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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Dahlia Adler
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November 13 - November 22, 2024
He was so much more observant than he gave himself credit for. Except about the one thing that mattered. Antonio had been waiting for Seb to put it all together. The nights spent at his house; the dedication; the loyalty; the way Antonio looked in Seb’s eyes as if eternity could be found there. But Seb just smiled, and the two moved out on the dance floor, and Antonio burned with shame. It was never going to happen. To be in love with someone who did not love you back was the loneliest thing in the whole damn world.
The actors were in place. The play began.
No, no, no. This wasn’t supposed to happen. And yet … There was a thrill. It rose from deep within their belly, sent waves of energy through their body. Vi and Seb had not been mixed up all that often by their peers, yet Vi had been worried this would happen. But … no reason to get excited, right? Olivia didn’t like them; she liked Seb. (Even if, for the briefest span of time, Vi could imagine that the excitement was for them.)
And Vi vowed to make this perfect for their brother. I’m going to sweep her off her feet.
Antonio’s heart raced, pattering violently in his chest. Did he really want to witness this?
He was going to make this right, no matter what it cost him.
And maybe she was attracted in some platonic way to Seb—she had not really considered it before—but this feeling? The energy that Vi gave off? The way Vi held their chin high? Whoa. Where did this come from? Why hadn’t Olivia paid more attention during those student council meetings? Maybe this felt so exciting because Vi was finally being themself. The pair spun around together, even though the song wasn’t meant for slow dancing, wasn’t intended for two people like them, but who cared about intent? Who cared about plans and dreams and futures when someone came into your life like this? Vi had
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Right as Olivia said this, Seb looked down. To see Olivia gripping a hand tightly. Vi’s hand. Oh. Just that. Then: She made a choice. The realization awoke within him burning desire and the terror of rejection—simultaneous monsters that he needed to conquer. They had kept him too silent for too long. So now these feelings made him bold. Seb stretched his own hand down. Ran his fingertips over Antonio’s skin, toward the fingers he then interlocked with his own, and Seb squeezed tight. Once. Twice. Then looked at Antonio. Because if Vi could make their own decision, then damn it, so could Seb.
Right then, Sebastián Rojas got to see a new expression on Antonio’s face. The one where he was both surprised and delighted.
“No, Mal, you can’t.” “I can’t what?” “You can’t keep trying to control Olivia’s life,” she said, and even as the words left her mouth, she thought that perhaps this was too cruel. But it felt true. In the years since Olivia’s heartbreak, Mal had only gotten more protective of her. And Maria was, too, to some extent, but … not letting her make her own decisions? How was that fair?
“But … I don’t like seeing her hurt.” “Who does?!” Maria shot back. “That doesn’t mean you get to swoop in and stop her from feeling happiness, too.”
The actors were all in place. And then—in possession of the truth, standing in their own selves, breathing the air of possibility—they danced. They did as they would. And the night went on.
No shame but mine. I must, forsooth, be forced To give my hand, opposed against my heart, Unto a mad-brain rudesby, full of spleen; Who wooed in haste and means to wed at leisure. I told you, I, he was a frantic fool, Hiding his bitter jests in blunt behavior, And to be noted for a merry man, He’ll woo a thousand, ’point the day of marriage, Make friends invite, and proclaim the banns; Yet never means to wed where he hath wooed. Now must the world point at poor Katherine …
“I bet if he was your soul mate, you wouldn’t care about the sideburns,” she said. “It literally turns you into a fool who would fall in love with anyone. I would blind myself to avoid it, if only I didn’t like seeing so much. I don’t even know if getting to see colors for the first time is worth that kind of embarrassment.” “Yeah, okay. But what if your soul mate was really hot or a celebrity?” Sabrina replied, dusting her under eyes with setting powder. “You’d change your tune then.” “I think you should be able to choose who you wind up with—”
“Oh, you think I’m acting like I’m the only one impacted by this?” Katherine spat. “It’s not like I’m not dealing with enough nonsense, it’s not like I’m about to conceal my sister’s elopement a few weeks from finals. You have no idea the amount of stress I’m under right now. I can’t do this.” “At least you aren’t supposed to be perfect for the bitchiest girl in the entire history of our high school. At least you don’t know you’ll spend the rest of your life with someone who loves making people miserable. You don’t know me at all, Katherine, but I know you. Everyone knows about you, and how
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“They’re still in the honeymoon period of being colorborn!” he argued. “Why are you going to ruin this for them? Don’t make them associate this day with us and with your fucking bullshit. I didn’t pull you into this closet for a game; I did it to avoid ruining this party. We need some time outside of here to sort this situation out, and if you don’t understand that—” Katherine pushed against his chest and tried to breathe out of her mouth so she wouldn’t remember what he smelled like. It would be easier to never see him again that way. She’d heard that smell was involved in the soul mate
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“It’s not that,” she said finally. “It’s not that I don’t … like … men. It’s more that I don’t have time for them right now. I wanted to focus on school then focus on my career. Most people don’t meet their soul mates until they’re in their late twenties or early thirties. I should have had more time. And I wanted to be the one to choose my partner. I wanted to be able to meet someone and work together to build a relationship. Not have instant love tell me what I was going to do and who I should trust. It doesn’t seem fair.” The closet was still for a while as Petrucio thought. “How we react
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“I know that you’re responsible,” he continued. “I know that Bianca looks up to you, which means you’re worth looking up to. It’s … it’s not the worst that I could find, you know?”
