Paintings. Paintings all around me. Paintings stacked against one another, hung up on the walls, half-finished on tables and easels and floors. Mostly landscapes, still-lifes, a few portraits. Bottles of varnish and tubes of paint litter the room.

"So this is where you commit art fraud," I say to Eris. "I can't believe you have a whole studio to yourself."

It's nearly the size of my house. I recognize a few rip-offs of some obscure Dutch painters and even a Monet.

Eris makes a face and runs her hand through her hair. She's back to her usual grimy, just-rolled-out-of-bed, definitely-didn't-wash-off-yesterday's eyeliner look. Her posture is slouched, her gaze on the ground—is she embarrassed? Ashamed? She looks like a teenager again, not the mafia boss from Friday putting a gun to Javier's head. 

"No one else comes up here other than my siblings and my dad," she mutters. "This is weird as fuck."

Does anyone else know she's a forger? I still have no idea why she told me.

This time coming to her house, I thankfully didn't see Iker or Axel downstairs. Earlier Eris told me Iker was pissed when he found out that not only did she take me to that art show, but we're still planning on working together. "Me dio un regañazo," she'd muttered, then grinned. "But he wants me winning the Olympiad no matter what, and it's too late to find another partner. So I win."

Except he'd taken the keys to her car as punishment for taking me to the show. And today we had to get a ride to her house with her bodyguards.

"Okay," I say. "This round's theme is past and present. And as per our agreement, I'm letting you decide what we'll paint."

"I've been thinking about it," she says. "And fuck, I think you have a point with all my landscape paintings being lame. I wanna do something different. If we're gonna have the finals in Mexico then let's make this shit Mexican. Past and present. We do your little triangle design, and within the triangles we split the past and the present. Past is a corpse. Bullet wounds, slit throat. But it's not any corpse. It's the virgencita. Virgin Mary, Virgin of Guadalupe, whatever you wanna call her. It's like a metaphor for all the feminicide shit in Mexico, all the mothers who've been murdered. But then you have present. And she's not the virgin anymore. You ever heard of Santa Muerte? That's what millions of people worship nowadays. She's the saint of death. She's like Mary except for the new generation. The lost causes, the criminals, the oppressed. The corpse is now just bones, but she's more powerful than ever."

I stop my mouth from opening in shock. Is Eris actually putting thought into a theme? This is more elaborate than even what I come up with. My paintings are based on my internal landscape, my feelings, my anguish. But she wants to paint something real. Not that I believe in the Virgin Mary or whatever Santa Muerte is, but other people do. There's power in symbols. Is this why my art isn't landing as of late? Does it lack relevance to others, symbols they would recognize? This could just actually work.

"That seems... almost brilliant actually," I say.

Eris' tired face lights up. "Wait, really?"

I nod. Where was this type of thinking during the first round of the competition? I feel a sudden pang of regret for ruining her work—maybe we could've come up with something even better. Too late now.

She grins, showing the gap between her teeth. The dreary cloud hanging over dissipates with her excitement. "Well, shit, let's do it then."

"I know what the Virgin Mary is supposed to look like," I say. "But not the death saint."

"Let me show you something."

I follow her out of the art studio. We walk down a few hallways until we reach a door. And as soon as I step inside, I know it's her room because it's a total mess. Elaborate, bejeweled crosses are hung up on the walls. Instead of band posters, she has pictures of various saints. Bags of marijuana on the nightstand. Rings and necklaces everywhere like they're worth nothing. A rolled-up stack of bills. A polaroid camera. Several trinkets that look like they're from a tourist shop somewhere in the tropics. Sneakers thrown across the floor, piles of clothes accumulating in corners, and in the center of it all—a black, lacy bra.

"Is that bra yours?" I ask.

She hurries to kick it under her bed, and her round cheeks flush. "Uh, yeah."

"Looks way too big for it to be."

She glares at me, her face reddening. "You staring at my tits?"

"Not like there's much to stare at."

She shoves me, hard, and I nearly fall onto her bed.

"Now's not the time, pendeja. You don't see me saying you have a fat ass, do you? Anyway, come look."

She opens her closet. It's a walk-in, of course, and at the end, far from all her clothes, there's a literal shrine. In the center, there's a statue of a skeleton wearing a black hood and holding a scythe, like a typical grim reaper. Around it are black, white, and red candles. An offering bowl with a bottle of whiskey. The air smells like burnt incense.

"Looks like a fire hazard," I say. "Is that her?"

Eris nods. "Not literally. Just a statue I got off the Internet."

