When the Moon was Ours

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  Now Miel’s body felt like soft, papery petals. She kissed him back, pushing him toward the stairs, him stumbling up them without turning around. Even with his eyes shut, taking the stairs by muscle memory, he was careful not to crush her rose. She reached for his belt and the top button of his jeans, and he let her. He slid his hand under her shirt, and she let him.

  He let her, she let him, and then they were in his bed. The smell of paint made the air in his room bitter, sharp. A tarp covered the floor, his brushes and paints and the makings of half-finished lights scattered in a way that looked disordered to her but made sense to him.

  Light from the moons spilled a layer of milky lilac over the floor. They were covered in the blue-green of his bedroom walls, and the smell of spices from his mother’s kitchen that soaked into his hair and came off onto his sheets. Orange flower. Green cardamom. Pomegranate molasses. It was so sharp and vivid on him that it made her bite the back of his neck. He startled, then settled into the soft pressure of her teeth, and set his fingers against her harder.

  He didn’t take off his shirt. She didn’t try to take it off him. He never took off his shirt for the same reason he worked on the Bonners’ farm. Their school let his work weeding the fields and cutting vines stand in for the PE requirement he’d put off since ninth grade. He couldn’t meet it any other way, not if it meant changing for class or team practice in a locker room.

  His skin smelled like warm water, not taking on the scent of his soap. She ran her fingers over the faint scarring that shadowed his jawline, from acne he had both grown into and out of early.

  The petals of her rose skimmed his neck—she did that on purpose—and then along the inside of his thigh—she did that without meaning to. He shivered, but didn’t draw back. Even when her touching him made her rose petals flick against his body, she kept a little distance between him and her wrist so the thorns wouldn’t scratch him.

  When he traced her skin, the thought of everything he told her about the moon skimmed across her, about the lunar seas and bays. Mare nubium and mare undarum, the sea of clouds and the sea of waves. Lacus autumni and sinus iridum, the lake of autumn and the bay of rainbows. The features he painted with brushes and with his bare fingers.

  His hands were so sure, the pressure of his fingers so gradual and steady, that she couldn’t help thinking of his family, years ago. Their fields of crocuses. Their quick, delicate work of picking the saffron threads from the center of those purple flowers. She wondered if this was a thing that lived in his blood and in his fingers. A craft that started as finding wisps of red among violet petals, and that, through years and generations, became the skill of finding, easily and without hesitation, what he was looking for.

  The one thing that marred it all, that made it anything shy of perfect, was the Bonner sisters. Las gringas bonitas. Those pale girls, pretty and perfect. One stray thought, and those threads of saffron turned to the red of their braids and curls. Just that single, unwanted thought, and the gradient of their hair swirled through Miel like fall leaves.

  The Bonner girls hadn’t felt far from Miel since the first time she saw them at the water tower. She let Sam think it was just that Peyton had been holding that pumpkin she treated like a pet. But it was more than the pumpkin. The water had barely cleared from Miel’s eyes when she saw the moon, caught between last quarter and full, disappear behind their heads. Even against the not-yet-dark sky, it lit up the red and gold and orange of their hair. From where Miel stood, her eyes feeling new, blurring everything, it looked like the moon had vanished into them, like they’d absorbed it. They had taken all its light. And Miel kept screaming, wanting to warn the boy standing in front of her that the moon was a thing that could be lost.

  Now the Bonner sisters were older, and beautiful, their eyes a fierce and fearless kind of open. Together, they were as imposing as an unmapped forest. Some called them witches, for how many hearts they’d broken. Some said they had hidden, in the woods, a stained glass coffin that acted like a chrysalis, turning each girl who slept in it as beautiful as every Bonner girl before her. But ever since Chloe had left town, they were no longer the Bonner sisters. It was just Lian, and Ivy, and Peyton drifting through their father’s fields. Sometimes Miel saw Lian in the grocery store, picking out yellow apples, or Peyton riding her bike at the edge of town.

  Miel had never understood why, with the four of them around, Sam would ever choose her. Miel was a handful of foil stars, but they were the fire that made constellations. Her hair was the dark, damp earth under their family’s farm, and they were curling vines and scrolled pumpkins.

