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The last thing Camilo’s gift did before it stopped working was to cycle him, too fast for comfort, through a succession of his favourite shapes. By the time it stopped and the whole family was lying on the grass outside a pile of rubble that used to be Casita, he’d lost track of who he looked like. The last thing he expected was Mami’s weirdly delighted scream of “Bruno?!”
What? Camilo’s missing uncle was here? With his eyes shut against the dust that was still settling, Camilo stood up. And up. And up. When he opened his eyes, everything looked green.
“Camilo,” said Abuela with impressive dignity, considering. “Please tell us why you look like that.”
After looking down (and down, and down) and suppressing some words Abuela wouldn’t like to hear, Camilo improvised a bullshit story about a play that some of the town kids were putting on, where the villain was only inspired by, wasn’t supposed to actually be Bruno or anything, but he might have ended up subconsciously looking a bit too close, oops! The subconscious, always a tricky son of a … something, right? Long gangly shrug.
At the back of his audience, Dolores was in muffled gales of laughter.
“Can you at least turn off the glowing eyes?” Tío Agustín asked.
Camilo concentrated, and found he could. He could also turn them back on. But otherwise he was stuck.
The glowing eyes came in useful when he helped look for Mirabel. He paired up with Luisa, partly because she could loom off-puttingly at anyone who tried to have too much fun at his expense, but mostly because she made his height look less startling. With his long stride matching hers, they covered a lot of ground that night.
Mirabel came back in the morning with Abuela and a random guy who stayed with the horse they’d all ridden in on. While Mirabel was hugging her parents, Abuela homed in on Camilo.
“I have an important matter to attend to and I can’t have you looking like that. I need you to hide for an hour or two.”
So Camilo climbed a tree. The long limbs were good at climbing, but the enormous ruana (down to his knees, why?!) tended to get in the way. Soon bored with sitting up there, he examined his hands, trying to decide if they were really green or if it was just the sunlight that filtered through the leaves and played on skin that looked, at best, the colour of raw mushroom caps.
Mami and Tía Julieta were hugging the horse guy. Weird.
The horse guy was dressed a lot like Camilo, down to the length of his ruana. But no-one was going to mix them up, because he was shorter than Tía Julieta, walked like he wished he was invisible, and had a nervous laugh that came out around the edges of everything he said. And he talked a lot. Camilo couldn’t make out words from over here, but he kept watching, making mental notes on the man’s body language so he could shift into him when he got his gift back. Because he would, sooner or later, right? The alternative didn’t bear thinking about.
Then loads of people from town started showing up. They spread out among the rubble, helping Camilo’s family sort through it. Camilo got a guilty itch like he ought to be helping with that, even though no-one had asked him to. Did hide for an hour or two mean he was meant to await Abuela’s signal or not? At least he had an excuse either way.
But he needed to pee, so he climbed down, did his business in a secluded spot, and was heading back to his tree when he spotted the horse guy, crouching behind a bush that wasn’t leafy enough to hide him properly. Since they’d already made eye contact, Camilo waved.
The horse guy stood up. “H-hey, Camilo,” he said, with a quick, toothy grin.
How annoying was that? Abuela had told Camilo to hide, which he’d thought was to save him from embarrassment, but then the family had ratted him out (rats along his back, haha) to a complete stranger! By name, even! Because they thought it was funny! Camilo liked being laughed at, but it had to be for the right reasons. He regretted the wave. It was too friendly. He struck a menacing Bruno pose instead.
“I am not Camilo,” he said, low and threatening. “I am Bruno Madrigal, the prophet of doom! You better run away before I look into your future, little man, or I will see such things as would freeze your blood and turn your brains to molten lead! For once I see something, nothing can stop it coming to pass!” He did the tarantula hands for good measure.
The horse guy flinched when Camilo started this speech. Then his eyes went very round. Then his lips curled inward and pressed together, his scruffily bearded jaw began to tremble, and by the time Camilo finished talking he was practically bent double with laughter. But, here was the weird thing, he didn’t seem to mind that he looked like he was laughing. He was only trying to suppress the noise. Whoever he was trying to hide his reaction from, it wasn’t Camilo.
Except that when he finally wound down, he said, “Uh, sorry, sorry. I forgot you could see me.”
“Don’t tell me,” Camilo said. “Your gift used to be invisibility. You were so good at it, the rest of us didn’t even know you were there.” It was a variation on a routine he often used with kids: pretending he thought the kid was a Madrigal and talking about their gift. It had never failed to get a laugh.
Until now. The horse guy’s eyes went even wider. He opened and closed his mouth a couple of times. Then he said soberly, “Did Dolores tell you?”
What.
“I mean, I’ll tell the family soon, I guess. I just haven’t figured out how yet. But there’s already been some questioning, like, ‘What’s it like outside the Encanto? Tell us about your adventures!’ and I’m kind of, ‘Uh, later, okay?’ I mean, I have seen some things about the world out there, but y’know, they were green all over and probably still haven’t happened yet, and I’m always missing the context, so, not very helpful, heh. Plus, none of them had me in them, well, of course not, it’s not like I’ve actually been flying in an avianca or anything … I don’t know what those things are really called, I just go by what’s written on ’em. Dunno how big they are either, but I’m pretty sure you couldn’t fit one inside the walls. Shame, really. It was pretty monotonous in there, even though I could listen in on you guys a lot better than when I lived in my tower. Oh, speaking of which! I heard what you told Mirabel about me yesterday. I mean, better clear the air about that, right? I don’t want you to feel bad. It was actually pretty funny. And looking on the bright side, you got some of it right! But, uh, for the record, only one thing.”
He clicked his tongue twice. Camilo didn’t quite follow what happened next, but after a moment there was a rat sitting on the palm of the horse guy’s hand, gazing at him with its front paws in the air and its nose twitching.
“This is Vesta,” he said. pointing with his other hand and grinning proudly. “Isn’t she beautiful? Good sense of humour too. She’s a natural comedian, and uh, I think she’s one of the most musical ones. She runs away when I sing out of tune, but when Agustín plays the piano, she can’t get enough of it. Great taste, that rat.”
Camilo’s brain quietly dropped out of his head, hiked through the new gap in the mountains, and flew away in an avianca.
This guy …
This dorky little guy, whose ruana was fraying, whose trousers needed patching on both knees, who grinned with too many teeth and never stopped twitching or gesturing when he talked …
This guy who’d apparently been living inside their walls …
This guy was …
No way.
“If it makes you feel better,” said Tío Bruno, “that thing about ‘Nothing can stop it coming to pass’? That’s true, as far as I know. I mean, not all of them have come to pass yet, but hey, pretty good track record, right? And I’ve definitely had some visions where some of the family were using their gifts, that haven’t come true yet. So I don’t think you’re gonna be stuck like that for ever. See? Mirabel’s right! My gift is good for something!”
“Ooookay,” said Camilo, wondering who had been the first person to think of portraying this smushed polvorosa of a man as a villain, and whether they’d been laughed out of town. “Any idea how long it’s likely to take? Like, do I have to go to school like this?”
“Well, it would explain that vision I had of me in a classroom …”