Home felt empty long before his father threw away her things. The flower printed kettle on the stove was a dead thing without his mother there to use it. Her plants looked like claws frozen in an attempt to grasp the light that fed them, the pictures hung on the wall that showed her smiling looked like vulgar lies, or ghosts trapped in the house with them behind glass and glowing holograms. When Marroo couldn’t sleep he tried to read, but the books seemed as empty as the house. The food they ate, like ash on his tongue.
Marroo spent a long sleepless night tossing and turning beneath the covers, or staring out at the midnight sky, and the stain on the road where the aircab crashed when his mother spilled out her life on the street.
Of all the nights, the first night was the longest…
But not by much.
He dozed off near morning, pressed into the alcove of the window in his room overlooking the street while a book dangled from his hands. He felt the core peak around the midnight plains like a hint of the warmth that once accompanied his mother’s touch when she curled up to soak in it’s light. His body ached and his guts felt hollow as the endless pits he’d seen in the underground. His father touched his shoulder to wake him and Marroo opened his eyes, but he didn’t move.
“It’s time.” His father grated. “We have exercises to do. Get dressed. I’ve ordered breakfast.”
Darro moved slowly that morning. They both did. Marroo sat at the table with him while he filled his mother’s usual role, served out noodles and eggs from cardboard boxes and made tea, not in the flower printed kettle his mother always used, but in a big polished steel frying bowl where he sprinkled in the loose leaves, then strained them out after it filled the room with their acrid stench.
He served Marroo, for the first time, from the same pot of tea as himself. “Adult tea” as his mother once called it when he was only five. In another first, they brought their cups into the training room with them to steam into the air beside their mats as they did their breathing exercises, or pretended to at the very least.
He’d spent other mornings like this, pretending to be awake after long hours spent pretending to sleep during the night. Usually he’d been reading, but he remembered another morning like this as he sat on his mat and didn’t do his breathing exercises, one following a night spent with Aiza at a party thrown a few weeks after she turned thirteen. The first party he could remember attending without his parent’s supervision.
At twelve it began to feel awkward sharing books shoulder to shoulder with the girl who’d kissed him in a tree four years before. She’d grown up in that time, from a girl who reminded him at least in passing of the girl his father killed into a girl who showed all the promises of womanhood. He found himself more aware of her when she sat next to him to read the books he still brought.
A familiar delivered the invitation to his mother a few days ahead. When she showed it to him, he immediately felt torn between an intense desire to go, and a severe reluctance he didn’t try to understand.
On the one hand it was from Aiza, and that meant something more to him now than he wanted to admit, but on the other, the invitation called it a party which would mean people he didn’t know and groups where he would be an outsider.
He didn’t remember the trip there, but he remember the trepidation as he stepped, alone, into the ballroom of the tenement building where Aiza lived with her mother. Dozens of other guests, boys and girls Marroo’s age, some from their playgroup and some Aiza seemed to know from other social circles, sat on couches along the walls of the room, or cushions spread across the chairs, chatting and playing games, all of them as dark skinned as she was.
She found him as soon as he stepped through the door, which was a relief, until she whipped him on a whirlwind tour of everyone else at the party, forestalling whatever hope he’d had of finding a comfortable corner to hide in for the duration of the party.
She’d used makeup to give herself a more mature look than her frantic energy could carry and wore a dress that shimmered in the subdued light with hints of gold and green, a dress she made sure to tell everyone she’d gotten specially for the event, but what he remembered best was the way she smiled and laughed the entire time, with everyone, mocking those who mocked her, and practically bouncing off the walls as she introduced him to one group after another before whirling off to greet another new arrival and leaving him stranded in a sea of dark faced strangers.
He remembered games, most of them awkward personal things meant to make the people in your circle laugh and which he wasn’t very good at except occasionally by accident. The way his skin turned red when he stumbled through embarrassing prompts made the group he played with burst into hysterics. Someone even recited a poem about it, though he couldn’t remember it even an hour later, let alone a couple of years.
He remembered the dancing best though.
It was Aiza’s idea to start the dancing. This wasn’t just her party, it was, in her own words and to borrow from the melodramatic books about life in the heavesn she kept bringing to their playgroup, her “debut”. She was the queen of the event,and dictated its whims according to her own. When she wanted to dance, the games went away, the music came on, and they danced, or at least, Marroo tried.
“I think you’ll be great at it.” Aiza told Marroo as she dragged him onto the floor after he’d spent an hour watching her dance with partner after partner. She turned to face him while the music beat loud overhead from ribbons strung across the ceiling.
“I know.” Marroo said. He hesitated as other couples around them touched hands. He extended his own towards Aiza to do the same. “I could hear you.”
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He’d been awkward and uncomfortable most of the evening, doing little more than talking to the people around him and wondering if there was something he was supposed to do, but the most painful moment had come when, just before Aiza called for music, he overheard his name come in a conversation between her and one of the other girls as they compared notes on the boys who’d come to the party. He’d struggled not to be self conscious about his “awkward grace”, or to look like he could hear every conversation going on in every corner of the room, but it was the first time he realized just how embarrassing a cultivator’s powers could be when he just wanted to fit in.
When he told her about it, Aiza looked like she would have flushed if her skin color hadn’t hidden the rush of blood.
“So you can hear everyone here?” She asked while they spun.
Marroo hated the spinning. He could perform the steps to a half dozen katas perfectly, but the half dozen he seemed to need to dance with Aiza made all his instincts scream that someone was going to swing a sword at his exposed back, particularly when they spun.
