When the Moon was Ours

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When the Moon was Ours Page 11

by Anna-Marie McLemore


  The openness in Peyton’s face disappeared, quick and smooth as water slipping from cupped hands. “You don’t know anything about me,” she said. “Or my parents. After Chloe, they want me to be thirty before I kiss anyone.”

  Miel’s laugh came out small and cruel, but she didn’t bite it back. Because of the way Peyton referred to her own sister—After Chloe, as though the oldest Bonner girl could be reduced to the single event of her having a baby. Because of the implication that Mrs. Bonner wouldn’t sob into her casserole dishes if she knew what Peyton was doing with Jenna Shelby and Liberty Hazelton.

  “So that’s it?” Miel asked. “That’s the only reason you wear concealer on your neck?” Each word came out sharp and clipped, like yelling pressed down to keep it quiet.

  Peyton flinched, and then recovered, her shoulders straightening.

  She knew. Peyton knew that if the truth about her and Jenna and Liberty crossed the barrier from classmates to parents—if it moved from rumors in the halls of a school she no longer attended and into the whispers that covered this town—she would feel the scorn even through the walls of the navy blue house.

  After Chloe. After Chloe, the blooms of red on Peyton’s neck would make the town feel justified in calling the Bonner girls loose, immoral, sinful. Words the Bonner sisters would laugh off as old-fashioned, pretending each one didn’t cut.

  “Yeah,” Miel said. “That’s what I thought. And now you want to force on him what you can’t even take yourself.”

  God knew what words, or worse, this town would have for a boy who’d been born female. They would wrap their contempt and their cruelty in the lie that they wouldn’t have cared, if only he’d told them.

  It’s just the dishonesty of it all, they’d whisper.

  All that lying, it’s the lying I hate.

  How can you trust someone who pretends like that?

  As though the truth of his body was any of their business, as though they had a right to consider how he lived an affront to them.

  As though who he was had anything to do with them.

  Miel could hear those voices. She hated everyone who would say those words even if they hadn’t yet.

  And that was if Sam was lucky. This town would scorn Peyton, but they would hate Sam. That was how it worked, judgment for girls, and hate for boys. Boys had been run out of this town for sleeping with other boys, ones meant to marry pretty, pale-eyed girls. The boys who’d called Sam gay or a girl would hate him for what they would call a lie, solid in their conviction that his life was an insult to them, a deception, a trick.

  Judgment for girls, hate for boys. And because this town would not know what to do with Sam, he’d have to take both.

  “This will destroy him,” Miel said.

  “Then give them what they want,” Peyton said.

  This town had never seen anyone like Sam. If they had, they hadn’t known. And Miel’s fear over this, their reaction to that which they did not know, made her fight to keep her breath quiet. Girls who’d once thought Sam was handsome might let it slip to their boyfriends, who would beat Sam up because they could not stand the thought of their own girlfriends liking anyone born female. Boys who hated that he’d matched them, hated that for so many years they had not known, would corner him when he went out to hang his moons. Fathers, holding shotguns the same as Mr. Bonner’s, would threaten him to stay away from their daughters.

  “If he gets hurt, it’s on you. Because you should know better than any of them what this could do to him.”

  “No,” Peyton said, again with that slight shake of her head, so slow her curls barely moved. “If he gets hurt, it’s on you. Because all you had to do was give up something you throw away.”

  It wasn’t just throwing them away. It was killing them, destroying the petals her father could not heal her of and her mother could not baptize out of her.

  Now she was supposed to hand them over to girls who misunderstood their awful force. Her roses didn’t have the strength the rumors said, the power to compel love from those who breathed in the scent.

  But her mother had feared them so deeply she was willing to do anything the señoras and the priests told her to save Miel from them.

  “What do you even want them for?” Miel asked. “Just in case someone has the nerve not to fall in love with you?”

  That got a tight-eyed blink out of Peyton, a tension in her cheeks.

