The Mirror Season by Anna-Marie McLemore

Author:Anna-Marie McLemore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends

Pansexuality and Pan Dulce

“You might want to rethink this,” Lock says, taking in the metal counters and pallets of flour in the pastelería kitchen. “I once set a stack of coffee filters on fire trying to sauté something. I didn’t even know what sauté meant, I just heard it on TV and I really wanted to try it. Trust me, you do not want to teach me.”

“I like a challenge.” I hand him a hairnet and gloves.

“Okay.” He puts both on without comment. “But I warned you.”

“Wow,” I say.

“What?” he asks.

“You’re pretty secure in your masculinity.”

“Thanks?”

“I mean it. Most guys aren’t man enough to put on a hairnet.”

“My mom used to work in a school cafeteria.” He stands next to me at the metal counter. “I take food safety pretty seriously.”

Before knowing Lock, I had no idea it was possible to look this earnest and this cocky at the same time.

I pick the most proofed of the base doughs, show him how to shape it into rounds.

“How are you not babysitting right now?” I say.

“What do you mean?” he asks.

“I mean”—I hand him a stainless steel cutter—“you have a little sister, and you’re not on a sibling-watching shift. I had to look after my younger primos all the time, and they’re not even my brothers and sisters.”

“She’s with her grandparents.” He makes even cuts to divide the dough, a perfect copy of the first balls I made. So far, so good. No coffee filters bursting into flames. “One of the few convenient things about us moving here. We’re a lot closer to them.”

“They live around here?” I ask.

“About a half hour, forty-five minutes.” He keeps looking at the rounds I made, trying to copy them. “They love her, so they do the drive a lot.”

“That’s nice of them,” I say.

He pushes on the sides of one round. “Yeah.”

I look up from the one I’m shaping. “That was a loaded yeah.”

He sighs. “Yeah.”

I stare at him until he buckles.

“Violet’s grandparents don’t really like my mom and me,” he says. “They”—he hesitates—“kind of think my stepdad married beneath him.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah,” he says. “At Christmas, you can almost hear how hard they’re working to tolerate us. So I think they like getting Violet away from soap operas and Velveeta.”

“That’s the big bad influence they’re so afraid of?” I ask.

“Well, hearing how my mom named me didn’t help.”

“How did she name you?” I ask, going back to shaping another round.

“She named me Lock because everyone was giving her a hard time for getting pregnant and not being married.”

I stop. “What?”

“I told you this.” He squints at me. “I know I told you this.”

“You definitely didn’t. What does her not being married have to do with your name?”

He laughs, more to himself than me. “They really liked using the phrase ‘out of wedlock’ so this was kind of her screw-you.”

“Out of wedlock?” I ask. “When were you born, 1910?”

“It kind of seemed like it sometimes.”

I finish shaping one of the rounds. “For whatever it’s worth, Violet clearly adores you.

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