Roses and Rot (7 page)

“Someone else told me that, once.” His eyes went very far away. “She didn’t like fairy tales, though. She said they made things sound too easy.”

“Not all of them do,” I said. “Not the true ones.”

“True fairy tales?” He turned back to me, all the way back from wherever he had been lost. “Do you think they exist?”

“I don’t think that someone named Sleeping Beauty literally slept for one hundred years,” I said. “But there are fairy tales where there is a cost, where the veins of the story run deeper than ball gowns and handsome princes. I don’t think they’re real, but I think they’re true.”

“Interesting,” he said. “Is that what you’re here to write?” He nodded at the notebook on the bridge in front of me.

“Something like that. Are you a writer?”

“No, I leave the words to people who are better with them.” He walked closer, and leaned on the edge of the bridge, watching the river flowing beneath. The light through the trees, through the leaves of the elf maples—which I would have called by the much less romantic name of box elders—slanted across him, covering him in alternating patches of bright and shadow, obscuring his expression. “I’d forgotten how beautiful it is here.”

“Forgotten? So you’ve been here before.” He must be a mentor, in that case. Fellows weren’t allowed more than one residency.

“I have. And only recently returned. I’m Evan.” He held out his hand.

“Imogen. I just started my residency.” His hand was rough, callused. I wanted to ask if he was a sculptor, but that would mean admitting I had noticed.

“Do you like it here so far?” he asked.

“Very much.” I smiled. “It’s more than I expected. Better, somehow. Which is weird, because I’d thought that it sounded perfect. Are you happy to be back?”

“Melete, this part of the woods in particular—they’re among my favorite places. They feel right. So I always like coming back to them. Even when there isn’t such excellent company.” He smiled, and my blood fizzed.

The wind rustled through the trees, shaking loose the seedpods from the maples to spiral in helicopters down the air and into the river. Goosebumps rose on my arms, and I shivered.

Evan looked up at the darkening sky. “Storms can come in fast here. If you’re not the sort of person who likes to get caught in them, you might want to go in.”

The wind grabbed at my hair, turning it to snakes, and the leaves were silver fish against the slate-grey sky. Thunder rumbled in distant echo. “Maybe next time, when I’m dressed for it.”

“How will I find you, the next time there’s a storm?” Evan smiled. The rain fell, heavy drops that splotched his shirt.

“Do you have a phone?” I asked. I very much wanted to be found.

“Not with me.”

“The old-fashioned way, then.” I fished in my bag for a pen, then scrawled my number across a notebook page. The wind nearly tore it from my hand as I passed it to him.

“Until next time,” he half-shouted over the rising wind.

The skies opened, bucketing rain. I ran for home.

Soaked to the skin, mud-splattered, and dreaming of hot chocolate and a hotter shower, the sheer delight of dry clothes, I clumped up the porch stairs and through the front door. I toed out of Converse that squelched when I walked, and fought the urge to wring the water from my sopping hair. “Marin?” I called. “Are you here?” I didn’t want to drip my way up three flights of stairs.

Face flushed, she stormed out of the kitchen. “What?”

“I was hoping for a towel and dry clothes, but if this is a bad time . . .”

“No. It’s fine.” She bit her words as if they were apples. “I’ll get them. And maybe while you’re waiting, you could explain to Helena that I’m not a whore.”

“I—what?” Marin was already halfway up the stairs, so I stood where I was.

“Your sister is fucking her mentor.” Helena slouched down the hallway. “Also, you’re disgusting, and I can see through your shirt.”

“Good. Yes. Glad to know my secret plan to call down a rainstorm so I could flash my bra to the entire campus worked. Also, how is Marin’s sex life any of my business? Or yours?”

“It’s not.” Marin held out a towel, leggings, and a T-shirt. “Which is what I’ve been trying to explain.”

I peeled out of my soaked clothes and toweled off.

“How do you not care?” Helena asked me, eyes ostentatiously averted from my nakedness.

I did care, but I was pretty sure not for the reasons Helena did. I let the towel fall and pulled on the dry clothing.
So much better.

“I don’t care because Marin is an adult who is capable of making her own choices. So long as it’s consensual and she’s happy, it’s none of my business who she has sex with.”

“It is, and I am,” Marin said, the color still high on her face.

“Well, there you go. And even if it were my business, he seemed perfectly nice when I met him. So there really is no reason for me to step in here, and even less of one for you to.”

“You’ve met him? Of course you have. Ugh.” Helena looked like she might spit right on the floor. She cut her eyes back to Marin. “He’s using you, and you’re too fucking stupid to see it.”

“Still not sure how that makes me a whore,” Marin snapped.

“Right. Because he didn’t promise you anything to get you to drop your tights. Whatever. Some of us have to actually work to get what we want while we’re here.” Helena stalked upstairs.

“So, that was pleasant,” I said. “Want some hot chocolate?” I wanted it even more now, and it had been Marin’s favorite comfort food when we were growing up.

“Yes. I’ll drop your gross clothes in the wash.”

“I can—”

“I’ll do it.”

I raised my hands in surrender and went into the kitchen. I had forgotten that was what Marin did when she was stressed. She cleaned, straightened. Did something to impose order on the chaos.

The milk was warming on the stove when Marin came in. “So, what brought all that on?” I asked.

“Thin walls,” she said.

It took me a moment to register what she meant, and then I snickered. “Well, if you’re whoring yourself out, at least the sex is good.”

