When the Moon was Ours

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  It was still enough to let her guess what he didn’t finish saying.

  I don’t want you to map me. I want you to love me.

  The unsaid words clung to her like foil stars. She felt the light from his moons tracing them, the shadows of lunar seas leaving their outlines on her skin. She would wear this night—those words, said and unsaid—on her body. Whether the points of those stars would cut into her hinged on whether she answered what he could not say.

  “I love you,” she said, the words said so softly they didn’t feel tethered to her. “I’ve always loved you. You know that, right?”

  She meant it however he wanted to take it. That she loved him as the boy who’d first been willing to come near her. That she loved him as her best friend. That she loved him in a way that made her glow with the memory of every moon he’d ever painted and every time he’d spread his hands over her back.

  “Yeah, great.” The sarcasm in his voice was sudden, as sharp and narrow as an icicle, and she felt the rose stem dragging its thorns against her skin. “But you know what? I don’t love you. Because I don’t know you.” He turned his back to her and the river. “You never let me.”

  lake of sorrow

  They had said so many awful things to each other, but this was what echoed in her head like the sound of glass breaking. I don’t love you. I don’t love you.

  She had loved him since they were small, when they’d met on feral land among the brush of feather reed grass. They had spent nights pretending the stars were things that could be lured to earth. That the fairy rings thick with white-capped mushrooms were the light of the moon seared into the ground.

  A little more of the rose slid out of Miel’s wrist. It made her bite down on her tongue, the faint taste of blood slipping down her throat.

  She knelt next to the water and plunged her hand in, her palm still hot from hitting Sam. The first cord of gold was tracing the hills, but she hadn’t gone home, knowing Aracely would probably still be sitting in Ms. Owens’ kitchen. If she went home, she’d take Sam’s words home with her, and they’d rattle around in that empty house, barren and cold without Aracely’s noise and laugh.

  Miel beat her hands against the water. Her fingers clawed at the current, even though she knew it wouldn’t feel it, that she never hurt it the way it had hurt her. She could never take from the river as much as it had taken from her.

  And now she couldn’t even give her mother the offering of her roses. She couldn’t cut them away and force them down into the river that had stolen her mother. The Bonners demanded she surrender those petals, or they’d spread lies about her mother and what they thought was the truth about Sam.

  The blood and muscle holding her together felt like a cast iron pan left out on a stove, barely cooled. The autumn air around her felt like ice that might crack just from touching her skin.

  A thread on her forearm, hot and damp like a trickle of honey, made her open her eyes.

  She looked down at her wrist.

  A trail of blood dripped onto her palm.

  The rose was gone. There was nothing but the stub of a stem, the wood rough from being snapped instead of cut.

  “No,” she said.

  She grabbed at the water, reaching out for the rose she’d broken off. Her fingers clawed for the flower head, her eyes scanning for the violet petals, the pink center.

  “No,” she said, the word splintering across the flickering water so she couldn’t tell if the river was echoing it or if she was saying it, over and over.

  They’d never believe her that she hadn’t meant to.

  “No,” she said, and this time she could hear her own voice, repeating it.

  She’d lost something the Bonner girls considered theirs. She’d lost the only thing protecting her mother’s wandering spirit, and a secret rooted so deeply in Sam that if anyone tried to tear it out of him he’d break apart.

  She saw the flash of copper in the same second she felt Ivy’s hands on her.

  “No.” This time the word hardened and turned to screaming. “No.”

  Ivy had seen her. Of course Ivy had seen her. Miel had been kneeling here long enough that the she could smell the faint warmth of the sun, and there was nothing the Bonner girls did not know.

  Ivy was pulling her to her feet, gripping her on the sorest point of her wrist.

  Miel kept screaming, twisting out of Ivy’s hold.

  Ivy dugs her nails into her. “Stop,” she said, the word hot in Miel’s ear. “Or I’m telling everyone about her.”

