An idea came to Karou, and a faintly villainous smirk crossed her face.
“What?” asked Zuzana, seeing it.
“Nothing. We’d better get back in there.”
“You’re sure? You don’t have to.”
Karou nodded. “Nothing to it.”
Kaz had gotten all the satisfaction he was going to get from this cute little ploy of his. It was her turn now. Walking back into the studio, she reached up and touched the necklace she was wearing, a multistrand loop of African trade beads in every color. At least they looked like African trade beads. They were more than that. Not much more, but enough for what Karou had planned.
3
CRANNY
Profesorka Fiala asked Kaz for a reclining pose for the rest of the period, and he draped himself back across the daybed in a way that, if not quite lewd, was certainly suggestive, knees just a bit too skewed, smile bordering on bedroom. There were no titters this time, but Karou imagined a surge of heat in the atmosphere, as if the girls in the class—and at least one of the boys—needed to fan themselves. She herself was not affected. This time when Kaz peered at her from under lazy eyelids, she met his gaze straight on.
She started sketching and did her best, thinking it fitting that, since their relationship had begun with a drawing, it should end with one, too.
He’d been sitting two tables away at Mustache Bar the first time she saw him. He wore a villain’s twirled mustache, which seemed like foreshadowing now, but it was Mustache Bar after all. Everyone was wearing mustaches—Karou was sporting a Fu Manchu she’d gotten from the vending machine. She’d pasted both mustaches into her sketchbook later that night—sketchbook number ninety—and the resulting lump made it easy to locate the exact page where her story with Kaz began.
He’d been drinking beer with friends, and Karou, unable to take her eyes off him, had drawn him. She was always drawing, not just Brimstone and the other creatures from her secret life, but scenes and people from the common world. Falconers and street musicians, Orthodox priests with beards to their bellies, the occasional beautiful boy.
Usually she got away with it, her subjects none the wiser, but this time the beautiful boy caught her looking, and the next thing she knew he was smiling under his fake mustache and coming over. How flattered he’d been by her sketch! He’d shown it to his friends, taken her hand to urge her to join them, and kept hold of it, fingers laced with hers, even after she’d settled at his table. That was the beginning: her worshipping his beauty, him reveling in it. And that was more or less how it had continued.
Of course, he’d told her she was beautiful, too, all the time. If she hadn’t been, surely he’d never have come over to talk to her in the first place. Kaz wasn’t exactly one to look for inner beauty. Karou was, simply, lovely. Creamy and leggy, with long azure hair and the eyes of a silent-movie star, she moved like a poem and smiled like a sphinx. Beyond merely pretty, her face was vibrantly alive, her gaze always sparking and luminous, and she had a birdlike way of cocking her head, her lips pressed together while her dark eyes danced, that hinted at secrets and mysteries.
Karou was mysterious. She had no apparent family, she never talked about herself, and she was expert at evading questions—for all that her friends knew of her background, she might have sprung whole from the head of Zeus. And she was endlessly surprising. Her pockets were always spilling out curious things: ancient bronze coins, teeth, tiny jade tigers no bigger than her thumbnail. She might reveal, while haggling for sunglasses with an African street vendor, that she spoke fluent Yoruba. Once, Kaz had undressed her to discover a knife hidden in her boot. There was the matter of her being impossible to scare and, of course, there were the scars on her abdomen: three shiny divots that could only have been made by bullets.
“Who are you?” Kaz had sometimes asked, enchanted, to which Karou would wistfully reply, “I really don’t know.”
Because she really didn’t.
She drew quickly now, and didn’t shy away from meeting Kaz’s eyes as she glanced up and down between model and drawing. She wanted to see his face.
She wanted to see the moment his expression changed.
Only when she had captured his pose did she lift her left hand—continuing to draw with her right—to the beads of her necklace. She took one between her thumb and forefinger and held it there.
And then she made a wish.
It was a very small wish. These beads were just scuppies, after all. Like money, wishes came in denominations, and scuppies were mere pennies. Weaker even than pennies, because unlike coins, wishes couldn’t be compounded. Pennies you could add up to make dollars, but scuppies were only ever just scuppies, and whole strands of them, like this necklace, would never add up to a more potent wish, just plenty of very small, nearly useless wishes.
Wishes, for example, for things like itches.
Karou wished Kaz an itch, and the bead vanished between her fingers. Spent and gone. She’d never wished an itch before, so, to make sure it would work, she started with a spot he wouldn’t be shy to scratch: his elbow. Sure enough, he nudged it casually against a cushion, scarcely shifting his pose. Karou smiled to herself and kept drawing.
A few seconds later, she took another bead between her fingers and wished another itch, this time to Kaz’s nose. Another bead disappeared, the necklace shortened imperceptibly, and his face twitched. For a few seconds he resisted moving, but then gave in and rubbed his nose quickly with the back of his hand before resuming his position. His bedroom expression was gone, Karou couldn’t help noticing. She had to bite her lip to keep her smile from broadening.
