We Are the Ashes, We Are the Fire Read online

  DUTTON BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

  Copyright © 2021 by Joy McCullough

  Interior illustrations copyright © 2021 by Maia Kobabe

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Dutton is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us online at penguinrandomhouse.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  Ebook ISBN 9780525556077

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover photo courtesy of Stocksy

  Cover design by Dana Li

  pid_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  For Jennifer, my sister

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Bloodied Tapestries

  Chapter Nine

  Blurring Faces

  Chapter Ten

  Scaffolding

  Chapter Eleven

  Flay

  Chapter Twelve

  Larder Mouse

  Chapter Thirteen

  Wide-Open Night

  Chapter Fourteen

  Sword and Book

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Know My Name

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  A Wider Stance

  Chapter Nineteen

  Untitled

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Untitled

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Personal Friends

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Butterfly

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Apology

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  We

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Pennyroyal Tea

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Entitled

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Equal

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Useless

  Chapter Thirty

  Ainsi Tu Seras

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Please, Sir

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Bindings

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Flowers

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Untitled

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Subservient

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Bias

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Armor

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Counterstrikes

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Conqueror

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Untitled

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Untitled

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Untitled

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Thus Shall You Be

  Resources

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  BOYS

  I’m

  about

  to tell you

  a secret. you’d

  like that, right?

  secrets are

  your favorite currency

  (power)

  so come close

  listen carefully:

  my body

  is not for you

  for your distraction

  your consumption

  your possession

  I know you’ve been told

  every second of your life

  you’re the center

  I’d tell you I’m sorry

  but that would be

  another lie

  if only you hadn’t

  skipped english lit

  the day we learned

  the center cannot hold

  you think you’ll hold forever

  all the power

  all the girls

  whatever body parts

  you want to grab

  you’d make a joke

  of the blood-dimmed tide

  (if you ever listened to ms. gregory)

  but joke’s on you

  because just maybe

  that blood flows from

  all the girls you seek to possess

  but one day we’ll be loosed

  and you’ll be drowned

  * * *

  —

  A poem wouldn’t change anything, not even if I scrawled it on the walls of the boys’ locker room at Fremont Middle School instead of into my notebook, while huddled in the back of the auditorium, choking on the fumes of Connor Olsen’s vile body spray. Which would probably never wash out of my favorite hoodie.

  Writing a poem was just something to do while the boys learned the fight choreography, the whole reason they’d signed up for the play, the chance to swing big swords. You’d think they’d have paid attention to the fight director, considering.

  You’d be wrong.

  I had to stay until the end in case I was needed, in case by some miracle the boys learned the choreography and there was still time to work on one of the few scenes I was in.

  There wouldn’t be time.

  Finally I was released and Connor’s body spray was no match for the crisp fall air as I walked north on Wallingford toward home. To the west, the Olympics stretched out along the peninsula; to the east, the Cascades separated Western Washington from the rest of the state.

  I stopped at a light and the Eau de Boy caught up with me. Once I got home, I’d probably have to burn the hoodie. A ritual sacrifice to the goddess of middle school girls.

  As if on cue, a pack of boys came barreling through, jostling me as they went. Did one of them grab my ass? Don’t be so sensitive, they were only brushing past.

  I ducked down an alley to avoid them at the next streetlight. The boy next door was a fairy tale. I’d known that since my mom told me about her first period. No big sister and Grandma didn’t speak of such things, so Mom biked to the drugstore and used her birthday money to get everything she might need. She bought so many different products that on the way home everything toppled out of the bike basket and the boxes of pads and tampons spilled all over the street, right next to where a group of boys from her school were playing basketball.

  She practically does a stand-up routine about it now. But it can’t have been funny then, to scramble in the street retrieving everything she’d bought, everything she needed because o
f the body she was born with. What was she supposed to do? Leave it all? She’d spent her money. It would have been humiliating enough without those boys—they might as well be the same ones who just shoved past me on their way to the same basketball court—guffawing and shouting obnoxious things like it was all a hysterical joke.

  Hysterical: from the Greek word for “uterus.”

