Zirfens ot Zogotos

THE MAIN ISSUE they were dealing with was bravery thieves. 

Bravery thieves, Zelles always said, were the worst creatures that existed because they stole bravery, which was the most valuable treasure in the universe. 

Without bravery, you can’t do anything, Zelles said. At least not anything interesting.

Zixian and Zelles saw each other every day after school, spent afternoons hiding bravery holders where the bravery thieves couldn’t find them: in Zelles’s back yard or outside the library or in the gnarled roots of the redwood trees in the park near Zelles’s house. They made coded maps with built-in misdirections and deceptions. But the bravery thieves still found the holders sometimes. The hiding place would be empty, or a couple times the holder would be there but destroyed, smashed to tiny, shimmering splinters. Zixian had seen the broken holders with her own eyes, even once cut her finger on one as she pulled it from its hole in the ground.

There was only so much bravery. The bravery released from a smashed holder was lost to the universe forever.

Zelles got the bravery holders from Magic Earth Healing and Rocks, heavy translucent spheres that only cost a dollar fifty. She showed Zixian how to use them, how to keep them in little pouches around her neck, how to hold them in her hand and draw their power into her spirit. How to use them to slip into the tiny opening in the fence outside the train tracks, too small for adults to fit through. How to stand on the tracks and feel the vibrations of trains a mile away. To walk alongside the tracks all the way downtown, feeling the crunch of small white landscaping stones underfoot. To keep walking as the train sped by, sounding its angry horn, close enough to touch if it wasn’t moving so fast.

Or they could use them to climb the giant pine outside the high school they would someday attend to watch the bad kids smoking on the lawn. Without the bravery holder, Zixian would never had the courage to pull herself by the ever-narrowing branches, higher than the classroom buildings, her face scratched by twigs, hair tangled with sap and dry pine needles knocked loose by Zelles’s sneakers overhead.

Up there, they could see the high school kids in their black hooded sweatshirts, smoke pouring from their noses or through their pursed lips. Normally Zixian would be scared of kids like that, older kids who sneered with confidence, knowing this was the coolest they would ever be in their entire lives. But from so high up, Zixian could appreciate that the kids were kind of beautiful, like majestic angsty dragons. She felt brave enough to wonder if maybe someday, she could become one of them.

They met at Glenda Banks’s Dance for Children. Leda had been taking classes there since she was seven, two years ago, kept coming back even though all the girls at Glenda Banks were mean to her and Glenda was also mean to her.

“Monster fingers!” she would yell whenever Leda tried to do a movement. Everything about Glenda was long and skinny and weathered: her lean, wrinkled face, her torso and thigh bones, the carved walking stick she waved at students when their movements were, as she called them, attrocious.

“Do you want to keep going to Glenda Banks?” Leda’s mom asked her at the beginning of each session, and every time Leda wanted to say no. The class was basically torture, a bunch of tall girls who were good at sports laughing at everything Leda said and did. Her leotards were ugly, she looked like a special ed when she danced. The illustrated maps she drew in her notebook waiting for her mom after class were hella stupid and ugly. They never said this to her directly, just about her in her general direction.

“You go to her school,” Julie Rykoff would say to Kendra Willis. “Do all her friends move like—”

She flopped her mouth open and waved her arms like an injured seagull. The tall girls all laughed.

Kendra shrugged and said, “She doesn’t have any friends,” and the tall girls laughed even harder.  

It wasn’t a lie. Everyone in Leda’s fourth grade class made fun of her for drawing fairies on her worksheets and reading in the bathroom during the spring movie party. They called her Scleroderma because of the Scleroderma Reading Challenge where all the students read books to raise money for scleroderma awareness. Scleroderma was a horrible disease where your skin froze and your face got stuck. Even Leda’s teacher Mrs. Feder called Leda Scleroderma, especially when Leda read during recess.

“Enough reading, Scleroderma,” Mrs. Feder would say. “Why don’t you get some exercise?”

Aren’t teachers supposed to want us to read, Leda asked herself, but she knew the answer. They didn’t like to read, and they wanted you to be stupider than them. Leda spent most recesses hiding in the trees by the fence behind the playground where no one could see her reading books and drawing secret maps that she hid all around the school and everywhere else she went.

