When the Moon was Ours

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  But maybe that was just because Miel knew. Everyone knew. The thing Chloe had tried to keep secret had become its own little life. It had grown so big it refused to go unremarked on.

  No matter how tight Chloe’s jeans, people would look at her stomach and wonder if she was showing again. She may have been a porcelain figurine, repaired by the finest hands, but she had still cracked and broken. When anyone held her up to the light, the milky threads of where she’d been glued back together showed.

  She’d never rule the Bonner girls again. Her reign would pass down to Ivy. Not Lian, even though Lian was the second-oldest. If anyone called Lian dim, the Bonner girls would have scratched them to bleeding with their unfiled, bright-polished nails, but that wouldn’t mean they didn’t agree.

  Now that the Bonner girls were together again, they were a force as strong as the wind that ripped the leaves off maples and sycamores. They were every shade of orange and gold in an October forest. The life would come back into them, and every girl in town who loved any boy in town would take a little longer to fall asleep tonight.

  If the Bonner girls knew Miel wanted to keep Sam, that she was not just a strange girl who was friends with a strange boy, they would realize how much fun it would be to take him. It was why they had never had any friends at school except one another. Whenever a girl wanted a boy, so did they. The second they sensed that Miel cared would be the second they decided he would be the next boy whose heart they broke. Not that they ever tried to break anything. They never meant to hurt anyone. They were children petting a cat too hard for no reason except that they liked the feel of its fur.

  Together, they were similar enough to dazzle half the boys in this town, different enough that they’d intrigue Sam. And if he ever trusted them as much as he trusted Miel, they would ruin him. They would take everything from him without trying.

  Miel’s wrist prickled. She looked down at her rose. The pink of her favorite lipstick was draining out of the petals, giving way to red, and then orange, until every petal had turned to copper or amber or rust.

  Las gringas bonitas, these four girls who’d made the moon disappear, were back.

  lake of hatred

  She had to kill it. She’d already waited too long, not wanting to slice away the rose she’d worn on her body the night she slept with Sam. And if she kept it on her body, the Bonner girls would know. They’d see the colors of each of their hair. The copper of Ivy’s hair at the center, the soft orange and strawberry-blond of Peyton’s and Chloe’s, the almost-brown of Lian’s at the edges.

  If they were witches like the rumors said, they’d know. Even if they weren’t, they would wonder why Miel’s rose held their colors in its petals, and they would look at her, and then at Sam.

  Miel paused, finding a break in the familiar silhouettes along the river.

  Two shapes stood against the dark, close enough to Miel that she hid in a tree’s shadow so they wouldn’t see her. Her eyes adjusted to the dark, letting her see one feature at a time. A girl. A boy. Neither standing in enough light for her to recognize them.

  But she could make out their posture, the girl’s inclining forward. Eager and flirtatious, her hands flitting in the space between them like birds. From where Miel stood, a tree branch obscured the girl’s face, but the moon lit her hair enough to show the color. A veil of rich red that could only belong to a Bonner girl.

  The boy’s stance did not match the girl’s. He did not lean forward. He did not try to touch her. There was no sense that he was making an attempt at persuading her. To let him kiss her, or to get her sisters to sneak out and see him and his friends, or anything at all.

  He seemed bored, humoring her rather than being entranced by her. The way he held his shoulders, facing a little out, made him look like he would leave as soon as he could figure out a way that wasn’t rude.

  Miel knew this same scene. She’d seen it, when girls had tried flirting with Sam, who seemed as oblivious as he was indifferent. She’d been half of it, with other boys, to get back at Sam for—she flushed realizing this later—nothing more than being interesting to another girl.

  But she’d never seen it with one of the Bonner girls. The Bonner girls had stolen boyfriends, enchanted reverends’ sons, lured away boys who, before, never did anything without their mothers telling them to.

  If a Bonner girl couldn’t interest a boy she wanted, if she couldn’t have anything she wanted, how could she keep her own last name?

