Shadowshaper (7 page)

Sweat rolled down the back of Sierra’s neck and stained the armpits of her gray T-shirt. Juan’s band careened into another chorus on her headphones.
“Cuando la luna llena …”
crooned Culebra’s lead singer, Pulpo. His voice wrapped a perfect velvet strand around Sierra. The music roared to a new height of thrashing, static-laced madness, and then got suddenly extra chill as the syncopated bass tumbao trundled out, followed by the
clack-clack
of the clave and then the swinging horns and warbling keyboards.

The song came crashing to an end and Sierra took the headphones off her ears. She climbed down the scaffolding, stepped back from the wall, and grunted with satisfaction. The dragon was almost done; its wings stretched magnificently over the Junklot, a ferocious middle finger to the seriousness of the Tower. Sierra had given it Manny’s smile and mischievous, squinting eyes, and added whiskers in more or less the shape of Manny’s big mustache. She chuckled to herself.

Robbie must’ve come back late at night to work on his side: The skeleton woman had a guitar now, and colorful swirls poured from its strings, forming the beginning stages of a bustling city. Sierra could see how the whole wall would look when it was finished, and it was going to be spectacular.

Manny walked up next to Sierra and put a Malta in her hands. “That’s a strikingly handsome dragon.”

Sierra laughed. “Thank you, sir. I did my best.”

“Robbie’s stuff is nice too.”

“I aspire to be like him. Everything he draws blows me away.”

“Oh, you’ve got your own style, Sierra. Trust me. You’re doing amazing things.”

Sierra kicked the ground and shrugged. “Thanks, Manny.”

They stood staring at the wall in silence. Then she said, “You know this guy Raconteur?”

Manny shot her a stern look. “Sierra …”

“I know! You don’t like to talk about stuff from the old days or whatever, but look, this is important. I … I’m not sure what’s going on, but I think you — we — I think we all might be in danger. The night Ol’ Vernon disappeared, I —”

“Sierra.” She’d never heard Manny sound so grave. “A lot of things happened in the last couple of years with your grandfather and the shadowshapers. I don’t know most of it — I stayed on the sidelines mostly. But there’s a lot of bad blood around that. Folks don’t like to bring it up, you know? A lot of friendships ended, even families torn apart.” Manny looked back at the painting.

“Raconteur was a shadowshaper?”

He nodded.

“Do you know how to reach him? If he’s still alive? Anything?”

“I’m a newspaper man, Sierra. I understand curiosity, believe me. But this … For your own good, this is something you need to stay out of. Stay far away from it, okay?”

“Manny … This is my family. You can’t ask me to —”

The Domino King shook his head and walked away without another word.

The second she walked into her house, Sierra was greeted by the heavy, mouthwatering smell of arroz con pollo and plátanos simmering on the stovetop. It never failed; even today, with paintings crying and strangers lurking, the scent of her mom’s chicken and rice eased her mind away from all that trouble, at least for a few seconds. It wrapped her up in a fragrant cloud that seemed to carry her into the kitchen, disentangling her cares and worries on the way.

“Sierra, m’ija,” her mom said without looking up from the stove. “Your father’s leaving for the night shift in half an hour, and your abuelo’s acting up. I have to finish cooking and I have about fifteen thousand and a half things to do by tomorrow. Can you please, por favor, mi hija querida, take care of Lázaro’s room and whatever it is he keeps yelling about up there? He’s scaring Terry.”

“You mean Timothy?”

“Look, I’m not in the mood, okay? Too much going on right now. Squeeze this garlic into the mojo before you go, please. Gracias.” She handed Sierra a little flowering bulb of garlic, its crackling paper skin fluttering like broken wings onto the kitchen floor. Sierra found the press, stripped two little cloves, and placed them in the metal chamber. The stinging smell of garlic surrounded her, stuck fast to her fingers and nostrils.

“Mami.” Sierra used a knife to pry the last strands out of the tiny holes in the press. “Can we please talk about Abuelo and the shadowshapers now?” Her hands shone with the pungent juice and slipped around as she worked the tip of the blade back and forth. “I just want to know what’s going on.”

María Santiago turned slowly around and glared at Sierra. She almost always flitted back and forth like an anxious hummingbird. Now she stood perfectly still, a little fire glinting in her dark eyes. “Just finish squeezing the ajo for me and go see what your abuelo wants, please.”

