Marianna
Skye watches me with feline intent as I mix chocolate powder into her glass of milk. Her favorite glass. The only glass she’ll drink milk out of. She has a glass for juice and another for water, but those are tightly packed away as it stands.
The kitchen is in shambles, boxes stacked as high as my shoulders in some spots. I know she saw me slip her vitamins into the milk. I know she’s going to curl her lip at me, giving me that… look. That look that reminds me who her father is, even if nothing in the world could ever make me forget.
“It’s just protein powder,” I say, setting the blue ombre glass with little painted daisies dancing around it on the table, which has just enough space carved out for her cereal bowl. The rest of the space is taken up by train tickets and moving manifests, which she’s picked through, of course, sucking every insignificant detail into her mind like it matters to her in the slightest.
“There’s already seven grams of protein per serving in my cereal,” she remarks when I turn back to the sink to continue scrubbing… nothing. Biding time. Wasting time until the movers get here.
“There is,” I agree, giving her a smirk over my shoulder. “You need it. You’re a growing girl.”
She shifts her weight on her stool, the only thing she’ll sit on these days. She’s a peculiar little girl, but she’s mine. My little weirdo. My starling. My sweetheart. She’s… particular. Strict and nosey. But she’s so smart. So freaking smart. Scary smart, if I’m being honest. She eyes me cooly before taking an exploratory sip of the milk.
“See? Another ten grams of protein won’t kill you. Plus, it tastes good.” She’s also the pickiest child I’ve ever encountered.
She begrudgingly entertains me and drinks her milk, daintily wipes her mouth with a napkin, and hops off her stool. Her dark brown hair falls to the middle of her back. She halts when I tsk. A few strands of her hair catch the morning sunlight dancing through the windows, turning them a deep red, the color of wine. A familiar shade she didn’t get from me.
“Not so fast,” I say, arching a brow as she slowly turns to look at me over her shoulder. “You need to make sure everything is out of your room, okay? Do a second, then third, pass. You’d be in pieces if we got halfway to Eastonia and you realized you left your stuffies behind, right?”
Because we’re not coming back here. This little house is no longer home. She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t even nod. She just stares at me with those eyes that look just like his, with a mirrored expression I used to spend hours trying to untangle.
I’m used to Skye being silent. She kind of just exists around me and my mom, Leona, her grammy, the only other person she trusts in the world. Skye likes to read. She likes to draw and often sits in the center of the rug in the living room scribbling, an open book just a foot away, multitasking.
Math is her strong suit, however. Numbers are like a second language to her. She’s leagues ahead of her class when it comes to arithmetic, so much so that I was accused of doing her homework for her, but I’m a musician. Math was never, and will never be, something I grasp past the most basic levels.
I watch her skip out of sight. A memory floods my mind, turning the kitchen to the basement level apartment I grew up in, to the dimly lit living room with wood paneling where a sixteen-year-old Blake poured over an algebra textbook, scratching his head as he watched me tearfully try to grasp the concept of exponential equations.
“Marianna,” he said gruffly, scrubbing a hand over his face, “you’re mixing up cosines and tangents. I don’t understand how–”
I burst into tears twenty minutes into that first tutoring session. We didn’t even know each other. I was fifteen and trying to take my exit exams so I could transfer to a better school, my sights set on Wellington University, but passing my algebra class was the one thing standing in my way. He’d answered a desperate ad that my mom hung on a streetlight somewhere downtown, and then there he was, the Prince of Crescent Falls, in my living room, trying to teach me math.
He’d sat there just… staring at me as I came apart at the seams. His expression didn’t fluctuate while I blubbered about how I was going to fail, how I wasn’t going to get into Wellington, how my future was doomed. He had no idea how to react.
Instead, he asked, “Are you going to be an engineer?”
“No? Why the hell would I–” I’d noticed the relief sweeping across his face as he closed the textbook, and my tears dried instantly, replaced by the overwhelming urge to laugh.
Blake was, and still is, an enigma. He’s not the least bit empathetic. He just doesn’t get it–emotions. Crying in front of him had confused him greatly, and that was our first interaction. But he… kept coming back week after week, kept trying, ever patient while I failed over and over again.
“I’m trying to get into their music program,” I told him one day, watching him sip cherry cola as he thumbed through a practice test he’d designed for me.
“Why?” His eyes met mine and held for a few seconds longer than they normally did.
“Because I want to,” I shrugged, rolling my eyes. “Why do you want to be an architect?”
“Because I want to.”
“Why are you looking at me like that answer didn’t suffice, then?”
He looked away, then back again, scanning my face like I was some creature from space, and he was the unfortunate soul who’d discovered me.
It took weeks, then months, for him to say more than a few words to me outside of math talk. I was the one who prodded, asked about his personal life, which sounded a whole lot like he didn’t have one. He was a student at Wellington, the prestigious university two hours away by train, but… commuted for some reason. He didn’t live on campus. He didn’t seem to go out much, no partying, no sports, no… nothing. Blake liked being alone; that was clear. He liked quiet and order. He often frowned at my untidy handwriting and smears of pencil lead.
But he did like the cherry cola I purposefully kept stocked in my ancient refrigerator. He did like the hum of classical music drifting from the stereo next to the TV. He liked… me.
He liked me enough to give up trying to tutor me and started using our twice weekly sessions to do my homework for me while I lounged on the couch picking through sheet music, my toes tucked under his thigh.
We would sit in silence together for hours.
Those two years were the most intimate of my life.