The only reason Leda stayed at Glenda Banks was the summer show and the winter show. The summer show was always about outer space. Leda had danced as a star, an asteroid, one of Jupiter’s moons. The winter show had an undersea theme, all dark blues and greens and purples. Leda had been a starfish, an anemone, a shining silver anchovy. She had swam with her anchovy school in the murky dim light, wriggled her anemone tentacles to the burbling sea music.

The shows were basically magic, or the closest a regular human could get to magic. They were good enough to put up with the tall girls a hundred times over, or at least two afternoons every week plus dress rehearsals.

The new girl stood in front of Glenda Banks building with a hand-drawn map in her hands.

It was one of the ones Leda hid in the bushes a year ago. She remembered folding it into a tiny packet, encasing it in crinkly giftwrap she had saved from a birthday present. She had turned sideways to fit between the bushes and the concrete wall, scooted about halfway in, crammed the packet between wiry branches that held it like fingers. The bushes looked fuller now, harder to get in back of. She wondered what kind of girl would bother crawling around back there.

“Is this yours?” the girl asked, without looking up. They were the last two students waiting for their parents.

“No,” Leda said.

The girl frowned at the map, dark eyebrows furrowed. A few dead leaves were stuck to the back of her sweater.

“Bravery thieves,” she said finally. “We can go after their treasure, but it might be a trap. They’ve taken control of Zandrum and driven the elves underground. We’ll need to stay alert and watch for danger.”

The girl looked at Leda. Her face was small and shrewd and pointed, her skin like cocoa. On her wrist was a bracelet with a small green key on it.

“I’m Zelles,” she said. “I’m a warrior elf.”

Leda looked into her big, dark eyes and knew it was true.

“Do you have an elf name?” Zelles asked. “It would start with Z.”

“Zixian,” Leda said. It came out so naturally, she knew it must have been her secret name all along.

Zixian loved Zelles’s house.

Zixian’s parents were fighting all the time and didn’t care if she was home for dinner, and Zelles’ parents didn’t care if she stayed.

Zixian loved the scented rice and curried stews, loved sitting around the big table with Zelles and her little brother Gayan. She loved how Zelles’ parents spoke, how they always talked about politics. The mother’s accent was beautifully lilting so that she sounded philosophical saying normal things like, Alisha, Leda, come to dinner now.  The father’s accent was trickier, especially when he got going about wars, the one in Iraq that Zixian knew all about, or the one in Sri Lanka with the tigers that she’d never heard of. But after a while it didn’t sound like they had accents at all. She loved how they never yelled, even when they debated, how they spoke to her politely like an adult they were doing business with.

“Leda,” Zelles’ father would say. His name was Arun, and that’s what Zelles called him. Her mother’s name was Padma and Zelles called her Mom. Zelles and Zixian were called by their human names. “Every group of people deserves their own country that they can govern as they see fit. Don’t you think so?” 

“Yes, yes they do,” Zixian would say between bites of dal, trying to match his seriousness. She thought of the elves, of their struggles to reclaim the kingdom of Zandrum where they had once lived so peacefully before the bravery thieves had come.

“For example your mother’s country, Taiwan,” Arun said. “It was colonized by China, then Japan, then China again, and now it’s a free country.”

Zixian would nod and pretend that she already knew this about Taiwan. Zelles would roll her eyes and say, “Arun. Lighten up.”

“Alisha doesn’t like when I talk about things that are true,” Arun said.

Zelles would roll her eyes again. Under her breath she would say, “Zirfens ot zogotos.” It meant, Have strength against the bravery thieves.

Zelles usually wasn’t afraid of anything, but she was terrified of the winter show. As Zixian straightened out her tights and hummed the music for the jellyfish dance, she watched Zelles pace the full length of the dressing room, thick braids bouncing, clutching her elbows with her hands.

“I can’t do it,” Zelles mumbled to herself again and again. “This is crazy. I can’t do it.”

It had never occurred to Zixian to be scared of the shows. She loved everything about them: the whispered murmuring backstage, the darkened hallways, the smell of makeup. The music burbling like ocean depths, the normal, sad building turned enchanted. It was almost painful to watch Zelles be so scared, of anything, much less the thing Zixian loved the most. It was like everything in the world was backwards.

The tall girls thought it was hilarious.

“What’s she freaking out about?” Julie Rykoff said. “She’s just a jellyfish. She doesn’t even have, like, a real part.”

