadne: I would not forget you.
Afterward, Sascia looked up the myth of Ariadne, just to make sure she remembered it right.
Every year, King Minos of Crete demanded a host of fourteen Athenians to enter his Labyrinth in sacrifice to the beastly Minotaur.
Until his daughter Ariadne fell in love with one of the sacrifices, a young prince of Athens, and decided to help him survive the Labyrinth.
She gifted him a coil of red thread and instructed him to unspool it while he walked the cavernous pathways, so that he might retrace his way out.
They eloped, but in true Greek myth fashion, Prince Theseus abandoned her on an island and Ariadne ended up marrying the god Dionysus instead.
An Ariadne in love with the Labyrinth itself.
A girl in love with the dark and twisted, the inescapable, the forbidden.
Sascia likes how the phrase fits her—dark and twisted things deserve to be loved too, and who better to love them than a girl deemed a little twisted herself?
It’s strange that she should feel so seen, so understood, by a creature from another world who doesn’t even know her.
A knock comes on the door. “Cuz?”
Sascia leans over to pop it open.
Danny wheels himself to the threshold then proceeds to gyrate his wrists and massage the soft flesh around his thumbs. He gets cramps sometimes when he wheels too long. He makes a sympathetic noise at Sascia’s glum face. “They’re giving you the silent treatment?”
“Worse. They’re being nice. All smiles and hugs and clapping me on the shoulder while they talk me up to their friends.”
“Arg!” he fake-shrieks. “Forgiving parents—the horror!”
Sascia chortles, entirely involuntarily.
She steps around his wheelchair and takes the handgrips, bringing him past the dining space where guests are singing NSYNC and into the quiet solitude of the kitchen.
Wine bottles and pizza boxes are piled on the counter like the spoils of war.
Sascia goes straight for the medicine drawer and the half-finished tube of pain relief cream.
Dropping onto a stool across from Danny’s wheelchair, she squirts some in her palm and begins to massage her cousin’s wrists.
His head drops back. A pleased hum vibrates from his nose. “So what’s the latest on the elf? That’s why you were late, isn’t it? I knew you’d lose track of time. I should have dragged you away early with me.”
Sascia presses her lips together. She and Danny don’t keep secrets from each other, ever.
He knows every shitty thing she’s done, every regret and bad thought—and she knows his.
But he’s too gentle. Too respectful to actually say what he thinks, that she’s turning this elf, this moth, into her latest fixation.
Her point being: Danny knows all her secrets, but he doesn’t always understand them.
The silence must have stretched too long—he opens one eye and drawls, “What?”
“The cohort thinks the moth is some kind of ancient leader. But we still don’t know why it appeared to me, or how it relates to the elf. If we could talk to Nugau—”
“Sascia. You are not going to try to pull out the elf from the Dark again.”
His tone grates against Sascia’s ears, the whine of a parent about to tell off their kid. What is it about her that makes everyone want to set her straight?
“Oh, come on, Danny,” she says, half-pleading, half-snappy.
“I’ve met them twice now. The first time, they tried to kill me.
The second they didn’t even recognize me.
The entire world is looking for them and yet I keep stumbling onto them.
Don’t pretend I have any other choice but to get…
involved. You would, too, if you were in my place. ”
“No, I wouldn’t. That’s the difference between you and me, between you and the rest of the world, really. If I was convinced a dangerous elf princet from another world wanted to kill me, I would stay far, far away from them.”
“Stay away from who?” Aunt Rania asks, barging into the kitchen with the amygdalopita tray. Only clumps of syruped crumbs are left on the wrinkled foil.
Danny immediately goes beet red, but Sascia is a practiced liar. “I was thinking of taking a new class next semester, but Danny tells me not to. The professor has a reputation for failing freshmen.”
“Could he really fail you?” Aunt Rania says, her back to them as she wrestles to fit the tray in the overladen sink. “Since you’re only auditing?”
“She’s not auditing, Mom,” Danny says. “She’s taking remedial courses to boost her GPA. She has just as much homework and exams as I do.”
Aunt Rania makes a scoffing noise. “Well, not the same as you exactly if she’s contemplating skipping a class because she’s afraid of a strict professor.”
“Gee, thanks, Aunt Rania,” Sascia says drily, lifting herself from the stool. She’s had more than enough family time tonight. “Your support really means the world.”
Her aunt nails Sascia with one of her scathing looks.
She is a tall, imposing figure in her rib-knit dress and white-blond pixie cut.
