Lips Touch: Three Times(3)
Author: Laini Taylor

"She said it was sweeter than honey and richer than wine, and maybe it was, but it near carved her hollow — because it’s all she wanted after and all she thought of, day after day, like it was a drug that shrank her mind to a little nub of want, and she wanted and wanted and wanted after it, but she couldn’t have any more.

"She haunted that glen looking for the goblin men, but she couldn’t see them, even when they were there! I could hear their cooing, coaxing voices and see their ugly shadows tramping up the hill, and so could our cousin Peneli, but not Mairenni. It’s how they do it, torment a girl with wanting and lure out her soul like a snail from its shell, until she can barely feel it anymore and it seems like a skimpy, worthless thing to trade away.

"A girl from the next village had died already. Wasted away. I saw her near the end. Her eyes were huge in her face and all the juice looked wrung out of her. She died on the full moon and they buried her in the churchyard, but they dug her back out the next year because nothing would grow by her grave, not even grass, and that’s how they knew she was damned. Mairenni started to look like that poor girl and I knew she’d die too. She was my sister even if she was a fool. I had to do something."

At this point in the story Kizzy’s grandmother used to shiver over her memories and touch her lips, remembering how the crowd of goblins had turned on her, their creature eyes flashing in the gloom as they jumped on her and held her down, mashing grapes and figs against her prim, clenched mouth.

"The goblins can’t just take your soul, Sunshine," she had said in her thick accent. "You have to give it. It’s an old agreement between God and Old Scratch. Older than eggs! A soul that’s taken unwilling spoils like milk and then it’s no good to anyone, not even Old Scratch. That’s why he grows his evil orchards, because once you’ve tasted his fruit you’ll give anything to taste it again, and there’s only one thing he wants."

Mairenni had been ready to give up that one thing. But instead, her sister had braved the goblins and come home bruised and bleeding, with the pulp of that evil fruit still sticky on her skin, and Mairenni, wasted and white, had clung to her and wept. She had kissed her and tasted the juice on her skin — the juice she was supposed to give her soul for, sipped for free from her sister’s skin — and the spell had been broken. Mairenni had lived.

Kizzy had never met her — Mairenni had stayed behind in the Old Country — but her grandmother said she looked like her. There was a single sepia photograph of a girl in a doorway, full-lipped, with eyes that seemed to sparkle with secrets. Kizzy had always been fascinated by her — truth be told, she had always identified more with that wild girl who almost sold her soul for the taste of figs than with her grandmother who kept her lips tight shut and never hungered for forbidden things. But though she stared at that photo, and even saw the shape of her own eyes and lips mirrored back at her, Kizzy just couldn’t see herself in that long-ago girl, ripe and thrilling and flush with a weird species of beauty the young have no vocabulary for.

Kizzy was so busy wishing she was Sarah Ferris or Jenny Glass that she could scarcely see herself at all, and she was certainly blind to her own weird beauty: her heavy, spell-casting eyes, too-wide mouth, wild hair, and h*ps that could be wild too, if they learned how. No one else in town looked anything like her, and if she lived to womanhood, she was the one artists would want to draw, not the Sarahs and Jennys. She was the one who would some day know a dozen ways to wear a silk scarf, how to read the sky for rain and coax feral animals near, how to purr throaty love songs in Portuguese and Basque, how to lay a vampire to rest, how to light a cigar, how to light a man’s imagination on fire.

If she lived to womanhood.

If she remembered her grandmother’s stories and believed them, and if none of the host of other things befell her that are always out there on the fringes of worry, like drunk drivers or lightning or zombies or a million other things. But Kizzy was ripe for goblins, and if anything got her, it would probably be them. Already one had tracked the perfume of her longing past the surly billy goat to peer in her bedroom window. Already it was studying her every move and perfecting its disguise.

TWO Butterfly Rape

On Monday, there was a new boy at Kizzy’s school. "Yum," said Evie weakly.

"Be praised, O lords of boy flesh. We thank thee for thy bounty," whispered Cactus. "Amen," said Kizzy, staring.

They weren’t the only ones staring. Even Sarah Ferris craned her neck over Mick Crespain’s shoulder to get a better look as Saint Pock Mark guided the new boy down the hallway.

He was tall and graceful, with a frame of broad shoulders lightly fleshed with muscle. Wheat-colored hair curled down over his collar, uncombed and lustrous. His lips were red as angels’ lips in Renaissance paintings, and full and soft like angels’ lips too. His eyes, very dark, canted elvishly upward at the outer corners and were surrounded by delicate bruises of sleeplessness, bluish and tender, giving him the look — Kizzy fancied — of a poet who had been up all night with a candle and a quill, memorializing a beautiful lady who had fallen from the aristocracy to die penniless of a fever, perhaps in a snowbank, leaving, of course, an ethereal corpse.

"Hell’s he wearing?" Cactus asked, breaking into Kizzy’s romantic reverie. "He raid his grandfather’s closet?"

"That or he stripped a dead hobo," said Evie.

"Nah." Cactus shook her head decisively. "It’s old-man. Look at those suspenders. Total old-man fashion."

"Old men have fashion? Do they have, like, a catwalk?" mused Evie.

"Yeah, and he totally just stepped off it."

"Please," Kizzy said, glancing at the boy’s strange tweedy trousers, loose at the waist, too short, and upheld by suspenders. "That boy could wear a banana leaf and a propeller beanie and look beautiful."

"That how you like your boys, Kiz?" asked Cactus.

"Oh yes. All my boys. I’ll issue him a banana leaf and a propeller beanie at once and induct him into my boy-harem."

Evie snorted. "Boy-harem! Imagine — their little propellers all spinning around as they fan you with palm fronds."

"While they satisfy my every whim," added Cactus.

Kizzy snorted. "Forget it. I don’t lend out my boys."

"Come on, no one likes a greedy slave owner."

"My boys aren’t slaves! They stay because they want to. I give them all the elk meat they can eat. And Xbox, you know, to keep their thumbs nice and agile."

"Spaz," said Evie, laughing. They leaned against the lockers and watched the new boy out of sight. Just as he rounded the far corner with Saint Pock Mark, he glanced back over his shoulder. A thrill went through Kizzy. She imagined for a second that his eyes had silvered like a cat’s. And she imagined he had looked right at her. She blushed instantly, even though she was sure she was wrong. Boys’ eyes didn’t find her in a crowd. Boys’ eyes didn’t even find her when there was no one else around. They sort of glazed over or fixed on some fascinating object in the distance.