All the tall girls were seahorses. Their dance was the longest and supposed to be the best, a regal, prancing ballet, but Zixian liked the Jellyfish dance way better: the long gauzy costumes, the music like a quiet dream, the movements that flowed and warbled close to the ground.

She took Zelles into the bathroom, gave her a bravery catcher from her bag. It was white with purple swirls that looked like sly faces if you squinted.

“Zudag zumistran,” Zizian said. “The power of the warrior elves upholds you.”

Zelles took the bravery catcher in both hands, cupped it against her face like she was breathing it in. Zixian watched her eyes, giant and dark in the dim yellow bathroom light, turn from frantic to resigned.

“I guess it’s going to be okay,” Zelles said.

“It’s going to be amazing,” said Zixian.

The show was actually just okay. Zixian saw her parents during the opening dance, three rows back on the right. But when the jellyfish dance started, their seats were empty. She tried to focus on her moves, but she couldn’t stop looking at their seats. Yes, definitely empty, but their jackets were on the chairs. She scanned the darkened auditorium as she dipped and curled, trying to see if they were somewhere else, maybe standing in the back. It was impossible to see anything. When the dance was over, even though her body had done all the movements, she felt like she’d missed the whole thing.

“It was great, Leda-Pida,” her father said afterwards, smiling blankly while her mother scowled silently, arms crossed. “Beautiful dancing.”

On the way to the parking lot, Leda saw pieces of the white and purple bravery holder smashed on the concrete walkway.

*          *          *

Leda was twelve when the divorce happened.

“Your father’s been having intercourse with one of his students,” Leda’s mother said one morning, making pancakes for breakfast like she did every Sunday. She raised her eyebrows, confrontational like she expected Leda to contradict her. Her face was puffy, her usually-perfect black hair sticking up at ugly angles. “At least one.”

It made Leda sick, that sweet pancake smell, her mother saying the word intercourse. The idea of her father doing whatever that vague thing intercourse was. The physical ugliness of her beautiful mother, the unexpectedness of this response to Leda’s simple question, Where’s Dad?

“So he won’t be living with us anymore,” her mother said. 

“Where is he going to live?”

She was almost too scared to ask. She couldn’t imagine the house without him, making his normal corny jokes over pancakes, complaining about how the maple syrup wasn’t real. Reciting random lines of poetry by free-association all the time, like when Leda’s mom cut up some melon and he said, “For he on honeydew hath fed, and drunk the milk of paradise.”

“I don’t care. Fuck.” Leda’s mom picked up a burnt pancake with the spatula, flipped it into the garbage next to the oven. “He can go live in the dorm.”

Leda cut her overcooked pancake into little pieces, squished them around in the syrup until it looked like she had eaten at least some of them.

Leda took the bus to Alisha’s house. They hadn’t seen each other in a couple months, now that they didn’t go to Glenda Banks anymore. Sometimes Alisha texted the name of some book she was reading, and Leda would text back a couple happy faces made of punctuation marks, but she hardly ever actually took the recommendations. She’d been reading a lot less in middle school. Half her brain was distracted at all times trying to avoid Julie Rykoff, who went to her school now. Julie yelled Costco every time Leda walked past her, because evidently she somehow knew Leda’s jean jacket was from there. Leda liked the jacket, but she could only safely wear it during class. She took it off outside during passing periods in case Julie was around, which was the reverse of when she actually needed it. Basically middle school sucked and it took most of her energy not to want to kill herself.

From outside the front door, Leda could hear Alisha’s parents arguing in the kitchen. In quiet, strained voices that were scarier than yelling, something like: My mistake was counting on you to do anything. I consider myself alone in this marriage. In the world.

Leda took out her phone—her father’s old flip-phone that he’d given her over the summer when he got an iphone—and texted Alisha.

I’m in front of your house, she wrote. My parents are assholes.

Alisha was at the door in a few seconds looking ready to get out of there. Shoes on, a bag slung across her shoulders, her green key bracelet on her wrist. She looked taller than Leda remembered her.

“Yeah, my parents are assholes, too,” she said, closing the door behind them. “Let’s go to the park.”  

They walked the two blocks to the park, talking in a shallow way about school and which teachers they hated and which kids were dicks.

