Bleeding Violet (6 page)

I dropped into the red chair, trying to block the flood of embarrassing images that wanted to fill my brain.

My own mother. A call girl.

Had Poppa known? Had he been a
client
? No wonder Rosalee had never cared about him, about me.

“You want coffee?”

“Ah … yes.” I had no trouble looking her in the face anymore. She was still beautiful, but the burning, rapturous aura surrounding her had dimmed. “I mean no,” I amended. “I can’t drink coffee anymore. It interferes with my meds.”

Rosalee went to the fridge. “Then I’ll get you some milk. Finns love milk. At least that’s what Joosef always said. Here.” She tossed me a box of Famous Amos cookies.

I gaped at the box in wonder. “Milk and cookies, Mom? Really?”

She set the milk before me. “Eat ’em and shut up.”

“But it’s just like TV!”

“How? It’s fake and unhealthy?”

Let her be sarcastic. I was over the moon. The horrible day I’d had was almost worth it, as I sat with my mythical milk and cookies and felt at ease with Rosalee for the first time.

“What’s a transy?” I asked.

“A transient.” She grabbed an apple for herself and leaned against the picture window, since she couldn’t sit with me at the table. “Anything transient. Like a mayfly.”

I knew about mayflies, had seen them in action during the slow summers at our lake house in Finland. Huge swarms of them rising like dark mist from the lakes, mating in the air in winged orgiastic abandon, only to flutter back down into the water, drained. Dead. An entire lifetime played out in the space of a few hours.

But what the hell was mayflylike about
me
?

Rosalee polished the apple on the scant bit of fabric covering her chest. “How well did you fit in today?”

“Not too well, actually.”

“I knew you wouldn’t.” She took a triumphant bite of her apple. “That’s why I sent you to school. I figured it’d be better if you tried and failed on your own. Better if you could see for yourself.”

“See what?”

“That you don’t belong here.”

“
Yet
. I have a few prospects.” Just one, and a lousy one at that, but she didn’t need to know everything. “I hung out with this popular boy and his friends at lunch. I could tell he was
really into me.” And he was. Too bad he was rude and not at all a nice person, despite what he’d looked like.

After a lengthy silence, Rosalee took another bite of her apple, chewed carefully. Swallowed. “Just so you know, sleeping around doesn’t count as fitting in.”

If anyone else had said such a thing to me, I would have slapped her, but this wasn’t just anyone.

The milk and cookies lost their sweetness. “Sex isn’t the only thing I have to offer,” I said, the words so low I could barely hear them.

“But it’s the only thing they want.” Rosalee frowned out the window at all the sex-hungry men in the world. “Besides, what else
is
there to offer?”

“Trust. Affection. Respect.” I shoved her tainted after-school snack across the table. “It must be hard to think of qualities you don’t possess.”

Rosalee’s hand tightened on her apple—for a second I thought she was going to hurl it at me. “Go take your pills,” she said, her voice as empty as her expression.

I took my pills all right, but not the ones she wanted me to take. I went upstairs and downed four sleeping pills before crashing on my pallet. I watched the light grow dim as the sun
traveled low in the sky, but mostly I watched the box of sleeping pills I’d replaced on the shelf. Right above my head. So easy to reach up. Never mind how heavy my arm, how tired my heart, how bleary the box. So easy to swallow the remaining four. Or more. If I could just reach—

A sharp pain stabbed my hand as Swan landed between me and the box, wings outstretched, feathers bristling. She eyed me balefully, a spot of blood on the end of her hard yellow beak, the same blood that now dotted the back of my sore hand. She whooped angrily.

“Not the boss of me,” I muttered, barely able to get the words out as the pills I’d already taken worked their magic.

Swan scooped the box of pills into her beak and swallowed it whole, as though it were a particularly good piece of fish, the last thing I saw before sleep took me. I was glad to be taken.

Outsmarted by a bird.

How humiliating.

“Hanna!”

I awoke with a start, Rosalee shaking my foot like a castanet. I jerked free and kicked at her, but she had excellent reflexes and easily dodged me.

“You awake now?”

“What do you think?” I would have thrown my pillow at her, but I had none. I had nothing.