The front door swung open, and Sierra’s Tía Rosa came swooshing in as if pushed by a heavy gust of wind. “¡Buenas noches, familia!” she called from inside a thick cloud of perfume. She doled out sloppy cheek kiss-kisses to Sierra and María, and then settled into a chair at the table. The smells of garlic, well-seasoned chicken, and Rosa’s ridiculous lady scent clashed in the steamy air.

“Hi, Tía,” Sierra said. “I was just about to go clean up Abuelo’s apartment.” Her mom shot her a look.

“Mi niña,” Tía Rosa snickered in a mock whisper. “I hear you have a little boyfriend?”

Sierra felt her whole face turn bright red. “Who?”

“Ay, Sierra,” María chided. “The boy you were talking to outside the house yesterday.”

“Who, Robbie? Nah, we’re just cool is all. He’s helping me with the mural.”

Rosa lit up. “Robbie, you say? Ooh! What’s he look like? Where’s he from?”

Sierra’s whole body ached to run out the door. “He’s, um, Haitian.” For a second, she wasn’t sure why she was tensing up. Then she saw her aunt’s exaggerated scowl.

“Oh, Sierra, m’ija, what are we going to do with you? Is he, you know …”

“What?” Sierra said.

“María,” Rosa said, turning in her chair toward the stove. “What did Tía Virginia used to say?”

María shrugged and shook her head.

“If he’s darker than the bottom of your foot, he’s no good for you!” Rosa let out a shriek of laughter.

María looked horrified. “Rosa …”

“Is he darker than the bottom of your foot, Sierra?”

“Tía, really … What’s wrong with you?”

Rosa rolled her eyes. “See, María, this is what happens. You let her keep her hair all wild and nappy like this …”

Sierra’s arms twitched with the impulse to swing out at her aunt’s makeup-saturated face, but she resisted.

“Rosa, stop it,” María said.

“You let her wear whatever she wants …”

“Rosa!”

“All I’m saying is, this is what you get.”

Sierra stormed out of the room.

In her mostly dark bedroom, Sierra stood in front of the mirror and frowned. She’d been listening to Tía Rosa’s offhand bigotry her whole life and mostly learned to just tune it out. Her mom would always chide Rosa lightly, and then the conversation would turn to something else. But the words crept in, made a home in Sierra’s mind no matter how much she fought them off. Her
wild, nappy
hair. She ran her hands through her fro. She loved it the way it was, free and undaunted. She imagined it as a force field, deflecting all Rosa’s stupid comments.

Still … the mirror had never been a comfortable place for Sierra. It wasn’t that she thought she was ugly or anything, but it was never the glance and grin that it was supposed to be. Instead, some patch of dry skin on her face would jump out her. Or a shirt that fit perfectly before suddenly seemed a little too tight, or a bra strap would peek out from a wide collar. And now she needed to get dressed for her — date? — with Robbie, and she really wasn’t in the mood. He had completely shattered her whole boys-are-cute-until-they-open-their-mouths thing. Not only was he not stupid, he looked at her like she made sense, like they shared some secret language that no one else knew, and that they spoke it even when they weren’t speaking at all.

Go casual
, she said to herself.
Nothing special. Casual with a touch of cute.
She chose a skirt and a tube top with a loose white blouse over it. But it was hard work making suggestions and not blatant declarations with her ever-changing Puerto Rican body. Some days her butt was too big; on others she couldn’t even find it. Was it the way her pants hung? What she ate last night? Her mood? Her period?

She sighed and glanced sideways at herself. Her butt seemed to be cooperating — it made just enough of a bump beneath her skirt to make itself known without being all extra. Alright then. She laced up her tall combat boots and squinted at herself again. Her hair exploded around her face with its usual reckless abandon. Bennie had insisted on Sierra coming by later so she could braid it.

Her skin was another matter. It wasn’t bad skin — a zit here and there and the occasional dry island. But once when she was chatting with some stupid boy online, she described herself as the color of coffee with not enough milk. There was a pause in the conversation, and the words glared back at her strangely, like the echo of a burp in an empty auditorium. She wondered if what she’d typed was burning holes in her chat partner too. Then he typed
o thas hot yo
and she’d quickly slammed her laptop shut. In the sudden darkness of her bedroom, the words had lingered as if imprinted in her forehead:
not enough.