Things shifted, however, a few days after my seventeenth birthday. It was a horrible, rainy, utterly gray late spring evening, a Saturday, if I’m remembering correctly. I spent my weekends at the music shop a few blocks from my apartment, and while my mom worked her waitressing job, I sorted records and gave violin and cello lessons to little kids to make some extra money to help with the bills and such, but that night… I can’t remember exactly what happened or why I’d ignored my phone, the three texts rotting into oblivion, but one moment I was tucked in a practice room, rolling through the allegro of a sweeping, dark and riveting melody, and the next…
“Why aren’t you answering my texts?” Blake ground out, shutting the practice room door behind him in a huff. He looked completely undone–his normally swept back, gelled hair wild and ruffled, his shirt unbuttoned and damp. He smelled like… water. Brisk and clean, like he’d been in the rain for a while.
I turned to him, my chin still pressed to the chin rest of my violin. “Blake?”
“I texted you three times,” he said in a tone that… I’d never heard him use before. The hint of panic was enough to release my grip on my bow and lower the violin to my side.
“Are you okay?”
“Are you?”
“I’m–I’m fine,” I managed to say, but the look behind his violet eyes made my stomach tumble to my toes as he braced a hand on the wall and hung his head like he was struggling to catch his breath. He was dressed strangely, I remember. I watched him unclasp a button holding a thick cloak over his shoulders. I… never asked about his family. To me, he was just Blake. Not the prince. But I knew he often went to Eastonia where his cousins lived… and ruled. Things are different there. Magical. Hard to explain.
“Blake, did something happen? You look–you look like–”
“I’m sorry I interrupted you,” he said, briefly looking into my eyes. “I thought–it’s nothing.” He began to turn toward the door, but I stopped him, tapping my bow against his upper arm.
“You can stay, if you want.” I tilted my head toward a stool in the corner. “I’m practicing my piece for my audition for Wellington’s arts program. I’d kinda like your input.”
His voice was like gravel when he replied, “I know nothing about music.”
“And I knew, and still don’t know, anything about quadratic equations,” I replied, and he looked amused for a fraction of a second, but then he sat, and I played, and he… looked… so relaxed. So stunned–
“Anna, the movers are here!”
Mom’s voice rips me out of my memories. I blink away tears I… I don’t remember forming and wipe them off my cheeks with the back of my hands. Skye thunders down the stairs, tearing for the front door. Mom and I call her our little house cat because she likes to sit in the front window and watch the world go by but also is exceedingly interested in strangers who show up in our cracked driveway, despite numerous conversations about safety and not talking to people she doesn’t know.
But she skids to a stop in front of me, her violet eyes catching mine, and she furrows her brows.
I sniffle, shaking my head as I rub my cheeks. “I’m fine, Skye. Just a little sad.”
“Because you love this house?”
“I do,” I tell her with a squeeze of her narrow shoulder. “I did, I mean.”
“Will we have windows like this at our new house?” She points to our view of… suburbia, I suppose. It’s nothing special, but light dances into the nearly empty living room, and I sigh.
I crouch so we’re eye to eye. She looks like me. She has my thick dark hair and heart-shaped face. Her eyes are big and slope downward toward her button nose, and she inherited the high, chiseled cheekbones my mother blessed me with. A dainty chin. A widow’s peak. A shorter than average stature. Yeah, she’s my daughter, and it’s easy to see.
But where my skin tans easily and holds a golden bronze hue, she’s fair. Her skin is dusted pink from running up and down the stairs, and freckles dot the bridge of her nose.
Her eye color is unique. It’s Blake’s. His contribution to her complicated genetics.
Skye might look like me, but her expressions were written by him. The slight narrowing of her eyes. That twitch of a smile. The smirk. The dead, hollow look she often wears when she’s trying to understand someone else’s big emotions.
“You’re going to love it in Moonrise,” I tell her. “I promise.”
“Will you?” she asks, holding my gaze for longer than she usually does.
This move isn’t about me. Sure, I’m accepting first chair of their absolutely stellar philharmonic, but the season doesn’t start until this fall, which means I have the summer to settle her into her new life, which includes… hopefully, a new school. We’ll see. I’m working on it.
“I think I’ll like it a lot. I’ve heard it’s beautiful there. I’ve heard there are flowers everywhere, and there’s a big lake.”
She perks up, still inspecting my face, trying to gauge what I’m feeling because she… can’t make sense of it. She can’t decipher the tired look behind my eyes. The uncertainty. The fear.
“Grammy says there’s magic in the air there,” she says, her voice tilted and bright. “Is that true?”
“It is.”
“Grammy said people like me live there.”
My stomach pinches, but I keep my face neutral as I nod… even if it hurts. “There are.” I smooth her hair away from her face and count the freckles on her nose. “I think you’ll like it better than you’ve ever liked it here.”
She turns her head to the door as male voices drift inside, followed by boot treads and the smell of sweat and cardboard.
“Stay out of their way, okay? Go find Grammy. We’re going to leave for the train station soon.”
She rushes out of sight as the movers funnel into the house. I fold my arms under my chest and look around, taking in the house and its details for the last time, my chest painfully tight as my eyes roam over the rug in the living room, over the coffee table with the cracked corner.
I watch a mover step toward it, reaching for it, but I say, “You can leave the table here. We’re not taking it with us. Leave it–leave on the side of the driveway? Maybe a neighbor will want it.”
He nods, picking it up like it weighs nothing. Like it wouldn’t have hurt someone to crack their face against that corner.
My fingers find the nearly healed bruise on my cheekbone, and I close my eyes and breathe.