All Out: The No-Longer-Secret Stories Of Queer Teens Throughout The Ages. Saundra Mitchell

       ROJA

       BY ANNA-MARIE MCLEMORE

       El Bajío, México , 1870

      They all gave him different names. The authorities, who had been trying for months to catch him, called him El Lobo. The Wolf. La Légion called him Le Loup.

      His mother, back in Alsace, had christened him with a girl’s name, though he had since forgiven her for that. It was a name he had trusted me with but that I knew never to speak. The sound of it was too much a reminder of when he’d been too young to fight the hands trying to turn him into a proper demoiselle, forbidding him from running outside because young ladies should not do that. His heart had been a boy’s heart, throwing itself against his rib cage with each set of white gloves for mass.

      I called him his true name, Léon, the one he’d chosen himself. None of this was strange to me, a boy deciding his own name. The only strange thing was the fact that he knew mine.

      No one outside our village called me or anyone else in my family by our real names. They worried that letting our names onto their tongues would leave them sick. The rumors said our hearts were dangerous as a coral snake’s bite. They carried the whisper that the women in my family could murder with nothing but our rage. They pointed to our hair, red as our skin was brown, and insisted el Diablo himself had dyed it with the juice of devil’s berries, to mark us as his.

      Abuela had told me our rage was a thing we must tame. Though everyone else feared that our rage might kill them, the lives it more often took were ours. Poison slipped from our hearts and into our blood, she said. The venom spread to our fingers and the ends of our hair.

      But even she found a little joy in it. She flaunted it. So we would have enough to eat, she taught me to crush red dye from the beetles that infested the nopales. They were pests, ravaging the cactus pads, but if caught they made a stain so deep red we could sell it. My grandmother even tied tiny woven baskets to the nopales, luring the insects to make nests.

      That only added to the rumors. Las Rojas, the grandmother and granddaughter whose hearts blazed so red it showed in their hair, and who made the same color and sold it with stained fingertips. We heard whispers as we passed churches, families drawing back from us, afraid we could kill them with a glare.

      Now, as I stood in front of Deputy Oropeza’s polished desk, I wished all the stories were true.

      “You want El Lobo released?” Oropeza rested his boots on the smooth-finished wood.

      The

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