“You bet it is. But remember not to fall in love with a Dreadcat. Their love is not love. It’s not unconditional. Well, no love is, but a Dreadcat’s love is disguised poison and will leave you scarred and leached like acid.”

  Goldie’s brother laughed for three days and said she was finally trying to come to terms with her divorce. I told her not to worry anyway. Jolene seemed to have lost the pochette in the city.

  A week later, Violet asked me if she could see the famous pochette. I didn’t point out that sometimes I couldn’t find it, but I’d spot stray apple-red feathers next to her bed, and in turn, she promised not to tell Jolene I had the pochette. She must have liked having it a lot to be officially asking me. I made a show of taking it out from my bedside table. As she looked at it, the glint in her eyes returned. I told her she could borrow it anytime she liked.

  Right after Memorial Day, I asked Violet why she was ignoring her school friends. They had messaged me a mash-up video with the words Where is and Violet overlapping and set to techno music. I didn’t appreciate being used as a mediator. Violet rolled her eyes.

  “They say you avoid them.”

  “They’re being dramatic, is all.”

  “You never answer their texts even though you’re always online. Why are you always online?”

  “You’re not my mom, Lyla. Stop this.”

  I did. Because, yes, I was being a mom. It was the one thing I hated most about Goldie, her nose poking in my business. So, I dropped it.

  Later, I sent my daily good night text to Sean. He must have already gone to sleep after work. Violet switched on her table lamp and asked if I was still up. She told me she was seeing someone; her friends wouldn’t understand.

  “Does he love you?”

  “Oh, so much, Lyla, I can’t even describe it. When I’m texting him, I can’t even think of anything else. And you know, it’s just texts, he likes me for me, you know? Distance doesn’t matter, it’s just a mathematical concept and it’s not even real. But talking to him is and it’s the most wonderful thing in the world. Have you ever felt that way?”

  I thought of Sean. “Yes, yes I have.”

  One day while I counted down to Christmas, only seventy-five days until I saw Sean again, Goldie asked me, “You know how sex ends?”

  “What the hell?” I said over Grandma Lorrie’s audible gasp.

  “You never see the person again or you do and then you start a relationship. And you know how relationships end? In breakups and death.”

  “Someone’s cheerful,” muttered Goldie’s brother.

  Christmas that year, Goldie’s brother brought home his fiancé, and Woodrings had a new person to exhibit their oratory skills in front of. The house was too loud and too lit up.

  Outside, it grew cold but didn’t snow. The finch and the sparrow had moved in permanently. Their fighting screeched inside the house like nails on a chalkboard. Jolene sat in Sean’s lap. When I passed the cake around, I made sure to give him a bigger piece. He squirmed under Jolene as he took the cake from me. I wanted to tell him it was going to be okay. I was leaving for college in a year now, so he wouldn’t have to suffer Jolene for much longer.

  Violet wore a skimpy dress that showed off her long legs and the straps of a shocking red bra.

  Grandma Lorrie got mad. After a lot of yelling and tears, Violet retired to bed early.

  Grandma Lorrie shouted after her, blaming the lack of a mother for Violet’s lack of respect for Christmas. Our great-aunt, Grandma Lorrie’s sister, pointed at me from the other side of the room and said my lack of a mother hadn’t turned me into a prostitute.

  Jolene started yelling at everyone about calling girls names. Goldie joined her. She smacked at her brother and then everyone was fighting everyone, splattering cake and eggnog and chocolate on the walls, and the dog, upset, whined loudly from a corner.

  It began snowing, clumps sticking along the windowsills. I couldn’t leave, because Grandma Lorrie and her sister had me cornered and kept pointing at me.

  Sean, bless him, decided to go check up on Violet. It was good to have a boy who cared about your family, too.

  Sean visited for a week after summer that year, without Jolene. He said he was in town for work. I had deferred leaving for college this year, but it turned out, I rarely saw him. But I wouldn’t want to distract him. He left early in the morning and came back late at night, exhausted. Since Violet had her ballet classes in the morning, Sean drove her every day. She didn’t want to ask her friends for any favors. Sean was family, of course, and he told her stupid jokes and made sure she knew she could talk to him.

