Sam
As a child, Sam can see beauty in everything.
She can spend an hour admiring the spiral of a snail’s shell. Each morning, she and her stuffed animal, Rabbit, say hello to the buttery yellow dandelions growing between the cracks in the sidewalk. At night, the streetlamps form pools of silver on the ground. She runs her hands across the metal bars striping their apartment door and feels the music of them humming through her fingers. The crack on the bedroom ceiling is in the shape of a star. And when her mother makes curtains for the windows out of old bedsheets, Sam watches in awe, admires the handsewn flowers dancing in the wind as if the fabric itself is a meadow.
To her, their apartment is big. It has a tidy bathroom and working lights, a bedroom she gets to share with her mother, a carpet where she stages stories between Rabbit and a set of plastic horses, a kitchen that can turn out hot meals, and a refrigerator that her mother somehow manages to keep perpetually stocked. Her mother cooks late at night, making braised beef rolls and fluffy buns and eggs scrambled with tomatoes, transforming leftovers into fried rice, packaging portions of food into the freezer for the week. No one can stretch out a dollar like her mother. A five-pound sack of flour costs the same as a loaf of bread and can make noodles and scallion pancakes for weeks. Ground chicken can go farther when combined with eggs and cabbage and wrapped into dumplings by the pound. Watermelon rinds can be pickled, softened, and stir-fried. Freezing portions of stew made with chuck steak bought on Mondays—the Manager’s Special packages that are about to expire—can save you thirty dollars a month. Seventy-five cents can get an entire bag of squash from their Mexican neighbor’s backyard garden.
Sam loves falling asleep with the smell of good food filling their home. She loves how talented her mother is at everything she does. Sometimesshe feels like her heart will burst from these thousands of small joys in her world, and every day, she looks forward to each of them because they are all she’s ever known, because this is what a perfect life looks like.
So, when Sam first learns about alchemy, she sees only what it should be: a beautiful thing, an endless possibility.
Sam’s mother works at Mandarin Palace Chinese Food on 4th and Normandie. When Sam gets out of school, she has no friends to be with and no students who ask her to hang out, so she just takes the Metro past the YMCA and the Odyssey Theatre to the restaurant, where she sits in a chair in the corner and does her homework while waiting for her mother to finish. The other workers in the restaurant breeze past her without a second glance. In the summer, Sam spends long days sweating alone in the restaurant’s supply closet, savoring the wind from the oscillating fan, crushing fortune cookies into dust in their plastic packages. No one ever checks in on her or asks how she’s doing. It is her talent, she supposes, the ability to disappear.
One hot afternoon, right after the start of seventh grade, she witnesses her mother taking orders from two men wearing pins in the shape of a golden fox on the lapels of their suits. Mr. Hayes, the restaurant’s owner, comes over in a nervous rush to assure them that their meal is comped. Sam sits at the corner table beside theirs, unnoticed by everyone, abandoning her homework to steal glances at their beautiful Oxford shoes. In a setting as plain as this, the men look almost unreal, the fabric of their suits fine and rich, their hair sleek and perfect, cuffs glinting like jewels in the light. The only other time she ever sees people this well-dressed is when the bus passes by the Odyssey Theatre and she glimpses its patrons in their finery, all waiting eagerly for the doors to open. Now she turns her eyes down, her heart hammering at the shimmer of these men, wondering what it’s like to be so worthy of attention.
They’re talking in low voices.
“Will Taylor’s gotten an attribution?” one of them asks.
The other man nods as he picks up a fork. “Constantine,” he replies.
“Ah,” says the first man. “An elementalist, then?”
“A very good one. Word is that Diamond’s taking him with her when she goes to Oxford to negotiate a new deal.”
“Her son seems young for that.”
The other man toys idly with his fork. “He’s talented enough that they’re making an exception.”
“Should we be concerned?”
“You don’t think we have enough good talent in Lumines?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
The man turns his wrist slightly.
Sam blinks. She could have sworn he was holding a fork in his hand, but it is a spoon now.
As he uses it to stir a glittering white powder into his coffee, Sam tries to convince herself that the spoon had always been a spoon. If she were a duller child, perhaps she would have done so successfully. But her mind is as bright as quicksilver, her memory so flawless that she can memorize a book just by skimming the pages. So as much as she tries to believe otherwise, she knows what she saw. The spoon had been a fork.
When her mother returns with their orders, they change topics mid-sentence, complimenting the look of their food and the cheap silver earrings her mother wears. But her mother smiles in the way she does when customers yell at her—strained and meek, her eyes down. She murmurs, “Thank you,” to them. Only when she steps away again do they continue their original conversation. Sam, innocent and wholly ignored, listens on, too young to understand why a man’s praise would scare her mother.
“Does Reed know Will’s going?”
“Not yet.”
“You should tell him. Better he hears it from us than the winged lion.”
The second man grimaces. “And why do I have to do it?”
The first man shrugs. “You’re good at it.”
“Bullshit. I deserve a promotion.”
“Patience. Alchemy is the science of changing something into something more desirable, isn’t it? So transform yourself. Make yourself better. The rest will follow.”
The other scowls at the advice. And as Sam puzzles over their exchange, they move smoothly on to complaining about the traffic.