  Her. That one word, that word that did not belong to Sam, worked better than all the threats the Bonner girls could have made.

  Miel could have begged, could have sworn that she didn’t mean to lose the rose. But she owed this to Sam, and to his mother, and to Aracely. She owed them whatever compliance would satisfy the Bonner sisters. As long as it wasn’t forcing Sam into the light, she would accept the consequence of not handing over that rose.

  Miel went slack, and let Ivy take her.

  She let her pull her deeper into the woods, toward the stained glass coffin. She let Ivy force her inside, accepting this punishment decided by these four sisters and given under their watch.

  Ivy shoved the lid closed, and the latch clicked.

  Miel tensed, trying to breathe in the little ribbons of air from the holes in the stained glass.

  She looked through the side panels, wondering who would stand guard. She searched for the color of Peyton’s hair, that orange that looked softened by sun and dust. The almost-auburn of Lian’s, even the red-blond of Chloe’s. Though she doubted Chloe was made to do such chores as watching defiant girls. Chloe no longer led her sisters, but she had once, and even to Ivy, that must have counted.

  Miel looked again for Peyton and Lian, for their hair standing orange against the gold trees.

  But all Miel saw was that bright fall of copper.

  The back of Ivy’s hair.

  Ivy was walking away from her, leaving her, and none of her sisters were here. There was no other red. Just the yellow of hornbeam and hickory leaves.

  Miel threw her hands against the lid, screaming into the small space between her mouth and the stained glass.

  Without the other Bonner girls keeping Ivy in check, Miel was locked away, unseen and easy to forget. There was no one watching to make sure she was still alive and breathing.

  There was no one waiting to let her out.

  Miel rammed her hands into the stained glass above her. “They’re not gonna give you what you want,” she screamed.

  She wished, as hard as she wished to be out of these walls of stained glass, that the Bonner girls knew how little her roses could do for them. If they did, they couldn’t still demand she give them up. They couldn’t want them for the simple reason that they could take them. The roses weren’t some much-loved cat, and Miel hadn’t refused an invitation to a birthday party.

  But Ivy was so desperate to believe the rumors that the petals could cast a kind of love spell. She wanted four of them so she and her sisters could slip them under pillows or bake the petals into vanilla cake.

  They were grasping at anything that could show they had no less power than before Chloe had left them. A point they wanted to make with four roses and four stolen hearts.

  They were lashing out at Miel, because she had seen what no one ever should have, Ivy and an uninterested boy, a boy who did not matter except for the fact that a Bonner girl had bored him.

  But understanding this would not crack these glass walls. It would not make the Bonner girls hear her.

  Miel’s hands stung from the impact, but she kept throwing them at the glass.

  “You don’t need them,” she called out to the space between trees. “They won’t help you.”

  But Ivy was gone, and the trees didn’t answer.

  sea of the edge

  Miel wasn’t in their first class of the morning. He hadn’t seen her in the halls, or on the walk to school he’d taken fif
teen minutes early, both trying to avoid her and hoping he’d see her.

  Mr. Valk called on him just before the bell rang. “Samir,” he said.

  Half his teachers called him Samir even when no one else did. Maybe they thought it was more formal. Or they meant to command his attention, like calling a child by both first and middle names. Or they wanted to be sure he never forgot that he was different from his classmates. The Henrys and Christophers. The Lilys and Julias.

  Mr. Valk tipped his pen in the direction of the empty desk next to Sam’s. “Where’s Miel this morning?” he asked, as though Sam was responsible for whether she showed up to class.

  Sam opened his book to the page chalked on the board. “I don’t know.”

  At the end of the fifty minutes, Ivy Bonner ducked into the classroom, saying Miel was sick and that she was picking up her assignments.

