“I’ve worn it nearly every day.” Teddy regards it. “Yesterday, Caitlin said she’d lend me a tenner to buy a new one.”
“Little bit—” I bite my lip. Kids. Some are sweet; most need a good slap. I think of the French family staying in room 38, with a boy Teddy’s age.
“I’ll get you something new soon,” I promise. “Don’t worry.”
“You will?” Teddy barrels into me, arms flung wide. I hug him back. He’s slight as a fresh-planted sapling, limbs so thin I worry they’ll snap if I hug him too tight.
“Yes,” I say. Something so stupendous even that goblin child will have to admire it.
7:07 a.m.—Bea
“Get up, get up, get up.”
The elongated lump beneath Bea’s bedcovers groans.
“Come on”—she finds his thigh with her heel and gives it a hefty kick—“You lazy sod.”
A matted head of hair, along with a face she vaguely remembers from last night, emerges from under the blankets and squints into the milky morning light. “Have a heart.” He drops his head back to the pillow. “It’s barely dawn.”
“No, it’s not,” Bea snaps. She wishes, not for the first time, that she’d been able to sneak Little Cat into her college room since he gives comfort without reciprocal demands. “Now fuck off, I’ve got a lecture.” This isn’t true and they both know it. But, though Bea wants to get rid of him, she also has a standing date with the University Library. Every morning, as soon as it opens. To study philosophy. She chose this subject in order to entertain and evaluate ideas that might, in another context, raise questions about her mental health, since she still worries that the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree.
Her mamá is the first to remind her of this. Her falcon-featured mamá, whose nose is nearly as sharp as her tongue. “This isn’t your purpose, niña,” she says. “You’ll find that out soon enough.”
She speaks, every time, with such authority that Bea sometimes finds it hard to disregard her. Cleo García Pérez always sounds sincere telling tales she claims are true, of invented places she claims are real. As if she isn’t either teasing or mad. When she’s both. Which is why she spent Bea’s childhood in and out of Saint Dymphna’s Psychiatric Hospital, while Bea spent it in and out of foster homes. Cleo also spends an unusual amount of time extolling the virtues of vice, insisting Bea follow in her murky footsteps. Unlike other mothers, Cleo approves of bad behaviour and admonishes good, praising her daughter for selfish acts, for anger and unkindness, while chastising slips of thoughtfulness or generosity. Her mamá, a chill wind of cruelty blowing through an otherwise calm world, a textbook example of how human beings can be so fucking foul to one another.
“Life is a fight for survival,” her mamá says. “Good, by its nature, will lose this fight, leaving the rest to win. ¿Entiendes? So you can’t be good, if you want to survive.”
Fair enough, Bea thinks, though it’s not an opinion she’ll be sharing. It’s always struck her as funny that, in all her ardent ramblings on the war between good and evil, her mamá has never tried to claim that these Sisters Grimm of which she speaks, of which she claims Bea is one, are fighting for good. For why be good when you can be great? Evil, she always says, is greatness. Evil means having the courage and ability to do what’s needed in order to triumph: to rid the world of the weak.
“If you leave the future of humanity in the hands of the good,” Cleo says, “they’ll create a piteous race: people crippled by compassion, tolerance, empathy. People who accept what is instead of fighting for what’s possible. Leave the patetica human race in their hands and we’ll be wiped out—by the elements, the animals, any invading alien race . . .”
When her mamá talks like this, Bea has learned to nod along and say nothing. Arguing only means she won’t shut up. Bea came to Cambridge to escape, to distance herself from Cleo’s fascist opinions, to steep instead in gentle rumination, speculation, consideration. Socializing, except for the purposes of physical satisfaction, is not something that interests her.
Finally managing to extricate the interloper from her bed, Bea cycles (too fast) to the library, only slowing as she crosses Queen’s Road to glance back across the river and inhale the beauty of King’s College Chapel, its intricately carved spires reaching like immortal fingers towards the curve of the rising sun. Sometimes Bea imagines that the spires are trying to pull the great weight of the college into the sky, to fly like a majestic migrating bird to warmer climes in winter—Paris, perhaps, to sit beside Notre Dame, or Barcelona, for the illustrious company of La Sagrada Familia.
Every day, Bea feels grateful to be here, among such beauty and inspiration. Grateful to sit in the University Library, to immerse herself in the opinions of Bertrand Russell, who, predictably, proves far better company than the fumbling student she kicked out of her bed.
11:48 a.m.—Liyana
Liyana balances her sketchbook on her knees to draft the next panel of her graphic novel, the one she’s been working on for nearly two years. With ink and pen she depicts BlackBird hurling LionEss from the top of the tallest oak tree in Elsewhere. BlackBird laughs as LionEss, flailing and unable to fly, plummets to the stones below. When Liyana has shaded in the last leaf of ivy, she starts to write the story of how BlackBird came to be.
BlackBird
Once upon a time there was a girl born with ebony skin, jet-black hair, and inky eyes. She was so dark that she could slip into any shadow unseen, so dark that she shone almost blue in the moonlight. She was also the most beautiful, enchanting, and wisest girl in seven kingdoms—far more beautiful than her pale stepsisters, all of whom had ashen skin, bleached hair, and chalky eyes; all of whom were slightly dull and dim.
The girl had one great delight in life. On nights when the moon was full, she could fly. She stood naked in their garden, her black skin brushed with a sheen of blue, waiting for her curls of jet-black hair to catch the wind and transform into magnificent wings. Then she would soar above the lands and seas, her feathers glinting in the silver light, gliding on currents of pure joy.
Her sisters couldn’t fly. They were as fixed to the ground as the cows who grazed the fields. But, rather than admit their jealousy, the sisters pretended that they simply didn’t care to fly, that walking through the grasses was grander than swooping through the skies.
Her stepsisters were so jealous of Bee—as they named her, since they claimed she was nothing more than an insect—that they fashioned a plan to convince her that she was an ugly fool. Every day they told her so, inventing elaborate reasons and echoing each other’s examples. At first, Bee, wise as she was, saw through their efforts. But, as the days and months passed, she began to waver and doubt herself. And, since there was only one of her and three of them, eventually she started to believe her stepsisters. Until Bee was convinced that she was indeed an ugly fool.
And so, feeling embarrassed, Bee flew only in secret now and then and found, when she did, that it didn’t bring her the delight it once had. Months of unseen moons turned into years, until she no longer went out on moonlit nights at all. Until one day, Bee had forgotten that she could grow wings, had forgotten that she could fly, had forgotten the one thing that had brought her such joy.