Saundra Mitchell - All Out - The No-Longer-Secret Stories Of Queer Teens Throughout The Ages

I would not let this rage kill me. By using it, I would drive it from my body. I would turn it against the last man who would not save Léon. The man, who, by dawn, would be robbed of his finest things.

Oropeza’s guards, I took first.

I neared the hacienda with my head lowered. My hat hid the red of my hair. The brim shaded my face. I left the guards no chance to wonder if I was some messenger boy bearing midnight news, or whether they should draw their brass-throated pistols. I let my rage stream into them. I let it become liquid and alive.

They fell, one gripping his side, another holding his chest as though the venom clutched his heart.

Anything I could carry, I stole. Fine cigars. Money and papers from the desk drawers. Jewels that had once belonged to Oropeza’s wife; Abuela was sure he had killed her with his cold heart as well as we could with our poison.

I slipped through the house, the moon casting clean squares of light through the vestíbulo windows. The strap of my woven bag cut into my shoulder, heavy with all I had taken.

The rustling of grape leaves outside and the tangle of voices stilled me.

Oropeza and his friends stumbled drunk through the dark grapevines. Calvo and Acevedo and other men with more power than sense and more money than mercy.

They laughed. They swapped echoes of the same questions.

“How much are los franceses giving you for the traitor?” Calvo asked.

“How did you even manage this?” Acevedo asked. “I thought the only Frenchmen you knew were the ones you’d had shot.”

“Why didn’t I think of this?” another man asked.

“Because you’re not as smart as I am,” Oropeza said.

A question had just formed in me when I saw the figure held between them, being shoved forward and made to walk. Blindfolded, his wrists bound behind his back.

Because he could not see, he stumbled, drawing their laughter. The long points of their boots needled his shins.

They were forcing him toward the road that ran behind Oropeza’s estate.

My gasp was sharp as the first breath waking from a nightmare, the moment of wondering if, as in those dreams, my fingers were made of lightning or the sky was truly a wide blue blanket woven by my abuela’s hands.

Léon.

They hadn’t let the firing squad take him.

Hope bubbled up under my rage, but with it my anger thickened.

They hadn’t killed him, not yet. Instead, Oropeza was trading him to the country that now considered him an enemy. Trading him for money, for favors, for the currencies of men who owned so much ground but never bent down enough to touch it.

He was surrendering El Lobo to the country that called him Le Loup, the country Oropeza declared his enemy but still bargained with in secret.

My hope lifted my rage higher, driving it into a swirling cloud that flew out the windows and rushed at the men. It caught them, striking them down like el Espíritu Santo had slain them.

But this was not God’s work. This was not the Holy Spirit filling these men. This was the work of una Roja. A poison girl, veiled in men’s clothing.

The men fell to the ground, holding their throats and chests and sides. The richest ones, the ones whose boots had the longest tapered points, twisted to keep from stabbing themselves with their own shoes. Oropeza jerked as though demons poured through him. My vengeance, a vengeance I shared with my grandmother and all Las Rojas, was toxic as thorn apple and lantana. It was poison as strong as moonflower and oleander.

I threw open the glass-inlaid doors to the back gardens. I stepped between writhing men and grabbed Léon’s arm, pulling him with me. I caught the smell of his hair. Even now, it held the scent I’d come to think of as the countryside in Alsace. Dust and rain on hills. Fields covered in the blue of flax flowers and the gold brush of oats. He’d brought it with him on his skin. And when he told me the brown of my naked back reminded him of the deer that roamed that land, he gave me a place in his country.

Even through my rage and my fear, my lips felt hot with wanting to touch his skin. They trembled with wanting to give him my name.

Oropeza gazed up at me. His face showed no recognition, only the fear that I was a boy born of robbers and devils.

Through the open doors, Oropeza yelled into the house for his servants. He called them stupid and slow. He called them fools.

They ran across the tile. But when they saw the scene, when they saw the writhing men, and me, and the blindfolded man I had stolen from their patrono, they sank to the floor. They clutched their stomachs as though they, too, had been poisoned.

My breath stilled with worry that I had made them ill, that my venom was in them even though I had no rage for them.

But they caught my eyes, and smiled.

They twisted as though I was striking them down, so they could not be blamed for letting me rob Oropeza.

They had heard the stories. Las Rojas. They noticed the wisp of hair falling from my grandfather’s hat and onto my neck. They saw me as the poison girl I was, a daughter made of venom, even as I hid in my grandfather’s clothes.

I held on to Léon, leading him around the stricken men.

Oropeza and his friends would not die, not tonight. But they would thrash on the tile and the dirt until I was too far for my anger to touch them.

“Who are you?” Léon asked. His breath sounded short more from trying to press down his fear than from how fast I made him walk.

I cut the rope off his wrists and pulled off his blindfold and kissed him as fast as if I had more hands than my own. I didn’t care if the act would reveal me. My rage kept these men down like a blanket over a fire.

Léon’s lips recognized mine. He kissed me harder, setting his hands on my waist to hold me up.

“Go,” I whispered, my mouth feathering against his jawline.

Now he smelled like sweat, and the bitter almost-rust tang that I swore was the last trace of his fear. But under these things I found the smell I remembered. The warmth of flax and oats, things his family had grown for so long his skin carried the scent across the ocean.

“You have to run,” I said, my forehead against his cheek.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said. His breathing came hard. I could feel his heartbeat in his skin. “Not unless I’m going with you.”

I pulled away so we could see each other as much as the dark let us.

“They took you because you stayed for me,” I said, still keeping my voice to a whisper. “I am poison. Don’t you see that?”

Léon set his hand against my cheek.

“Emilia,” he said, quiet as a breath. He meant it for no one but me.

The wind hid the strain of his breathing. The far lamp of the moon turned the gray of his eyes to iron. The sound of my name made me feel like the cloth on my body was blazing to red, my hair a cape as bright as marigolds.

“You are here and I am alive.” Now his accent turned sharp, not his practiced Spanish. “So tell me what makes you poison.”

He put his hand on the back of my neck and kissed me, this boy who wanted to belong to the girl I was, brown and small and poisonous.

To the men, we might have looked like two boys, one pressing his mouth to the other’s. Tonight, we would pull off our shirts and trousers for each other. Léon would be a boy, no matter the shape of his chest beneath his shirts. And I would let my hair fall from my grandfather’s hat and be the girl I had always been to him. For Léon, I would put on my best enagua just so he could push the soft cotton of the tiered skirt up my thighs. I would let my breasts lay against his skin. I would kiss where the rope had cut into his wrists and the cloth into his temples.

I wanted to protect his body as though it were mine.