I turned over on the sweaty, twisted blankets, willing my heart to slow down and my hand to stop burning. Yellow light from the open doorway behind Rosalee spilled into the dark room. I looked at Swan up on the shelf in all her wooden majesty, her long neck ruler-straight, her wings folded close to her
body, aglow in the half dark. “You didn’t have to bite so hard,” I muttered.

“What?” Rosalee watched me closely.

“Nothing.” I drew my knees to my chest; my dress was damp and sticky-feeling, giving me chills. “What time is it?”

“Almost six.”

“In the morning?”

“I figured you didn’t have an alarm clock, so I brought one up. I
should’ve
brought you a nightgown.” She pulled one of the blankets free, untwisted it, and draped it over me. Then she set the ticking wind-up clock on my shelf.

And then, instead of leaving, she knelt beside me again. The tarty black dress was gone, replaced with fuzzy red pj’s.

“I was gone sneak in and out with that clock,” she said, “but you were making that noise.”

“What noise?”

“That nightmare noise. What were you dreaming about?”

I hadn’t remembered my dream until she mentioned it. And then I relived it.

“I dreamed I was at Poppa’s grave,” I said. “And he asked if I would lie with him beneath the earth because he was lonely. He said … being dead was lonely.” I rolled onto my back, and
tears pooled into my ears. “So I lay with him in his grave, and worms squiggled between my toes and bones poked the backs of my thighs. He missed me so much and was so happy to be with me, but all I wanted was to get away from him. The only person who ever cared about me.” I looked at Rosalee, a shadow-woman in the half-light. “How stupid is that?”

Rosalee listened to me cry for a while, staring out the open door as though wishing she’d fled when she had the chance. “You should do us both a favor,” she said, “and give me back the spare key you swiped. Because you won’t be happy here, either. Not with me.”

“But that’s just it,” I said, brushing my tear-wet hair from my face. “I’d rather be miserable and free than happy and caged.”

To my surprise, Rosalee nodded. “Love is a trap,” she said. “The ultimate cage.”

The trill of the alarm clock startled us both. Rosalee reached over and slapped at it—like it had cursed at her—until it shut off. We looked into each other’s wide, startled eyes. I laughed. I think Rosalee might have laughed too if she’d been capable of something so human. I wasn’t happy, but at least I wasn’t as unhappy as Rosalee. At least I was still able to laugh.

Maybe it was the laughter or the fact that Rosalee cared enough about me in her own weird way to drag herself out of bed at six in the morning just to bring me an alarm clock, but I didn’t feel hopeless anymore. What I felt was that I might be able to face another day.

This time when Rosalee insisted I take my pills, I took them.

The next two days were lonely, to say the least.

I’d meant to give Wyatt a piece of my mind for kicking me out of his lap, but I didn’t see him anywhere, not even at lunch. I saw his friends, Carmin and Lecy, and they saw me, but they ignored me, cold-shouldering me because Wyatt had.

Fucking herd mentality.

But before I could dissolve into a puddle of misery, Aunt Ulla made good on her threat to ship all my earthly possessions to Rosalee, who, screaming at my aunt over the phone, threatened to ship it all right back. I ignored them both and set to work building a nest for myself, glad to be able to make the empty attic my own.

That Thursday evening I opened the door to Rosalee’s room and found her sitting in the dark, her curly hair fall
ing into the open red box in her lap. The hall light touched the box’s smooth, lacquered finish, imbuing it with a ghostly aura. Rosalee stared into the box, entranced, as if the box were whispering secrets only she could hear.

“Hey.”

Rosalee started and slammed the box shut, the look she gave me more outraged than entranced. “
Knock
next time!”

I backed up. “Sorry.”

She put the box in her nightstand drawer and locked it with the key dangling from her red bracelet.

“What was in the box?”

“None of your business.” Rosalee snapped on her bedside lamp so that I could clearly see how angry she was. “What do you want?”

“I made dinner. Are you hungry?”

She looked like she wanted to say no, but she didn’t. Instead she followed me to the dining table, her stomach rumbling, and sat in the red chair. I sat in the desk chair, which I’d pilfered from her office so we could finally sit at the table at the same time.

Rosalee stared warily at the bowl I set before her, prodding the contents with a spoon. “What is this?”

“Stew,” I said, in front of my own steaming bowl.

