A History of Glitter and Blood (11 page)

“Can I see the library?” he says brightly, drinking juice Scrap squeezed from tightroper limes.

“Oh, of course. Of course.”

She leads him down to the damp basement, and she sees tension she hadn't seen in him unfurl and settle down. He smiles. “It's dark,” he says.

“You're weird, you know?”

“Yeah.” He runs his fingers over the spines and nods at the ones he recognizes. “It's funny seeing my books here with Scrap's. Does he read them ever?”

“When he thinks we're not looking. I think he secretly loves them.”

Tier laughs a little. “Noooo. They're fiction.”

“Maybe that's what he likes.”

He shakes his head. “That's not Scrap.”

“Like you know him so well,” she says, and she can see that hurts him, but really, most of his experiences with Scrap have been filtered through Beckan. She hands books from one to the other. She tells them stories that will make them trust each other and trust her when she's with them.

“What is that?” Tier says, pointing to the corner.

“My welding bench. Cricket set it up for me. A long time ago. So much better than my old apartment. I did it at the dining room table.”

He drifts over. “What are you working on?”

“An arm for Scrap. Made out of old pots and pans. He asked for a hook, but . . . I want him to be able to move the fingers. Well, not move. Pose. With his other hand.”

Tier goes back to the bookshelf, where he is more comfortable, she assumes, and she stays over and looks at the arm. It isn't much yet.

Tier pauses on one book—
Ferrum: A Brief History
. “Could I borrow this one?”

He flips through the book and says, without looking at her, “There are pages missing from this. Torn out.”

“Oh. I don't know.”

“My father has some gnome history book I've never read. Scrap might like it. I'll bring it.”

Josha's voice startles them. “Why are you trying to make nice with Scrap?”

Tier looks up. “I'm not—”

“Why don't you hate him?”

Tier breathes out. “Because what's the point? What good would it do?”

“He killed your dad. You can't be rational.”

Beckan says, “Josha, stop.”

Tier says, “It was war.”

“Can we keep using that excuse forever? It was war? How long do we say that? Is that going in the history books, Beckan?”

“Stop.”

“A thousand years from now, we'll be chewed up gnome food, and someone will open up a book, what, Scrap's book? And they'll say, it's okay, it's just a war. It's just history. Crate and Scrap's arm and Cricket and everybody.”

Beckan doesn't mention that there is no way any of them but Crate will make history books.

Does that mean Crate wins?

Who would have to write that book, anyway? (Please no, please no, please.)

Tier says. “I get that you're restless.”

Beckan puts her hand on Josha's arm, because she senses he's about to explode, but he doesn't. She watches him exhale something, and he says, “I am. I'm restless.” He shakes his head a little. “And I'm mad at Scrap.”

“Me too,” Beckan says quietly, because the truth is that Scrap killed someone, and the fact that who he killed was horrible doesn't change that. And it doesn't make him sexy and dangerous, it makes him scary, and she wants to hold him and get rid of the fever and she wants to hit him and she wants to run away.

Tier says, “Guys, give him a break. He's suffering for it.”

“Suffering doesn't do shit,” Josha said, and really, he would know.

Tier looks at Beckan hard and says, “He takes care of you. You tell me that all the time. He makes you food and cleans the house and worries about you. Do you know how rare that is? Do you know how few of us are left who are at all capable of taking care of anyone?”

It was amazing how quickly things became normal. Beckan and Josha shared a room, officially, and they tended house while Cricket and Scrap went out and came home with enough food to get them through the day, or fabric for a new shirt for Beckan, or pills for Josha's cold. They got used to chasing the mice around, staying up late singing folk songs their fathers had taught them, comparing imperceptible battle scars and finding the bits of them that looked like the other species they all were.

They were just so close and all so crazy about each other, so quickly. Beckan had a space on Cricket's shoulder that she told Josha
was only for her, and she would rest her head there when she was tired and kiss it over and over when she wasn't. She had a favorite place on the floor to stretch out with Josha and take a nap. And Scrap. Scrap was giggles through the walls, secret smiles, notes passed back and forth, but they were slow, they were childish about it, they never stepped over any kind of line. For some reason, it felt important to them both that they be careful. Because they would look at Cricket and Josha and see how crazy they were for each other and wake up gasping hard in bed, freezing cold, thinking about how dangerous it was to love someone that much during a war.

Anyway. They had plenty of time.

The guns got louder and louder and closer and there was more blood and gradually, around the time Josha started spending more nights in Cricket's room than Beckan's, they began to live their lives in new pairs. Josha and Beckan were still, in their way, ridiculously in love, but they spent less and less time together as Cricket and Josha threw themselves into shared sweatshirts and last-bite-of-ice-cream kisses, and Beckan and Scrap lived like (mythical) parents, teasing each other for sleepwalking and flat gnome noses, curling up together with a book after the kids were in bed.

It wasn't long before Beckan found out about tricking; Cricket had told Josha within days—the kind of indiscretion Cricket lived and died with—and Scrap never made much of an effort to hide it, coming home with half his glitter rubbed off, sometimes drugged and giggly, always in the mood for a kiss on the cheek and a bit of babying before he was sent off to bed. They never talked about it. Beckan washed bloodstains out of his underwear and rubbed his shoulders when he looked tense and comforted him after nightmares and Josha worried the three days a week Cricket accompanied each-night-every-night Scrap. “I don't make as much as Scrap does,” Cricket said once to Beckan, explaining his part-time work. “He's the best little whore in Ferrum.”

