When the Moon was Ours

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  The fact that Aracely might understand what he could not say, it seeded in him a want, new and raw, like not knowing he was thirsty until water was in front of him. No one else, not his mother, not even Miel, could understand this wanting to live a life different from the one he was born into, so much that his own skin felt like ice cracking.

  It shouldn’t have mattered, not when Miel and the other girls in his class wore jeans more than they wore skirts. Not when they went out as late as they wanted. Not when they told their brothers what to do, and borrowed their fathers’ books.

  But there was everything else. The idea of being called Miss or Ms. or, worse, Mrs. The thought of being grouped in when someone called out girls or ladies. The endless, echoing use of she and her, miss and ma’am. Yes, they were words. They were all just words. But each of them was wrong, and they stuck to him. Each one was a golden fire ant, and they were biting his arms and his neck and his bound-flat chest, leaving him bleeding and burning.

  He. Him. Mister. Sir. Even teachers admonishing him and his classmates with boys, settle down or gentlemen, please. These were sounds as perfect and clean as winter rain, and they calmed each searing bite of those wrong words.

  “Does my mother know?” Sam asked. “About you?”

  Aracely’s laugh was not the wild, reckless thing he sometimes heard coming from the wisteria-colored house. Now it was warm, almost pitying. “Of course she does. How do you think you ended up here?”

  “What are you talking about?” Sam asked.

  “I met your mother before you two moved here,” Aracely said. “She came with a cousin who wanted a lovesickness cure, and we started talking about you. I told her if she ever wanted to move out here, I couldn’t promise much, but I could promise I’d watch out for you.” This time Aracely’s laugh was lighter. She combed back a stray piece of her hair. “I never thought she’d take me up on it.”

  “But we moved because she lost her job,” Sam said. “The school was making cuts, and they let her go.”

  In Aracely’s smile, clench-lipped and sad, Sam saw the truth.

  The school hadn’t been making cuts.

  She hadn’t lost her job.

  “She loves you,” Aracely said. “She loves you as much as a daughter and a son and everything in the world put together.”

  His mother had gone from being a teacher to being something between a tutor and a nanny, for him.

  “That’s why we came here?” Sam asked. “Because of me? It’s my fault?”

  “Not your fault,” Aracely said. “Not because of you. For you.”

  Sam put the heels of his hands to his forehead, his fingers in his hair.

  “Your mother wanted to move,” Aracely said. “When you wanted to live as a boy, she knew how hard it was gonna be to stay in the same place. A whole town calling you Samira? What was that gonna do to you? She couldn’t decide what was worse, you trying to get them to understand a tradition they’d never heard of, or her trying to get them to call you Samir.”

  Sam kept his palms on his forehead, his fingers still caught in his hair. But he felt Aracely watching him, her stare landing on the backs of his wrists.

  “She wanted you to have the life you wanted,” Aracely said. “So figure out what kind of life you want.”

  bay of roughness

  The phone rang, and Miel answered, barely getting a full breath out before Ivy’s voice came through the line.

  “Come over,” Ivy said.

  Miel let out a laugh so small that on the other end of the line, it must have sounded like static. “Forget it.”

  “Come over,” Ivy said, “or I’m telling my father to fire her.”

  For the way Ivy said it, Miel felt something close to admiration. No taunting, none of the singsong of grade school playgrounds, none of the I-know-something-you-don’t-know. Ivy’s tone came clear and without pleasure. She wanted what she wanted. The rest was all transaction.

  But that didn’t mean Miel knew what Ivy was talking about. Aracely? Aracely didn’t work for anyone. No one could fire her. They could only decide whether to trust her with their broken hearts. Sam’s mother? The Bonners may have owned the biggest pumpkin farm for miles, but even they, with their acres of dark soil and their bright-haired daughters, couldn’t cost her the work a half-dozen families in town gave her.

  “Who?” Miel asked.

  “Samira,” Ivy said.

  The three syllables cut into Miel.

