When the Moon was Ours

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  “Do you have someone who can pick you up?” Mr. Woods asked.

  Sam let out a breath through barely parted lips. “Yeah,” he said. “I can probably think of someone.”

  sea of tranquility

  Once they were out of sight of the school, Aracely pulled over. Mr. Woods hadn’t been willing to let Sam just walk home, so he’d had to let Mr. Woods call her.

  She set the car in park. “What happened?”

  Sam slumped into his seat.

  She turned and faced him, one hand on the driver’s-side headrest. “Anyone ever tell you that you make one hell of an unresponsive seventeen-year-old?”

  “Thanks,” Sam said. “I work at it.”

  “Look,” Aracely said. “I know what you’re going through.”

  “No, you don’t.” Sam sat up. “I still have to live like this. Nothing is gonna fix me. There’s no water that’s gonna make me into something else.”

  “And I’d start from where you are if it meant what happened that night didn’t have to happen,” Aracely said. “We don’t get to become who we are for nothing. It costs something. You’re fighting for every little piece of yourself. And maybe I got all of me all at once but I lost everything else. Don’t you dare think there’s any water in the world that makes this easy.”

  Guilt crept over his skin like the wisp of cold air from the cracked window.

  He sank back into his seat. “Thanks for picking me up.” He meant it, but it came out bitter, almost sarcastic.

  “This is not okay,” Aracely said. “This is not an acceptable way to handle what you’re going through.”

  “Are you gonna tell my mom?” Sam asked.

  “No,” Aracely said. “You are.”

  “Fine.” He unbuckled his seat belt. “Can I go now?”

  “Is that what you want?” she asked.

  The thoughts of everything he wanted were so bright and numerous, like threads of sun coming through at the edges of his mother’s curtains. He wanted to be a girl who wanted to be a girl, or a boy who was, in a way no one could question, a boy.

  He wanted to be able to hang his moons in the trees without having his name stripped down to Moon. He wanted to remember if he’d asked to be called Sam or if his mother had decided this was his nickname, if she worried that Samir was a name that would, to everyone else, make him even more different than he already was.

  He wanted to know if Miel had chosen him, or if she’d just fallen into the familiar rhythm of their nights outside because he was the first one to be unafraid of her.

  He wanted not to want the girl whose attachment to him had been so tenuous that the Bonner girls had stepped into it as easily as Adair Lewis turned across a stage floor.

  “No,” he said, looking up at Aracely. “I want you to cure me.”

  She dropped her hand from the back of her seat. “What?”

  “Is that a what like you didn’t hear me or a what like I need to say it another way?” he asked.

  “Sam.”

  “Please,” he said. “Don’t treat me like I’m still five. I’m not. I can pay you, same as anyone else.”

  Aracely looked at her lap. “I don’t want your money.”

  “Then whatever you want, I’ll give it to you,” he said. “Just cure me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t want to feel like this anymore,” he said. “And I don’t think she wants me to either.”

  “Which of those is more important to you? Because…”

  “I want you to cure me,” he said. “I want you to fix me.”

  “I can’t fix you,” she said. “And you don’t need fixing.”

  “Fix this,” he said. “Fix this one thing for me.”

  “Think about this.” Aracely leaned over the gearshift. “Really think about this.”

  “I am thinking about it.” He raised his voice enough that he could hear it coming back to him off the car windows. “This is my body. It’s my heart. It doesn’t belong to anyone else. I say what I do with it.”

  Aracely gave him back a startled look, her fingers resting on the steering wheel.

  “So cure me,” he said.

  She opened her mouth, but then it fell shut again. Her polished nails scratched against the steering wheel. “Okay.”

  lake of summer

  She tried to tune in to some feeling in her body. Anything that would keep her from falling away from the golds of the trees, and into the memory of the river.

