Chapter 2 Calix
Calix
“Calix!” I shrieked.
He was standing in the village square, talking to Josie Stammerer and some other girls. Josie saw me before Calix did. I winced. I was supposed to be at work cleaning her parents house. But she very generously did not say, Hey, why aren’t you at work cleaning my parents’ house?
I rolled my eyes. I would have loved for rich, pretty Josie Stammerer to be more of a bitch.
Unfortunately, she just wasn’t. She even sat with my mom when I was working.
Of course, I often thought that it would have made more sense for me to sit with my mom, and for Josie to clean her own damn house, but then I wouldn’t have had any money.
Then Calix spotted me. His face broke into a wide grin. “Persephone!”
All my thoughts of Josie vanished. I couldn’t believe it.
Calix, here in front of me. I’d missed him so much.
If possible, he was even handsomer than before, his shoulders broadened, the last trace of baby fat gone from his face.
I raced over with my arms thrown wide to hug him.
But I skidded to a stop before I got there.
Calix was looking at me strangely.
I felt my face heating up. Why was he looking at me like that, with that blank, goggling expression?
Was it that my dress was too short? Of course it was too short; it was a hand-me-down of Josie’s, made brown and threadbare with work, and it wasn’t as if I could afford to buy a new one.
I tugged the hem down awkwardly, trying to cover more of my legs.
Then I realized the problem.
Calix was… clean.
Of course. He’d come from the capitol. They had water there, imported from the mainland.
Whereas I was living in a tiny remote village in the middle of a drought, and so I hadn’t… bathed. For months.
I swallowed. My face felt as hot as a coal.
In a last-ditch effort to salvage some of my dignity, I threw my head back and straightened my spine.
I refused to look at Josie and the other girls.
They all came from money. They didn’t have a ton of water, of course — a drought was a drought — but they sure had more than me, not to mention soap.
Calix coughed. He made a kind of abortive movement to come toward me, and then his eyes fell on the indecent hem of my dress and he stopped as if he’d run into a wall.
One of the girls cleared her throat. Her dress fit. I scowled at her.
It was Josie who piped up, sparing Calix the unpleasantness of having to hug me. I could have died. “We didn’t think you’d be home so early,” she said to him. I scowled harder. “We thought you were supposed to be gone a whole year.”
She was right. Calix had been at the diplomat’s college in the capitol city, Corcagia, for ten months, but he was supposed to have two months left to go. Surely he hadn’t… dropped out?
No. There was no way. Calix had always been the best of us.
The smartest, the most charming, the most fun.
Not to mention the best-looking. His hair was a darker golden-red than Josie’s strawberry, miles richer and brighter than my own white-yellow hair.
His eyes had a way of catching the light and sparkling whenever you’d made a joke.
Seeing him — even at moments like this, when I was embarrassed and annoyed — always made my body go hot.
Which only annoyed me more.
“I’m doing a special project,” Calix said.
He was talking to me, even though Josie had asked the question.
He was probably trying to make me feel better.
This was Calix’s way of apologizing: lavishing attention on you until you weren’t mad anymore.
To my irritation, it was working. “Kind of like a capstone.”
As if I, a woman who had never left Limer, was supposed to know what a capstone was. But Josie said, “Oh, cool. Like a thesis?”
“Sort of, but more hands-on.”
I could have killed them both. I said to Calix, “I thought maybe you’d come home because you wanted to see me.”
I was aiming for joking, but I was clearly still too ticked off to make it work. Calix just laughed uncomfortably. I wanted to sink into the earth. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool.
Then Josie said to me, “Hey, Persephone, were you on your way to the house? You don’t have to worry about coming over today.”
Great. First we were talking about my unwashed body, and now we were talking about my shitty job. I wasn’t ashamed of my job, but I would’ve preferred it not to be the first thing we brought up in front of college-boy Calix.
My heart fluttered a little with anxiety, though. If I wasn’t working today, I wouldn’t get paid.
But then Josie added, “I’ll just come to your place later,” and I knew she meant, (a), she would check on my mom, and (b), she’d bring the little bag of coins her father always tossed me at the end of a day’s work.
I relaxed a hair. Still, I was suspicious.
What did she mean, I didn’t have to work today? Why?
She smiled at me and Calix. “The rest of us are going to breakfast at the tavern. Want to come?”
