and I tremble and grow pale
for I am dying of such love
for I am dying of such love
Do you have a second name?
O’s body warps into overdrive, her heart stops, then starts again at twice the normal speed, she feels dizzy; her chest is cold and light; all at once she is back in the desert.
The wind bites at her skin. The sky is dark overhead. She is standing in the cool sand, smaller than she can ever remember being, and Acton is looking at her and saying lead on then, daughter mine, and then she’s back on the island so sick she feels she might die and realizes, with acrid nausea, that he had never called her O.
And maybe that was part of it, a part she had never considered (or wanted to) before. She had not been so angry before he died. She had not been so vehement about keeping her name a secret. Now it feels sacred—like telling too much of herself too quick, like digging up the wrong dirt.
She exhales. “Apolonia is my second name.” Admitting feels wrong. It feels like an apology, even. The sound of it is clumsy in her mouth, too wide and somehow too sharp, even for her. “I tell everyone else to call me O.” Almost she thinks of adding an explanation, but what is there to explain?
My name is O. “Apolonia” is too intimate. “Apolonia” has too much power. It all sounds stupid out loud, like she’s afraid.
O is not afraid.
She can’t be afraid, or the world will break open.
“I’m sure they will,” the girl says, half-smiling. “I will.” It is a promise as binding as anything else, and yet somehow she manages to make it sound casual (though it would be lying to say that it does not take some effort). Now they’re deep in the jungle, and leafy arms rise high overhead, lacquered green-dark and rustling in the faint sigh of wind. The air smells dark and wet and rich; the boughs look ancient, though the forest cannot be. This is as foreign to her as the desert must be to Anandi, and she gazes at it with no small sense of wonder.
And she cannot pretend she is dissatisfied by the way Anandi shudders under her touch. No, she can’t even quite hide it—she smiles, a secret-sweetheart kind of smile, and then turns her eyes duly away from Anandi and back toward the dark, seething earth as if she has seen nothing. Her heart trills in her chest like a mine-canary. But over that trill she listens intently, eyes wide and ears pricked forward as she imagines the ocean the way Anandi describes it:
Dark and deep and scary, and beautiful, so beautiful, like everything savage, the way an apex predator is beautiful—dark and deep interrupted by pearled, rainbow fish, curling tentacles, sharp sets of teeth—something between heaven and hell and the idea of being alien.
Oh, to see that with her own eyes.
But when Anandi turns to face her, O remembers: there is nothing I would rather see than this. The perfect lines of her cheeks, the steely gray skin rippled with cream, the bright, hungry eyes that should frighten her but don’t. O gives her the shyest smile. “I’ve seen it,” she says, “But no one’s ever taught me. I wouldn’t mind learning.”
She reaches out—
