Three Sides of a Heart Read online

  DEDICATION

  For my brother, A. Cajiuat Posadas,

  who left beautiful stories in his wake

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Dear Reader

  Natalie C. Parker

  Riddles in Mathematics

  Katie Cotugno

  Dread South

  Justina Ireland

  Omega Ship

  Rae Carson

  La Revancha del Tango

  Renée Ahdieh

  Cass, An, and Dra

  Natalie C. Parker

  Lessons for Beginners

  Julie Murphy

  Triangle Solo

  Garth Nix

  Vim and Vigor

  Veronica Roth

  Work In Progress

  E. K. Johnston

  Hurdles

  Brandy Colbert

  The Historian, the Garrison, and the Cantankerous Cat Woman

  Lamar Giles

  Waiting

  Sabaa Tahir

  Vega

  Brenna Yovanoff

  A Hundred Thousand Threads

  Alaya Dawn Johnson

  Before She Was Bloody

  Tessa Gratton

  Unus, Duo, Tres

  Bethany Hagen

  Back Ad

  About the Authors

  About the Editor

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  DEAR READER

  The love triangle. The only topic more likely to spark a disagreement over Thanksgiving dinner is politics.

  Whether your first encounter with the love triangle was Olivia/Viola/Orsino in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, or Heathcliff/Cathy/Edgar in Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, or James Potter/Lily Potter/Severus Snape in Rowling’s Harry Potter series, it’s unlikely you emerged from the experience emotionally unscathed. Perhaps you lost your heart out on the moors of England, or secretly wished the cards fell in Olivia’s favor. Or perhaps you started a petition to end any and all fictional romantic entanglements involving more than two people. Love triangles can be enticingly sexy, deeply divisive, or occasionally hilarious, and the trope isn’t limited to the romance genre. It appears in all kinds of fiction, from space adventures to boarding school dramas.

  Young adult fiction is no exception and has become ground zero for love triangles guaranteed to cause arguments, memes, and tears alike. But within YA the trope is criticized for creating unrealistic expectations for readers, for falling into formulaic patterns, and for weakening otherwise strong female protagonists. In the wake of The Vampire Diaries, Twilight, and The Hunger Games, young adult fiction saw an abundance of the classic love triangle—one girl choosing between two boys who in some way represent different versions of the person she wants to become.

  But within these pages are sixteen reimaginings of the love triangle. Some toy with the traditional, others depart dramatically, but all are an examination of what this trope has to offer. The triangles that follow challenge and interrogate the classic; they are political and inclusive and representative of every genre. Through the lens of romance, these stories pose questions about self-determination and what it means to embrace the power of choice.

  It has been a pleasure and an adventure working with the authors on this collection, and it is an honor to introduce sixteen new faces of the love triangle. I hope that in them, you find something familiar, something new, and something unexpected.

  Riddles in Mathematics

  KATIE COTUGNO

  “All right,” Steven says grandly. “You walk into a room with a kerosene lamp, a candle, and a fireplace. What do you light first?”

  I watch Taylor think about it. She’s lying on the couch in my parents’ living room, her feet up in Steven’s lap. Her socks have Nordic-style reindeer prancing across the ankles. “A match,” she says finally, triumphant.

  My brother frowns. “How did you know that one?”

  Taylor shrugs. “Child’s play,” she says, then grins at me. “Right, Ro?”

  “Right,” I agree. I’m sitting cross-legged on the carpet next to the coffee table. It’s Christmas Eve, so our house is full of people: my grandparents in the dining room, my little cousins running up and down the stairs, Dean Martin crooning on the stereo about a marshmallow world. My mom’s collection of ceramic Christmas trees is clustered on the side table, their tiny colored lights winking away.

  “Try this one, then, smarty,” Steven tells Taylor, and I get up and go into the kitchen before he can finish. Taylor’s mom and our mom were the only two pregnant women on our block in 1997, meaning my brother and Taylor have been best friends since they were zygotes. There’s a picture of them on the bookshelf in our family room, three years old in their bathing suits, holding hands.