She knew I would say no. I couldn’t afford it. I refused to look at Calix. He could go, if he wanted.
“No, I’ll catch up with you guys later,” Calix said.
“Okay,” Josie said agreeably. (She was always so damned pleasant!) She went off with the other girls, all of whom cast sultry looks at Calix over their shoulder.
I put my nose in the air. I didn’t care.
Anyone could look at Calix however they wanted, and he could look at anyone however he wanted. It was no business of mine.
I was the one he looked at, though.
I ignored him. I was still simmering.
“Just us, then,” he said.
“Observant of you,” I bit out.
But I had never been able to stay mad at Calix for long.
When he flashed me an amused grin and started walking, I huffed and fell in beside him.
Soon we were walking side-by-side through the village as if he’d never left.
My chest eased. And my mind started thrumming.
Because I had a question to ask him, and I hadn’t figured out how to ask it.
I’d thought he would be gone for another two months; I was supposed to have more time.
(And no, it wasn’t Will you marry me, though that one had occurred to me, too.)
It was so impossible not to look at him.
Even with my face set straight ahead, my gaze fixed on the desiccated brown horizon where it met the blue sky, my peripheral vision couldn’t help but seek out Calix’s shining hair.
The flat plane of his jawline. The smooth movement of his hips. I wanted him so badly. I always had.
He started telling me about Corcagia. Thank the gods; otherwise I was going to say something stupid.
I had never been to Corcagia, even though I had wanted to apply to the engineering college during the same cycle that Calix had applied to be a diplomat.
Even Josie had wanted to apply; she had wanted to go to the nursing college.
But her parents had put her off. They wanted her to get married instead.
And in my case, obviously, there was my mom.
So instead of the three of us living in the capitol right now, studying in beautiful libraries and eating buttery meat-filled pastries and not dying of thirst, it was just Calix there, and me and Josie here.
It was a beautiful city, he said, like nothing I could ever imagine (thanks), a thousand times bigger and more solid than our teensy little village of mud-brick huts and thatched roofs.
Every day, Calix witnessed all kinds of people conducting all kinds of business, even people from the mainland.
The waterfront market sold cloth woven from threads of pure gold.
The fishmonger sold fish the size of human beings hung up by their mouths to drain.
The harbor was full of boats at all hours.
The bridges were delicate as filigree. The streets were paved with cobblestones that looked silver in the rain.
He told me about school, too. His favorite professors. His school’s partnership with the war college.
“Do they have a partnership with the engineering college, too?”
“Sure do,” he said, oblivious to my bitterness. I bit my tongue and knocked into him with my shoulder in an effort to get the hell over myself. He knocked into me in return, automatic. Good old Calix.
“Tell me about your special project,” I said. “Your ‘capstone’.”
“It’s a secret.”
I laughed. “Who do you think I’m going to tell?”
“I’m serious. It’s a special assignment from the college president. He’s a member of Corcagia’s Body.”
The Body was Corcagia’s governing entity, its twelve members appointed by the ruling families of our island country of Iernia. (One of those ruling families was the Stammerers, a.k.a. my employers, a.k.a. Josie’s parents.)
“Are you kidding?” I said. “The Body gives you your final exam? Don’t they have anything better to do?”
“It’s not a final exam. It’s a capstone.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
“And the capstone isn’t assigned by the Body. The college president just happens to be a member of —”
“Yeah, okay, I get it. Look, fine, don’t tell me about your project. I hope you do really well on it, whatever it is.”
“You tell me what you’re doing.”
I spread my hands wide and rolled my eyes. “I’m force-feeding my mom and cleaning Josie’s house.”
“Persephone.”
“What?” But despite my bravado, my stomach roiled anxiously. Because this took us back to the matter of my question. I had to ask him. It was now or never. “Actually, you know what, I have an idea I’ve been playing with.”
“What do you mean, an idea?”
“I have ideas, too, Calix.”
“I know! That’s not what I meant. Ugh. Just —”
I relented. “I’m sorry. I’m just kind of sensitive about it. It’s something I could… use your help with.”
He brightened, pleased. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. But you aren’t going to like it.”
“Sure I will. What is it?”
Trust me, I wanted to say, darkly, you won’t. “I have to get some stuff from my mom’s house to show you. And you can’t laugh at me. Okay?”