  But the Bonner sisters weren’t the ones who’d met Sam a thousand times in the open land between their houses. They hadn’t shown him the slight differences in blues and browns of Araucana and Wyandotte chickens’ eggs. And maybe these things had made Miel look different to Sam. Maybe the time he’d helped her shear a pair of jeans, the knees worn through, into cutoffs, made him overlook the fact that jeans fit her a little different in a thigh than they did the Bonner sisters. Or maybe the deep, bright colors of her roses distracted him from how her nails were almost never polished.

  Maybe the day she’d helped him paint his room the color of the ocean his father was born near, that afternoon when she’d gotten that deep blue-green all over the front of her, made Sam forget that she did not stretch out a shirt like the Bonner sisters. Except for Peyton, the youngest, the Bonner sisters filled their bras like batter poured into a cake pan.

  If those things made Miel look different to Sam, if that was why he was under her now, she didn’t mind. Because she saw him as something different than anyone else did too. She had seen him naked. Almost naked. And she understood that with his clothes off, he was the same as he was with them on.

  new sea

  One day, they would be no more than that fairy tale. They would be two children named Honey and Moon, folded into the stories whispered through this town.

  But tonight they were not those children. Tonight, they were Sam and Miel, and he was pulling her on top of him and then under him. The way she moved against him made him feel the sharp presence of everything he had between his legs and, for just that minute, a forgetting, of everything he didn’t.

  He thought he knew her body. He was so sure that he could have drawn it, mapped it as easily as the lunar seas he could paint without looking at a map of the moon. But under his hands, against his own body, she was both safe and unfamiliar. She was a world unknown. She was a place whose darkness held not fear, but the promise of stars.

  Even against him, she was a locked world, sealed off. Even with how she let him put his hand anywhere he tried to, even with how she took his hand and put it where he was too shy to go, she had so many secrets. He’d given her every one he had, from why he never took off his shirt, to the truth of how badly his mother had wanted a child, and the cold bargain she’d made to get one.

  Miel still had thousands of secrets, small and shimmering. She held them tight in her hands, and he had nothing left that he had not given up.

  bay of harmony

  The day after Miel slept with Sam was the day Chloe Bonner came back.

  That morning Miel came downstairs and found Aracely in the kitchen, putting on coffee and yawning at a morning so new it was still silver.

  Miel set three cups she’d collected from her room in the kitchen sink. Lately Aracely had had it with Miel leaving forgotten cups of tea on counters and tables. She’d find one and say, Will you put this in the sink already? I feel like I’m living in a coffeehouse.

  Even in her nightgown, without her makeup on, Aracely was a slice of color against the window. Her hair was as bright as the fruit of a nectarine. The brown of her skin looked like raw gold stripped from quartz. And she stood tall enough that she looked like she could meet the gaze of the sky out on the horizon.

  The stories said that Aracely had appeared one summer along with a hundred thousand butterflies. The butterflies covered the town l
ike bright gold scales, powdered wings shivering in the breezes. And when, early that autumn, they all flitted away, there was Aracely, this strange, tall young woman with skin like those iridescent wings.

  Of course, that was years before Miel fell out of the water tower, before the water had given her back. So she never saw that cloud of wings.

  Aracely handed Miel a spoon of honey, thick and deep as amber.

  “Fireweed,” Aracely said, pulling her hair back into a loose bun. Her fingernails, painted the color of achiote seeds, stood brick-red against the pale gold. “Just got it from that place on the edge of town.”

  Aracely knew how much Miel liked honey, how she ate it straight, every kind Aracely brought home. This woman who acted as something between a sister and mother to Miel knew every food and spice she liked and disliked. She knew that windstorms gave her nightmares, and that the light of Sam’s moons let her sleep.

  But Miel didn’t know how to tell Aracely about what had happened with Sam. About sneaking out of his house before his mother came home. About the soreness in Miel’s body that felt like a thing to hold on to instead of wait out.