“I was reading somewhere that you can smell your soul mate from really far away after a while. Which is kind of gross.” “The entire concept of soul mates is gross, so I’m unsurprised.” Katherine snorted. Petrucio was quiet after that, and Katherine could feel a frisson of pain coming from him. She couldn’t tell yet whether it was from his multiple hanger wounds, or if their new connection was forcing her to perceive his feelings. It hadn’t occurred to her that he would have felt differently about this. Boys didn’t seem to care about romantic stuff, so she had assumed he would be on her side
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“You know, we can do this however we want. We can pretend we’re not soul mates until we can announce this at a better time. We’re basically strangers, Katherine. The only thing we owe each other, really, is consideration. I know you’ve got a lot of stuff going on and that this wasn’t a part of your plan, and I respect that.” “You would let me go? Just … let me do what I want?” Katherine asked, leaning closer. It was an unusual offer. Not unheard of, but certainly not traditional. “Yes!” Petrucio cried. “I don’t want someone who doesn’t want me. We don’t have to … you know. Be a couple. We can
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“What do you want?” Petrucio asked, when both of their hearts had stopped wildly pounding. Katherine thought for a while. “I want … to be respected. To be loved by someone who won’t tie me down and force me to do things I don’t want to do. I want to be independent but know that I have someone to come home to. I want to be myself and to not be mocked.” “You say that like those are incredible things to ask, but they’re not. That’s basic. Everyone wants to feel like that, it’s not special. And if someone cares about you, they’ll give you that stuff without you having to ask for it,” Petrucio
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The colors were still there, still bright and achy as he looked up at her from the floor with his weak-tea eyes and warm-bread curls and the heat of his cheeks like the sun on her skin. This boy, who was hers. Who she didn’t know, who she knew better than anyone, who didn’t know her but was willing to learn her anyway. Who ran from her when she first walked into the room but wasn’t running now. Her stranger, companion, not yet a friend, who thought she was a bitch, who gave her a doorknob like he was giving her his heart. Who was still growing up, who was so far behind. Who offered her freedom
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Well, come, my Kate. We will unto your father’s Even in these honest mean habiliments. Our purses shall be proud, our garments poor For ’tis the mind that makes the body rich; And as the sun breaks through the darkest clouds, So honor peereth in the meanest habit. What, is the jay more precious than the lark Because his feathers are more beautiful? Or is the adder better than the eel Because his painted skin contents the eye? O no, good Kate; neither art thou the worse For this poor furniture and mean array. If thou account’st it shame, lay it on me.
That very time I saw (but thou couldst not) Flying between the cold moon and the Earth, Cupid all armed. A certain aim he took At a fair vestal thronèd by the west, And loosed his love shaft smartly from his bow, As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts. But I might see young Cupid’s fiery shaft Quenched in the chaste beams of the watery moon, And the imperial votaress passèd on, In maiden meditation, fancy-free. Yet marked I where the bolt of Cupid fell: It fell upon a little western flower, Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound. And maidens call it “love-in-idleness.” Fetch me
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By the time I realized this was not some fairy dream, that Titania and Oberon would never return me to my father, I did not know how to leave. I did not know how to be anything but that changeling who exists to delight them.
