Bea, meanwhile, had risen to leave, but I held out a hand to stop her. “Show your sister your ideas for the pageant.”
Eva’s eyebrows shot up, and she shifted her attention to Bea. “What ideas?”
“It’s nothing,” Bea said, digging her toes into the carpet.
“Oh, come on, Bea, it’s not nothing!” I cried. “It’s brilliant! Come on, let Eva see!”
Bea threw a non-committal glance my way, and I smiled encouragingly. Finally, she sighed, opened to the sketch, and turned it around so Eva could see it. I watched with satisfaction as Eva’s eyebrows rose, and her mouth fell open.
“Bea, what the hell?” she gasped. “These are… did you seriously come up with this?”
Bea was trying very hard not to look too pleased with herself as she nodded.
“We have to show this to Zale. Bea said she could paint the masks to look just like this,” I added.
“And we could add these to the cloaks,” Eva said, looking excited now as she pointed to the icicles. “Glass ones would be too heavy and loud, but I bet we could make them out of glue and some serious glitter.”
I turned to Bea, whose tentative smile was slowly blossoming with every word. “I think you’re hired, Bea. Welcome to the design team!”
“Let’s go down to the theater,” Eva said. “Zale should be down there rehearsing everyone. He needs to see this.” She turned to her little sister and gave a playful flick to one of her braids, causing the beads to clack against each other. “I guess I should let you eavesdrop more often,hermanita.”
Bea raised her chin. “I guess you should.”
16
Over at the theater, Zale looked ready to pull his hair out. He stood on the lip of the stage as Sergei and Ethan attempted to toddle around on the stilts we’d found in the storage building. They were supposed to be learning to walk on them, and instead, they kept trying to sweep them out from under one another, and make the other fall.
“Will you two stop dicking around, and learn how to use those things already!” Zale shouted, looking close to tears.
“We are learning to use them,” Ethan insisted, as he lurched dangerously to one side and took a vicious swipe at Sergei’s knees, which Sergei successfully dodged, but then lost his balance and toppled backward into the curtains.
“Not as weapons!” Zale shouted. “We have the staffs for that!”
“Yeah, and we don’t even get to carry them!” Sergei complained, as he disentangled himself from the curtains. “The whole reason I took this part was because I get to do the fight scene, and now you’re telling me someone else is going to be controlling the arms on these things? What’s the point if I don’t get to hit someone?”
“The point is to put on an entertaining performance!” Zale snapped.
Off to the side of the stage, four of the girls stood holding staffs and the branchy arms Zale had built for the puppets. They looked bored and aggravated, and kept rolling their eyes at the boys on the stilts.
“Are we ever going to get a chance to do anything?” Petra whined.
“Not if we have to wait for those two to grow up,” Kaia grumbled.
“I’m not going near them until they can keep their balance,” a third girl added. “I don’t want to get trampled.”
Zale’s hair was sticking straight up from the number of times he had run his hands through it. He turned toward us as we walked up the aisle, looking like a mad scientist with anxiety.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
Zale let loose a hysterical cackle of laughter in reply.
“That good, huh?” Eva asked, grinning.
“My goddess, they are so pretty, but so impossibly immature. Like, what minor deity did I piss off to be born attracted to them? At this point, I’m seriously considering giving them each a real sword, and letting them take each other out so I can recast them,” Zale huffed.
“You’re telling me you think you can get someone else to play these parts?” Eva asked.
Zale opened his mouth to retort, but I interrupted him.