"You don't get creeped out sleeping with that so close?"

She laughs. "I gotta surround myself with the Santísima. Bathe in her. Cloud myself in death so that it doesn't touch me."

"This is some very ritualistic behavior," I say. "I thought you were Catholic."

"You can do both."

"What does your family think?"

"My mom thinks it's terrifying. She thinks I'm going to hell, always gets on my ass about going to confession and not worshipping false idols. To her, anything that isn't Virgin Mary or the Holy Trinity is demonic, which is just dumb, because like there were so many pre-Hispanic gods, and you're really telling me all of them were the devil? I mean, I get it, there's only one God, but I like to think that the ancient deities were like archangels or something, you know? Or like Jesus. Who's to say there was only one son of God? Why the hell is it only some Jewish dude from Israel? Who's to say there wasn't a Mayan Jesus, and we don't know because the Spanish burned all their books? I don't know. I'm like the worst Catholic ever." She motions to the statue. "Iker doesn't really care. He thinks it's stupid. The only thing he believes in is money."

"I think that if you have to go in circles to justify your religion and make it more than what it actually is, maybe it's not for you," I say.

"Maybe," Eris says quietly. "I don't know. Don't make me think too hard."

We stand in silence for a moment. An uneasy feeling prickles at the back of my neck. I've never believed very strongly in the esoteric, but there's a palpable energy coming from the altar and its half-burned candles. Or maybe it's just Eris and the ghosts of the men she's killed. I walk out of the closet, and for some reason my brain conjures up the image of her wearing that black, lacy bra from earlier, the exaggerated padding compensating for her nonexistent cleavage.

I almost slap myself to stop thinking about it. Being in her room is suffocating, her essence concentrated in such a confined space, reeking of her perfume.

We return to her art studio and start sketching out ideas. I don't expect it to take two hours, but it proves to be a much more elaborate process than the first time. We're sitting on the ground, swapping papers back and forth, going over one another's lines. Eris brings in her little Virgin Mary prayer sheets as references, and we pull up more images of Santa Muerte on her expensive MacBook. For once, we don't argue, focusing only on the vision. I calculate ratios in my head and measure out the triangles on the canvas, which she finds ridiculous.

Finally, we prepare to paint. She prefers oil while I've always been fond of acrylic, and, like last time, we choose the latter so we don't have to wait ages for it to dry. We decide she'll paint the corpse of the Virgin Mary and I'll paint Santa Muerte, since she has more experience with realistic portraits than I do.

The background is a close-up of the desert landscape of our first painting—a dilapidated, middle-of-nowhere town, contrasting sharply against the jewels crowning the saint.

"It's like how you get all these beautiful, expensive churches in towns where people are poor and suffering," Eris says. And since I essentially erased all her work in the first round, she demands to do the background herself. 

"I'll finish it tonight," she says. "Bodyguards can take you home, and we'll start the real painting tomorrow."

I stand up, glancing at the forgeries splayed out throughout the room.

"Copy one of mine," I say impulsively. "The one I did for the last competition. Spring in Ottawa."

She looks up from the canvas. "...are you sure?"

"I'm challenging you."

There are so many ratios and calculations I doubt she could get it perfect. No offense to Marie, but my paintings are far more technically advanced than hers. Eris will need measurements, rulers, compasses. In this entire room there is nothing that comes even lightyears close to what I paint.

Eris looks me up and down. God, I hate when she does that. Like she's sizing me up, judging me from head to toe.

"And what do I get in return?" she asks.

"I'll try to be nicer to you while we're painting together."

"I don't know, you've behaved yourself pretty good today."

"Behaved myself?" I scoff. "What am I, a dog?"

"Nah, but you're still my bitch."

"Eris!"

She bursts into obnoxious laughter. "Bro, I had to. You walked right into that one."

I want to strangle her. She looks so pleased with her idiotic joke.

"Are you doing it or not, then?" I snap.

"Copying your painting? Sure. Just have the bodyguards bring it back. Give me five to ten business days, and you'll finally see that I'm just as much of a genius as you."

She says the word genius mockingly, like it's the last word she would associate with me. And that painting took me a month, not ten measly days.

"Deal," I say. "I can't wait to see you fail."

"Aight. Bye, pendeja. Actually, wait. Let me take you downstairs."

▴ ▴ ▴

I don't tell my father a word about what happened last Friday. He doesn't pry too much, especially since he's now gone all day and busy with his new job—a high school art teacher. It won't pay millions, but the relief of finally having another income in this household is so profound I end up finally relaxing enough to take a nap in the afternoon, exhausted from all the nights worrying about money and Eris and criminals and the competition.