  She tried to shut her eyes and feel the dryness on her tongue, but she felt both thirsty and choked with water. Her stomach should have clenched, but her whole body seemed weightless, floating. She’d been in here long enough that she should have felt pressure against the fly of her jeans and the hard seam between her legs. But even that she didn’t feel. She’d been sweating too much, even with the chill of the glass, and she felt nothing but the clammy layer of wet salt coating her skin.

  It had been the water that killed them all, but it had started with there being so little of it. There had been a drought that year, and summer had left the river low, braided with undercurrents her mother did not know about until they took Miel, and then Leandro, and then her. The roots and stones and contours of the riverbed made whirlpools and riptides that, in most years, more rain and greater depths smoothed out.

  Her mother had thought the lower waterline would make the water safer, easier to wade through even in the dark. She had no idea that the drought had given what little water was left claws.

  Her mother did not guess that water could be more dangerous when there was less of it.

  The memory of her mother’s screaming rang through her head. It splintered into each trembling note, and then resolved into a clear, haunted sound. And the silence, the lack of her father’s voice, the wondering if maybe the water had taken him too, turned each of those sounds jagged.

  Her mother had only done what the priests told her to, holding Miel in the river. But Miel fought so hard as her mother kept her underwater that her mother took it as proof that these roses had cursed her, that her daughter was pure and good and just needed to be saved. Whatever petaled demon made her grow them was leaving her body.

  But Miel fought so hard she broke out of her mother’s hold, and the current, with its hands grown from the dust and cloudless skies of this drought, swept her out of reach. It took her down so far she lost the moon, and all its distant light.

  The space between the stained glass panels turned dark as the river. It was swallowing her.

  The memory of her mother holding her down forced away the feeling that she had her own body. She was turning to water.

  Her mother’s voice echoed in her head, her insistence that all Miel had to do was stay still, give in, and she would be cured. Her mother had repeated the priest’s words. The difference between baptism and drowning is a few faithless breaths.

  Miel threw her hands against the glass, banging her palms against the dyed stars and planets not just because she was trapped but because being among the blues and greens plunged her into that night years ago, that night that had made her water. The memory was floating back, a distant air bubble at the bottom of the river, making a slow ascent.

  She was hitting the glass because her brother was gone, her brother was dead, and she could hear the echo of him calling her from the river, looking for her, realizing there was none of her left to find or save.

  She was hitting the glass because, years ago, when Sam had first knelt in front of her, the rust-dirtied water soaking the knees and shins of his jeans, she had thought he was her brother.

  Later, when Miel looked at Sam, she didn’t understand how she could have thought this. Sam looked so little like Leandro. He did not have Leandro’s arching eyebrows, and Sam’s lips, compared to Leandro’s, were thin and tinted almost purple. His hair fell in loose coils instead of half-straight and half-curly like Miel’s and Leandro’s.

  But no matter how many years she put between her and tha
t moment of mistaking him for someone else, it stayed.

  She drove her hands hard into the top panel. The skin on her knuckles broke and bled, and the pain made her shut her eyes. But she still shoved her hands against the glass, because her mother was dead too, and Miel could hear her cry on the wind.

  Her mother had died not just in the water, but in a way only a broken heart could kill. Not with the kind of lovesickness Aracely cured. Not longing for a lover. Her mother’s heart was the kind of broken caused by children, one who grew forbidden petals from her skin, and the other who lost his life trying to save her.

  Miel’s roses had cost her both Leandro and her mother. And the memory, inside this small space that would not let her get away from it, drained away the daylight. The silver between the trees turned to gray and then deep blue.

  She was screaming and sobbing even knowing that no matter how much noise she made, even if her voice could tear the gold leaves off the hornbeam trees, it would not bring back her mother and Leandro. Here, within this narrow space, covered in stained glass light, she could not forget. The air around her, hot as her skin, and the glass, cold as the river, would not let her go.

  unknown sea

  Sam watched Aracely pick through her store of eggs, all those colors she could get only from the Carlsons at the edge of town. Theirs was the only farm that had so many kinds of chickens their egg cartons held every shade from mint green to pink to dark brown.

