Eleven #2
The kitchen was dark when I slunk into it.
That didn’t mean much given my living situation, but with escape to my bedroom within reach, I beelined straight for the fridge without checking my surroundings.
Only once I had filled my usual tumbler did I notice Annalisa blinking yellow-green eyes across the kitchen island.
I would’ve splashed myself with cow blood if not for the cover on my cup.
“Big cup,” she noted. Before her was a floral massacre.
“It’s been a couple days,” I said into the rim, shaking my head to clear the static of the first drink.
“Why do you go so long?” she scolded me, as she had before.
“Why are you panic drying?”
“I am not panic drying. This is recreational.” She gave a harrumph and resumed stripping the leaves and side stems from her pile of wildflowers.
Annalisa had taken after her mother’s flower-picking hobby.
She collected them at night, hung them upside-down near first-floor windows, and left them in vases around the house once they’d properly dried.
I’d been noticing them more often lately, finding a new hanging bundle or two every week for months now.
She was going to run out of space. A house only had so many vases.
She claimed to like the process of air-drying them.
She liked waiting, checking on their progress each night.
So when she got out her gallon-sized bag of silica gel and the monstrous Tupperware she owned for the sole purpose of microwave-drying her flowers, it meant she was feeling impatient.
From Annalisa, who moved through the world unhurriedly (from my experience, most immortals were like that—Cedric was the exception, always reaching, rushing), this was startling.
I had only seen her like this on certifiably bad days: once after she’d shape-shifted in front of her childhood hamster and it had dropped dead (my dad had examined the body afterward; the ancient thing had had heart disease, but Annalisa could not be convinced it hadn’t died of fear); a few times on the anniversary of my mom’s death; and several times in the weeks leading up to her twelfth birthday, the day when adolescents typically made the Trade.
I had to hold my cup with both hands; they were so unsteady. Annalisa continued working in the dark.
“That’s yarrow,” I said as she stripped a stem with three big, flat clusters of whitish flowers. I took a sip. The next few had thin purple petals around yellow centers. “Aster,” I said and sipped.
“Goldenrod, right?” she asked as she started on the next bunch. I nodded and drank. “And these?”
“Pearly everlasting.”
“Keep going,” she said, and I drank.
It was what our mothers used to do. During spring, my mom would join her sister-in-law on early-morning walks through the forest and down roadsides.
Francesca picked flowers to press and make into perfume, and my mom couldn’t resist describing what they came across.
They always brought back a few extra flowers to braid into Annalisa’s hair.
And Cedric’s, if they could catch him, until he turned ten and decided to chop off his ponytail.
A few times, they left at night so Annalisa, Cedric, and I could come along.
Annalisa would point to random plants, and I would name them, sometimes tugging on my mother’s shorts for her to whisper the answer to me—I had learned to be conspiratorial from her.
A lot of the foliage looked similar, so Annalisa had often pointed out the same plant several times, sometimes back-to-back, which had once annoyed Cedric enough to return home.
We didn’t speak as Annalisa placed flowers in her Tupperware over an inch of silica gel. While they were in the microwave, she cleaned her mess, and I drained my cup. She carried the container downstairs with oven mitts and an unspoken invitation to follow.
The basement had wetter air than the upper floors.
With its stone walls and candelabras, it looked the part of the vampire den.
Every staircase down was carpeted in red velvet.
The furniture was all ebony and cabriole.
Our predecessors had been super into posing dramatically for huge portraits.
I knew of at least three gargoyles, though it was hard to get a real count (They were always getting moved around.
My clan used them to prank each other). Annalisa’s vases of dead roses really tied it all together.
“Basement” was a grossly inadequate term, but “lair” seemed melodramatic. Beneath our house was another house, a series of rooms connected by passageways, where the Lunars lived. I didn’t spend much time there.
“I should warn you,” said Annalisa, “about my room.”
She had always been devoted to our kind’s aesthetic—I had yet to meet a gloomier child, not even Cedric—but she took creative liberties with her bedroom.
She had heaps of gothic decor from the actual Gothic Revival at her disposal, a lifelong obsession with the color pink, and a recent weird thing for mismatching animal prints.