  Of course there were some things Aracely did not know. Sometimes, she seemed about to ask Miel something. Maybe about who Miel had been before she spilled out of the water tower, or if she had ever belonged to anyone else before she belonged to Aracely. But Aracely would always open her mouth, pause, and then close it again and turn back to the sink or the stove. Aracely knew, without being told, the things Miel did not want to talk about.

  Now Miel couldn’t even meet Aracely’s eyes. Aracely’s work was curing lovesickness. It was her gift to know when a heart was overrun with wanting someone. When it came to Aracely, this town alternated between gratitude and blame. At night, they came to her, asking her help for their worn-out hearts. During the day, they whispered that she was a witch, or blamed her for the powdery blight bleaching out an orchard’s harvest, or held her responsible for the storm that might rain out that year’s lighting of the pumpkin lanterns.

  They gave her the same inconsistency they might give a lover, adoration at night, disavowal in the morning. How indebted they were to her meant they offered her either scorn or respect, depending on the time of day and how many people were watching.

  Miel had learned to live with the self-conscious feeling that Aracely could sense the weight of her heart. This morning, she was sure if she let Aracely look at her for too long, she’d know. The fact that Aracely liked Sam made it worse. Miel imagined Aracely thinking of them more like brother and sister, recoiling at the idea of Miel digging her fingers into Sam’s back.

  Aracely poured coffee into heavy mugs, and Miel flushed and looked down. She’d never noticed that the color of these cups, blue-green as eucalyptus, was only a little off from Sam’s bedroom walls.

  “She’s back,” Aracely said. She half-sang the words, drawing out each syllable until it was almost a trill.

  Miel licked the honey off the spoon. It tasted a little like tea, the flavor from the stalks of pink flowers that dotted scarred land after a fire. “Who?” she asked.

  “La última bruja.”

  Miel gave Aracely a laugh. This was one of a thousand reasons Miel loved Aracely. So often, Aracely was called a bruja herself, a witch, and still she didn’t flinch at calling someone else the word.

  Miel’s smile vanished the second she realized who Aracely meant.

  Aracely was trying to make a joke of it, sipping her coffee like this was any other morning gossip. She was all charm and assurance. It was what made her so good at curing lovesickness. Less skilled curanderas left their patients stricken with susto, a fright so deep they wandered the woods startled and blind. But Aracely never left a lovesick man or woman sobbing on the wooden table. She placed her palms on their shoulders, whispering to them, so they barely noticed the lovesickness leaving their bodies.

  Miel knew Aracely’s voice better than those men and women. She heard each catch and hitch. It wasn’t that Aracely was afraid of the Bonner girls. Aracely wasn’t afraid of anything; she had pity for Miel’s fear of water but little patience for her fear of pumpkins. Each fall, on the night that half the town came out to set carved, glowing pumpkins floating on the river, Miel hid in her room, and Aracely stood outside the door saying, “Oh, for God’s sake, they’re fruits not hornets. Get out here.”

  But even Aracely was wary of the fire-haired girls. She’d always thought their nervous mother and father pulled them from school less because of what happened with Chloe, and more because if they taught them at home, it was less obvious that the girls had no friends but one another. That they never invited anyone over. That they flirted with boys on crowded streets but that even those boys were not their friends, would not last the next frost or blossom that marked a new season.

  Miel left the spoon on the counter and went back upstairs.

  “Don’t do it,” Aracely called up.

  Miel heard the smile in her voice, but that smile didn’t veil the warning.

  “I mean it,” Aracely said. “Don’t do it. You’ll just torture yourself.”

  Miel listened.

  She listened until about four that afternoon, when she stood at the edge of the Bonners’ farm trying to keep away the echo of Aracely’s words.

  If Mr. or Mrs. Bonner saw her, she could always say she was there to see Sam. She could say he was going to show her how he used the pollination brushes.

  No. Something else. Not the pollination brushes.

  Miel kept her distance from the vines. No matter Aracely’s reassurances that they were just fruit, Miel still feared pumpkins the way other girls feared spiders or grass snakes.

  Then she saw the curtain of Chloe’s hair, the softening light turning it peach.

  The opening of Miel’s rose grew from prickled and turned hot.

