Now, she slipped him tampons at school because he couldn’t risk carrying them in his bag. They had it timed so they passed each other while she was leaving the girls’ bathroom and he was going into the boys’, the two of them clasping hands just long enough for the handoff.
Once they’d worked out the system, they never spoke of it again, and she never brought it up. He never asked how she always knew when. He didn’t have to. They’d spent enough time together that their bodies had pulled on each other, and they now bled at the same time, when the moon was a thin curve of light. If Miel had been anyone else, her knowing this, the steady rhythm of her knowing every month, would have been humiliating.
Sam braced himself, though for what he wasn’t sure. Not a morality lecture. His mother had never cautioned him to wait until he was married. Agnostic, indifferent to the faiths of both her father’s family and her mother’s, she had barely tolerated Sam going along with Miel and Aracely to church and Sunday school. She allowed it only because she thought things would be easier for him if this town thought he was a good Christian boy, a phrase she never said without disdain edging her words. She’d made it clear that any God she believed in could not be contained within walls, certainly not inside the whitewashed clapboard of the local church.
But he was never supposed to sleep with a girl. This had been temporary, him living this way, with his breasts bound flat and his hair cut as short as his mother would let him. It was so he could take care of his mother, so there would be a man of the house even though his mother had no sons.
“Are you mad?” he asked, trying not to cringe and look down. His mother hated when he did that, which made him tend toward it even more.
“If you didn’t hurt yourself or anyone else, it’s not my place to be,” she said.
Sometimes she said things like that, and he could almost see the pallor of frost on her words. It’s not my place to be disappointed, she’d said when he was failing math three years ago. It’s your future, not mine. And that made him feel even worse.
But it wasn’t like that now. There wasn’t the same posture of holding herself tall and straight, her expression still. Now her face looked soft with worry. Worse, pity.
“Are you upset?” he asked.
She put her fingers to her temple, shut her eyes, let out a long breath that turned into a sigh. “Sam,” she said, the word sounding like wind, like a soft, sad song.
Whenever she said his name like that, it meant the same thing. That whether she or anyone else was upset wasn’t the point. That, failing math grade or lost virginity, this was his life, and to her mind, he wasn’t acting like it, not as long as his first question was Are you mad?
“Are you okay?” his mother asked.
“I think so,” he said.
“Is she?”
“I think so.”
He would grow out of this, he wanted to tell her. The same way he’d grown out of saying his favorite color was clear (Why? Miel had asked him. Because everything clear is magic, because it’s invisible, he’d told her) and Miel had grown out of saying her favorite color was rainbow (Why? he’d asked her. Because they all look prettier together, she’d said, and because I don’t want to pick.).
He would wait it out.
His grandmother had told him the name for these girls. She had brought it with her from Pakistan, and from stories she’d heard from across the border in Afghanistan. Bacha posh. Dressed as a boy. Girls whose parents decided that, until they were grown, they would be sons. Sam and his mother had lost his grandmother when he was so small he could barely remember the wrinkles of her face and whether the brown of her eyes was more gray or gold. But he remembered her voice. Her telling him that their family’s saffron farm in Kashmir had been small, but for its size the most productive for a hundred miles. How it took a hundred thousand of those purple crocuses to yield less than a kilogram of saffron.
When his grandmother told him this, it was always with a current of sadness beneath her pride. Their family had had to leave Kashmir to stay with distant relatives in Peshawar, abandoning their bright fields. As things around them grew worse—that was how she always put it, things were getting worse—trading the spice from their fields became impossible. And when she got to that part of the story, the part that left her heart bitter, she turned to stories that did not pinch and bite, like the stories of these girls. Daughters who lived as sons in families who had no sons. These girls spoke to boys and men in the street. They escorted their sisters out. When Sam heard these stories, he felt a clawing envy as strong as if he knew these girls by name.
He had been four, his grandmother only a few months gone, when he decided he could—he would—be one of these girls. He would be a bacha posh. He would be the same kind of boy as those girls who lived as sons.
But when those girls grew up, they became women. And maybe their lives as wives and mothers at first felt cramped, narrow after the wide, cleared roads of being boys. But whatever freedom they missed was not because they wanted to be boys again. It was because they wanted to be both women and unhindered.
That was his problem. Sam was sure of it. He couldn’t be a girl. But maybe if he waited out these years in boys’ clothes and short hair, he would grow up enough to want to be a woman. He would wake up and this part of him would be gone, like rain and wind wearing down a hillside.
“You know, I never wanted a son or a daughter,” she said.
“Mom,” he said, trying to cut her off.
“I didn’t think about it that way,” she said, ignoring him. “I just wanted a child.”
Sam nodded. He’d heard the story before. How his father had come from a family of fishermen in Campania, all of whom were famous for catching a kind of red-mantled squid that came close enough to the surface only during new moons. And how his father’s lack of talent with that squid was the first of many things that made Sam come to be.
But she didn’t go on with the story.
“Do you want to talk?” she asked.