  Back in the kitchen, my mom is finishing the seven fishes, which is actually five fishes because she already put out shrimp cocktail and clams casino as appetizers. She is nothing if not efficient. “Do you need help?” I ask, and she looks surprised I’m offering, which makes me feel a little crummy.

  “I’m set,” she says, pushing her dark bobbed hair out of her eyes with her forearm. “Go tell everybody to come sit down.”

  I pass the message on in the dining room and out in the backyard, where my namesake, Auntie Rowena, is smoking a cigarette on the deck. She lets me have a drag and tells me she loves me—something everyone in my family has been doing lately, like I’ve got cancer or I’m dying, or maybe just like I’ve suddenly got a reason to doubt my own lovability. Grandma Cynthia keeps glancing at my shorn head like it’s done her harm.

  I double back to the living room, where Taylor and Steven have their heads tipped close together; they’ve never dated, supposedly, although they went to every formal together freshman and sophomore year. Junior year Taylor had a real boyfriend, and it made Steven so totally unbearable that when Taylor finally dumped the guy I would have been ecstatic even if I hadn’t hated the idea of him almost as much as my brother did.

  “Time for food,” I say, glancing at Taylor again. She’s wearing dark jeans and a fuzzy cardigan, her hair long and a little frizzy. In the light from the candles on the table, her skin seems to glow. All through middle school I thought I wanted to be her, look like her, and dress like her, which, as it turns out, was not what I wanted at all.

  “All right,” my mom calls, carrying a giant pan full of spaghetti out into the dining room. “Everybody ready?”

  Christmas Day is always kind of anticlimactic in our house, just the four of us instead of last night’s parade of one thousand family members. In the afternoon Steven goes to Taylor’s and I hang out watching a Hitchcock marathon on the classic movie channel, my mom perched like a swallow in the armchair across the living room. My dad comes in and settles beside me, the worn leather couch dipping under his weight. “You have a good Christmas?” he asks, putting a bearlike arm around me. “You like your presents?”

  I nod. I did too, buttery brown leather hiking boots like Steven’s that I know my mom picked out specially, plus a sterling silver key ring with my initials engraved on it. “For car keys,” my mom explained apologetically when I opened the little box, and everyone grimaced. Three days ago I failed my road test. I couldn’t manage the parallel park.

  North by Northwest is on now, which is my dad’s favorite. He’s the movie buff in our family, but my mom’s the one who got me into costuming, who taught me all about Edith Head and Irene Sharaff. I’ve always loved clothes. The two of us used to go shopping together constantly, back when I still dressed to copy Taylor. Every year on my birthday we’d take Metro North into the city and go look at the costume exhibit at the Met.

  “Do you still want to go?” she asked this y
ear, a worried-looking furrow between her eyebrows. “Even though . . . ?”

  For a second I thought she meant even though I was going to be sixteen and maybe I was too old for it, but then I realized she meant “Even though you’re gay now,” like she thought that meant I wouldn’t like costumes anymore, and just like that I didn’t want to do anything with her at all. “No,” I deadpanned, “I want to go to a Giants game,” and she actually nodded earnestly before she realized I was making fun of her.

  “Really, Ro,” she said, frowning, but then my birthday came and went and we had a cake and all, but neither one of us has brought up the museum since then.

  “You okay, Squish?” my dad asks me now, squeezing my shoulders a little. I lean into the bulk of him, looking at the tree. I waited until my parents had been back together for almost six months before I came out last summer, and even then I was kind of afraid it was going to somehow break them up again. I told my mom first, had her parrot it back to my dad for me after I was in bed that night; afterward he came into my room and turned on the desk light, crouched down next to my bed. “I wish you’d told me,” he said quietly. “I’m so sorry if I made you feel like you couldn’t.”

  Now I tilt my head onto his shoulder, look back at the TV. “Yup,” I say, rubbing the side of my face against the sleeve of his sweatshirt. “I’m good.”

