8-2

“In the light of her love…in the light of her love…come dance with me in the light of her love. Sing it with me!”

There was hardly anyone out in the street to join in. Anyone who would have gone out, in fact, kept their doors shut. This was a street preacher Clover had never seen before. At sixteen years old, she looked out the window and studied him for a moment. He wasn’t ragged. His bald head was perfectly uniform. He should really be in a temple somewhere. Clover turned back to her room.

It was austere. Desolate. Very tidy. All of her books but the one she’d been reading were neatly stowed away. The only trace of anyone but her living here was the faintest whisper of hair from her mother’s little yappy dog, which she refused to take any more than the base level of responsibility for. The dog’s absence on a long walk, combined with her mother’s recent agreement not to go through her things anymore, represented a breakthrough. Someday she would go a step further and live in her own hermetically sealed chamber.

But then the street preacher started singing loud enough for it to come through her window.

Clover tried to psyche herself into returning to her book, but she wouldn’t be able to focus. The chorus was too incessant.

Then he added clapping. “In the light of her love,” he kept singing, with a chorus of no one.

She ran through the front door with a burst of what she thought was frustration but, she decided, could have been mixed with interest. This was a peculiar scene. Enthusiastic preachers were nothing new, but one so presentable out here…

“Amanda loves everyone!” he shouted, arms splayed wide. He had unwittingly stepped into the short yard of her neighbors. “She is the keeper of familial love, mother’s love, friendly love…but hers transcends all!”

Amanda was far from the only god, and there were far too many, most modern people thought, to keep up with.

Clover looked around. Then she came closer and asked, “Is there anyone who can’t love?”

His eyes grew wide. Still brisk and strident, but shocked other people lived here. “No, of course not,” he said. “It’s in us all.”

“But some people don’t feel anything,” she said. “They’re still human.”

She expected him to say something about institutions and the brokenness of those who inhabit them, but immediately he told her, “Amanda loves, but she’s not even human.”

He leaned in closer. “Why is that? How is that?” Then he swooped away. “Because she wanted to! Because she decided to! Because she would rather have a world filled with her love than one that is not!”

Love was the thing that gave life meaning. It could take a mere game, the struggle for success, and turn it into an adventure. If love was something she had to feel deeply, she couldn’t promise that she felt anything beyond a need to learn (if the person was interesting) and a drive to treat them well (if they gave her food). But if love was a mere decision, that changed things.

A chime jingled as a door opened.

Days had passed since the preacher came through town. Her conviction had only grown. Clover left the ramshackle store with a cheap amulet. She pulled its chain tightly against the back of her neck. I WILL love.

People didn’t like her being so competitive. She’d change that. They didn’t like her never smiling or laughing at their jokes. She’d change that. She would—without hanging her head, with a whole new vibrancy that others would find charming—make careful exceptions to her rules, nudge the dials on her personality. The first step of loving was to be lovable—Clover decided it was.

It wouldn’t work today, in such a small school, but she knew that as soon as she had enough wherewithal to travel, it would work someday.

The scholarship would feel like a stroke from heaven.

***

A chime jingled as a door opened. Carmina stepped out in a swishing skirt, the fine material of the black dress seeming to eat the light. The scars along her arms were almost gone. What was left was the fleshy color of sunset.

Clover was learning. Carmina was a tactile girl, deeply interested in the smell of pollen and the feel of fabric between her fingers. Once Carmina had been coaxed over the initial hurdle of Clover-is-spending-way-too-much-money, she’d indulged, running her arms through the rows of gowns and samples. She cared for feel more than look, but Clover was seeing her admire her appearance more and more in real time.

She had never looked this way. She had never been allowed to. Out there, she must have only worn what was practical.

Now she was telling Clover that she had a real interest in going to parties, at least one, with her. And now she could.

It was a waste of time to hang out with Carmina; some part of Clover still had to be convinced it was not a waste, but a diversion.

Which didn’t seem like the type of thing Carmina would appreciate hearing, if she were to admit it.

***

“I wanna ask you something,” Tango had said before she could leave the room.

She sat across from him, the tea simmering in his cup.

Fear jumped up in her. He was about to break up, forever. Her mouth almost opened preemptively, wanting to say anything as long as she could delay it.

But she was quiet as he said, “Do you have a split personality or something?”

“What?”

He rolled his eyes. “Okay, so I can’t be rude, but you can.”

She rolled her eyes back, then realized the attempt to be playful was misplaced.

“Maybe there’s some other way to explain it. Sometimes you’ll say things and I don’t even know where they come from. Like you have different—personas. Okay, that’s a better word.” Now that the words were spilling out, he was animated. “Usually when we’re hanging out, you’re really bubbly, you’re friendly, you’re funny…but then the other side is cold, and she has no business trying to comfort people when their families are dying.”

“I’m sure I could change,” Clover said.

Tango let out a sigh. He seemed calmer now, yet he struggled to find his next words. “Yes, but…I don’t know if…if that would be enough.”

“Why not?”