  Samira. The name sounded less like a thing that had once belonged to Sam than the name of some specter, a spirit that might come and take him if Miel did not keep it away. It was a name of a girl who had not died because she had never quite lived. She had never truly existed. She was a life that did not belong to Sam but that he’d tried too hard to belong to.

  “Who?” Miel asked, but she heard the wavering in how she said it now. Not the true confusion of the first time she’d asked, but a false start to the word, a breath hitching before she got it out.

  “Sam,” Ivy said. “Samir. Whatever you want to call her. Come over, or I’m telling my father to fire her.”

  Ivy hung up.

  A new rose stem twisted inside Miel’s arm. The opening it would grow through looked as smooth and round as a cigarette burn in a blanket.

  When they were ten, Miel had let Sam touch it, let him set his thumb against the little knot of scar tissue. He’d touched her so lightly, so afraid of hurting her, she’d taken his hand and pressed it against her skin, making him feel it.

  Now these roses, these roses she hated more than she feared pumpkins or the deepest parts of the river, were what the Bonner girls wanted so much they’d rip apart the life Sam had built. They wanted them enough to drag back a girl Sam thought he had shed years ago. He was a comet burning through the night sky, and Samira was the trail of dust and ice streaking after him.

  And the Bonner girls would make everyone tilt their faces and see them both. Sam, the boy he was. Samira, the girl he wasn’t. And the blur of scattered light that would make everyone think they were the same person.

  Miel was still buttoning her sweater as she left the violet house. Of course she would come, and of course Ivy knew that.

  She felt a flare of anger toward his mother, that beautiful, kohl-eyed woman who told her charges stories of brazen, fearless daughters. Yasmin saw her son for what he was, a boy who would never feel like himself inside the name Samira, or inside clothes that let people see and judge his body. But she was as intent on letting things take their own course as she was indifferent to religion. She accommodated both the boy at the core of him, and his brittle, tight-held hope that one day he would want to be a girl.

  So you’re just gonna wait? Miel had asked her when Sam couldn’t hear. Yasmin had just said, He’ll get there. Her shrug was more a gesture of levelheadedness than an indication that she didn’t care. Miel knew that. It still frustrated her, how well she knew Sam and how comfortable she seemed waiting him out.

  Miel let that little shred of resentment float away from her. It wasn’t his mother’s fault. She had given him as much space as she could and as much time as he needed.

  Neither of which would mean anything if the Bonner sisters dragged out the name he’d been born with. By saying that name that once belonged to him but that he never quite belonged to, they could strip him naked.

  Mr. Bonner was in his truck, the wheels grinding along the dirt path that cut through the farm. He leaned out the driver’s-side window and nodded at Miel, like she was coming to see his daughters so they could share library books or polish one another’s nails.

  She nodded back, because that was what people did in this town.

  She kept her eyes up, not letting them fall to the glass pumpkins.

  Las gringas bonitas sat in the same arrangement as the last time Miel had been here, as though she had left and they had stayed the whole time. The Bonner sisters had gathered around that dining room table, Ivy’s and Lian’s gray and green eyes book
ended by the redless brown of Chloe’s and Peyton’s.

  That blue vase sat in the center of the table. Miel saw the first rose they’d cut. It had barely wilted, the edges of the petals darkened to copper.

  They hadn’t tried using it. They hadn’t yet found out that the rumors about Miel’s roses were nothing more than town lore.

  Miel felt caught in a second of wondering why, but then the Bonner girls’ four faces, their four shades of red hair, made her feel so dizzy she could almost see four roses. Like they had multiplied in the vase, growing roots and new leaves.

  Then those echoed roses vanished, turning to faint washes of color.

  The Bonner girls hadn’t used that rose yet because they were collecting them. They wanted four of them. They had decided that until all of them could have one, none of them would.

  It made Miel unsteady with wondering how many of her roses were at the bottom of the river, whole and alive.

  “You don’t care about your mother,” Lian said.