  Play rehearsals start again at noon on the day after Christmas, so I jam one of Steven’s hats on my head and schlep over to school through the snowdrifts. I started borrowing his clothes way before I chopped off all my hair, his big Patagonia sweatshirts and his skinny boy-band jeans, his T-shirts that were somehow always cooler than mine. We’re nearly the same height, me and Steven, all long bones and noses and hooded eyes. My mom loved it at the time, even buying me my own stash of chinos and stripy boy sweaters. “It’s adorable,” she said back then. She did the same thing when she was my age, I know from family photos, decking herself out in overalls and big seventies glasses. “It’s such a look.” She finds it less adorable now, although of course she wouldn’t say that. Instead she just frowns.

  Rehearsals the day after Christmas is extreme, even for our school: Thomas Jefferson High puts on three shows a year instead of two, but only the most serious theater dweebs do the middle one because it goes up in January, which means coming in over break. I’ve never cared. My best friend, Danielle, goes to Pompano Beach every Christmas to visit her grandma, so it’s not like I’d be doing much anyway. This year she tried to convince me to come with her, like she was especially worried about leaving me on my own.

  By the time I get to school I’m sweating inside my puffy coat, but my hands and feet are frozen. I yank off my gloves with my teeth and dig my keys out of my backpack. Normally juniors don’t get a key to the costume shop, but there were no rising seniors last year, and so Mrs. Royce gave it to me. This year’s January show is Once Upon a Mattress; I can hear Donnie O’Neal singing in the auditorium about how he’s in love with a girl named Fred.

  Mariette Chen is waiting in the hallway outside the locked costume shop, sitting on the linoleum floor with her ankles crossed in front of her. “Hi, Ro,” she says, getting to her feet. Her hair hangs long and black and straight past her shoulders. She’s wearing leggings and boots that go up to her knees, like a Triple Crown jockey or one of the girls from the Pony Pals.

  “Hey,” I tell her, and smile. I always feel a little embarrassed in front of Mariette. Last year at the cast party for The Glass Menagerie we kissed a little, and after that she sent me a Facebook message wanting to know if I wanted to hang out, which I never answered because I am a piece of trash and also that was the same time Taylor broke up with her boyfriend and was over at our house every day for a week.

  “How was Christmas?” Mariette asks as I let us inside and flick on the lights. The costume shop is tiny, just two dinosaur sewing machines left over from home ec in the nineties and piles of whatever mismatched fabric Mrs. Royce can get on clearance at the craft store. A lot of times all we do in here is modify weird dresses or whatever that come from Forever 21 to try and make them look like they’re from colonial times or the Wild West, but every once in a while I get to make something really cool.

  “It was good,” I tell her. “How was yours?”

  Mariette smiles like she wasn’t expecting me to return the question, which makes me feel like a jerk. I like her, is the thing. I wouldn’t have kissed her if I didn’t. She’s just not—

  Anyway.

  “It was nice,” Mariette says, launching into a play-by-play of the fight her aunts all had over a Lord & Taylor gift card, and just like that, it isn’t awkward anymore. We hang out in the costume shop for the rest of the afternoon, sewing underskirts for the ladies-in-waiting, passing the measuring tape back and forth. I show her how to use the serger. After a while we dig the ancient school-issue boom box out from under a pile of cardboard crowns, but the only station coming through is local Lite FM. “Who listens to this stuff?” Mariette asks, laughing in disgust after the second Celine Dion song comes on.

  “My mom,” I say, even though it isn’t true. In reality she likes the Talking Heads and Patti Smith and Joy Division, has flawless post-punk taste.

  But Mariette smiles at that, shakes her head a little ruefully. “Yeah,” she says. “Mine too.”

  “Come on,” Taylor says later that night, appearing in the doorway of my bedroom and curling her delicate fingers around the jamb. I’m at my desk, supposedly writing an essay about social reformation movements in the 1850s but actually doodling trim designs for the edges of the queen’s red velvet gown in the margin of my notebook. “We’re going to Carvel.”