But I do tell Fitz.

"Damn," he says. "Wish I could witness somethin' interesting like that."

"You mean listen to a guy get his fingers chopped off?" I ask.

"Doesn't need to be that. But you lived out a scene from an action movie. Sick."

I roll my eyes. He's such a teenage boy. Even with what I've told him and William's stories about what happens over in Tijuana, Fitz is unphased. We're a family known for our stoicism, but he takes it to another level, acting like life is a video game.

The next day, I meet up with Eris after school. And again, she offers to stop at a vegan restaurant to eat. I don't mind the food, and we pay more attention to our phones than one another, but it almost feels like we're "hanging out". Gross.

But finally, we resume our work. She's actually done a decent job with the background. I separate the triangles fragmenting the saint with thin lines of tape we'll peel and paint gold later. And unlike last time, we opt to work simultaneously. It feels so antithetical to the act of painting, two artists with completely different minds sharing a canvas. With a bigger space to work on—the competition rules have us increase the dimensions of our work for every round—we're not too cramped for space, but our elbows still bump against one another's far too many times.

More than once, she stops to watch my slow, methodical movements. I don't use too many layers, making each one perfect, while she just slaps paint on top of each other with large strokes until the shapes come together and she fine-tunes the detail. I fine-tune from the beginning, measuring lines and cross-referencing an image of skeletal anatomy to get the bones perfect.

"You're so slow," she complains.

I pause. She's been classically trained whereas I've only learned from sporadic lessons over the years and my self-taught father. But any technical knowledge she possesses—or speed—doesn't come close to what I have in raw talent.

"And you're a mess," I say, even though her parts of her painting, I hate to admit, look decent already, and she's progressed at twice the rate I have.

"You're so tense," she continues. "You hold the brush like a surgeon holding a scalpel. Here."

I flinch when she grabs my hand. Slowly, she unfurls my fingers from my tight grip around the brush and adjusts them in a way that feels foreign and loose and wrong.

"Try that," she says. But I'm still fixated on the fact she touched me, not to shove or push, which has been the extent of our physical contact for years, but for such a minuscule, non-aggressive movement. It's sickening. It makes my face unbearably warm. 

Slowly, I put the brush to canvas and resume filling in the red jewels on the skeleton saint's veil.

Eris grabs my arm. "Less wrist, more shoulder."

But the shock of her touching me again makes me jolt, painting a line of red across the painting—red that was meant for only the jewels on my side and the blood on hers, red that is now streaked onto the background.

I stare at the line until it grows and covers every corner of my vision. I blink. Everything returns to normal, the red angry and pulsating against everything we've painted so far. The tension Eris tried to guide out of my body returns to harden all of me to stone.

This is what happens when you lose focus, I think. This is what happens when you don't maintain control.

It looks so much like blood.

Blood. Blood on the windows, dripping from her head onto the car ceiling, drip drip drip, the only sound grating against the thread of consciousness I still had, the only sound until she realized what had happened to he baby.

Blood coating plastic bag with severed fingers. Two years ago, blood from my punch to Eris' nose, trailing down to graze her lips.

I jerk back. My paintbrush clatters to the floor, droplets dotting the wood.

"Ef?" Eris asks. "You okay?"

"I ruined it," I whisper. "You ruined it."

She stares at the red line. "It's fine. I'll wipe it off and cover it up."

I'm no longer in my body. If I had a soul it would be somewhere in the stratosphere, watching the present moment unfold from a high-altitude screen. Eris wipes off the excess paint, waits a minute for it to dry, and covers it in white. She then replicates the exact colors of the background she used before, camouflaging the mistake. But the shadow of red peeking out beneath the beige is still there.

I think of punching a hole through the canvas. I think of throwing it out the window. I think of finding scissors and chopping it up into dozens of small pieces until I don't have to look at it anymore.

Eris places her hands on my shoulders, halting my train of thought. Not aggressive, but firm as she holds me back. The red line leaps off the canvas from underneath all the layers of paint and digs around in my chest.

"Be forreal, are you okay?" she asks. She's wearing golden, dangly earrings in the shape of small bullets. I wonder if they're real. If a teacher notices them at school, she'll get written up for dress code.

The more I stare at the painting, the more it mocks me, and the more I want to dig my fingernails into the canvas and see if it tears through.