  Miel tensed, even though there was no malice in Lian’s words. Only a bluntness, a carelessness evolved to make up for how long thinking took her.

  Remembering that stopped Miel from rising to the insult.

  “I guess you don’t care what anyone thinks of her,” Chloe said.

  You have no idea what happened. She tried to say it, to cut Chloe off. Just because she wouldn’t give up her roses, just because she wouldn’t barter away the thing her mother considered so dangerous, didn’t mean she didn’t care about her mother’s memory. It meant she wasn’t willing to put into the Bonner girls’ hands the petals her mother feared, and that her father was so sure could be willed away.

  But those pumpkins outside, the jewel colors of the stained glass coffin, were a threat she could wish away no more than her father could cure her with bandages wrapped so tight her fingers prickled. And her voice felt like a thing outside her, like a breath she had let out and could not pull back.

  “You don’t care about everyone knowing she tried to kill her own children,” Chloe said.

  Chloe’s voice was more knowing than Lian’s, but it was still soft, unthreatening, like she’d just woken Miel from a nap. Her voice was afternoon gathered in the folds of sheer curtains. It was her white hand on patterned wallpaper.

  It was a lit match produced from her palm like a magic trick, and the whole room going up like kindling.

  Miel looked toward Peyton, who stayed quiet. But she was looking right at Miel, not tracing her fingers along water stains, or looking for anywhere else to settle her eyes.

  “But you care about this.” Ivy tapped a finger on the table.

  Miel noticed, for the first time, that a piece of paper sat on the wood. A photocopy. But the edging, the familiar border and spacing of the lines, made Miel feel like the Bonners’ wood floor was buckling under her.

  A birth certificate. Sam’s. Miel knew without looking. And that knowing came with the sharp drop of realizing Aracely had not settled everything with Ms. Owens. Maybe she thought she had. Maybe she thought she’d left Ms. Owens hopeful, calm, sure in her faith that when she grew lovesick again, Aracely would be ready for her.

  But because of Miel, Aracely had botched Ms. Owens’ lovesickness cure. Because of Miel, Ms. Owens, scattered, sobbing, and flighty Ms. Owens, would have been so open to the kind words of four girls who told her how useless men and boys were. Miel could imagine them leaning their elbows on the office counter as though they were enrolled, their hands rising and falling in soft gestures. They would have whispered to Ms. Owens as though she was part of their club, told her how men and boys were animals that were easy to control once you knew how they worked.

  Maybe they had gone in looking for Miel’s file, something they could use against her. She had refused them something they demanded. Of course they would want to wrench her up against the truth that if she defied them, they would tear into her life like teeth into muscle.

  But with all of them talking and laughing in hushed tones, how easily Ms. Owens could have let slip that she’d been keeping secrets for Miel’s best friend. And the Bonner sisters would have charmed those secrets out of her so slowly, so gently, Ms. Owens would have barely noticed she was giving them up. Confiding in the Bonner sisters would have felt like an act so quiet and harmless, she wouldn’t have realized the weight of what she was doing. Showing them the birth certificate would have seemed not like a betrayal, but like chatter between girlfriends.

  Miel tried to smooth the wondering out of her face.

  She looked at Ivy. “How do you know I care?”

  “You’re here, aren’t you?” Ivy said.

  Miel held her throat tight, wound with the feeling that every small movement was one the Bonner sisters would notice. If she swallowed, they’d know they had her. If she breathed in a little too quickly, or out for a little too long, they’d know they had her.

  “What I’m wondering is what you care about more,” Ivy said. “Everyone knowing she’s a girl, or everyone knowing you like girls.”

  The second half of that threat was so weak, Miel felt the sudden rise of a laugh. She took a breath in, stopping it.

  To this whole town, she was odd and unnerving. To them, she was the motherless girl who came from the water tower and grew roses from her wrist, a girl whose skirt hem was always a little damp even on the driest days. Whatever they said about her liking girls or liking boys was a handful of water next to the whole river. It could not make her stranger, more unsettling to everyone else, than she already was.