As the ivy enrings the elm. She is talking of Narciso binding his chest. She is talking of how, to be taken properly as the boy he is, he must wrap cloth around himself beneath his shirt.
I cannot imagine the grief of this boy who was likely given a girl’s name at his birth. But I find in his face no shame or fear. Only that defiance. He holds Oberon’s gaze.
Her voice is more that of a reasoning sister than a soothing wife. Their marriage is woven more in power and esteem than in love. Titania forswore his bed long ago, and he minded little. She has her elves who sing her asleep, and their beds. He has Puck, whom I hope he loves in at least half the measure Puck loves him. “I will not see that bastard darken our court again,” Oberon says. Two words in the single declaration sting me. Bastard. Oberon said the same word when he first saw Narciso, but I didn’t think he meant it as more than insult. Now, hearing it again, hearing Oberon’s anger
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Titania tells me that my mother would have wanted her to have me. It should have been no surprise to Titania that if she claimed something pretty and rare, the king would want it for himself.
Their happy concord was to share me, their changeling child. Except that now, their changeling child slips away into the dark. With each step, my heart pulls on me, trying to tug me back toward the fairy court. But I keep on. I lost my mother. I was stolen from my father. I was taken from the land that grew my blood. I will not lose the chance to know the first brown-skinned boy I have ever seen at the fairies’ court.
The silver boughs seem to acknowledge him. Even the hardwood of birches bends and sways, their rustling a kind of music for him. The eglantine and musk roses incline their blooms toward him. The land itself seems to breathe with him, as though he might turn the far-off mountains to clouds. He finishes a step, swift as a shadow. Then he looks at me. Not for me. At me. With a small, exact glance, he places me precisely where I stand. He smiles.
What must that be like? my heart asks before my thoughts can quiet it. For a woman to care for you as a child and not as an ornament?
“The story Oberon tells is of a mermaid on a dolphin’s back, her song so dulcet and harmonious that the rude sea grew civil,” Narciso says. “The sky loved her music so well that certain stars shot madly from their spheres. And among them, Cupid flew between the cold moon and earth, if you believe such things. And if you can hear Oberon speak of Cupid’s ‘love shaft’ without laughing.”
“He tried to make you lead him to it?” I ask, softly, not in surprise but in recognition. Narciso gives a sad breath of a laugh. “As though I were a pig bred to find truffles.”
Oberon could ask Puck to sprout the wings of a griffin, and the poor man would give his life to trying.
“You were”—I begin the question without knowing how I will end it—“given the name of a girl at your birth?” He laughs. “A fine and kind way of asking. I am well impressed.” I am learning his laugh, the low music of it. “Yes,” he says. “Given a girl’s name, and it fit me no better than a wrongly cut blouse. But renamed by my good stepmother upon realizing the mistake. And since that day, I have been Narciso.” “Narciso,” I say, letting my amusement show. “The name of the hunter who died for love of looking at himself in a pond?” This boy holds little in common with that hunter. Yes, he is
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The quiet of his voice does nothing to dampen the weight of his words. This, the twin lodestars of our loneliness, pulls on us as surely as a moon. I thought I had come here looking for him. But he came here first, looking for me. “So now you have the story,” he says. “Oberon wanted something, and I wouldn’t give it to him. Not for his favor. Not to avert his wrath. Not for anything. I was an obstinate child, so he decided I would come to nothing but a defiant youth, dangerous when full grown.” “Was he wrong?” I ask. The corner of Narciso’s mouth matches the quirk of that eyebrow. “In this
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I try to let sleep take me. I try to let my body sink into the green give of the bower. But I think only of the smell of wild thyme on the wind and a brown-skinned boy who would not do as these pale beings bid him. All I have tried to shut away, he has brought back, quick as any dream. When I was small, when Titania and Oberon argued over me as though I were some disputed necklace, they called me Indian, a word I have learned that pale men—fairy and mortal—use for anyone with a color near mine, no matter what blood made them. To them, we are enough alike that we should share one word. To them,
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That summer found a happy conclusion for the king and queen, but not for me. For ever since then, I have lived here, in this flowering court where pale fairies eat swans not for the taste but because they are beautiful, and because they want to remind themselves that beautiful things are theirs to consume. This flowering court, where a fairy king and queen each wanted a brown-skinned child only because the other wanted her. Even now, almost grown, I am more pet than child. And they remain, to me, more king and queen than the mother and father they proclaimed themselves when I was too small to
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For the moment it takes him to stand, the words are caught in my throat. It seems an easier task to move storms than to loosen my tongue. But I do. “I don’t want to live unexamined either,” I say. Without letting a moment fall between us, he asks, “And what do you propose to do for it?” In the little time I have spoken with Narciso, I have learned his voice and manner enough to know this: These words he has spoken are not challenge. They are not dismissal. They are an invitation.