The worst part about it, the part she couldn’t let go of, was that the thought came from her. Not from one of the teachers or guidance counselors whose eyes said it again and again over sticky-sweet smiles. Not from some cop on Marcy Avenue or Tía Rosa. It came from somewhere deep inside her. And that meant that for all the times she’d shrugged off one of those slurs, some little tentacle of them still crawled its way toward her heart.
Not enough milk.
Not light enough.
Morena. Negra.
No matter what she did, that little voice came creeping back, persistent and unsatisfied.

Not enough.

Today she looked menacingly into the mirror and said: “I’m Sierra María Santiago. I am what I am. Enough.” She sighed. These days were spooky enough without her talking to herself. “More than enough.”

She almost believed it. Downstairs, María and Rosa cackled at some inside joke.

Sierra scowled, grabbed her shoulder bag, and walked out of her room.

Bennie’s corner of Brooklyn looked different every time Sierra passed through it. She stopped at the corner of Washington Avenue and St. John’s Place to take in the changing scenery. A half block from where she stood, she’d skinned her knee playing hopscotch while juiced up on iceys and sugar drinks. Bennie’s brother, Vincent, had been killed by the cops on the adjacent corner, just a few steps from his own front door.

Now her best friend’s neighborhood felt like another planet. The place Sierra and Bennie used to get their hair done had turned into a fancy bakery of some kind, and yes, the coffee was good, but you couldn’t get a cup for less than three dollars. Plus, every time Sierra went in, the hip, young white kid behind the counter gave her either the don’t-cause-no-trouble look or the I-want-to-adopt-you look. The Takeover (as Bennie had dubbed it once) had been going on for a few years now, but tonight its pace seemed to have accelerated tenfold. Sierra couldn’t find a single brown face on the block. It looked like a late-night frat party had just let out; she was getting funny stares from all sides — as if
she
was the out-of-place one, she thought.

And then, sadly, she realized she
was
the out-of-place one.

Bennie jumped up from her bed as soon as Sierra walked in. “Look at you, fly girl!” She squeezed past Big Jerome and the two friends embraced.

“Shut up,” Sierra said, giving Bennie a kiss on the cheek and extending a pound for Big Jerome. “Whaddup, man?”

“Is what it is.” Jerome shrugged. “Just chilling, you know, hanging with Ms. B. I heard you got a hot date tonight with Weird Painting Dude.”

“Bennie!” Sierra hissed. To Jerome she said, “It’s not a date, he’s not
that
weird, and … yes. We’re hanging out. That’s all.”

Jerome rolled his eyes. “Okay, Sierra.”

“You ready for
Extreme Makeover
, Brooklyn Edition?” Bennie said. She settled back into the cushiony pillow throne on her bed and picked up a glass of tea-stained ice cubes. “It’s gonna be fun! And extremely painful. But mostly fun!”

“Yeah, listen,” Sierra said. “I know this is kinda messed up, Jerome, but I gotta talk to Bennie.” He stared at her blankly. “Alone.”

Jerome pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes. “Oh.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Nah,” he said, tossing a supposedly carefree arm in the air. “No doubt. I get it. Girl stuff.”

“Yeah,” Sierra said.

“For your date.”

“No! Other girl stuff. You do realize girls have other topics of conversation besides dudes, right?”

“I … guess.”

“Anyway, it’s wack to kick you out, I know, but …”

“Nah, it’s cool.” Jerome was up, sliding himself awkwardly toward the door. Sierra felt crummy.

“Thanks for walking me home,” Bennie said.

“No thing, B.”

“At least you don’t have far to go,” Sierra said.

“Yeah, just around the corner.” He laughed lamely and was gone.

Bennie shook her head. “You’re cold, girl. Ice-cold.”

Sierra sat in front of her best friend’s mirror. “I know. I feel terrible, but … I don’t know how to explain this.”

“What? You nervous about the date?” Bennie stood behind Sierra and began combing out her hair.

“It’s not that.”

“Then whatsa matter, girl?”

No words came. How to explain it all? Where to even start?

Bennie narrowed her eyes in a pretty good imitation of her mom’s suspicious face. “Alright,” she said. “I’ll just start braiding this fro and tell you random gossip until you’re ready to talk.” She separated out a large section of Sierra’s hair and started braiding it. “Did you know Pitkin dumped Butt Jenny?”

“Already? The party was like yesterday!”

“Seems he moved on to bigger and better things.”

“Janice? Oh my God, Bennie! She’s like what? Eighty?”