She shares a long nose and strong jaw with Sascia’s mother, but the two women couldn’t be more different: where Mom is gentle and quick to laugh, Rania is closed-off and bitter.
After years of observation, Sascia has concluded that Aunt Rania can feel love, and does so acutely for Danny and her best friend and her sister.
Sascia is just not on that very exclusive list.
“My support,” her aunt deadtones. “You had my support. Until I had to sit through a ten-hour surgery wondering if my son would live, because you were foolish enough to drag him into the known hunting grounds of a Darktiger.”
“Mom,” Danny snaps. “For the last time, I knew full well what I was getting into. It’s not Sascia’s fault.”
Sascia barely registers his words. Her chest is heaving with stabbing breaths, with memories heavy with guilt. “I have apologized a hundred times, to Danny, to you—”
“And it’s still a hundred times too few,” her aunt barks. “You don’t get to stand there and use sarcasm with me when you make one bad decision after another. You want my support? Earn it.”
Oh, this is too much. “I’m trying!”
“Are you?” her aunt asks, with a sincerity that’s altogether too uncomfortable.
“You got the opportunity of a lifetime of a free Ivy League education and you squandered it. You lied about your grades instead of asking for help. You’re gone all day every day, supposedly working on your research, but I have seen that fishing rod sticking out of your backpack, girl.
Wherever you might be spending your time, it sure as hell isn’t a lab or a bookstore.
And you’re an hour and a half late to your own parents’ twenty-fifth anniversary party. ”
Sascia presses her lips together.
“Mom,” Danny pleads, “stop.”
“What’s going on?” Sascia’s father says from the doorway.
Her mother is peeking over his shoulder.
She wears a look of worry, but her father’s face is carved with austere lines: a frown on his brow, a pinch to his mouth.
He takes a look around the room—at Sascia’s arms wrapped around herself, Danny glaring daggers at his mom, Aunt Rania fuming—and then asks a level: “Rania, are you fighting with my daughter again?”
The silence is a heated pressure, pulsing loud at Sascia’s ears. Her nose stings. Wetness beads at her eyelashes. She knows the best course is to apologize. To defuse the tension and make it up to them all. But as Aunt Rania just pointed out, Sascia has never been good at making the right choice.
“You know what?” she tells Aunt Rania. “You’re right.”
Four pairs of eyes land on her.
“I did squander my golden opportunity. I did lie about my grades. I was late to my parents’ silver anniversary party and yes, I do know I can never atone for risking Danny’s life in that tunnel.
But none of this matters. Because no matter what I do, no matter what I say, you’ve already decided: I’m a screw-up.
I’ll always be a screw-up. So no, Aunt Rania, I’m not going to try to earn your support any longer.
You and I both know you were never going to give it to me, anyway. ”
You, she says, but she means all of them, her parents especially.
They’re kind and gentle and forgiving, but they’re also the people who sat her down for that damned intervention seven months ago and opened her eyes to a painful truth: she’s not special.
She is made of mistakes and fixations and brazen impulsivity, and she doesn’t have her life together and is probably never going to, because the life she wants for herself, a life with the Dark, is naive, utopian, laughable.
Her mother speaks gently. “Sascia—”
“May I be excused?” Sascia interrupts.
She doesn’t want her mother’s comfort right now. She’s angry and she wants to stay angry because anger is better than grief, better than having to confront her own mundanity.
“Sure, honey,” her mother says at last. “We can talk about this later.”
Sascia slips between her parents and out of the kitchen, hurrying up the stairs to their apartment.
When she’s safely inside her room, she locks the door and stays there for a moment, letting her forehead rest against the wood.
She’s not crying, but she has that horrible feeling in her throat, like her flesh is pressing in to strangle her from within.
A loud thump reverberates through the floor of her bedroom. The door of her closet rattles against its hinges. Muffled sounds echo and then the knob of her closet is turning. The door slips open and Darkmoths burst out—dozens, hundreds of them, a torrent of black and iridescent neon.
“What—” Sascia chokes out.
Through the onslaught of moths, a body appears. Shoulders clad in armor, long legs in scaled leather, hair tangled and matted to their face. It’s their face, their violet eyes and arched brows and their wintry Darkprint, blazing a bright white.
The name whooshes out of Sascia in a terrified breath. “Nugau.”
The elf slips, crashing to their knees. Dark blue blood oozes from a gash on their forehead. Their lips are stained a dangerous kind of black that veins down their chin to disappear in the high collar of their armor.
“Little gnat,” Nugau rasps. “Help me.”
Then their eyes roll back into their head and they collapse in Sascia’s arms.