  Sam glanced toward the ceiling. “Is Miel gonna hear us?”

  “No.” Aracely weighed each egg in her hand, pale blue and rich olive green, deep copper and peach. “You know why? Because she’s at school.” She side-eyed him. “Where you should be.”

  So Miel wasn’t sick. He’d never known her to cut class, but if anyone could get her to do it, it was the Bonner sisters. If they could get Mrs. Galen to tell their parents they were in Sunday school when they’d really snuck off to try nail polishes at the drugstore, then they could get Miel to skip school. She was probably somewhere looking through magazines with Lian while Chloe braided her hair. The ways in which girls made formal their friendships, the ways they declared and solidified that yes, they belonged to one another, were as foreign to him as the ice-covered fjords in his geography textbook.

  Maybe they weren’t friends anymore, but he wasn’t turning on her, not even for Aracely. If Miel wanted to cut class with the Bonner girls, it was her call, not his. If she was willing to have Ivy come in and lie for her, and the teachers were stupid enough to believe everything Ivy said, it was none of his business.

  Aracely had narrowed her choices down to three eggs, one blue, another brick red, another dark brown. “And where you would be if you hadn’t punched some guy in the face.”

  “I didn’t punch him in the face,” he said.

  Aracely took the sheet and unfurled it, letting it spill over the table like milk. “Lie down.”

  Even through the sheet, he felt the grain of the wood. In a few minutes, he would look like Aracely’s other visitors, calm, as though they could see the stars on the walls of the indigo room.

  From this angle, he saw a flash of green.

  A sweater the color of clover hung over a chair. Sam’s heart pinched. He recognized it as Miel’s, remembered unfastening each button as they climbed the stairs, eyes shut, his mouth on hers. It had ended up draped over the edge of his bed.

  So many times, he’d found a scarf she’d left behind in a classroom. Halfway through their study sessions, she’d take down her hair, and then she’d forget to pick up the hairpins. He had learned, early on, that Miel was both clean and sloppy. She left her clothes strewn over the floor of her room. But when she came over, and Sam left her alone for more than a minute, she would start doing any dishes in the sink. “Will you stop that?” he would say when he came back into the kitchen. “What?” she would ask, and then say, “It’s here, and I’m bored.”

  He had spent the last ten years making sure he pushed exactly as hard against her as she did against him, so that everything they had built would stay standing. If he either let up or gave it more of his weight, it would fall.

  And until the night he ran the pollination brush over her arm, this kept him still, the possibility that if she did not feel how he felt, it made no difference, unless he put her in the position of having to tell him.

  This was what they had created, a place where she was more than the girl the water tower had spilled out, and he was more than a boy painting a hundred moons, a boy who knew mare nectaris and sinus roris, the sea of nectar and the bay of dew, and every other lunar feature better than his own body. As long as he didn’t question it, prod it, it stayed. But now he had, and he was losing her.

  It’s here, and I’m bored. The words came back to him. Maybe why she once met him on the open land every night was that simple. He was here. She was bored. And now she wasn’t. But he was still stranded in this world that only half-belonged to him.

  Aracely considered a blood orange but then set it down, and chose a bergamot, the kind grown in the place that made the father he had never known.

  The warm scent of cloves and the honeyed acid of the bergamot orange wafted over him. He opened his eyes just enough to see the pair of eggs Aracely had chosen, one red, the other copper.

  Her hands settled on his shoulders. He tensed, then reminded himself that this was how the lovesickness cure worked. He had to let himself take it.

  The room turned into a whirl of scents, cloves and cardamom and laurel leaves. The walls took him into their blur of indigo. Aracely whispered a prayer under her breath, keeping her hand on his chest. Not off to one side enough to touch either place his binder flattened. But in the center, below his collarbone.