He twitched as muscles tried to parry attacks that were just her taking his shoulder to walk a slow circle around him. He was supposed to move counter to the circle to catch her so that they could spin off into the other dancers as though walking on air, but he messed up the timing and practically crashed into her as she came around.
“Alright then.” Aiza said as they continued to spin. She didn’t try to follow the next complicated steps of the dance which left Marroo grateful, until she nodded towards one corner of the room as they spun. “What are they talking about?”
Marroo glanced into the corner where two boys sat with their heads together. “Palace Ascendent.” Marroo said as he turned back to her. “Danza says any card with a higher priority than one is junk and Kest is arguing he’s wrong.”
Aiza rolled her eyes. “Of course they are. That was a bad test. How about them.” She spun with him and nodded to a couple who watched the dancers without joining in. They were both older than the rest of the guests, probably closer to fifteen or sixteen than Marroo’s twelve.
“They aren’t talking about anything.” Marroo replied, but he could feel his face growing warm.
She raised an eyebrow, and after a minute he leaned towards her ear.
“He wanted her to sneak away with him, but she said no.” He whispered. “They haven’t said anything else.”
Aiza pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows at the scandal then grinned and turned with him for a couple more steps before nodding to a third couple sitting on the floor playing cards. “What about them?”
Marroo listened to their voices until he recognized the thread of conversation he’d filtered out amongst the party goers. “She asked him if he’s made any career plans for after his majority. They’ve been talking about it ever since.”
Aiza gave him an appraising look, then abruptly broke away from the dance steps she’d kept up as automatically as he might have parried a blade while he stumbled and stopped amidst the turning guests. She flit away to the couple playing cards and he heard her ask what they’d been talking about. They told her and she asked if they wanted punchier music which got odd looks from both before she nodded mysteriously and returned to the dance partner she’d abandoned on the floor.
“What did I ask them?”, she asked.
Marroo told her.
“Well.” She said after they’d turned for a couple of minutes. They separated, the palm of her right hand pressed to his left while she studied him and he tried to follow her steps. “That could be a useful trick.”
He was supposed to step with her in synch and touch her hands, but he moved too quickly and had to wait for her to catch up. “Doesn’t make me a better dancer though.” He told her.
She smiled and two purple eyes met his.
“But that’s what I can do.” She replied.
So they danced.
Aiza kept the music going for hours, even when other dancers dropped out to play the awkward social games again, or when other teenagers curled up on sofas to nap. When they finally had to turn off the music around midnight, she touched his familiar’s clip and he heard the music move into his ears where it wouldn’t disturb the rest while she fought on in an attempt to straighten out the footwork he’d been trained to keep his enemies, and apparently even his friends, from getting close.
By morning, he’d almost learned to dance.
“You know.” Aiza said as they danced alone in the middle of the room several hours after midnight. Even over the music only they could hear Marroo could make out the others at the party laughing softly to jokes he chose not to understand, or sharing gossip in little circles that, more than once, turned their attention to the girl still trying to teach the ape at the party to dance.
“Now that I’m thirteen,” she said, “my mom said I can go out on dates, if anyone my age asked.”
Marroo watched her feet and slowed his steps to match hers, but didn’t say anything. For a little while that was all they said, but later, after she’d quizzed him on conversations she couldn’t hear going on around the room, and satisfied herself that she was not the subject of any conversation, even if he didn’t tell her about the few who were laughing at them while they danced, she brought it up again, more directly.
“Do you want to take me out on a date?” She asked.
Marroo focused on his feet to keep from stumbling. “I’m only twelve.” He said.
“I’m only thirteen.” Aiza replied. She raised her eyebrows and tilted her head as she looked up at him so that she looked like she peered over an invisible pair of glasses. “What does that have to do with anything?”
Marroo tried to turn before it was time and she pulled him back to her as they slid into the easy part of the dance. He put his hand on her waist while she did the same and he was suddenly very aware of how close they were, the smell of her perfume, the intimacy of the moment, and just how long they’d been dancing for.
“You’re supposed to step.” She told him.
He did, and for a moment neither said anything.
“Well?”, she asked with some exasperation. “Do you then? Or have I been wasting all my time teaching you to dance?”
“I don’t…” Marroo wanted to tell her he didn’t have any money, or that he didn’t know what they’d do, that he was only twelve, and didn’t people usually start these kinds of relationships as teenagers? But those weren’t really the problem. “I don’t know if I’d be allowed.” He finished lamely. “My father…”
They stepped together, but Marroo couldn’t look at her.
“You could sneak out.” She said. “We could meet somewhere. Yellow street’s not that far from here.”
Marroo opened his mouth, but when he looked at her, he saw the girl his father killed when he was ten again. They stopped, he closed his mouth, and they looked at one another in silence while the music played on in their ears alone.
She looked away and dropped her hands from his.
“I won’t be around forever you know.”
And she wasn’t, not even for that night.
Others came to dance with her past midnight, when a boy turned the music back on and yelled at the ones who were dozing off to wake back up and get moving. They took her whirling off onto the dance floor as though Marroo weren’t even there. Even when other girls came to dance with him and suffered through his awkward steps Marroo felt as though he faded when Aiza wasn’t there, as though he became an awkward ghost that didn’t really belong, even when her friends thanked him for the dance and went off with others at the party while he waited for her to return, and listened to her friends live their lives around him.