In the glare of the sun, Leda felt light and ungrounded, unattached to her body as it moved across the hot sidewalk. Finally her mind floated straight out of her head and ten feet up towards the sky, an unreal blue. She watched the light hit the top of her own head, her hair smooth and brown and sweaty, Alisha’s head with its crown of black hair reflecting the glare. The glinting on their bare legs, Alisha’s brown and skinny under her swingy tunic dress, Leda’s so fleshy and pale in contrast that she wanted to send herself home for some jeans and never wear shorts again, even though it was eighty degrees out. Her legs were disgusting, her whole body was disgusting, and that wasn’t the only thing bothering her. Something else.

What’s wrong, she asked herself. Why am I floating above my body?

Then a bright flash of vertigo.

Your father—

Your father—

Having intercourse—

She could hear her own voice coming out of her body down below, so casual and unbothered, crafting supposedly-clever burns on Julie Rakoff.

“It’s like, she thinks she’s so smart all the time but she’s not even in one honors class. She should try to be smart at something actually useful.”

Pathetic burns, Leda’s mind could tell, all fake and confident as though she would ever have the guts to say them to Julie’s self-satisfied face.

Leda Levine, you’re such a coward, she told herself. Why are you scared of Julie Rakoff? What do you think she’s going to do to you?

Her mind looked into the future, expecting some bad thing there: Julie beating her up after school, humiliating her at their high-school prom, stealing her boyfriend for no reason except that Leda loved him.

But that’s not what she saw. Instead, there was a future where she had become cooler than Julie, had climbed above her in status. Julie was courting her, trying to win her favor. She saw Julie smiling at her, pretending they were friends while Leda rolled her eyes and turned away. Julie asking Leda for some unspecified thing that she didn’t want to give. Leda annoyed, shaking her head, sighing.

She wondered if this was the real future or just a fantasy she’d invented to make herself feel powerful. In which case, yes: watching Julie grovel made Leda almost ill with pleasure. On the very small chance that this was indeed the real future she was watching, she wondered how it would come to pass. What magic would she invent or discover that could turn her from a loser nerd, harassed and bullied, to someone kids begged for favors and friendship.

Leda didn’t come back to her body until they sat down in the redwood grove behind the tennis courts. It was the scratch of dirt and twigs on her thighs that brought her back. The uncomfortable physical sensation of childhood, even though it hadn’t actually bothered her then, when they used to hide under these trees drawing maps and planning triumph for the elves of Zandrum.

“I need to ask you something but it’s gonna sound weird,” Alisha said, flattening out the bottom of her dress to better protect her legs from the twigs. “Okay, so it’s: have I harmed you with my anger?”

“What?”

“They’re making me see a therapist. I’m supposed to check in with people I care about to see if I have harmed them from being so angry.”

“I didn’t know you were angry,” Leda said.

Alisha wrinkled her face skeptically, like maybe Leda was being sarcastic. It was true, though. Alisha was definitely intense. Inappropriate, a little mean, kind of reckless sometimes. But Leda had never taken any of that as anger.

“Yeah, I am,” Alisha said. “So sorry if I caused you harm. Here, look at this.”

She took her bracelet off, handed it to Leda. Leda had never held it before, never seen Alisha remove it, in fact. She held the small green key charm in her hand, studied the carved patterns on its surface.

Then Alisha pulled a wooden box out her bag and gave that to Leda, too. It was the size of a hardback book, inlaid with a flower pattern made of little stones. Leda ran her fingers over the patterns, smooth dark stones and cool white ones, wondering if the white ones came from elephants.

“Unlock it,” Alisha said.

Leda stared blankly at the box for a second, the bronze lock on the front of it, before it occurred to her that the tiny green key might be an actual key. It made a satisfying little click as she turned it.

The box was filled with papers and cloths and small pouches, the kind that held bravery holders. Leda hadn’t seen a bravery holder for a while now. She still had a couple in a box on her shelf, took one out and held it in her hand occasionally. They were just large marbles if you thought about it, a pretty kind of trinket that could seem magic before you grew up. There were two of them in the pouch she pulled out of Alisha’s box, one milky white and one green and purple, plus a bunch of smashed ones at the bottom. Leda spread the pouch’s drawstring opening wide so she could see the smashed bravery holders, small, jagged glass shards marbled with rainbow swirls.

“There’s a picture in there somewhere,” Alisha directed.