Eris' hands move from my shoulders, down my arms, down down down to wrap around my wrists. My guts start doing cartwheels inside of me, but nausea is the last thing I feel.

"Let me go," I demand, trying to wrench myself free from her grip, but she grabs me tighter, pulls herself closer. I should spit on her face, bite her arm so she lets go. This is crossing so many lines, and my nervous system doesn't know what to do with the onslaught of adrenaline as I sputter out, "Stop touching me!"

She shakes her head. "What's wrong with you?"

"It's ruined."

"I fixed it, Ef. It's fine. Only you and me will know it's even there."

"It isn't," I breathe. "I need to—let me go."

Instead, she pushes me until I fall on my back and the bitch literally climbs on top of me, straddling my hips, pinning me down with her twig legs while she holds my wrists in a death grip above my head. The red smudge digs into my heart and strokes it with the saint's bloody red hands.

"You're not ruining our painting," she says, hovering over me. "No way in hell I'm letting you."

"I... what... how..." My skin is burning hotter than the California sun. The only time she's been on me like this was during our fight two years ago when she threatened to stab me, and it took days for the adrenaline to leave my system. I'd forced myself to forget the uncanny, unacceptable, consuming feeling of her this close. I don't remember it being like this with her brother, my usual stoicism shattered as I'm reduced to an anxious wreck, my guts doing so many flips I fear they'll never unwind again.

"How," I finally say through gritted teeth, "do you know I wanted to ruin it?"

She squeezes my wrists. "I can read you better than the pinche Bible, Ef."

She can't weigh more than 110 pounds—why does she feel so heavy? She must be trained in a martial art of some sort, the way she can pin me down and entwine her legs with mine so I can't move. Her hands are warm. I can't tell if it's her pulse or mine I feel as she cuts off my circulation.

"We need to start over," I mutter helplessly.

"Do you always start over when you make a tiny mistake?"

After avoiding her gaze for the last minute, I finally look up. She stares down at me. Her unappealing raccoon face reminds me of all the reasons I can't stand her, the unquestionable reality that until Friday, all she's ever been to me is a piece of chewed gum under my shoe. Am I really letting her get to me? Am I really letting her be the one who makes me squirm?

"I don't make mistakes," I declare. "This is your fault."

"Let's just call it a day, yeah?"

This is too much. Too much Eris for one day, for one hour, for one minute. I'm about to be sick with Eris poisoning. I need fresh air; I need to stare at a face that isn't hers, her smudged eyeliner that brings out the poop brown of her stupid, stupid eyes. My heart is pounding faster then Friday when she pulled out the gun. Faster than when I was forced to listen to Javier's cries.

I need to get out of here. I spot my painting, Spring in Ottawa, propped against a wall, sticking out sharply against the rest. Knowing her, she'll probably procrastinate for weeks before getting around to the copy.

"I won't ruin our painting," I say. "If I do, you have my permission to ruin mine. Now get off me."

Finally, she does. The revulsion hits me far too late. All this depraved bitch wanted was a chance to dominate me, to overpower me, to make me small. To show me that I'm in her territory, and she's stronger than I gave her credit for, even without her little golden killing toys.

"Don't ever do that again," I say, getting up.

She stands, and I bet she wishes she were taller so she could stare down at me. But no, the only time she can appear intimidating is when she's pinning me down like a creep.

"Don't make me have to restrain you again," she says. "I know what you were going to do. Didn't expect to make you so nervous, though."

"You make me ill."

Her lips, which she never puts lipstick on, leaving them bare and peeling from how much she bites them, turn up in a sly smile. "You're not used to people touching you, huh. You're definitely a virgin, but be honest, have you ever even been kissed?"

Yeah, by her brother...

"That's really none of your business, Eris."

"So pure and innocent," she drawls. "You'd make such a perfect Catholic girl, saving herself for marriage."

"Marriage?" I scoff. "In that case, I'd rather be a nun."

She laughs, light and airy, and it cuts through some of the searing tension. "You'd rather be a nun than marry a dude? You sure you're not a lesbian?"

"Positive," I breathe, then realize my voice is far too soft for her to hear. I'm out of breath without having taken more than five steps, my skin still hot. Finally, I clear my throat. "I, um, I'm sure."

▴ ▴ ▴

a/n: 14 chapters in and things are finally heating up a little bit 🤭 do let me know what you think, and thank you to Wattpad for featuring this book in their Latino and Hispanic writers list!!

what do you think it's gonna take for persephone to admit she's not straight?? 👀🤧