I am sprawled on the couch when Mom arrives with takeout, which is the first sign something’s off.
“Where’s Papi?”
“Hello to you too, my darling daughter.” She dumps the bags on the kitchen counter and stomps back to their bedroom.
I get up to investigate the food. When Mom wants me to know what’s wrong, I’ll know. Plus the smell of Gordito’s wafts from the bags. They have these burritos that are literally as big as a baby. The restaurant has photos on the wall of infants lying next to these monster burritos for comparison. We used to get a single burrito and split it four ways for the whole family.
Inside the bag I find three separately wrapped foil packages.
When the door slams, I wonder if Mom slipped out her bedroom window to come around and make another pissy entrance. But this time it’s Papi. Who also has takeout bags.
He doesn’t slam them on the counter like Mom, though. He stands frozen, staring at me in confusion. “Is that . . . for you?” He chin points at the three burritos I’m putting onto plates.
“For . . . all of us, I assume? Mom brought them home.”
That unfreezes him. He drops his bags on the counter and stomps off to their bedroom. There’s no way to avoid their rising voices in our tiny house. Plus, I’m kind of curious. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve heard them yell at each other.
Papi’s bags contain Korean. I start transferring the food to bowls.
“I said I’d get dinner!” Papi says.
“You said you wouldn’t have time to make it!”
“And that I’d pick something up!”
“You were being sarcastic!”
“Why would I be sarcastic about that?”
I whistle at Chester to follow me so he doesn’t sneak any food off the table, and we march to their bedroom. I knock on the door, but open it without waiting for a response. They both turn to me in shock.
“Jess is coming over in twenty minutes,” I inform them. “Their parents have actual reasons to scream at each other in bedrooms, given the bitter divorce and all, so they get enough of whatever this is. There is an abundant multicultural feast getting cold on the table, so whatever this is? Maybe it can wait.”
With that, I return to the table, where I start serving myself bibimbap. This could go any number of ways. We’re all sort of spelunking without a headlamp here. After a shocked silence, they both explode in laughter and I breathe a sigh of relief.
They give explanations for their short tempers over dinner, even though the real explanation is we’re all fried down to the last wire and could spark at any moment. They ask questions about Jess’s home life, and I remind them of Jess’s pronouns when they mess up. Papi ponders how to handle nonbinary pronouns in Spanish, which is so heavily gendered.
By the time Jess arrives, my parents are cleaning the kitchen together, talking about taking a salsa class at the community center.
“You’re so lucky.” Jess props their feet up on the railing along the back porch.
It’s that time of year when the evenings stretch further and further and sometimes it seems like darkness will never fall.
But it always does eventually.
I know what they mean, so I don’t say something snarky. I am lucky, in so many ways. I breathe in the last blooms on the neighbor’s lilac tree while Jess’s pencil scritches along a sketch pad.
“Can I see?”
“Not yet.”
Chester perks up at the sound of a siren in the distance but decides it’s not worth his while and settles back down at Jess’s feet.
When we were little, anytime we heard a siren, Nor and I used to stop whatever we were doing, no matter what, and turn to each other, clasping both hands, and say, “Fire, sickness, horror, flood, sisters always, heart and blood.”
I have no idea where it came from. Some creepy fairy tale, probably.
“Has your dad moved out yet?” I ask Jess.
Instead of answering, they hold up the sketch pad. They’ve drawn an amazingly intricate sword, the hilt engraved with curlicues and letters I can’t read, the blade somehow catching the light, even though it’s sketched in pencil.
“That’s gorgeous.”
“It’s meant to be terrifying.”
“Well, yeah. If it was pointed at my neck, it would be less gorgeous.”
On the table between us, Jess’s phone buzzes. They glance at a text, grimace. “Can I spend the night here?” When I don’t answer right away, they add, “I don’t have to if it’s weird. It just sounds like they’re still at it.”
The relief I feel at the idea of late-night whispers, a person who’d wake if I wake, rushes in so fast it floods me with guilt. Jess is not a replacement for Nor.
“Of course you can.”
I leave the notebook I’ve been holding like a shield on the table and go inside to pull out some extra blankets and arrange the hide-a-bed in the living room. I half expect Jess to follow me in and chatter up a storm while I make up a bed. But for once they stay still and quiet, alone except for Chester and the distant sirens.
Fire, sickness, horror, flood.
Once I’m done, I make hot cocoa and fill my parents in. They’re all sad, concerned faces, but at least they don’t go out to the patio to smother Jess with loving kindness.
When I get out there with two mugs of cocoa, Jess’s pencil is back to scratching away.
“Another sword?” I ask, setting the cocoa down. Then I see that they’re not drawing on their sketch pad. They’re writing in my notebook. Cocoa sloshes across the table, spattering Jess’s abandoned sketch pad as I grab Marguerite from their hands. “What the hell?!”
“What?!”
“You can’t write in someone else’s journal!”
“And you can’t pour coffee all over someone’s sketch pad!”
“That was an accident! And it’s hot cocoa!”
The ridiculousness of that distinction dampens my fury, but only a little. “This is private.”
“You’ve been asking for my help on every little thing! What kind of sword? What’s the castle layout? Clothing? Armor? Where they’d take a shit!”
I take a careful breath, notice my parents watching us from inside. “That still doesn’t make it okay for you to write in my book.”
They nod. “Okay. You’re right. I’m sorry. I should have asked. But I didn’t write; I drew.”
That doesn’t make it better. But it does make me curious. I open the notebook and flip through until I find a page that contains not only my sprawling handwriting, but also a striking medieval sword over an intricate flowered tapestry, ripped and jagged at its bottom edge. But it’s also this incredibly beautiful piece of miniature art.
I glance up. Jess watches carefully, more vulnerable than I’ve ever seen them.
“It’s beautiful.”
They let out a breath. “I was thinking about illuminated manuscripts? Do you know . . . ?”
I shake my head and sit while Jess pulls up some images on their phone. I’m looking at ornate pages from books—really old manuscripts from way before the printing press. The words look like calligraphy, but what’s notable about these pages are the intricate borders, miniature illustrations, and gorgeous letters beginning each page.
“Illuminated, because they always had some gold leaf involved,” Jess says, reaching over to scroll through and point out a favorite.
“They look religious.”
“A lot are. Originally monks made them. Like, there were monks whose whole job was making these beautiful works of art. But by Marguerite’s time, they weren’t only religious. Books became status symbols. They were superexpensive, because of all the labor.”
“And the gold leaf.”
“Right. They sort of fell out of fashion when the printing press came along. But that was after Marguerite.”
I scroll through some more of the photos. They’re absolutely stunning. I’m not really a fine-art person, but I can’t stop looking at these, all the detail, all the time poured into them. Books as status symbols, stories valued so much they were cast in gold.
“Marguerite’s story is worth illuminating,” Jess says carefully.
“Yeah. It is.”