  Miel moved a little farther down the river, putting tree cover between her and those two shapes. She knelt alongside the river and stared down into the dark water, trying to make out a shape, any sign that something was down there. Fish. The glimmer of pondweed leaves. Or the river mermaids Sam told her stories about, so Miel would one day be unafraid to go in the river.

  She wasn’t ready. She was never ready; even when she was anxious to have the weight of the rose gone, she cringed before slicing the blades across the stem.

  Rumors about her roses laced this town’s gossip. Some said her roses could turn the hearts of those who had no desire. Others insisted their perfume, the soft brush of their petals, was enough to enchant the reticent, the frightened, the guarded.

  One said Miel had given a pale pink rose, barely blushing, to one of Aracely’s friends. A boy had done something so bad to her that she could not think of parting her lips to be kissed even years later, when another boy with hands as gentle as tulip tree leaves wanted to love her. Another said that last year, she’d given a rose to a farmhand who had fallen in love with an apple grower’s daughter, but who could not see past how her eyes were the same green as his family’s, a family that never let him forget his were brown.

  But Aracely had cured them both, not Miel and her roses. Aracely had convinced that girl to love the boy with hands like tulip tree leaves. And the farmhand, he had come to Aracely, and so had the apple grower’s daughter, wanting her heart rid of her love for a boy too shy to love her back. They had both wanted lovesickness cures, and Aracely had told them both to come at the same time. When they saw each other in Aracely’s indigo room, when they both realized they were heartbroken enough to want the love torn from their rib cages, they touched each other with their hands and their mouths, and they forgot they wanted to be cured.

  Aracely was all the magic and skill. Miel was just a body so restless petals burst from her skin. Aracely was all the beauty and goodness in their violet house. Miel was a girl stained with rusted water and the blood on her hands of two people whose names she could not speak.

  The silver-plated scissors, both the strangest and the most useful gift Aracely had ever given her, whined when she opened them. She poised the scissors low, close to her skin, and snapped the blades shut. Pain shivered along her veins. It found her heart and her stomach and everything in her that was alive.

  Blood seeped from the opening. Pain made Miel’s fingers heavy. It weighted her to the ground. It hurt like a knife blade, pressing into her wrist so hard she felt it flash to her ribs.

  She let the rose slip into the water, an offering to the mother who now lived on the wind but had died in this water. When the storms came, Miel could hear the murmur of her mother’s voice beneath the shriek of the winds, like she was trying to whisper Miel back to sleep.

  This was the only gift Miel could give her, the obedience of destroying the roses her mother had feared. She wanted to give her more, a fearlessness of water. But inside Miel was the small, echoing voice of the girl Sam had found, a girl whispering that she should not trust water she could not see to the bottom of.

  She didn’t remember her father as well as her mother. She knew he was a curandero, the kind skilled at treating wounds, with a talent for setting bones that gave him work as a huesero. And she remembered his hands, how gently he cut her roses away, and then covered the wound with a bandage. Sometimes she tried settling into the memory, but she knew him so little he was not really hers.

  The petals vanished under
the surface, and the water rippled like the hem of a dress. The moon refracted into a dozen sickles.

  Even with as little as Miel remembered, she remembered the whispers about how children with roses growing from their skin would poison their own brothers, or steal the rings and rosaries from their family’s graves. It didn’t matter if the roses grew from their wrists, like Miel’s, or from their ankles or backs. Every son or daughter in their family whose body made roses, they said, turned bitter and ungrateful.

  Once their family made cakes with rosewater and cardamom. But that was before roses were things edged with the fear of new mothers. Young women worrying over their sons and daughters, looking for the first signs of green coming through their skin.

  The river settled back into its slow current, and the soft rushing of the water carried the sound of muffled sobbing. It broke into small, stifled cries.

  Miel startled, searching the sky and listening for the wind. When the wind came, she listened for her mother’s voice, hoped she wouldn’t hear her crying. The only thing she wanted more than she wanted Sam was for her mother to know that Miel forgave her. That she understood why she did what she did. That she knew her mother loved her.