  The refuge of the alley only lasted so long; I emerged where the boys’ shouts at the basketball court still reached me, inescapable, but I wouldn’t have to walk past the court. Instead, I was on the kind of Seattle street that’s a mixture of hundred-year-old homes with inhabitants to match, mid-century bungalows, and the sleek, shiny-new structures of tech executives with Teslas parked in front.

  I scowled at the SANDERS sign on a lawn as I passed. He lost the nomination ages ago, but the signs are still everywhere. Mom came home from that primary caucus so defeated—the Bernie Bros had won the day in the Fremont Elementary School cafeteria, and even if the rest of the country didn’t agree, those guys would probably leave their signs out forever, unable to fathom that they hadn’t gotten their way.

  Papi couldn’t vote, as a permanent resident, but he wore his LATINOS FOR HILLARY shirt and made molletes to comfort Mom after the caucus.

  I couldn’t understand why she was so upset. Washington State was Bernie country, maybe, but Clinton would get the nomination, with or without our state.

  “It shouldn’t have been such a struggle,” Mom snapped at me. “And she hasn’t won the presidency yet!”

  Of course she would win. How could she not? She’d been working toward this since she graduated from Yale Law School. Before, probably. And her opponent was a complete buffoon with no qualifications and a whole list of sexual assault allegations against him.

  We’d have our first female president soon. Which would open the floodgates for more women in politics. More women in charge.

  And then, when the boys grabbed asses and sent dick pics, there’d be someone in power to make it stop.

  * * *

  —

  Even the familiar smells of rising dough and Papi’s marinara sauce were not enough to dull the edge of my fury as I burst into the house.

  “I’m home, people!” I bellowed.

  I didn’t need to bellow. I could see at a glance the rest of my family, gathered in the kitchen where the ancient stove took the edge off the crisp air I’d brought in. They talked and laughed like the world wasn’t a miserable cesspool of injustice.

  “Always the picture of quiet refinement,” Mom said with a grin as I dumped my bag and notebook on the ground, flung off the stinking hoodie, and slumped into a chair across from where Mom sat, hands wrapped around a chipped mug full of steaming tea, surrounded by student papers.

  Grandpa used to bake in this kitchen too. Mom might have come home from the drugstore that day to the same instant-comfort smell of yeast and sugar and heat doing their chemical thing to transform into something completely new. It probably didn’t make her forget those asshole boys, either.

  “You want to talk about unrefined? Let me tell you about unrefined.”

  “I’m guessing we couldn’t stop you.” Nor stood at the counter, chopping garlic, her hair frizzing in the humidity of the kitchen. She paused to lift the lid on the sauce and steam clouded her glasses.

  “Tell us the horrors of your day, canchita, of how you listened to the seas that love nothing but themselves,” Papi said. “Pero ayuda while you’re at it.” He placed a cutting board, a knife, and two bell peppers on the table in front of me.

  “Gabriela Mistral?” Nor asked as Mom’s hand flew out to stop a damp green pepper from rolling onto a freshman English composition.

  “Así es,” Papi said, hurrying back to the stove to stir the sauce. More steam. “Escuchando mares que no aman sino a sí mismos.”

  “Middle school boys,” I said, ignoring the poetry lesson and pointing with the knife for emphasis, “are unrefined. Ugh, I cannot wait for high school.”

  Nor laughed. “High school boys are worse.”

  “Impossible.”

  “They’re at least not any better.” Nor scooped the chopped garlic into her palm and moved to drop it in the sauce, our father countering her as he reached for the oregano on the windowsill, a perfectly choreographed dance in our tiny kitchen.

  “Fine then, college,” I said, making slow, careful slices into the peppers on the ancient wooden cutting board my uncle made in woodshop a million years ago. There’s a scorch mark where Mom set a too-hot pan when she was my age, but Grandma didn’t throw it out. I didn’t have my sister’s knife skills—or any of her kitchen skills, really. It all took so much time and care, the perfect measurements, exact right temperatures. “Bring on the college men!”

  Mom looked up from her grading in alarm.

  “Not yet, obviously. Just like, today was supposed to be fight choreography? And Alex and Connor were being such boys!”

  “Pero what a lazy description,” Papi said as he pulled the pizza dough from the bowl and began to shape it. “Was their behavior directly related to their anatomy?”

  I rolled my eyes.

  He continued. “I’m sure you don’t want to hear my lecture on the power of specific word choice—”

  “I really don’t.”