  “The four of you,” Miel said. “You’re worse than anyone on Aracely’s table. You want to fall in love more than you want to be in love, and you want someone falling in love with you more than you want them loving you.”

  “That’s not true,” Peyton said.

  “Then what are you doing with Liberty?” Miel asked. “You don’t like her the way you like Jenna and everyone knows it.”

  Peyton’s eyes opened a little more, a wild look that was closer to anger than surprise.

  It satisfied Miel more than she expected. It may have been as surface-level as the cracks on the stained glass coffin, but it still cut across the color and shimmer that was the Bonner girls.

  “I hope the three of them are all you need,” Miel said. “Because they’re gonna be all you have left.”

  Her wrist felt heavy, like the muscle had grown dense as a river stone.

  It felt heavier when she realized Peyton was watching it.

  A few more leaves had grown from her wrist, peeking out from her sleeve. They sheltered a tiny rosebud, the near-blue of an amethyst, shining with blood and water.

  lake of winter

  The green shoot was already thickening into a stem, and the heat turned to a slashing feeling. Miel felt the stem’s base anchored in her forearm, reaching almost to the inside of her elbow, under a veil of skin and muscle.

  After she’d left the Bonners’ house, the round pearl of the bud had fattened to the size of a marble. Now it was as big as an unbloomed peony, one flinch from shuddering open.

  Miel thought of Sam’s palm on her shoulder blade, and pain burned bright through her forearm. It felt as alive as if it had fingers and breath. Each time the stem crawled a sliver further out of her wrist, she wanted to let a scream pour from her throat.

  Its perfume, like the warm sugar of figs and pomegranates, felt damning, proof to the Bonner sisters of how much she wanted him. It gossiped to the women at the market. It confessed to the priests at church. It spoke of the olives and lemon groves Sam’s father ran through as a child.

  The thought of cutting it off her own wrist came to her, and stayed. It scratched at her, like noticing a trickle of blood on her lip and trying not to lick it away. It pulled her, this rose that had grown faster than any other before it.

  But she couldn’t cut it away and kill it.

  The Bonner sisters wanted it, demanded it. And Peyton had seen the start of this one, a deeper violet than the house Miel lived in with Aracely.

  Without putting on her shoes, Miel crept downstairs and outside, taking a full breath when the night air hit her forearm. The grass smelled clean and strong as citrus pith, and each blade looked a little gilded, taking in light from the house like a cloth soaking up oil.

  “Miel.” She heard Sam’s voice. Not the question he’d made of her name when he found her staring at the stained glass pumpkins. He was calling her.

  He’d been coming from his house. Even from this distance, in the dark, she could see the tints of the roof tiles. The day she had spilled out of the water tower, her eyes damp and sore, those different-colored tiles had made Sam’s house seem like a place out of a fairy tale.

  Now it seemed like a place that the cruel force of her roses might wreck if she came too close.

  The moon he carried was not the kind he hung outside her window, the pale blue-lavender of a frost moon, or the soft green of a corn moon, the kind he made for nightmare-plagued children. This one he’d painted in white, and black, and where they met, a thin band of gray. He painted not on paper or fabric but on a rusted metal globe, dis
carded by an antique shop; she’d gone with him to get it and a half-dozen others they were junking.

  He’d covered it in the blue-black of a new moon, and then added the sharp slice of a waning crescent.

  “Where are you putting it?” she asked.

  “I don’t know yet,” he said.

  She wanted to ask if she could go with him, watch him climb that wooden ladder and set the moon in a high tree, this gash of light.

  It scared her a little. She’d never seen him paint a moon like this, all white and black, no hint of color, mare insularum and sinus honoris in gray. It was so different from every moon he’d ever brought her, the violets and blues of lunar seas painted on paper, or the plains in a gold so faint they looked like cream.

  But that stark beauty made her want to kiss him so badly that the lack of it made her lips feel cold. Her tongue was ice in her own mouth. Her breath was winter wind that stung every surface inside her.