Her room was what I imagined it would look like if someone robbed the wardrobe of that vampire from Monster High and wove it all into blankets, sheets, cushions, and rugs. In 1850s Italy.
I’d seen her room in various stages of disarray, but this was in a league of its own.
Annalisa’s vanity, dresser, desk, nightstand, and bed were covered in dried flowers.
Only a sliver on her comforter was clear enough for sleeping.
Petals and silica gel crunched beneath my feet.
The yellows and browns went horribly with so much pink.
She must’ve walked miles to gather this many flowers or else stolen her parents’ cars while they slept.
“The ecosystem will never recover,” I said.
Annalisa struck a match, because she was a sixteen-year-old girl who lit her room with candles in sconces, if she lit it at all. “I’m very responsible.”
Sitting at the vanity so Annalisa could take the sliver of bed, I asked, “What’s wrong?”
Instead, she sat cross-legged at my feet, hair sweeping the floor as she rested her temple against my knee.
“You first.”
So I said, “How do you know you like someone?”
“I’m not the one to ask. I’ve only ever known the people I live with.”
“I mean more like, how do you know you like a type of someone?”
“What type do you mean?”
I averted my eyes. “Boys?”
“Oh.” Annalisa straightened but mercifully didn’t look at me. “I think I can answer this one, actually.”
Her words drew my eyes sharply back to her. They had come out trembling and wet, like something drawn up from the bottom of a well that hadn’t seen the sun in ages. A deep, lightless sense of understanding passed between us; we had more in common than I’d thought.
“You can?” I asked uncertainly, which felt foolish when I had been the one to ask her to begin with, but she seemed to know what I was really asking.
“Yeah. I can.” She said it solidly, dispelling any doubt.
“You know how, before your Trade, someone reads off everything you’re giving up?
You won’t live forever. You’ll lose your thick skin.
You won’t heal quite as well, and if you lose a finger or a leg, you can’t regenerate it.
You’ll give up some of your speed and strength.
You’ll age. If you have a gift, it won’t be as easy to use.
All for the chance to go out in the sun. ”
The soreness in my throat was proof of my weakness.
I had known what I would lose long before I became a Solar; my family had made sure of that.
I hadn’t been deterred. Annalisa had watched me go through the ritual: the recorders and mirrors, the candles and ash, the blood bezoar, the thick black book.
Six years later, she had backed out of her own Trade the night before.
“It’s wanting something so badly you consider giving up power for it, even knowing it might still burn you. Even if you’re not brave enough to actually do it.”
I couldn’t tell if she was still talking about the Trade or if she was talking about girls. She was probably talking about both. I wondered how long she had been suffering alone, taking care of me while her room filled with dead flowers.
“Understanding that something makes you vulnerable and craving it anyway,” she said. “It’s a hunger. That’s how I knew.”
“But I don’t even know what it would mean. To like . . . them. Boys.”
“You don’t know how it feels to stand under the sun until you make the Trade, either. You don’t know it’s worth it until you jump. It’s that kind of yearning.”
She bumped her head against my knee like the cat she was. “Also, do you remember years ago when we snuck into your dad’s room to watch Magic Mike that night he and my parents were out? You sat so close to the TV I thought you’d get drool on it.”
“Not true!” It might have been true. After a sweet silence, I said, “Your turn. What’s wrong with you?”
“I just told you.”
She hadn’t, not directly, but I let it slide. Girls, huh?
Or the Trade?
Definitely both.
“Instead of drying more flowers,” I said, “maybe make something out of the ones you have. For the ecosystem.” And, “Do you want to talk about it?”
“No. I’ll probably cry. I think I already am.”
“Want to come up?”
Annalisa nodded. Her body rapidly shrank and grew long black fur.
She could shift much faster than her dad, with a seamlessness the sun had taken from him.
She curled up on my lap, folding one paw over her watery green eyes, and purred as I drew my nails from the top of her head to the base of her spine.
Annalisa was easy to be quiet around, but that night, talking seemed like the thing to do. I told her everything.