  But the sound wasn’t coming from the sky. Or even from under the water. It pulled Miel’s eyes down the length of the bank.

  The dark outlined the figure of a girl, arms crossed, wind fluffing her hair.

  The Bonner girl, though Miel still couldn’t tell which one.

  Miel got to her feet, pain spinning in her forearm.

  “Are you okay?” she called, trying to keep her voice calm like Aracely’s, soft and clear as the trickle of water over stones.

  But the girl still jumped. Her gaze snapped toward Miel, and the moon turned her face as pale as its own surface.

  Ivy Bonner. The ribbons of light off the river showed her features. Her cheeks shone wet. Hints of copper warmed the edges of her hair, even in the dark. Her nose sat between Chloe’s, long and straight and proud like their father’s, and Peyton’s, short and upturned like their mother’s.

  Ivy nodded, dabbing her fingers over her cheeks. Miel was not important enough for Ivy to pretend she hadn’t been crying.

  That nod made Miel feel like she was intruding, like she’d been summoned and now was dismissed. She clutched the silver-plated scissors and turned her back to the river.

  But Ivy took a few steps toward her. Not in a hurried way. But quickly enough that Miel stopped in her path.

  “What are you doing out here?” Ivy asked, and in the same moment glanced down at Miel’s bare wrist, and the scissors. “Oh,” she said.

  Ivy lifted her eyes to Miel’s again. This close, the salt and water drying on her cheeks looked like the thinnest frost.

  “Does it hurt?” Ivy asked.

  “What?” Miel asked, cringing at the uncertainty in her own voice.

  “Cutting them,” Ivy said.

  To say no would seem like a kind of defiance Miel could never wear as well as Ivy or her sisters. To say yes was too much of an admission.

  Miel nodded.

  She hadn’t been this close to Ivy since the Bonner sisters left school. And now, so close to her that she could smell the watery camellia scent of her soap, all Miel could think of was Clark Anderson, another of the boys lost to the Bonner sisters. Clark had thought a girl like Ivy, with her hair the color and shine of new pennies, could cure him of wanting to kiss John Sweden under the new water tower. He slept with Ivy in her bedroom in broad daylight, with Sam and the other workers on the farm below her window. And less than twelve hours later he was kissing John again, this time on the water tower ladder at midnight, where people could just recognize their shapes against the stars.

  He disappeared from the town the next week. But unlike Chloe or the boy whose baby she had, no one knew where he’d gone.

  The way Ivy kept blinking, stung by the salt of her own tears, made pity spread through Miel, until she had to give it words.

  “He doesn’t matter, you know,” Miel said.

  Ivy drew back. “What?”

  Miel knew to be quiet, but she wanted to even out what she’d said, like smoothing the layer of cream on a tres leches cake.

  “He’s just a guy,” Miel said. “Who cares?”

  Ivy’s eyes tensed and narrowed.

  With that pinching of her eyelashes, Miel knew she’d made a mistake. Now Ivy knew Miel had seen. She would hold against Miel her witnessing this sign of the Bonner girls losing their power over this town’s boys.

  Ivy tilted her head, watching Miel’s wrist. “Why do you kill them?” she asked, neither horrified nor concerned. More curious. More like she thought drowning those petals was a waste.

  Miel sank into the relief of Ivy changing the subject, then realized this was something she wanted to talk about even less. She knew how everyone looked at her, at her roses. The rumor that, if a girl slipped one under a boy’s pillow, if he breathed in the scent while he slept, she could make him fall in love with her. Or that, for even better effect, the petals could be sugared and baked into a vanilla cake or lavender alfajores, but only with the secret recipes used by the girls in the violet house.

  For that second, her nervousness around Ivy, her feeling that she was her handmaid waiting for dismissal, softened. Miel might have been as strange to Ivy as the Bonner sisters were to her. She lived in a house as violet as blueberry cream. Roses grew from her wrist, and Aracely, this woman she lived with, invited lovesick men and women to lie down on her wooden table so she could cure their broken hearts.