  He knew. She saw the shift in how he looked at her, the way his lips parted, a breath held between them. He set down the moon and kissed her, the taste of him like the black cardamom Aracely kept in a glass jar. The smoke and spice filled the air whenever she opened it. Like ginger made darker.

  Sam tasted like the one night each year when the air turned from fall to winter, the sudden cold, the smell of damp bark.

  Winged cardamom. That was what Aracely called it. For the way the pods, split open, looked like moths about to take flight. The taste fluttered on Miel’s tongue like a meadow brown on an iris petal.

  Even when her lips broke away from Sam’s, he kept his hand on the back of her neck, his mouth still so close to hers she felt the rhythm of his breathing.

  He pulled her against him, his arm holding her waist. This morning her rose had given off the scent of honey and apricot, but now its perfume had the weight and spice of copal incense. It filled the air between them.

  Each time he kissed her, that faint cardamom taste of his mouth made her shut her eyes. But then it turned bitter on her tongue. The more she cared about him, the more the Bonner sisters saw she cared about him, the more they’d know he was how to get to her. The more they saw how she looked at him, touched his arm when she laughed, pulled him into the trees when he was on his breaks, the more they’d wield that birth certificate.

  He was her best friend, and everyone knew it. But half this town must have assumed they were best friends by default. The boy who hung dozens of copies of the moon, and the girl from the water tower. The girl afraid of pumpkins, and the boy who knew how to keep snakes away with cinnamon and clove oil and pink agapanthus. They were each so strange that only someone as odd as the other could get so close.

  But if she loved him, the Bonner girls would feel it. She already had to do what they wanted, offer her roses in exchange for their silence. But she couldn’t let them near him. He couldn’t know that the secret held between him and his mother and Aracely and Miel was also in the hands of these four sisters. It would turn him frightened and skittish. He’d hide from the questions he needed to stare down.

  She put her hands on his shoulders and pushed him away. “I can’t.” She cradled her forearm against her sweater. “We never should have done this. Any of it.”

  “What?” he asked. “Why?”

  She reached into the dark for a lie, her fingers grasping for anything solid. “We know each other too well. We’ve been friends too long to do this.” Her voice was thinning and breaking. “We can’t do this.”

  “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, the first word clipped by a hard swallow. “I care about you. But I can’t be with you.” She turned her back to him before the damp sting of salt hit her cheek. “Not like this.”

  Even walking away from him, she heard him catch his breath in the back of his throat.

  “Miel,” he said.

  But she didn’t answer, so he didn’t go after her.

  She tried to get far enough away that she wouldn’t hear the soft brushing sound of him slipping his hands into his pockets. And she didn’t look back until she knew he was gone.

  This time, when the Bonner girls found her in the dark space between trees, she did not fight. And because she did not fight, they did not dig their fingers into her, or drag her to the stained glass coffin. They just set their hands on her, like they were all in church and they were blessing her. Ivy parted the blades of those brass scissors, and Miel gave herself over to the blazing reds and oranges of the Bonner girls, bright as tongues of flame.

  bay of honor

  She kept the door to her room closed. She almost never kept the door to her room closed. But lately she and Aracely barely spoke. Miel didn’t know if Aracely was still mad at her, and she didn’t know if she should ask.

  Miel lay curled on her side, cheek against her comforter.

  Aracely was civil, and that made it worse. She poured Miel coffee in the morning, offered without speaking, but didn’t hold her lips tight or look away like she was angry. She just handed over the cup and then went back to frying nasturtium blossoms. It reminded Miel of how badly she’d ruined the lovesickness cure, and how she’d thinned out Ms. Owens’ loyalty so badly that she was open to the whispers and charms of four fire-haired girls.

  Now it was all on Miel to save Sam, to make sure no one tried to force him into matching the name on that paper. She had cut into pieces the net Aracely had woven for all of them. The ache in her wrist, like Ivy was pressing the point of those brass scissors into her, would not let her forget.