A few weeks into the war, the tightropers invaded the mines and took the women captive, and business boomed for Cricket and Scrap. The gnome men had been wanting before, surrounded by women who instead of getting into bed with them waited around and dreamed about fairy boys and fairy babies—a piece of immortality—instead of another generation in the mines, but now with the women gone entirely they needed Cricket and Scrap more than ever, and the boys were happy to oblige. During that initial surge, when sex was valuable and food wasn't, quite, they ate and drank and fucked like kings.

And somehow, in the war, Scrap came alive. While Josha and Cricket nervously discussed weapons and production, Scrap tried three-ingredient recipes with whatever three ingredients they had left and made Beckan guess what he was trying to make. He invented card games called Treewoman and Cabaret and lied when he said he would let Beckan win. He once lay half naked on the kitchen floor and laughed hysterically while the other three rubbed him as hard as they could to get glitter off him, and he kicked and screamed and tackled them back on the floor.

And one night he and Cricket came home too late and nearly empty-handed for the fourth night in a row and sat in the kitchen in silence, their fingers laced together and Josha and Beckan sat with them and eventually there was no way to avoid the fact that two prostitutes was no longer enough, in a time when the gnomes were clinging to each bit of meat like it was made of gold and licking their teeth and smacking their lips whenever Cricket and Scrap came down, to secure food for four mouths.

“Teach me,” Beckan said, and most of her was excited, most of her had been waiting, most of her wanted to feel everything that Scrap had ever felt, because that was where she was then. “I'll go.”

Beckan browses
the tightroper shops and is wandering around, looking up at the sky, when a hand pushes down hard on her shoulder and a little blue and pink fairy catapults over her shoulders and onto the ground.

She hauls him off the ground. “Someone's feeling better.”

“Much.” Scrap bends over and pants. The brass locket she made jingles around his neck. “Had to run ages to catch up to you. What are you doing out? Are you working today?”

“No.” Now that the girls are back, Beckan goes down much less frequently, despite the silence still between Tier and Rig. “What, are you?”

“Yeah.”

“You're still sick.”

“No.”

“Their girls are back. Why do they still need you?”

“They love me. I went down back when the girls were still here, remember?”

“Well . . . I guess we need the money.”

“Yeah. Hey.” He grabs her, suddenly, and hugs her. “Thank you for taking care of me. You're amazing. I owe you. Really big.”

“Shh, no. You sure you're better? You're still all pant-y.”

“Yeah, I'm going to hit Tier up for another one of those pills when I'm down there. But I'm much better.”

“You look good.”

He smiles at her. “Hey,” he says. “I found some old board game in the basement. Want to play tonight? I think we can get Josha to. He's having one of his better days.”

“Absolutely.”

“I'll invite Tier if you want,” he says.

“No, no, he needs to stay down there. Girlfriend and all.”

“You got it.” He stands up, finally done panting, and smacks a kiss on her cheek. “See you. Thank you, Beckan. You help with all of it.”

She touches her cheek for a while before she starts scanning the sky again. It isn't long before she finds him, that smiling figure in the sky, leaning against the rope. Patient, hopeful, incredibly young.

What bothers her, she realizes, is that's the most happy Scrap's been since the war ended, and it is a far cry from tickling him on the floor.

But there's a boy in the sky smiling at her.

Scrap brings Tier's history book home and sits down and tears through it, and Josha takes the opportunity to steal Scrap's notebook. Not the one he kept during the war, not the boring three-line descriptions of each day, but the blue one he keeps hidden under his pillow, the one with loose pages and glued-in ripped-out paragraphs and spaces for illustrations and horrible, fevered handwriting.

Josha reads it and now he knows everything.

Scrap sees him and his mouth opens, and he is very quiet for a minute.

“I didn't know it was this bad,” Josha says. “I thought you were just . . .”

“Don't tell Beckan,” Scrap says, eventually. “For the love of . . . please don't tell Beckan.”

“Shouldn't you tell her?”

“I do,” Scrap says. “Every day.”

“You're a coward.”

“This is . . . this is all we can handle right now.” He looks down. “I'm getting there. I'm working on it.”

“That's abuse,” Piccolo says. “Pushing you into prostitution like that. You know that, right? You could pretty much arrest him or have him killed or whatever for being a sexual predator.”

“He's younger than me.”

“Oh. Well then you have no case, sorry.”

Beckan rolls her eyes and cranes her neck further over the rope under her chin. In the afternoon sun, the city looks so much different from the last time she was up here, when everything twinkled with an imaginary magic. Now, everything is sharp, real, and almost comical in its smallness. It must be so easy to come into a city, to invade, to kill, when you see how small everything can really be.

He says, “There's something inside you, Beckan. I can see it. You have something. A spark.”

“It's called glitter.”

He laughs. “All of you have that. This is just you.”

“I'm the only girl. I know how these things work. It makes me look more special. Process of elimination. You know Scrap used to think he was interested in me? And I used to think I was interested in him? Just because we were the only ones not paired off.”

Piccolo says, “There are a lot of soldier's daughters and a lot of cute nurses up here and I'm talking to you. What does that say?”

She looks away and rolls her eyes and feels so much different from when Scrap kissed her cheek. “That you have a thing for fairies.”

He laughs. “That's not what makes you interesting. The fairy thing or the girl thing. They listen to you. And that's really interesting.”

“Who?”

“The other ones. Scrap especially.”

“You
are
a bad spy.”