  “I love that lecture,” Mom said, making moony eyes across the kitchen at him.

  “They were being revolting and immature and super disrespectful of the fight choreographer, who was completely amazing.”

  “Mucho más específico,” Papi crowed, making a failed attempt to toss the crust, which he speared with his hand on its descent.

  “She’s a student from Cornish—”

  “Who?” Mom said.

  “The fight choreographer! The sequence looked so cool when she was doing it, but they weren’t even listening, they were just screwing around.”

  “How are those peppers coming?”

  I glanced at the cutting board. I’d only cut a few slices before I started venting about rehearsal. Between my righteous anger and the alchemy in the kitchen, my flannel was too much. I shrugged it off and kept cutting. “If I got to do any fighting, it would be amazing. But all I do is sit there, cheering on my man.”

  “I’ve always hated the Arthurian legends.” Mom began to clear the table of her freshman compositions. “Brave knights and fair maidens.” She snorted. “Only the compliant women are good, and the women with any power at all are evil. Don’t get me started on the vilification of women’s sexuality.”

  “We won’t,” Nor and I responded in unison, then exchanged a glance. I giggled and Nor quickly turned away to stifle her laugh in the refrigerator.

  “But it was medieval times,” I said. “That’s what the gender roles were then. It’s different now. Or it would be if middle school boys weren’t stupid.”

  “Canchita,” Papi said, coming around the counter to rescue the peppers. He placed a warm, heavy hand on my shoulder. “It is a truth universally acknowledged that middle school boys son tontos. Estoy seguro que you will make the most of your role in the play, even if you must play a compliant woman. Consider it an acting challenge you will master with verve.”

  As he turned back to the counter, Nor tossed the pizza crust in the air, catching it perfectly.

  “Show-off.” Papi shook his head. “When are you going to open a Michelin-star restaurant and make us all rich?”

  “Em can make us rich,” she said with a faint smile. “Marine biologists don’t make that much money.”

  Always with the marine biology. Nor had been focused on that forever. I, on the other hand, had no goal beyond washing the smell of middle school boy off my body. Connor wouldn’t listen during fight choreography, but he had no problem following instructions when the director told King Arthur to hold Guinevere close.

 
“Do I have time for a shower before the pizza’s ready?”

  “If you make it quick,” Nor said.

  I headed from the room.

  “Boots, backpack, journal, room,” Mom called after me.

  I doubled back, grabbed the stuff I dropped earlier, and left my parents grilling Nor on how she liked the new advisor for the high school paper.

  I didn’t care what Nor said. High school had to be better than middle school. Especially the boys.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “You can’t react.” Mom smooths her hair for the forty-seventh time since we parked in the public garage a block away from the courthouse. Now we sit in the freezing car. Waiting. “No matter what. All the cameras—”

  “I know.”

  “Don’t snap at your mother, Marianne.”

  I watch the slice of Papi’s face in the rearview mirror. The fresh gray at his temples, the new lines around his eyes. Weary would be a specific word choice.

  They’re so afraid, my larger-than-life parents. Shrinking into themselves for nearly a year, layering on armor that doesn’t even protect them. Retreating when they should have been on the front lines. With me.

  My fury begins to unfurl, deep down. If I stay trapped in their inaction, it will spill out, blazing hot, and scorch them until their skin blisters, the seats of this ancient car melt, the whole thing burns down.

  “I have to stretch my legs.”

  I bolt from the car before they can object.

  They would object. They want to keep me close, muzzle me, don’t write your columns about the case, Marianne, don’t be so outspoken, Em, don’t, don’t, don’t.

  Outside the car, I’m free of their crushing inaction but I’m boxed in by the dark, low ceilings of the parking garage, the stench of furtive smoke breaks, urine, and gasoline seeped into concrete that’ll never be washed clean.

  I walk toward the hazy light of the exit to the street. Every step I take away from the car, I know my mom is fretting. We’re supposed to wait for Layla! Walk in together. United front!

  But the slick sidewalk grounds me, the damp air, the concrete and steel fading into skies that are yet another shade of gray. This is my Seattle. I dig a dollar out of my pocket and hand it to the guy huddled in the opposite corner of the parking garage entrance.