Oh, Kazimir, she thought, you shouldn’t have come here today. You really should have slept in.
The next itch she wished to the hidden place of her evil plan, and she met Kaz’s eyes at the moment it hit. His brow creased with sudden strain. She cocked her head slightly, as if to inquire, Something wrong, dear?
Here was an itch that could not be scratched in public. Kaz went pale. His h*ps shifted; he couldn’t quite manage to hold still. Karou gave him a short respite and kept drawing. As soon as he started to relax and… unclench… she struck again and had to stifle a laugh when his face went rigid.
Another bead vanished between her fingers.
Then another.
This, she thought, isn’t just for today. It’s for everything. For the heartache that still felt like a punch in the gut each time it struck, fresh as new, at unpredictable moments; for the smiling lies and the mental images she couldn’t shake; for the shame of having been so naive.
For the way loneliness is worse when you return to it after a reprieve—like the soul’s version of putting on a wet bathing suit, clammy and miserable.
And this, Karou thought, no longer smiling, is for the irretrievable.
For her virginity.
That first time, the black cape and nothing under it, she’d felt so grown up—like the Czech girls Kaz and Josef hung out with, cool Slavic beauties with names like Svetla and Frantiska, who looked like nothing could ever shock them or make them laugh. Had she really wanted to be like them? She’d pretended to be, played the part of a girl—a woman—who didn’t care. She’d treated her virginity like a trapping of childhood, and then it was gone.
She hadn’t expected to be sorry, and at first she wasn’t. The act itself was neither disappointing nor magical; it was what it was: a new closeness. A shared secret.
Or so she’d thought.
“You look different, Karou,” Kaz’s friend Josef had said the next time she saw him. “Are you… glowing?”
Kaz had punched him on the shoulder to silence him, looking at once sheepish and smug, and Karou knew he’d told. The girls, even. Their ruby lips had curled knowingly. Svetla—the one she later caught him with—even made a straight-faced comment about capes coming back in fashion, and Kaz had colored slightly and looked away, the only indication that he knew he’d done wrong.
Karou had never even told Zuzana about it, at first because it belonged to her and Kaz alone, and later because she was ashamed. She hadn’t told anyone, but Brimstone, in the inscrutable way he had of knowing things, had guessed, and had taken the opportunity to give her a rare lecture.
That had been interesting.
The Wishmonger’s voice was so deep it seemed almost the shadow of sound: a dark sonance that lurked in the lowest register of hearing. “I don’t know many rules to live by,” he’d said. “But here’s one. It’s simple. Don’t put anything unnecessary into yourself. No poisons or chemicals, no fumes or smoke or alcohol, no sharp objects, no inessential needles—drug or tattoo—and… no inessential penises, either.”
“Inessential penises?” Karou had repeated, delighted with the phrase in spite of her grief. “Is there any such thing as an essential one?”
“When an essential one comes along, you’ll know,” he’d replied. “Stop squandering yourself, child. Wait for love.”
“Love.” Her delight evaporated. She’d thought that was love.
“It will come, and you will know it,” Brimstone had promised, and she so wanted to believe him. He’d been alive for hundreds of years, hadn’t he? Karou had never before thought about Brimstone and love—to look at him, he didn’t seem such a candidate for it—but she hoped that in his centuries of life he’d accrued some wisdom, and that he was right about her.
Because, of all things in the world, that was her orphan’s craving: love. And she certainly hadn’t gotten it from Kaz.
Her pencil point snapped, so hard was she bearing down on her drawing, and at the same moment a burst of anger converted itself to a rapid-fire volley of itches that shortened her necklace to a choker and sent Kaz scrambling off the model stand. Karou released her necklace and watched him. He was already to the door, robe in hand, and he opened it and darted out, still nak*d in his haste to get away and find a place where he could attend to his humiliating misery.
The door swung shut and the class was left blinking at the empty daybed. Profesorka Fiala was peering over the rim of her glasses at the door, and Karou was ashamed of herself.
Maybe that was too much.
“What’s with Jackass?” Zuzana asked.
“No idea,” said Karou, looking down at her drawing. There on the paper was Kaz in all his carnality and elegance, looking like he was waiting for a lover to come to him. It could have been a good drawing, but she’d ruined it. Her line work had darkened and lost all subtlety, finally ending in a chaotic scribble that blotted out his… inessential penis. She wondered what Brimstone would think of her now. He was always reprimanding her for injudicious use of wishes—most recently the one that had made Svetla’s eyebrows thicken overnight until they looked like caterpillars and grew right back the moment they were tweezed.
“Women have been burned at the stake for less, Karou,” he’d said.
Lucky for me, she thought, this isn’t the Middle Ages.
4
POISON KITCHEN
The rest of the school day was uneventful. A double period of chemistry and color lab, followed by master drawing and lunch, after which Zuzana went to puppetry and Karou to painting, both three-hour studio classes that released them into the same full winter dark by which they’d arrived that morning.