There was silence, and I worried that I had overstepped and said the utterly wrong thing. Then Marin burst into laughter.

“Yes, yes it is,” she said.

I carried the mugs over to the table and set them down next to her. “Feel better?”

“Much, thanks. I know there are going to be people who think the worst about me because of this, but she really freaked out.”

“There are always going to be people who think things. Obviously, you and Gavin are both hideous, unpleasant people with no redeeming personal qualities, so why would anyone want to have sex with either of you, unless they were getting something in trade?”

Marin grinned, then looked down into her cocoa. “It’s still pretty new. This thing. The two of us. I thought maybe it was just going to be casual, but I really like him.”

“Are you worried about that?” I asked. “The liking him, I mean.”

“I wasn’t until Helena freaked out.”

“Do you think she’s right, that he’s using you?”

She shook her head. “He’s a brilliant dancer with a great career. There is literally nothing I could give him that he doesn’t already have. But people will think I’m using him.”

“They probably will,” I said. “And some people will think he’s abusing the power he has over you. Scandal is more fun to talk about, and there will always be people who would rather believe the gross stuff.

“But if you know it’s not true, and Gavin does too, then it really doesn’t matter. Just be happy, and tell the gossips to go fuck themselves.”

Marin leaned her head on my shoulder. “Thanks. It means a lot that you’d stand up for me. So, what were you doing out in the rain?”

“Flirting with a cute boy.”

Marin raised an eyebrow, and then shook her head sadly. “Whore.”

“Runs in the family, I guess,” I said. We tapped our mugs together in a toast.

“Hey, Imogen.” Ariel knocked on the half-open door to my room. “You have a letter. It looks fancy.”

“Really?” I pushed back from my desk.

“Here it is.” She leaned against the door frame.

No stamp, so it had come through Melete’s in-house mail system. The envelope was decorated—a sketch of a bridge, surrounded by trees. Hand drawn, the pencil smudged in places from handling. “Elf maples,” I murmured, and smiled.

“Do you know who it’s from?” Ariel asked.

“I think so. This guy I met the other day.”

“A cute guy?” She waggled her eyebrows and mock-leered.

I felt myself blush and ducked my head, embarrassed by the reaction, and so of course turned even redder.

“Never mind.” Ariel laughed. “You just told me. I’ll let you read your love letter in peace.”

I slid my finger beneath the flap and opened it. The stationery was gorgeous, a thick cream, and the ink deep green. He had drawn leaves here, too, borders of them all around the words.

Dear Imogen—

Forgive me for not calling. The storm stole your number. But I took the liberty of sending you this
letter so that I might convince you to go to Melete’s Night Market with me.

It will be held this Friday, in the common area at the center of the campus. I hope to attend, and hope even more to see you there.

Yours, waiting,

Evan

I smiled as I refolded the letter and tucked it into the top drawer of my desk. I had no idea what the Night Market was, but I was definitely going.

Friday night the trees around the Commons were strung with fairy lights, and they sparkled like fireflies in the darkening September sky. The air smelled like the burnt sugar of caramel corn and the fading sweetness of the grass that crackled underfoot. Evan was waiting by the entrance.

“Imogen! I’m so glad you came.” He hugged me hello, both of us holding on a moment longer than mere friendliness.

“I loved the letter. Do you draw, then?” I was still curious about what kind of art he made.

“Only well enough. I’m a sculptor—right now, I work mainly with metal. I was worried you’d think getting a letter was too weird.”

“I like getting mail. It happens so rarely anymore, it’s almost like getting a present along with the words. I should give you my number, through, to make things easier.”

“I didn’t bring my phone—I didn’t want to be disturbed.”

Hard to argue with that. “Next time, then. So, what is the Night Market?”

“Let me show you,” he said.

Walking through it was like walking through an enormous cabinet of curiosities. Wax-stoppered apothecary bottles of perfume sat on velvet the color of a faded rose. A man with a map tattooed on the globe of his head sold thick silver jewelry designed like miniature barquentines and sextants.

A poet busked, calling out verse that was both spontaneous and awful: “Haiku, limerick, or sonnet, spoken here in praise of your lord or lady, and then disappearing like smoke.” Evan dropped a bill in the open pencil case at the poet’s feet, but held up his hand to forestall the poetry. “My lady cannot be improved, even by praise in verse.”

“Beware perfection unremarked,” the poet said. “Peril lies within.”

“I certainly hope that wasn’t his idea of romance,” I said.

“I’ll make a note,” Evan said, smiling. “As wooing techniques go, cryptic, creepy poetry is right out.”

As we walked past, a shadow rose, clawed and horned, from the poet’s back. The light shifted and it was normal, his only shadow a copy of himself. Still, I looked twice more over my shoulder as we continued on.

“How often does this happen?” I asked. The sky had grown darker, the fairy lights in the trees now like closer stars. Fire pits had been set up just off the path, and we stopped at one for s’mores. They tasted like pieces of campfires, like memories of childhood summers that never were. I wanted to take the moment and press it between glass, safe forever.

“Part of the appeal of the Market is its mystery, so there’s no regular schedule, though there are traditional times. The one around Halloween is a spectacle, and there’s always one just before Christmas. But really, it appears when it wants, or when it’s needed.
I know that sounds ridiculous, but it really does seem to be the best way to explain the randomness.”