  If Aracely had been there, she would’ve told Miel to stop standing there, stop waiting for la bruja to give her instructions.

  Miel tipped her head, a greeting and a good-bye.

  But then her heart pinched. The Bonner sisters had rarely talked to anyone but one another and the boys they loved and wrecked. Lian had been quiet but friendly enough when she and Sam had to do a group presentation on the orographic effect; Sam wrote the report while Lian drew and colored in all the pictures. When Miel got her period a week early, Chloe had, without comment, slid her a tampon under the bathroom stall. They were neither rude nor warm; they just preferred one another’s company to anyone else’s.

  Now maybe Ivy was lonely enough that she’d talk to anyone. Chloe had been gone for months. She’d missed Lian turning eighteen and Peyton turning fifteen. (Ivy, sixteen, wouldn’t have her birthday until December.) Now that Chloe was back, Miel imagined everyone as formal and careful, so attentive to Chloe that she felt smothered and the rest of the sisters felt both jealous and grateful not to be her. Lian and Ivy and Peyton would have crowded together not to miss her, to make it less obvious that she was gone. Now they would all try to shuffle apart to make room for her.

  Chloe had been sent away the same week she started to show. Her baby now lived with the aunt she had stayed with these past six months, and, likewise, the boy she’d been seeing was sent to live with relatives in a town so far away Miel had never heard of it. Her sisters must have both missed her and considered her a stranger. This tall young woman who was now a mother, who was angled in her arms and nose but soft in her hips and breasts.

  “Ivy,” Miel called out.

  Ivy turned.

  Miel was one of a hundred girls who would sleep better if the Bonner girls lost their peculiar power. But she couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for Ivy.

  “If you ever need anyone to talk to,” Miel said.

  Ivy paused, and then nodded, saving Miel from having to say the rest, and herself from having to hear it.

  sea of islands

  His mother knew.

  She’d stayed the night before at the Hodges’. Mr. and Mrs. Hodge were in the city until morning, so they’d asked her to watch their children. She’d probably told them bedtime stories about a brother and sister crossing a forest guided only by stars, or a girl learning the language of Kashmir stags and musk deer. Or one Sam had heard from his grandmother, the story
of a girl named Laila and a boy called Majnun.

  Now his mother stood in the doorway. As soon as she looked at him, he caught the slight lift of her chin, half a nod, that told him she understood.

  She looked tired but not wearied, this morning’s kohl drawn over the smudged echo of yesterday’s eyeliner, so soft gray ringed her eyelashes. The kohl, and the way she painted it on, was one of the few traditions from their family she’d held to, that one from her mother’s side. Her father, Sam’s grandfather, had given her washed-out blue eyes that looked even paler the way she lined them.

  Neither surprise nor disappointment crossed her face. Only a breath in, a steadying. As much as Sam wanted this to pass by without comment, he knew better.

  Finally, she said, “Well, I hope you were both safe.” She set down the red and blue tapestry bag she’d taken over to the Hodges’. “I’d hate for you to get that girl pregnant. Aracely would murder me.”

  He was supposed to laugh. He knew he was supposed to laugh.

  But he couldn’t force out the sound.

  He wished he were different. He wanted to laugh off her words, to say back, Oh, very funny. Short of the kind of miracles Aracely taught Miel out of her Bible, Sam wasn’t getting anyone pregnant.

  “And you trust her,” his mother said, more checking than questioning.

  Of course he trusted Miel. She knew everything that could wreck him, but acted like she didn’t.

  When he was eight, and she walked in on him changing, she didn’t scream, or run down the hall. She just shut the door and left, and when he pulled on his jeans and his shirt and went after her, he found her sitting on the back steps. Her expression was so full of both wondering and recognition, as though she almost understood but not quite, that he sat down next to her and told her more than he’d ever planned to.