  Violet talking to someone apart from that boy she was in love with was a good thing. Plus it was her sixteenth birthday that week; she shouldn’t be alone. It didn’t matter if Sean’s only free time was spent driving Violet around.

  It didn’t.

  Goldie was the only one upset about Sean taking care of Violet. She demanded to know how I ever let Violet alone with that man. Sean is family, I told her in a shaky voice. Jolene called then, crying, and said she and Sean were fighting. I was sitting next to Goldie, but I heard Jolene clearly, that’s how loudly she was crying on the phone. It made me feel slightly better.

  Goldie only said, “If he’s making you cry like this, what does that tell you?”

  On the next Christmas, while all Woodrings and would-be Woodrings collected around the tree, Jolene announced her engagement to Sean. A white-gold band with a tiny diamond sat on her slim finger. Goldie laughed so much that her brother and his fiancé escorted her out. She trailed her champagne all the way out to the poplar.

  It wasn’t snowing yet.

  I tightened my scarf until my vision grew red, matching my eyeshadow (blood moon) and blush (cheeky rose), which was important to hide the marks on my face from the pochette’s buckle. I’d tried to get the pochette to unlock, but all I ended up with were these cuts.

  “Isn’t it terrible to be forced with someone you don’t love?” Violet was slurring faintly.

  I agreed and put my arm around her waist to hold her up. Good for her that our great-aunt had died, so no one was there to back up Grandma Lorrie’s muttering about Violet’s drunken state.

  “Sean doesn’t love her.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Can you keep a secret, Lylie?” she said, her eyes sparkling like Goldie’s laughter in my head. “I keep your secret in a pochette, don’t I?”

  The secret was that Sean didn’t love Jolene. That didn’t count because I knew it. The secret was that Sean had agreed to get engaged to Jolene so he could stay close to Violet. He said he couldn’t break up with Jolene because you know how Jolene is?

  “He loves me and it’s wonderful. Have you ever felt that way?” Violet asked me.

  “You’re so drunk, Violet,” I said, fighting to keep my voice from trembling.

  I waited until she was singing carols under the tree and everyone else was arguing over the date of the wedding. Then I took the pochette from Violet’s side of the room, like we’d been back-and-forthing over the past year.

  “I’ve been looking for you,” Sean called from the door. “It feels like I haven’t seen you in forever.” He always dressed in absolutes that hid him, but tonight, he seemed so strange. Outside, lights blinked on and off. Sean came closer and put his arms around me and kissed me. “You look beautiful tonight.”

  He kissed me again and said something about trying to fix things but they kept spiraling out of control, and you know how Jolene is? I said I understood. What I finally understood was that no one was coming to protect me or Violet.

  Sean lifted my shirt over my head and pulled me close, grazing his teeth and tongue down my neck while I stood steady, reaching for the pochette behind me.

  Violet and I had tried opening it many times. I’d seen some of my aunts and older cousins gather on Sunday mornings to discuss various kinds of purses and zippers and bolts and locks. They’d tried, too, I knew. All we were left with were wounds. The pochette never opened because everyone tried too hard: they held it level or upright, clutching it tight, trying to twist the buckle forcefully, but that pinched the opening taut, not allowing the occupants to travel upward and push the buckle from the other side, too.

  But now when I held the pochette above my head, angled so it was upside down, twisting the buckle came as easily as lying to my family. The small click resounded in the room. A faint growl, like a cat, came out of the pochette. Sean stopped. “What are you doing?”

  What happened then was that I made sure I didn’t open the pochette all the way to let the Dreadcats escape. They tried, of course, but the mouth of the pochette was too small for all three of them, and they kept slipping back in.

  Sean pushed me, and in his haste to disentangle himself, his head came too close to the pochette. One of the Dreadcats caught at his collar and dragged him in. He screamed the entire way through. I buckled the pochette shut the second Sean’s foot was inside. The pochette thumped onto the floor.