  The rhythm of her hushed words cut through him. Her hand hovered over his body.

  The perfume of the spices, the calcium of the eggshell, the sweet acid of the bergamot left his forehead throbbing. Under the pressure of Aracely’s palm, he felt his love for Miel turning over and pulling away from the places it hid. It had woven itself into his veins, as much as the stem of her rose had roots under her skin.

  He felt the sting of the lovesickness dragging away, like tearing the weft out of a woven cloth. His body resisted, but Aracely kept him still, pinned like a butterfly under glass.

  With one hand, Aracely cracked the first egg into a jar of water. She held the jar up to study the pattern of the yolk.

  Sam set the heels of his hands against his eyes. He would not give in to the jagged breathing that rattled his lungs and throat. But he blinked, and tears dropped from his eyelashes, first the left, then the right.

  He brushed them away. He knew what Aracely thought of crying. She once caught Miel sobbing because the pain of a new rose, hours from bursting through her skin, would not let her sleep. She stood near her bed and said, “Stop it, mija, you’re gonna turn yourself to salt.” When she found Sam crying over a stray kitten that had died despite him and Miel feeding it eyedropperfuls of milk, she said, “And you think this will bring it back to life?” Not harshly. The truth ballasted her words. It kept them straight and tall.

  Crying was a waste, she told them.

  But now Aracely whispered, “Get it all out of you,” neither kind nor reprimanding, a recommendation no different from another curandera’s prescription for curing nightmares. “It’ll make everything inside you softer. This’ll go easier.”

  He kept his hands on his eyes as Aracely swept the bergamot orange over him. It hurt, the lovesickness coming unanchored and drifting from the edges of his body, his fingers and his toes, his lips and the ends of his hair. It drained toward his heart, the gathering weight pinning his rib cage to the table.

  But it was as much relief as pain, the shock of relaxing a muscle after keeping it tense. Aracely’s hands were sharing the weight, luring it toward her palms and out of his body.

  Aracely had left the window open, knowing that he didn’t care how cold the room got. He was not some lovesick wo
man or man who expected his money’s worth, who would complain if the indigo room had chilled, making it necessary to keep the window closed until the last minute. Aracely would draw out his lovesickness, and then throw the nervous, feathered thing, no bigger than a thrush, out the open window. She would launch it like a dove, a barely visible wash of peach or blue Sam never would have caught if Miel hadn’t taught him to watch for it flying out the window and vanishing.

  Aracely set one palm on his heart and the other on his throat until the lovesickness rose to her hands.

  In that moment, he was thirteen, and Miel was wearing her favorite dress, the violet-tinged blue of a cloudless sky. The thin ribbons of the dress’s straps kept loosening and falling down her arms, and each time he helped her tighten them he peeled a gold foil star off a sticker sheet and pressed it onto her shoulder or her upper back. She asked him why, and he told her to trust him.

  And she had. She had left them there the whole day, while they let the sun heat their backs. When they ran, her perspiration made the foil shine damp, and it wore the edges of the adhesive, but the little stars stayed. And that night he had lifted each one off her, slowly, so they didn’t pull at her skin. When he was done, she laughed, mouth open, to see that each foil star had left a lighter cast of its shape. In that first blazing day of summer, her skin had tanned enough that she was covered in constellations.

  She had wanted to name every one. She named one for Aracely, one for Sam’s mother, and then she told Sam he had to pick one, the one she would name after him. He had brushed his fingers near one at the base of her neck, the shape small but the edges clean and sharp.

  He had mapped her body like a new sky. He had known even then that this night was something perfect, without jagged corners to catch themselves on. But it was only now that he knew why. That day, with the foil stars, there was both a reason for him to be touching her, and no need for a reason. They were younger. She didn’t hesitate before she pulled leaves from his hair, and he hadn’t paused before reaching out and placing one of the foil stars on her shoulder.