Sam picked up the tapestry bag, to take it upstairs for her. “No.”
bay of the center
Miel picked up the phone thinking it was Sam. When he got back from his shift at the Bonners’ farm, he’d call her, never starting with a greeting. He’d hear her answer and then start with something like, “I just saw a woman jog past the hardware store with two parakeets, one on each shoulder.” Or, “The king of hearts is the only one without a mustache. Ever notice that?”
She was one of the few people Sam would talk to on the phone, afraid of how the line skewed his voice a little higher when he was always working to keep it low.
But it wasn’t Sam. It was Ivy. Asking Miel to come over.
Not asking. Just saying, “Come over.”
Miel wondered if Ivy was calling on the ivory princess phone that had once belonged to her grandmother. So old it had a rotary dial and a silver base, that phone, according to Sam, was something buyers always wanted to see when they came to negotiate pumpkin prices. Carlie Zietlow, the girl Miel shared a desk with in math class, said the Bonner girls took pictures of one another with it each time they dressed up, once before dances and now before the pumpkin lighting each October.
A week had gone by since Miel had seen Ivy at the river. She’d settled deep into the relief that Ivy had disregarded her offer, and had forgotten about it.
Now Ivy hung up, so softly the noise was a single, crisp click.
Ivy’s voice stayed inside Miel’s ear like the sound of the ocean caught in a shell. The words had sounded open, guileless, one girl asking another outside to play. But there was also the edge of something a little alluring, like the piloncillo sugar Aracely melted into hot chocolate. It made Miel cringe, thinking of every time Sam heard that voice as he bent down to the vines crossing the Bonners’ fields.
But in those two words, Miel thought she caught a little of that same sadness. Ivy’s voice matched that same blank, damp-cheeked look she’d had by the river. So she
did what Ivy said.
If no one in this town had cared what happened to Miel, she would still be wild-eyed, hiding in the brush where the old water tower had fallen, or in Sam’s house, his mother wondering what to do with her. It was the least Miel could do to go over, even if the Bonner sisters, the whole Bonner house, scared her. The Bonner sisters talked to so few people outside that house that Ivy’s request seemed like something of an honor, and something dangerous to turn down.
Compared to the violet house Miel and Aracely lived in, with Aracely’s blue-green cups and her kitchen table, yellow as a Meyer lemon, the Bonners’ farmhouse looked so neat and tame. That navy paint made the white trim so bright. The shutters were hooked in place. The lace curtains in the windows looked age-softened, but Mrs. Bonner bleached them so often they never yellowed.
The door was open, only the screen shut. That seemed like an invitation to come in without ringing the bell.
The strangest thing about the house was their mother’s mint-green refrigerator, an antique that, according to Aracely, she spent more money to repair than it would have cost to replace it. The rest was so much more muted, so ordinary, compared to the girls and even the farm. The kitchen counters were plain white tile. Linen dish towels, creased and folded, were stacked next to the sink. There was no orange like the girls’ hair or the Cinderella pumpkins, flat and deep-ribbed. No deep green or gold or blue-gray like the few rare ones dotting the fields.
Miel’s eyes moved over the first floor, until they landed on those four shades of red hair.
Las gringas bonitas. All four of them. The Bonner girls clustered around a wooden dining room. Round, no bigger than needed to fit the six Bonners, or at most, them and a couple of guests. As though Mr. and Mrs. Bonner assumed their daughters would never leave them, or that they would leave and never come back, never bring their husbands and children for Thanksgiving or Christmas.
Chloe still wore those cigarette jeans, but now with a turtleneck that covered her freckled collarbone. Lian had pulled her hair, so much darker than the rest of theirs but still so red, into a bun that was already falling out. She rested her elbows on the table, one hand cupped loosely in the other. Peyton was tracing her finger along the circle of a water stain, her hair in a braid so much like Chloe’s that Chloe must have done it.
Ivy leaned against a sideboard, hip against a drawer.
They all looked at Miel.
They’d all been waiting.
“You’re not going to kill your roses anymore,” Ivy said.
It wasn’t until that moment that Miel noticed the vase at the table’s center. She wondered how she’d missed it, the glass as dark blue as the Bonners’ house.
The sleeve of Miel’s sweater covered her newest rose, as pale yellow as a candle flame. But Lian and Chloe were looking at her wrist as though they could see through the fabric.
She pulled her eyes away from the vase, to the Bonner sisters’ faces.
Miel looked at Ivy. “They don’t do what you think they do,” she said. Her roses, left under a pillow, would not make boys fall in love with the Bonner sisters. They would not give them back what they had before Chloe’s body held another little life.
“You’re not going to kill your roses anymore,” Ivy said again, opening a sideboard drawer. Each word was as calm and sure as the first time. “When you grow one, you’re going to bring it to us.”
In Ivy’s face, Miel saw a calm that fell between them like a sheet. The Bonner girls were losing their strange power, but Ivy thought these roses could get it back. They could make any boys they wanted fall in love with them. This town would understand that the Bonner girls could take whatever they wanted. And that fact would ring louder than any whispers about Chloe.
Miel looked around the downstairs, wondering where Mr. and Mrs. Bonner were. Either they weren’t home, or they were upstairs, or the sisters didn’t care. If they thought their daughters were, for once, having someone over, they might be keeping their distance, not wanting to disturb the strange, unknowable act of girls becoming friends.