  It must be terribly crowded in there now.

  I sat beside the open windows until dawn, winter digging its fangs into my exposed skin, and wondered how I’d explain to anyone where Sean was. Then I wondered if anyone would even ask. Goldie might. She would drunkenly tell someone to make sure the carpet isn’t stained. Then turn everything into a story and narrate it to the next person she finds. I started to cry. Mama had promised they would look after me.

  I put both my palms over my shoulders and patted my own back. “Everything will be okay now. I’m going to take care of you,” I murmured to myself, rocking like I was a child.

  I didn’t feel silly doing it.

  When the sky became lighter, I picked up the pochette and the scarf I was wearing and slipped out the window. I wrapped the scarf around the stupid apple-colored pochette and buried it in the corner of the yard.

  I looked up at the ranch. With the Woodrings all asleep, and the sun coming up behind in the mountains, it felt at peace. The wraparound porch was dotted with wreaths and unlit lanterns, and potted plants on the steps buried beneath snow. The finch from the birdhouse flew down to where I’d buried the pochette and then hopped to me.

  “Mirabelle,” I said, “your children and their friends are a nuisance.”

  It isn’t difficult to get on an Amtrak once you’ve chosen the irreversible. So that’s what I did. Over the next few days, the birds brought me news of everything that happened at the ranch after I left.

  The Woodrings put up posters and called the police, and Jolene contacted Sean’s family. Turned out, they weren’t his family and he’d hired people off shady subreddits to pose as his family when Jolene wanted to meet them. “A con artist,” Goldie said, staring at the poplar.

  I tried not to think of what my family must assume. That I ran away with Sean. Because I was stupid and naive. That, by now, he must have killed me.

  Violet cried for days and only Grandma Lorrie had the time to sit with her and pat her on the head.

  I tried not to think of Violet. How I was abandoning her. But I took comfort in knowing that she wouldn’t need to do what I did.

  Goldie bought a diamond-encrusted birdhouse, but your cousin told her he saw the finch and the sparrow fly into the sun.

  They haven’t come back since.

  I told the birds not to go back anymore. They had better places to fly to.

  Author’s Note

  The first version of this story wasn’t hopeful. It was bleak, almost sad.

  Not until I was asked why did it occur to me that everything I’ve ever written features a girl and her fight against the world. She’s armed with the jagged edges of her heart, only to settle for an unresolved ending. Left in a limbo, upset and hurt, having recognized that the world has let her down. The story doesn’t end well. It ends with anger and frustration and an anxious uncertainty.

  The sharp, horrible endings make sense of the world; they validate the confusion some of us have at the world’s treatment of us. Though reading those stories doesn’t come easily to me, writing them has always been cathartic. But as this story evolved to its final version, I was reminded that we’re allowed to change our minds. About what we want, what we need, and what we think we deserve.

  Writing is real magic in this way. It does something: it changes us.

  The Twist in ESCAPE

  by Nova Ren Suma

  I’m the kind of reader who aches for a surprise, especially one that comes with a sudden twist. What I admire most is a twist I didn’t see coming and yet at the same time am convinced had to happen, as if the story couldn’t have gone another way. So how does a story get me gasping in delighted shock?

  There could be a change in circumstance. In character. Perhaps in the very fabric of reality . . . for example, a glossy, apple-red pochette that’s been handed down to the women in the family, one that nips a cheek sometimes and ends up saving the day . . . as you’ll find in ESCAPE.

  The twist is seeded scene by scene, line by line, detail by perfect detail. “The red feather ends make it look like it’s dripping blood, have you noticed?” Goldie says of the pochette, though Goldie tells a lot of stories, doesn’t she? She says things that strain credibility, but still she slips an idea into our heads early on—the biting, the mention of blood—so when the pochette opens its jaws at the end of the story and takes what’s offered, we can’t say we weren’t warned.