  The tap of knuckles struck Miel’s door, the soft rhythm she recognized.

  “Come in,” Miel said without moving.

  The thread of Aracely’s perfume snuck into the room ahead of her.

  “Are you hungry?” Aracely said. “I was thinking of making something.”

  Miel shook her head, cheek still against the bed.

  Aracely sat on the edge of her bed, the slow lowering of her weight buoying Miel a little. It had always been a comforting feeling to her, the sense of another person sitting near her, especially Aracely. Now it sharpened the truth of how little they’d talked.

  “I’m sorry I yelled at you about Emma,” Aracely said.

  “I deserved it,” Miel said, her voice coming out hoarse without her meaning it to. Not a crying sound. More like her voice, within the country of this house, had fallen out of use.

  “No, you didn’t,” Aracely said. “And I went over there and made it right. She’s cured. At least until the next time around.”

  “Great,” Miel said, and the word came out so soft even Aracely missed the sarcasm.

  “You can’t do that again,” Aracely said. “If you’re not really here, you can’t help me. I’d rather you tell me that.”

  Miel nodded, her cheek rubbing against the quilt.

  “I know I’ve expected a lot of you,” Aracely said, and the lowering of her voice made Miel know what she meant, how Miel had been handing her eggs and lemons and glass jars since she was six, her small hands holding them up. “But you’re not gonna disappoint me by telling me you can’t do it. Everybody has bad days.”

  Miel shut her eyes, guilt braiding thick in her wrist and snaking deeper into her.

  Aracely ran a hand down Miel’s hair. “Do you want to talk about what happened?”

  She almost asked what she meant, the night Aracely had to bring her home, or the lovesickness cure Miel had wrecked when she did not open the window fast enough.

  But it didn’t matter. The answer was the same either way.

  “No,” Miel said.

  A knock echoed up from downstairs. Sam’s mother. She was the only one who never used the doorbell. She thought it was too formal when the four of them were so much like family.

  Aracely went downstairs. Miel pulled herself off the comforter, tripping over clothes she’d left on the floor yesterday and the day before, and followed her.

  Sam’s mother stood in the front hal
l.

  “Have either of you seen Samir?” she asked.

  Aracely’s eyes crawled over to Miel. “You were supposed to meet him somewhere, weren’t you?”

  She could see Aracely holding her back teeth together. Her eyes flinched a little wider. Miel could almost hear what she was thinking. Yes, Miel. Say yes.

  “Yes,” Miel said, letting her gasp sound like a sudden realization, as though she’d forgotten and now remembered. “Yes.” She glanced toward the watch Sam’s mother wore on her left wrist. “I’m late, but I’ll make sure he’s home early.”

  Sam’s mother looked between the two of them, her gaze careful and considering.

  She did not believe them.

  Miel knew how tall Sam’s mother was, taller than Sam or Aracely. Her long skirts, skimming the floor, made her look even taller. But she never seemed this tall when she laughed, or when she taught Miel the difference between sweet basil and tulasi. She had a tulasi tree on the side of her house that she never cut or picked from, and its green and purple leaves seemed to give off a stronger scent for being left alone.

  She seemed this tall only when Sam and Miel brought home grass snakes. Or when the parents of one of the girls she looked after did not notice that their daughter was so nervous so often she bit her fingernails to bleeding.

  Or when she wore this kind of worried look. It was those moments, and this look, that made Miel hesitate to call Sam’s mother Yasmin. It didn’t matter that she’d told Miel to. This woman was so much a mother, so much an adult, and any reminder of that made addressing her by her first name feel strange and irreverent.

  “Do you want to stay until he comes back?” Aracely asked. “I’ll make café de olla.”

  Of course Aracely would think the answer was coffee mixed with cinnamon and piloncillo in a clay pot. It made their lies feel as weak and thin as skim milk.

  “No,” his mother said. “Thank you.” She nodded at Aracely and left, turning toward the door.

  She must have been willing to believe them, or pretend she believed them, for now.

 

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