  So now Ivy was Miel’s best friend. That hadn’t taken long. That made sense though. Miel was their kind of pretty. Not perfect and polished, not like Nina Chan, one of the girls who knew as well as Sam that if they wanted this town to love them, they’d have to give themselves nicknames; Nina had been crowned Pumpkin Queen last year, her curls so coated in hairspray they looked varnished. Or even like Adair Lewis, who always danced the part of the sugar plum fairy at the community theater each Christmas; she stood up straight as a cypress tree, and had her hair, almost as pale as her skin, always rolled into a bun with no stray pieces.

  No, Miel was like the Bonner girls. She was dark where they were pale, her hair brown-black while theirs came in all shades of red. But they were both a little careless, unpolished, half the time without their shoes and half the time wearing their good shoes into the dirt. No makeup except for some brushstroke of bright color, the Bonner sisters’ pine-green eyeshadow or the plum-colored lipstick Miel sometimes wore.

  It made him wonder how many other best friends Miel had on standby. Maybe it’d been all four of the Bonner sisters the whole time, and he’d just been too dense to notice.

  Outside Mr. Valk’s room, his classmates lined the hallway, boys mostly, watching Ivy and probably trying to work out if she’d gone up one or two cup sizes since she’d gone to this school.

  That was a difference between Miel and the Bonner girls. Miel had shed her baby fat a little at a time, like each season was water, wearing her down, cutting her into a different shape. But the Bonner girls started out bony, all jutting elbows and knees so skinny the sharp round of the cap showed, and each year filled out a little more. Boys had already been looking at Ivy when she left school, but those who hadn’t seen her up close since then wore their wonder on their faces, their shock at how her hips and her breasts now seemed as round and soft as her face.

  Two seniors—Sam thought one had the last name Reese, but the second was a transfer he didn’t know—stood against the lockers. They didn’t hide their survey of Ivy’s sweater and skirt and tights as she made her slow walk down the hall.

  “Is she registering?” the transfer asked Reese.

  “She’s picking up stuff for another girl,” Reese said.

  “Another girl who looks like that?”

  That. Sam felt the first flick of anger clawing its way down his arms.

  “No,” Reese said. “Miel.”

  “Who?”

  “You pay attention to anything I say?” Reese asked. “Miel. The girl with the wet skirt.”

  “Huh?”

  “Her skirt,” Reese said. “It’s always wet.”

  For the first time since Sam noticed them, the transfer looked away from Ivy and at Reese.

  “Look sometime,” Reese said. “Been that way since she came out of the water tower.”

  The transfer held his tongue against his bottom teeth, and Sam looked away. The gesture repulsed him, and at the same time seeing it felt like the breach of some rule, like walking in on a guy masturbating and then not backing right out of the room.

  Reese’s laugh was low, a half-grunt.

  “What?” the transfer asked.

  “Nothing,” Reese said. “Just makes you wonder if she’s always wet anywhere else, doesn’t it?”

  Sam felt the part of him trying to hold him back. He registered it, like the brush of fingers on his shoulder. But it couldn’t stand up to that clawing feeling that now made its way up to the back of his neck.

  He grabbed Reese by his jacket, shoved him against the locker hard enough that the back of his head hit the metal.

  “What the hell?” the transfer said, grabbing at the back of Sam’s shirt.

  Sam jerked out of his hold.

  Reese looked scared for a second. Then his lip drew back, and he looked more offended that Sam was touching him.

  Sam pressed his forearm against Reese’s throat, and the fear rushed back into his face.

  “Take it back,” Sam said.

  The transfer caught the back of Sam’s collar and pulled him off Reese. Then there was the shout of a teacher, pulling them all apart, and then walking them to the vice principal’s office with everyone watching.

  Then everyone in the hall scattered. That left nothing but the transfer’s insistence that Sam had attacked Reese, out of nowhere.

  Mr. Woods, the vice principal, dismissed everyone except Sam.

  For the most part, Sam had managed to stay out of Mr. Woods’ way. He only knew him by the way he wore a different pin on his tie each day of the week, and by the stories about how, at the start of each year, he held a lawn games party half the teachers looked forward to and the other half felt obligated to attend.