“She’s eighteen, Sierra, jeez!”

Sierra laughed and then it happened: She started talking. The whole weird situation poured out of her mouth, all the things she hadn’t even known how to express to herself, from the crying murals to Grandpa Lázaro’s strange, doomed fellowship to Nydia the librarian and the search for this spirit Lucera.

“Dang!” Bennie said when she’d finished. “That’s wild!”

“Pretty much,” Sierra said, breathing a sigh of relief now that it was all out of her system and her friend hadn’t called her a raving lunatic. Not yet, anyway.

“I’ve never hearda anything like that in my life.”

“Basically.”

“But still, there must be some explanation.”

“You and your explanations!”

“I can’t help it,” Bennie said. “I’m a scientist. That’s what we do: We explain stuff.” Bennie had spent every year of the decade that Sierra had known her obsessed with one branch of the natural sciences or another. She had settled on zoology recently, after having one eye glued to her telescope for what seemed like forever. “I’m just saying not everything is necessarily how it seems. Okay?”

“Okay. Ow!” Sierra wrenched her head away from Bennie’s fingers. “Leave it!”

“You can’t leave a half-done braid. C’mere.” Hands returned to hair, and the yanking and tugging began all over again. “Look,” Bennie said, glaring at Sierra’s reflection in the mirror, “I know you excited ’bout seeing Robbie tonight, but I really don’t think you should be talking to him about everything that’s going on.”

“What? Why not?”

“Think about it, Sierra.” She began wrestling another strand of wily hair into submission. “He’s clearly all up in whatever that whole strange world is. Shadowshapers and all that.”

“True.”

“And he disappeared right when that creepy dude showed up at Sully’s.”

“Ow! Be easy! Anyway, he was trying to draw it off, I think.”

“I’m just sayin’: You can’t assume Robbie’s on our side.”

“What side are we on?”

“Our side. We on our side. Just be careful, Sierra. That’s all I’m saying. Do what you gotta do, but don’t run your mouth about everything. Just keep that stuff to yourself.”

Sierra tried to turn her head, but Bennie tugged her back. “What are we supposed to talk about then? You know I hate small talk.”

“Suck it up. What do you think the rest of us normal people do on dates?”

“It’s not a date!”

“Whatever.” Bennie grabbed another two strands of hair and went to work. Sierra couldn’t help but feel that her friend was enjoying herself quite a bit.

“What if he doesn’t like my ponch?”

“Your what now?”

“My little belly ponch.” Sierra patted her tummy.

“Oh lord, Sierra, really? Everybody has a little gut, and plenty a’ dudes go crazy for ’em. Stop fretting.”

They sat in silence for a while, Bennie twisting and pulling away as Sierra tumbled the past two days around and around in her head like a load of laundry.

“Ow!”

“Relax, I’m done. How you feel?”

“Like my face is being slowly yanked around to the back of my head.”

“Awesome. Well, you look hot, so go get ’em.”

Sierra got off the Q train at the dimly lit Church Avenue station in the heart of Flatbush. The platform was deserted, and a gentle rain drifted onto the tracks.

Robbie smiled as Sierra came out through the turnstile. His long locks were tightened and wrapped into a bun behind his head, and he wore a dignified blazer over a T-shirt and whitewashed jeans. He also had on old sneakers, but Sierra decided to let that one go.

“Not bad,” she said.

He looked relieved. “Not bad yourself.”

“Why, thank you.”

He stopped just in front of her, just a little too close, and then leaned in and kissed her cheek.

“Hey, when did you get so slick?” she said, pulling away. “You’re supposed to be the quiet, dorky type.”

Robbie laughed shyly. “I am the quiet, dorky type,” he said. “I’m really, really nervous.” Sierra felt her stomach relax a little. “In fact, that move’s all I got, really, and believe me, I rehearsed that like six thousand times.” He exhaled sharply, and she realized his fists were clenched at his sides.

“Okay,” she said, laughing. “You can relax, buddy, you’re doing fine.”

“Okay,” he whispered. “You ready to go?”

“Where we going?”

“It’s called Club Kalfour. I painted a mural for them. I want you to see it.”

“You’ve been planning this for a while,” Sierra said, her eyes narrowing. “Either that or you take all the girls there.”

Robbie let out a nervous burp and then looked more relaxed. Sierra did her best not to burst out laughing again. “No,” he said, “I’ve been planning this a while.”

They walked side by side out into the night.