She swallowed a hesitant mouthful, then relaxed. “Your father fixed me a bear meat sandwich once. Been kinda leery of Finnish cuisine ever since.”

“What’s wrong with bear meat sandwiches?” I asked, curious.

She gave me a long look. “From now on,
I
do the cooking.”

If she wanted an argument, she wouldn’t get one from me. I couldn’t believe she’d volunteered to do something so domestic in the first place. After giving me milk and cookies that first day, she’d left me to fend for myself.

“What was all that racket you were making?” she asked.

“I just finished putting my room together,” I said, bouncing in the chair. “I had to borrow the armoire from your office since I don’t have a closet, but even still, all my furniture fits perfectly, even the sewing machine, like the room was made for me.”

“It
wasn’t
made for you. Don’t you dare get attached to that room.”

“You said I could stay.”

“For two weeks and that’s—” Her spoon clattered to the floor. “You took my armoire?”

“I needed a place to store my clothes.”

“I had all my books in that armoire!”

“I saw.” Hundreds of books, several in German and Dutch, and endless stacks of bound manuscripts had crammed the armoire; I’d sweated through my chemise removing them all.

“I stacked them neatly on the floor,” I said, so she wouldn’t think I was a slob.

Rosalee pushed away from the table, chair legs squealing angrily against the tile. I thought she was going to go into her office to see what I’d done with her books, but she went up to my room instead and did a slow 360-degree turn.

“Why is everything
purple
?”

“It was Poppa’s favorite color.”

“You painted my armoire
purple
!”

“It would have clashed otherwise.” She was making me feel like I’d murdered her best friend. “Why don’t we go finish that stew, hmm? Before it congeals?” Anything to get her out of my room before she decided to take back her armoire, and to hell with that. It had taken me forty minutes to wrestle it up the stairs—I’d
earned
that armoire.

Rosalee, looking like the only survivor of a train wreck, followed me downstairs. I tried to lead her by the hand, but she wouldn’t let me touch her. She was almost shy about it, the way
she tucked her hands into her armpits, hiding them from sight. She was like the moon—part of her was always hidden away.

She sat at the table and stared at her spoonless stew.

“Take mine.” I handed her my spoon and stood to get another for myself. A thrill shivered up my spine as I watched her take my spoon into her mouth, watched her swallow my germs as though they were old friends.

“Did you like it, at least?” I asked when I took my seat.

“Like what?”

“My room. The layout. The design.”

“It’s fabulous!”

“Thanks,” I said, ignoring the sarcasm. I waved my hand at her kitchen decor. “I noticed you like the Scandinavian style. So do I.”

“You
are
Scandinavian.”

“Then you must like me, too.”

I immediately regretted having set myself up so perfectly for what was sure to be a devastating put-down. But Rosalee didn’t say anything mean. She didn’t say
anything
. Just chewed and didn’t say no. She didn’t say yes … but she didn’t say no.

I met Petra on Friday. She cornered me at my locker before first bell. Petra van den Berg, dressed in all black, of course, with a silver key exactly like Rosalee’s dangling from a long, thin necklace. Blond, pretty, and bone thin. I wasn’t sure if her recent illness had wasted her flesh or if fashion had.

I figured she wanted to get into it with me, some he’s-my-man-so-step-off song and dance. If so, she would have to dance solo.

I don’t do drama.

“It’s not gone work with you and Wyatt,” she said, sounding congested.

“It isn’t?”

She cleared her throat and then leaned against me—like I was a wall!—resting her bent arm on my shoulder. “I get where you’re coming from, okay? You’re just a candy-ass transy; believe me, I’ve been there.”

Been there? She was still there. The slightest breeze would blow her down to Mexico.

“So you think, ‘Wow!’” she continued, her greenish waif’s eyes bright with sincerity. “‘Look at this strong, fearless, yummy-looking boy. He’s the answer to my prayers.’ Right? Well, wrong.” The sincerity darkened. “Wyatt’s Mortmaine duties always come first, so you’ll always come second. Or third. Or
tenth
.”

Petra took a break from her speech to cough into the back of her hand. She was
very
congested and still leaning against me, so I patted her on the back, wishing I had a jar of Vicks so I could offer it to her.