“Why aren’t you out looking with them? With the other brujos?” Julian asked. He was back in the chair, knees bouncing.
“Well, they won’t let me,” Yadriel said, pushing a box of old clothes out of his way.
Julian spun himself in a circle. “Why?”
“Because they don’t think I’m a real brujo.”
He spun himself faster. “Why?”
Yadriel was glad Julian couldn’t see his face. His cheeks burned hot.
“Because I’m trans.”
Julian planted his feet and came to an abrupt stop, swaying slightly in the chair. “Oh.” He paused. Blinked. “Ohhh.”
Yadriel’s hand finally closed around the slick material of his sleeping bag and he yanked it out. He hugged it to his chest and faced Julian, waiting for some kind of judgment. Maybe laughter.
Instead, Julian frowned at Yadriel, his lip curled in an annoyed sort of way. “That sucks, dude.”
The words were matter-of-fact. Straight to the point. Holding no pretense.
Yadriel hadn’t expected it. He exhaled, shoulders slumping. “It does,” he agreed. “It sucks a lot.” He spent so much time holding his tongue and only having Maritza to vent to, it felt nice to just say it out loud to someone else. “Since they don’t think I’m a real boy, they wouldn’t give me my own portaje or let me have the brujo’s quinces—”
Julian scowled. “The fuck?”
“Right?” Yadriel huffed. “They’re so stuck in their ways and traditions, they wouldn’t even let me try.” He undid the sleeping bag and shook it out with a snap. “So, Maritza made me a portaje and I did the binding ceremony myself.”
Julian grinned approvingly. “Badass.”
Yadriel found himself smiling back. He hadn’t really had the time to process everything that had happened, what with Miguel dying as soon as he’d completed the ritual. It was badass, even if he was going against his dad and the other brujx.
“So I’m gonna help you find your friends,” Yadriel went on, laying the sleeping bag out on the floor. “And you’re gonna help me by letting me release you to the afterlife, then they’ll have to accept that I’m a brujo.” He sat down on the edge of the bed and leaned his elbows on his knees. “On the second night of Día de Muertos, we have an aquelarre where the brujx who had their quinces that year are presented. This year, they’re going to have to let me be part of it,” Yadriel said with fierce determination.
Julian’s expression was suddenly pinched. “Back up a sec—are you trying to prove to them that you’re a brujo, or that you’re a boy?”
The bluntness of the question caught Yadriel off guard. It took some of the wind out of his self-satisfied sails. “It’s the same thing,” he said, prickling with annoyance.
“’Cause, if it’s to prove you’re a brujo, didn’t summoning me already do that?” Julian asked.
Yadriel huffed a laugh. “You just don’t get how it works,” he said, crossing his arms. “That’s not enough.”
“Not enough for who, though?” Julian questioned. He wasn’t being pushy about it, not on purpose, anyway. He just seemed curious, which only irritated Yadriel further. “Not enough for them, or not enough for you?”
Yadriel froze. The question stuck in his chest. “It’s the same thing,” he repeated, but was it? Yadriel shook his head. He was tired, and Julian’s incessant questions were just confusing him.
“You just don’t get it because you’re not one of us,” he insisted. “Here.” He tossed Julian a pillow from his bed.
Julian easily caught it out of the air. “Hey!” He flashed his teeth in a triumphant smile, giving the pillow a shake. “I caught it!”
Yadriel threw himself onto his bed. “Good job. Now go to sleep. I have to get up for school in”—he checked his phone and groaned—“three hours.”
SIX
Yadriel went into the bathroom to change out of his clothes and binder and into an oversize sleep shirt and pajama pants. When he got back to his room, he awkwardly dove under the covers of his bed. He didn’t like being seen without his binder on, and that was especially true with Julian.
Luckily, Julian seemed unfazed, or, at the very least, uninterested.
“Do ghosts even sleep?” he asked, lounging comfortably on the floor with his hands tucked behind his head.
“I have no idea,” Yadriel said, pulling his blankets up to his chin.
Julian refused to settle down. As Yadriel stared up at his ceiling in the pitch-black room, Julian’s sighs and huffs floated from the floor. They were quickly followed up by the most asinine questions Yadriel ever had to endure at three in the morning.