“Because it all feels fake,” he said in half a breath. “I’m sorry. That’s the only way I can put it. The more I hang out with you, the more it feels like you’re only smiling for my benefit. Or to keep me around. You’re kind of…possessive, a little? When you give me tea telling me I don’t have to leave, or keep trying to kiss me after class, it feels like there’s an ulterior motive, when really I just want to be existing with you right now, I just want your support. And that can be silent.” He looked her over. “Oh shit,” he murmured.

She was shaking and hadn’t realized it. She felt so seen, and so horrified, and so deep in frantic thought, that she didn’t respond except for reaching out through her nervous system and attempting to still herself.

Why don’t I feel sorry? Why don’t I feel guilty? How close can I get to someone without them realizing how artificial this all is?

“I am fake,” she said.

Tango had proven something about her. Now he had to leave.

He was in the awkward spot of feeling hurt and feeling apologetic. “No, I didn’t mean that—I meant I just want to see the real you.”

She chuckled automatically and shook her head. “That idea is such bullshit,” she said. “The real me is a schemer! She is empty! Bravo! All I can hope for is that you don’t tell anyone else and scare them off!”

Tango simply stared. Yes, she had scared him off. If he wanted to offer sympathy, she would rather he not.

“If you don’t like it, go.”

“…That’s it?”

“You basically said it yourself. I can only work on so much.”

***

“What’s love?” she asked Carmina. The beauty of the Spire in the sun, seen from the roof of the library, had started a melancholy ache in her chest. Once again, fear, pain, fascination, and the placebo effect of her own forced laughter were the things she felt the most. Here the beauty reminded her of love and her desperation to keep it.

Carmina leaned against the rail with her, her headband luminous, the dress as fabulously black in full sunset as ever. If luck and the will of Amanda held, she had no idea how fake Clover was. Perhaps she would get better at reading people—by that time perhaps she would think, “A little cold is just the way Clover is. It’s her normal.” She might not mind. And if she bore her heart to Carmina the way the lovers in books were supposed to, and revealed that so many of her habits indeed were only there to keep everyone else happy, that might not be the end.

But maybe it would be.

Carmina turned halfway around. “Hmm…are you implying something?”

Clover winked. “You’re the one who asked for flowers.”

Carmina looked away for a moment. “Is it customary for people to give flowers when they go on a date—”

“Yes, it is.”

“Oh. Well, no one in my family ever experienced that.” She paused. “But it is convenient. I really like you.”

“But you wouldn’t call it love?”

“…It’s not like the love I had for my birth mother.”

Clover cocked her head. It sounded more and more like Carmina had never met anyone outside of her age group. Manipulative and strategic as it felt to say in her own mind, this helped Clover. She was weird…Carmina was weird…they could be weird together and almost not notice.

Again, Carmina chose her words carefully. “I guess for me, love is…circumstances. My foster mother took me in out of guilt. That wasn’t love. She always held it over my head, that my sisters were—were better, and there first. But my birth mother was driven. She had no choice but to raise me, is how it always seemed, and she put every fiber of her being into that. Until she was gone,” she said, her voice falling. “Then I knew I didn’t have to have anyone.”

Clover let seconds pass before speaking again. “What about love between, well, lovers? Do you believe that’s mostly fascination?”

“Don’t ask me that.”

The answer came so fast, she could hear the whip crack. “Why not?!”

“Because I wouldn’t know! Both my families, we lived on our own. You know, in the woods.”

“But…surely you wandered some way beyond Littleburo, or else more people would’ve seen you and recognized you. You probably saw people on trains, and on horses, and in caravans. So surely you must’ve looked out through the bushes one day, caught two people kissing…developed a cohesive theory about how and why they fell in love? Anything like that?”

Carmina shook her head slowly. “Nothing like that.” There was a lightness to her voice that assured Clover she hadn’t overstepped (though she was toeing the line).

Then she stopped, turned again to the luminous Spire, and mused aloud, “Well, nowadays when I watch the people of the town, I think most of them have everything. If they need a wife, they can make a wife in their dreams.” She shrugged. “I mean, my birth father left, but we moved on.”

Clover asked with the tone of an investigator, “Don’t you think that’s a little dismissive? Everyone’s different.”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t hard to move on, but it’s easier in some ways when he doesn’t…acknowledge you exist.”

“Oh.”

The light of the world was beginning to dim. “So Clover,” Carmina said, “you never told me.”

Clover almost jumped. “Told you what?”

Carmina smiled. “What you think love is.”

“I strongly suggested my answer! I think it’s mostly fascination, and decision.” Her going theory: love was fascination and wonder, made possible by decision, strengthened by the trials of circumstances…and it meant you could tell each other anything. That was the kicker. She had things to tell Carmina, but they were too horrible to believe.

She stifled an urge to reach for her amulet. “I’ll tell you the rest later, when I figure it out, okay?”

The other girl laughed. “Wait, I don’t have to answer everything you ask me? I should say that more often.”

Clover echoed the laugh, and they walked down the stairs of the library roof together, arm in arm.