Leda found the photo, printed on slick paper, held it up to make sure it was the one Alisha wanted. It was Alisha’s mother, younger, with baby Alisha on her lap. A man with his arm around her, but it wasn’t Arun. Some other man, with thick, curly hair like Alisha’s, dark eyebrows and sad eyes. Leda had never seen him before, no photos of him in the family gallery in Alisha’s hallway. Maybe an uncle or a family friend. But the way he wrapped his arm around Alisha’s mother didn't seem like that.

“That’s Vittesh Iyer,” Alisha said. “He’s my real father.”

Leda shook her head, confused.

“He was an alcoholic.” Alisha was matter-of-fact, like it was a sad story she’d read in the newspaper. “He moved back to India.”

“An alcoholic.” The word was adult and scary in Leda’s mouth. Of course she had heard of alcoholics, as something on TV or in a movie, not someone who sat with his arm around Alisha’s mother.

“Arun is Gayan’s father,” Alisha said. “He doesn’t drink.”

Leda studied the man in the picture, the disappointment in his eyes even as his mouth spread in a grim smile, and wondered what it was like to be an alcoholic.

“Do you remember him?” she asked.  

“Yeah,” Alisha said. “I liked him better than Arun. He didn’t talk so much.”

She reached over and took the box from Leda’s lap.

“I’ve got some weed in here.” Alisha laid the picture neatly in the bottom of the box, rearranged the pouches. “Did you ever try it?”

Leda shook her head. She had smoked cigarettes a couple times with her new friend Maddie, had liked the feeling of the smoke in her lungs even though the actual tobacco made her queasy.

Alisha opened a purple, velvet pouch. Inside was a lighter and a plastic case filled with a row of four small, neatly-rolled joints. She took one out, pinched it between her lips as she used both hands to light it. Her cheeks sucked in hollow as she inhaled hard, then filled out to hold the smoke. She stayed that way for a few seconds, eyes closed, cheeks puffed wide. Then one giant cough like an explosion, smoke flooding from her face. More coughing, a sickly-sweet smell filling the air. She took a water bottle out of her bag, drank a few gulps, held the joint out towards Leda. 

In a croaked voice, she asked, “You want some?”

It was the first time anyone had offered Leda marijuana, and she halfway would have expected herself to turn it down. Definitely she wouldn’t smoke it with a group of people or at anything like a party. Because if she freaked out—and she had heard that some people freaked out—everyone would know forever. Then she wouldn’t just be Schleroderma with the Costco jacket, but she’d be the girl who had a nervous breakdown in front of everybody. It would follow her forever, no question. Even if she changed schools, they would know.

Leda looked at Alisha. Something about her was unreal and strangely beautiful, her chin intensely pointy, her cheekbones high. Her eyes, red-rimmed with giant dark pupils, had a lazy confidence that reminded Leda of Zandrum and the elves.

“Yeah, I’ll try,” she said.

She took the joint, making sure to hold it the way Alisha had, pinched between pointer finger and thumb, not propped between two fingers like a cigarette. The tip was a little wet from Alisha’s mouth and much smaller than a cigarette, but she figured out how to shape her lips around it and took a long, slow inhale, sucking her cheeks in the way Alisha had.

She could only hold it for a few seconds before it came exploding back out, a flood of smoke, a cough so hard it hurt her stomach muscles.

Alisha passed the water bottle.

“I don’t actually like it that much,” Alisha said. “Like it’s kind of relaxing, but it makes my brain feel stupid.”

Leda leaned back and looked up at the redwood trees. Their tops swayed lightly against the bright sky like they were trying to shake the tension from their trunks. She felt the breeze on her skin, the same one that was moving the trees. It was moving her, too, she realized, moving through her and the trees, dissipating her stress and fear and bad feelings safely into the enormity of the atmosphere.

She watched Alisha take her second hit, her body curled around the small flame, face illuminated and then shadowed by the redwood branches. Her cheeks were a mechanical contraption, a bellows that contracted, held still, expanded.

Then the contraption shot out smoke. Smoke that flowed into unspeakably beautiful patterns like embroidery on a tapestry. Alisha’s face in profile, small round nose and fleshy lips shooting steam that broke into intricate curls, or unfurled into delicate, beckoning fingers.

She looked like a dragon, Leda thought. 

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