“If you turned into a ghost, where would you wanna haunt?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m pretty sure the Jack in the Box on Whittier is haunted.”
“Mm.”
“One time, we were chillin’ in the parking lot, and there was definitely some haunted-ghosts stuff happening in the dumpster.”
“Mhmm.”
“But it turned out to just be a raccoon.”
“Cool.”
“It almost bit me.”
“Wow.”
“Damn, when’s the last time you cleaned under your bed?”
And on and on it went. When Yadriel refused to respond, Julian just went on talking to himself. Yadriel didn’t know it was possible for someone to have so little filter between their brain and their mouth. When Julian spoke, it was a constant stream of consciousness.
Even in the wee hours of the morning, Yadriel knew sleep wouldn’t come easy. His relationship with it was always tenuous at best. The events of the night buzzed through him restlessly.
In the span of a few hours, he’d gotten his own portaje and been blessed by Lady Death with the powers of the brujo. And he was still worried about Miguel. The grief of losing his cousin didn’t feel real yet. On top of all that, he’d summoned a spirit and was now harboring a dead boy in his room.
Yadriel didn’t manage to fall asleep until he put a pillow over his head with Julian’s muffled voice wondering whether ghosts got wet when it rained. A couple of times, rummaging sounds nearly pulled Yadriel back to consciousness, but then he always slipped back under.
When his alarm went off in the morning, Yadriel groaned into his arm. He felt even more exhausted than before he’d fallen asleep. He rolled over, hand blindly reaching to hit snooze on his phone. With effort, he forced his bleary eyes open.
To find a black pair staring back at him.
Yadriel thrashed and scrambled back, hitting the back of his head on the edge of the window. In his panic, he’d accidentally kicked Purrcaso off the foot of the bed. As his alarm continued to blare, Purrcaso cried from the floor.
“FINALLY!” Julian burst out, annoyed but smiling as he leaped to his feet. “I’ve been—dude, stop screaming—I’ve been waiting for FOREVER!”
Yadriel’s heartbeat hammered painfully in his chest, unable to comprehend anything Julian was saying. He snatched his phone and killed the alarm. Purrcaso stopped her indignant meowing and sat on the dresser, cleaning her paw. Yadriel squeezed his eyes shut, willing the throbbing in his head to stop.
He strained to listen for any signs from his family, wondering if someone had heard his shout, but there was only the distant bumping of his abuelita’s Tejano music from the kitchen.
“Are you even listening to me?” Julian demanded.
“No.” Yadriel squinted an eye open to look up at him. In his sleepy daze, it took a moment for Yadriel to remember he was a spirit. Standing there in the middle of his room, arms crossed and frowning, Julian looked very real and alive. But then Yadriel blinked, refocusing his vision enough to spot the telltale signs: blurry edges and the cool draft in the air around him.
“I said, I’ve been practicing!” Julian huffed. The amount of energy he had this early in the morning was obscene.
Yadriel sat upright, pushing back the mass of dark hair that had flopped into his eyes. “Practicing?” he croaked.
Julian’s scowl was quickly replaced with a sharp smile.
He swung back and forth between his emotions so quickly, Yadriel was bound to get whiplash.
“Look!” Falling into the chair, Julian hunched over the desk and pinched his fingers around a crumpled-up ball of paper. It was one of Yadriel’s failed attempts at math homework from the day before.
“Look, look, look!” Face screwed up in concentration, slowly, he lifted the ball of paper. Julian turned to Yadriel, a triumphant grin splitting his face. “See?”
Julian’s eyes burned with wild energy. Yadriel was starting to think it was less up-all-night delirium and more just, well, Julian.
“Good job,” Yadriel grumbled, sitting up and rubbing at his temples, warding off a headache.
The ball of paper dropped back to the desk. Julian scowled. “I worked on that all night, man!”
“What? I said, ‘good job,’” Yadriel replied, thumbing through the notifications on his phone to make sure he hadn’t gotten any important messages. Nothing about Miguel. Worry dug into his headache. Had they really not found him yet?