  Mr. Woods steepled his hands. “This is serious. You know that, don’t you?”

  Sam crossed his arms. He just wanted it over with. The detention if he was lucky, suspension if he wasn’t. Maybe even a threat of expulsion that he’d need his mother’s calm, friendly voice to smooth over.

  That was the worst part, the thought of them bringing his mother in, calling her away from watching the children she’d been hired to teach and look after.

  The doorknob clicked, and then the hinges of the door whined open.

  Peyton Bonner was standing in the doorway.

  “I just want to say that this is why my mother doesn’t want us going to this school,” she said, in a nasal, indignant voice she’d probably grown out of years ago but dredged up to make a point with anyone more than twice her age.

  Then she started into some story about how she’d heard Reese making racist comments about Sam’s mother, and that Sam had just been responding. She wasn’t making it all up; if there was a new slur running around the school, there was a good chance everyone could thank Reese and his friends. But what was she talking about?

  “That’s not what happened,” Sam said.

  But Mr. Woods wasn’t even looking at him.

  Who was he going to believe? A dark-skinned boy who’d just had his arm against his classmate’s neck, or this freckled girl with curls the color of the construction-paper pumpkins six-year-olds cut out at the grade school?

  For once, that was working in Sam’s favor.

  Mr. Woods looked between both of them. Then he landed on whatever conclusion he’d been scraping toward, and his eyes stayed on Sam.

  “Detention,” he said. “After school. One week.”

  “You can’t do that,” Peyton said. “My father needs him.”

  Now Mr. Woods looked annoyed, like he just wanted them both out of his office.

  “You can serve it out after the harvest,” Mr. Woods said. “Whenever Mr. Bonner says he can spare you. Understand?”

  “Thank you,” Sam said, biting back any other words so hard the two syllables came from between his clenched teeth.

  He caught up with Peyton in the hall.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “I don’t like having debts,” she said. “Now we’re even.”

  Before he could ask her anything else, she was halfway down the hall, toward Ms. Owens’ office, where her sisters were probably
waiting.

  “Samir.” Mr. Woods stepped into the hall.

  Sam’s back grew hot under his binder.

  “I think you should go home,” Mr. Woods said. “Just for the rest of the day.”

  Sam opened his mouth without knowing what he’d say.

  Mr. Woods held up his hand. “It’s not a suspension. It’s a suggestion.”

  Sam swallowed a laugh. A suggestion. That was vice principal for demand.

  “I think you and Mr. Reese both need some time to cool off,” Mr. Woods said.

  Sam saw the look on his face. He knew he couldn’t take back his proclamation, couldn’t decide now that he’d changed his mind and that Sam was suspended. This was how he could feel less like he’d been herded into doing what a fifteen-year-old girl wanted.

  “I know your mother’s working today,” Mr. Woods said.

  As opposed to any other day? Sam almost said, but held it back.

  Everyone knew Sam’s mother because she looked after the children of a few wealthy families. She coaxed them into practicing the violin or flute with promises to tell them more about Laila and the boy who loved her so much he was called Majnun, because people thought his own heart had driven him mad. Brothers and sisters fought less when she was around, reading together instead of grabbing at each other’s hair. To them she was magic and warmth, and they did as she said. She cleared their cupboards of oversalted and sugared food, and taught them the sweet bite of parsley, how lemon juice brightened the flavor of cucumber and yellow tomato. Daughters declared artichoke salad their favorite food. Boys came to love the sharp tang of onion and sesame seeds.

  When they did not want to eat their soup or practice their music, she bribed them with stories about goats whose wool changed color with the seasons. A moon bear appearing to travelers who’d lost their way, the white crescent on its chest bright against its fur. Banded peacock butterflies granting wishes to children who freed them from spiderwebs.

  Those children loved her, and Mr. Woods wasn’t willing to cross their parents by pulling Sam’s mother away in the middle of the day.