“No,” Miel said. “They’re mine.” The words sounded petty, but they were true. Her roses belonged to her. Her cutting them away and then drowning them was her offering to the mother who had feared them.
Chloe tilted her head. Her braid skimmed the side of her neck and traced the outer curve of her breast. Miel wondered if her breasts were heavy and full, and if so, how long it would take her body to realize there was no baby here, no one needing her milk.
But Lian spoke before Chloe did.
“It must make you sad,” Lian said, in a way that wasn’t warm enough to sound kind or sharp enough to sound mean. “What happened with your mother.”
Miel’s neck turned as perspiration-damp as the night she and Sam saw a lynx in the woods. Its pale fur had shone in the dark, its ruff banded in black. It had eyes the color of the dark yellow veins in canyon jasper. Two wisps of dark fur curved off the tips of its ears.
Don’t run, Sam had told her. You’ll just be telling her you’re less than she is.
I am less than she is, Miel had said. The lynx’s fur, gray tinged with red and gold, had looked like strands of light.
“You don’t know anything about my mother,” Miel said.
“I heard a story from a woman a few towns up the river,” Chloe said. “One of my aunt’s friends. This old lady who talked about a woman who tried to kill her children and then killed herself.”
“That’s not what happened,” Miel said. None of that was the way it happened.
“I doubt that’s what people would think if they knew,” Chloe said.
Lower your head, Sam had told her the night they saw the lynx. And your eyes.
Miel had, tipping her chin down, still watching the lynx’s face. She still remembered the feeling of perspiration dampening the small of her back.
Now back up, he’d said. Slowly. You don’t want to look like you’re retreating.
I am retreating, she’d said.
Miel met Chloe’s gaze, shrugging and shaking her head to say, I don’t know what you’re talking about. The woman in the old lady’s story could have been any woman, anyone else’s mother.
“You look like her,” Lian said, without malice, not baiting her. But Miel almost asked where they had gotten a picture of her mother, did they have it or was it pasted into that old woman’s photo album.
She didn’t ask. But stopping herself was enough of a flinch to tell them they were right.
One flinch, and they had her.
Miel not only had the petals they thought could root them back into being the Bonner sisters. She had committed the crime of witnessing one of them fail, seeing Ivy and that bored, polite boy.
Peyton was still tracing that water mark. She couldn’t meet Miel’s eye. Of course she couldn’t, not after everything Sam had done for her.
Miel tried to make her feet move, but her shoes felt heavy as glass.
The night they saw the lynx, Sam had put his hand on her shoulder blade, and guided her out of the lynx’s line of sight. The warmth of his palm had come through her shirt so quickly she thought the pattern of blush-colored flowers would turn dark as wet cranberries.
But she was not as calm, as steady with logic, as Sam.
“Isn’t it worth it to you?” Chloe asked. “So everyone doesn’t find out all the terrible things she did?”
Of course it was worth it to Miel. If people told those stories about her mother, her mother’s spirit would feel it. She’d be haunted, weighted by all those lies. Her spirit would never find any rest. She was already weighted down having a daughter born with roses in her body, a curse that spurred those petaled children to turn on their mothers.
Now, because of Miel, because of the roses the Bonner girls wanted, her mother would be blamed, slandered. What worse could Miel bring on her mother’s soul?
Without even meaning to, she had become everything a rose-cursed daughter was feared to be, a disgrace and bur
den to her own blood.
A breeze came in the screen door, ruffling Miel’s skirt. The damp hem brushed the backs of her knees. Streamers of chilled air snaked up her sleeves, cooling the wound her roses grew from. They felt solid as ribbons, tethering her to this spot on the Bonners’ floor.
The sideboard drawer slid shut, the wood rasping against a worn track. But Miel didn’t see the scissors until Ivy was peeling back her sweater sleeve. Tarnish dulled the brass of the blades, the handle rubbed shiny by the oils of the Bonners’ hands.
It didn’t make sense.
They thought Miel could give them back whatever they had lost.
They didn’t understand that the only way to do that would be for Chloe never to have gone away. Chloe was a tree ripped out of and then planted back into an orchard, her roots and the roots of every tree near her shocked by the turning over of earth.
But Miel couldn’t move. She was letting them, because they were the Bonner girls, and all of them had their stares on her. Ivy’s, her eyes a gray that made the red of her hair look hot as a live coal. Lian’s, a green as deep as her hair was dark red. Chloe’s and Peyton’s, both their eyes a brown that in certain lights looked dark gray.
Because together they had so much shared gravity they pulled toward that navy blue house anything they wanted. Because they were four brilliant red lynxes, and she could not run.
Ivy snipped the stem.
The cut bit into Miel, like thorns waited under her skin. She cried out for just a second before biting back the sound.
The feeling came back into her body. Pain snapped away the ribbons of cool air tethering her to the floor. And she ran, holding her wrist against her chest. The stub of a cut stem dripped blood onto her sweater sleeve, like a broken branch of star jasmine letting off milk.
When the Moon was Ours Page 4