  Chloe had graduated last year at nineteen, and had turned twenty while she was away. Twenty, that number that Miel always thought of as making someone, in some final way, an adult. Now Chloe swept across her family’s side yard wearing cigarette jeans that would have looked out of style on anyone else, and a sweater thin enough to show the pink tone of her skin underneath. She’d grown out her hair. When she left last winter, it had fallen to her shoulders in uneven curls. Now it tumbled to her hip, the weight stretching it straight, so light it was almost blond.

  She must have been wearing jeans that tight to show her flat stomach, to show that the thing everyone knew about had not happened.

  When Chloe left, the Bonner sisters had lost just enough of their hold to let every other girl in town breathe. Their parents, as frightened of their own daughters as they were concerned for them, had pulled Lian, Ivy, and Peyton out of school, convinced they’d end up like Chloe. So the girls stayed in that house. They sat at the kitchen table with their mother’s lesson plans. They peeked out of windows with white edging that stood crisp against the house’s navy paint. Or they wandered through their father’s fields, barefoot or in soft, worn slippers they borrowed from their mother but were too vain to own themselves.

  Chloe wore no shoes. Her feet and her ankles, bare from her cropped jeans, were pale as Lumina pumpkins.

  Miel dragged her gaze away from the corner of the farm where Chloe stood, sure if she stared too long Chloe would know, and catch her looking. Her eyes swept over the fields, and found Sam. First his hair, like black ribbon curled with scissors. The harvest season had left him even darker, his forearms the brown of a Welsummer chicken’s egg. He wore that color with the pride of knowing he’d inherited it from his grandmother, a woman Miel knew only from the few bright details he remembered enough to tell her.

  The metal of his shears glinted in his hands. He was checking for vines that had started to die off—going away, he said they called it—and shells just beginning to harden.

  For that moment, he could have been any boy. He could have been Roman Brantley, who once had a gaze so reckless teachers couldn’t meet it. But he’
d lost that look to Lian Bonner, to her hair that was so dark red it was almost auburn, to the bursts of freckles fanning her temples like wings. She still had his grandfather’s hunting jacket, which Lian swore she’d give back if he ever asked. Of course he couldn’t look her in the eye long enough to do it.

  Or Wynn Yarrow, who broke up with his girlfriend of two years for Peyton. Peyton, the shortest and youngest of the Bonner sisters, with pumpkin-colored hair her mother barrel-curled every morning, and who everyone but him knew would never be interested. Wynn lost not only his girlfriend, but every friend who took her side.

  Miel backed away from the edge of the pumpkin field, trying to vanish into the shadows before Sam saw her. The Bonner sisters, like everyone else in town, had seen her with Sam so many times that they noted it no more than seeing her alone. But if Miel came up to him now, he might slouch and blush in a way that traced a ribbon of cool air in the dusty heat. And when he did, Miel’s smile might glint like a coin.

  The Bonner girls would see it. It would draw them.

  They would watch how Sam sometimes climbed trees to set his moons where the branches met and joined, but just as often threw a thin rope over a bough and pulled the moon up. They would notice how, when he had to climb trees to put in new candles or relight ones that had gone out, he did it without hurry. How, if a moon was fragile, he carried a wooden ladder from his mother’s shed and leaned it against the trunk, so he wouldn’t jostle the moon as he climbed.

  They would realize how beautiful this odd boy was, how the moons he hung in the trees at night glowed like a bowl of stars. They would see how his painted lunar seas gave off different shades of light.

  No boy was ever so interesting to them as when he was interesting to someone else.

  Chloe turned, her braid running the length of her spine, rubber band hitting the small of her back as she followed the brick walkway. She took the stairs to the front porch, and the soles of her feet, dust-covered, flashed a little darker than her ankles. But even the defiance in how she whipped her braid through the air couldn’t hide the way she held herself a little differently. Her stomach was flat but her hips had spread. She folded her arms, even thinner than when she’d left, like she was cold. She looked both fearless and young as any Bonner sister, but now the set to her shoulders gave her the proud but cautious look of being someone’s mother.