The moon is a horned lantern the night of the midsummer masque. Half-covering masks painted as wings and fanned with feathers hide portions of their faces, a gesture of modesty to the sky and all her stars.
We dance, our hands drawing apart and then intertwining. Narciso’s fingers are warm as sun-touched bark. We dance, our brown arms grazing each other’s waists and shoulders. We move so quickly that my fingers touch his neck. My lips brush his unmasked jaw, and he shudders in a way so slight, only I perceive it. We dance, striking our heels with more certainty than the languorous fairies. We beat out each step of this dance, making it so hard and insistent, it is our own, instead of the flitting thing the court has made it. We dance, with such force the ground conveys the rhythm, and the fairies
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But silence does not come. A new song becomes heir to the one before. It sounds as I would imagine the call of mermaids, high and clear as the rarest bird. The first glint in the sky seems a falling star. Then another, and another after. Narciso and I are still, hands paused on each other’s waists. With their descent, each falling star comes closer, each a moonbeam forged into a rod of silver. The bright head of each grows glinting edges. Not falling stars. Arrows. It is a rain of Cupid’s arrows. We recognize them by their gleam, as much light as metal, and for this, I do not fear them. The
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The arrows, streaming down, set a rushing noise beneath the mermaid’s song. That far song rises, heralding the touch of arrow to earth. But they do not strike us. They do not sway the motions of our hearts. Instead, with each finding its ground, comes a bloom of color. I expect purple, as with the flower Puck fetched Oberon, turned white from Cupid’s mark. But the shade that opens before us is not purple or any of her sisters. It is brown, the soft heat and beauty of brown. Every pale flower touched with an arrow’s gentle weight becomes a rich and perfect brown. Every pitcher of milk and cream
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Still, they fall. Still, the palest things grow a warm color. The magnolias crowning the trees and the water lilies adorning the ponds are cast in copper. White cats and rabbits turn to brown, bewildered but not displeased with their new coats. Swans find their wings burnished in bronze. The moon-milk on the ponds turns to fireweed honey. Even the moon herself grows a copper sheen.
He draws a deep breath, nearly a sigh, as though we stand before something he thought we might miss. A meadow, the ground gently waving as a sea, wears a coat of rippling grass. Trees with leaves as deep as Narciso’s shirt define the edges, hiding it from view of the woods. Even through the rain of silver arrows, I know the place for what it is. I know it by the scent. The lilting perfume eases my heart open, even as I catch my breath. It is the damp green and early blossom of that which Narciso would not give up. A wide, glimmering meadow of love flowers. “And what shall I call you?” Narciso
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The king doth keep his revels here to-night: Take heed the queen come not within his sight; For Oberon is passing fell and wrath Because that she, as her attendant hath A lovely boy, stolen from an Indian king; She never had so sweet a changeling; And jealous Oberon would have the child Knight of his train, to trace the forests wild; But she perforce withholds the loved boy, Crowns him with flowers and makes him all her joy: And now they never meet in grove or green, By fountain clear, or spangled starlight sheen.
If these pages have offended, Think but this, and all is mended, That you have but slumbered here While this retelling did appear. And this brown and queerest theme, No more yielding but a dream.
Oliver: Can you tell if Rosalind, the duke’s daughter, be banished with her father? Charles: O no; for the duke’s daughter, her cousin, so loves her, being ever from their cradles bred together, that she would have followed her exile, or have died to stay behind her. She is at the court, and no less beloved of her uncle than his own daughter, and never two ladies loved as they do. Oliver: Where will the old duke live? Charles: They say he is already in the Forest of Arden, and a many merry men with him; and there they live like the old Robin Hood of England. They say many young gentlemen flock
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After camp ended, Lando had become decisively himself. It was such an unforgivably hot thing to do, I could barely stand it.