  But what took that stifled laugh, what folded it into something so small and dense it turned to anger, was going over the rest of what Ivy had said.

  “He’s not a girl,” she said.

  Ivy eyed the piece of paper. “That says different.”

  The grain of the photocopy pulled Miel into wondering what they’d noticed, what that birth certificate had made them look at a little more closely.

  How he fulfilled his PE credit with farm shifts.

  That he’d never taken off his shirt outside, even for swimming; even when he and Miel found places the river pooled, shielded by rocks, he didn’t.

  That Miel, a girl, was his best friend; so many boys were friends with girls, but not the way Sam was with her, not so close they became names like Honey and Moon.

  How often boys at school had called Sam gay or a girl. Even with muscle filling him out, he didn’t have the hard angles to his face or the wide spread to his hands to keep them from calling him feminine.

  Those boys had no idea what they’d been saying.

  Miel’s eyes crept over to Peyton. But she had nothing for her but that stare, her eyes the same brown as Chloe’s.

  There was so much art to it, how little they had to say to lay down the threat.

  As far as they could take it, they would take it. They’d proved that the second they’d locked her into those walls of stained glass.

  Miel’s wrist needled her, like peroxide in a cut. Like something biting her. They were all watching her wrist for the first sign of a new rosebud.

  Lian looked at her wrist. “You have time to think about it,” she said, and because it was Lian, it sounded like nothing more than an observation, neither a threat nor an assurance.

  Miel felt the point of a thorn dragging under her skin, ready to break it as easily as wet paper. She held her throat tight, killing the gasp.

  This time she did not run. She slid the paper off the table, folding it over until it was small and would not stay folded another time.

  She was halfway down the brick path when Peyton appeared from her mother’s herb garden, her hair bringing the smell of rosemary needles.

  Miel startled. A minute ago Peyton had been next to her sisters, and now she was here, a cat that was in an attic window one second and on a porch the next.

  “Miel,” she said.

  The give in Peyton’s voice sounded almost like an apology, but there was too much of that Bonner pride
, that shared sense of being one life in the body of four girls.

  “How could you do this to him?” Miel asked, pressing the folded paper between her fingers. “He’s done nothing but cover for you.”

  If Sam didn’t lie for Peyton, girls would laugh behind cupped hands when they saw her in the streets. Undisguised glances would needle her and her family at church. Mothers would forbid their daughters from visiting the Bonner house, not realizing their daughters were never invited there anyway.

  And God knew what words, or worse, the Shelbys and the Hazeltons would have for Peyton and her mother. They probably wouldn’t come by the Bonner house either. They wouldn’t bother with discretion. This town punctuated its quiet with enough fury to sustain the gossips for months. Last year a woman shoved her husband’s mistress into a stand of tomatoes at the market, sending red and yellow heirlooms spilling down the aisles. Three Christmases ago the Sunday school teacher, in front of everyone, ordered the girl playing Mary in the pageant to relinquish her blue dress, because she’d been caught smoking one of her mother’s cigarettes behind the church. If Mr. Bonner were another man, less timid, less afraid of his own daughters, he probably would have flashed his shotgun at the boy who’d gotten Chloe pregnant.

  “We don’t have to do anything to him,” Peyton said.

  “You can’t do this.” Miel leaned in close, checking that Mrs. Bonner wasn’t in the kitchen window or on the landing upstairs. “You can’t out him. He is so screwed up about this, and he’ll figure it out, but he needs time, and he’s not gonna get it if the four of you put this out there.”

  Peyton’s soft shrug came with a slight shake of her head. If her mother was watching from the upstairs landing, she wouldn’t have even seen it. “Just give them what they want.”

  “Don’t you get it?” Miel’s hand opened and closed, twitching with how much she wanted to grab a handful of Peyton’s curled hair and pull on it to make her listen. “A town like this, you have no idea what they’ll do. Don’t pretend you’re hiding from your parents.”