  The twist here is one we may have suspected, and at the same time, for those of us silent-screaming to get Sean out of that house, an electric shock. It’s Lyla admitting she’s been wronged—admitting it to us, and to herself. “The small click resounded in the room. A faint growl, like a cat, came out of the pochette.” All that’s been kept secret is acknowledged in a snap. Oh yes, now we know. We know for sure.

  This kind of twist can be such a delicious experience for a reader—if woven in from the first page, with sidelong looks and whispers and coded exchanges, built from the foundation of every secret that cannot be told. At the end of this story, Lyla has “chosen the irreversible” and we have witnessed her do it. This is a twist that cannot be taken back. It shocks but also speaks to everything that came before. It gives the story teeth.

  Pan Dulce

  Flor Salcedo

  “Flor Salcedo’s PAN DULCE is a glimpse into the split-screen reality that is adolescent life in America. The back and forth across the border from El Paso, Texas, to Juárez, Mexico, is the same duality knocking around in young Rosa’s mind—her conscience serving as border patrol—as she navigates her friendships, boys, and all the recklessness that comes along with being a teenager, coupled with the harsh reality of what’s at stake. Salcedo wove a complex story that captivated me with its textured language, both narratively and culturally, and left me wanting more. Oh, and it left me wanting . . . pan dulce. Seriously.”

  —Jason Reynolds, author of Look Both Ways

  Something bad is going to happen to you someday.

  Mom’s words burrow into my consciousness. I’ve been trying to shake them off since yesterday, and how the line in between her eyebrows deepened as she spoke. But I’ve been trying to shake off a lot lately. In a matter of a few high school years, I’ve realized people are fake. Friends talk behind my back; my parents—and even my friends’ parents—are suddenly not who I thought they were. It’s like everyone is lying to themselves, or each other.

  Tonight, I’m just going across the border for a night of dancing. It’s no big deal, even if Mom thinks otherwise.

  During my hasty getaway, I almost take a dive on my front porch stairs. I manage to catch myself with one arm like a stealth ninja. I double over, holding in a gurgle of laughter so Mom doesn’t catch me making my escape. That was close. Scuffed knees are so not cute.

  A light layer of sweat coats my arms by the time I’ve trekked the hill to Aida’s house at the foot of the Franklin Mountains, the sierra around it splattered with a symphony of dry shrubs. The party crew of three is hanging out in the front yard. Aida sits on her porch painting her nails, blowing on them, and then holding them up to the sun. Zulema sits in the passenger seat of Aida’s brown Nissan Sentra with the door open, her legs partially out of the car, looking into the visor’s mirror while applying makeup. Belen stands between them, watching over the beauty production with one hand on her waist and hips cocked to one side. My gears get cranking again, my thoughts moving to the possibilities of the night.

  I was hoping it’d only be me and Aida, but she says she doesn’t know her way across the border well, and Zulema is the one with the friends from Mexico, the so-called hotties we’re meeting up with in Ciudad Juárez, the city just a hop over a bridge from El Paso, Texas. Zulema is unquestionably not my friend. The other two might or might not be. They might be playing the game of fakes, too, or we might be playing it with each other.

  Aida is the first to notice me. She eyes me up and down but smiles. “Look at you, Rosa,” she whoops. “Sexxxy.” She follows it with, “Biatch, you better not take any guys I like away from me tonight.”

  Zulema pauses applying eyeliner to her left eyelid to look up. “Ugh,” she says loudly and shoots me a blunt look. I ignore it and instead smile back at Aida.

  I knew Aida’d have something to say about me wearing my jean miniskirt and cutoff top. She’s sporting white dressy shorts that make her dark legs really pop. Aida’s dark, golden complexion has always been so pretty to me. She looks like her mother, who still looks like she could be in her twenties and the boys at school say is hot. But despite all her beauty, Aida’s poor mom has to pretend her husband isn’t having an affair at work. Aida thinks her mom tolerates it for Aida’s sake, to avoid a divorce. Faking the marriage now, I suppose. Sad.