  My heart stutters in the second before I recover, before I realize that of course she means my brother is coming too. “It’s actively snowing,” I point out, nodding at the window above my bed.

  Taylor shrugs. “All the more reason to get milk shakes,” she tells me, coming into the room and peering over my shoulder. “That’s pretty,” she says, pointing at the trim design with one gold-painted fingernail.

  “Yeah?” I ask too earnestly, looking up at her. Her tangle of hair brushes my cheek.

  “Mm-hmm.” Taylor tips her head and smiles at me, all lip balm and one crooked incisor; then, like we both realize at once how close our faces suddenly are, she straightens up, and I look back at the computer.

  “Milk shakes,” I say too loudly, immediately worried I’ve freaked her out somehow. I click save on the computer and push my chair back. “Let’s do it.”

  Taylor’s car is a ten-year-old Jetta that smells a little like Play-Doh but mostly like the sprigs of dried lavender that dangle from the rearview mirror. “Who was sitting up here?” Steven asks as we climb inside, adjusting the passenger seat to make room for his long, spindly teenage-boy legs. He’s wearing the hat I borrowed earlier and of course it looks better on him, cooler in some ineffable Steven-ish way.

  Taylor rolls her eyes. “What are you, my dad?”

  “No,” he defends himself, still fussing. “I just take my seat very seriously.”

  “Oh, we know that about you,” Taylor says as I slide wordlessly into the back.

  “Okay,” she continues, switching to her riddle voice now and curling one hand around Steven’s headrest as she backs out of the driveway. “Paul is six feet tall, works as a butcher’s assistant, and wears size nine shoes. What does he weigh?”

  “Meat,” I say without thinking.

  Taylor grins at me over her shoulder. “Nice, Ro.”

  “She’s a ringer,” Steven agrees. I slump down in my seat all the way into town.

  It’s strangely warm inside Carvel, considering it’s an ice-cream shop in December, and we peel off our layers immediately, shedding scarves and gloves like molting lizards. Steven pulls his arms out of his unzipped parka and hangs it off his head by its hood like a little kid as he tries to convince Taylor that they should buy a Fudgie the Whale cake. The air smells like vanilla sugar. “S
ee?” Taylor says, waving me off when I try to hand her money. “Carvel is always a good idea.”

  She swings her arm around me as we head back out into the parking lot, a chocolate milk shake heavy in my hand. My whole body prickles through four different layers of wool, everything hot and cold at once.

  “You hanging in?” she asks, and I nod. I made Steven tell her for me after I came out to my family, not that he would have kept it a secret from her either way. She hugged me for an extra-long time the next time she saw me, and we haven’t said a word about it since.

  I’m not sick, I think about telling her. I’m just gay.

  “You guys hanging out here tonight?” I ask instead, as we’re driving back to my parents’. I’m working hard not to sound like I care one way or the other, but still I’m hit with a stab of disappointment when Steven shakes his head.

  “Nah,” he says. “Gonna head over to Henry’s and watch a movie—which is why,” he tells Taylor, “we should have gotten a Fudgie the Whale. We would have been fucking heroes.” Then, over his shoulder, “You’re on your own, Squish.”

  “Ro could come,” Taylor points out, glancing at me in the mirror. “Why don’t you come?”

  Because that would be pathetic, mostly. “Nah, I’m good,” I say, too brightly. I wish Danielle was back from the beach. “Thanks, though.”

  Back on our street, the Hudson kids three doors down are having a snowball fight by porch light, yesterday’s snowman slouching drunkenly to the side. “Night, Ro,” Taylor says as I’m climbing out of the backseat, her fingertips catching the edge of my sleeve as she waves over her shoulder. I watch the car until the taillights disappear.

  Later that night I’m watching a makeover show on the couch when there’s a clatter in the kitchen. For a second I think it’s thieves or murderers, but in reality it’s only Steven and Taylor—Taylor dragging Steven, actually, him stumbling with his arm slung over her shoulder. Taylor looks colossally annoyed. “What happened?” I ask, setting down my late-night bowl of Lucky Charms on the coffee table.