The Mirror Season: "Cold Spell"–"The Wind Takes Them All"

Did the neighbors give him a primer? Did they tell him about la loquita in the house across the street?

Understanding floats through my brain. It wafts like a leaf before settling.

“You mean we’re not required to memorize the student directory?” he asks with feigned offense.

He stares straight ahead and deadpans, “The less you know, the better.”

She has that considering look, tinted with disdain, that she learned from Victoria.

They could have snapped it at any party, and then pulled it out now, the image made new with the implication that it’s from the night I went into a room with PJ and Chris.

Antonio’s why questions tire out all but the most intrepid of us older cousins.

“Just drop it, okay?” I say low enough that my tía and Pilar won’t hear us over the whir of the mixers and the convection oven fans.

Jess moving out of her house and into the dorms was a fight with her parents, since she can commute, and clearly does for her shifts at the pastelería. Sunday dinners with her family are enough for her, especially with her sister, the buffer during holidays, living halfway across the country.

The words are threadbare as they come from my clenched throat.

Victoria knows better than to mess with the lacquer on her parents’ furniture, and because her parents are going to give her hell about the water stains, she’s going to give Brigid hell.

Chris’s face is still, almost placid, when he says, “No, you won’t.”

Their parents’ names are on plaques in hospital wings and theater lobbies.

“Thanks to suburban sprawl, there are no swallows.”

“You might want to rethink this,” Lock says, taking in the metal counters and pallets of flour in the pastelería kitchen.

“I once set a stack of coffee filters on fire trying to sauté something. I didn’t even know what sauté meant, I just heard it on TV and I really wanted to try it. Trust me, you do not want to teach me.”

“This particular color palette was my aunt’s idea,” I say.

“Has our academic rigor lived up to your expectations?”
He laughs. “They have a lot more advanced math classes than my last school, so yeah.”

He seems neither surprised nor bothered, like I’ve just said quantum physics postulates that you can't know the exact position and velocity of an object at the same time.

She has the luxury of being—when she feels like it, when the mood strikes her—magnanimous.

Something proprietary rises up in me. Not jealousy. To feel jealousy you have to think, at least a little, that someone is more likely to steal a person you care about than to hurt them.

It’s a look of the mirrored glass making him reckless, confrontational.

Lock puts the takeout container on the dashboard and the coffee into the makeshift cup holders, coils of wire that either he or the owner before him added.

His casual bluster is gone.

“So where are we going?” he asks. I can tell he’s trying to sound offhand about it, but the way he says it is uncertain, deferring.

“So where are we going?” he asks. I can tell he’s trying to sound offhand about it, but the way he says it is uncertain, deferring.

They meant it all as an invitation.
It was an overture to me becoming one of them, the pretty-enough queer brown girl they’d fold into their group, some novel addition.

They thought they were bestowing some kind of honor.

Except that Brigid is saying all this dead serious. Her mascaraed eyes blink with complete earnestness.

If I had laughed, even nervously, and then given in, they could have always pointed to that. You had a good time, you were laughing. Even if that laugh had been uncomfortable, apprehensive, an anxious reaction, they could have turned it into what they wanted.

But my resistance is an indictment. It’s a kind of condemnation they’re not used to.

I had to bury the part of me that knew, or else there was no him, and there was no me, there was only the unfathomable force of that moment, and that room.

When I clench my lips shut, they will throw ice water on me again, like they did that night, and I will gasp again, and my mouth will relent open.

It’s not shock or revulsion.

“If you tell me it has,” he says, “if you tell me that knowing helped you, I will listen.” He looks at me without wavering.