When the Moon was Ours

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  He laughed without looking up.

  Her own words, said without thinking, brushed over her, prickling her. Even with his laugh. Worse, because of his laugh. Was she flirting with him? She couldn’t flirt with him. He was Sam. Even after they’d slept together, flirting felt distant, almost formal, the act of a boy and a girl who’d just met. He knew all the things about her that made flirting impossible. There was only so much she could flirt with someone who knew that eating casaba melon made a rash spread across her stomach.

  A flash of color made her check her hands.

  A sugared starflower petal had stuck to her palm.

  The rough, shimmering surface, edges deep blue, made her wonder how much she could touch Sam without him flinching away.

  There was no flirting. They were years past that.

  She came close enough to make him look up.

  He took a step back, startled by the small distance between them. But she set the starflower petal against his lips, touching only the sugared surface, not his mouth, until he took it onto his tongue.

  He shut his eyes, letting the petal dissolve.

  Miel pretended, for that one moment of him closing his eyes, that the petal had come from one of her roses, that he was taking onto his tongue a thing she had grown from her own body.

  She turned back to the milk and sugar simmering on the stove. The thought of being in bed with him, how his mouth had felt when she brushed her thumb over his lower lip, made her feel like the powdered sugar in the air, floating and shimmering.

  The wooden spoon slipped against the bottom of the pot, and a slick of hot dulce de leche sputtered onto the heel of her hand.

  She pulled away from the stove, a gasp whistling across her throat. The coin of heat burned into her palm.

  Sam grabbed her hand and set her palm against his lips. His tongue licked away the dulce de leche, already cooling enough for his mouth when a few seconds before it had scalded her hand.

  In that second of his tongue on her palm, she felt the new rosebud pressing out of her wrist. Even with the pain cutting through her forearm, she thought of kissing him until it was a full rose, bursting open.

  She thought she felt his lips pressed against her hand, the place where the sugar would have worsened the burn if he hadn’t taken it into his mouth. But he did it so quickly. Before she could be sure, he set the cold rolling pin against her hand.

  Her fingers trembled from the dulce de leche’s heat and the sudden chill of the wood.

  She would never be Aracely. Fearless charm would never flow from her body like yards of chiffon. But Sam looked at Miel as if all her sharp edges and cursed petals, everything she’d tried to keep in shadow, were the glinting facets of unpolished rose quartz.

  What Sam had told her the time she first kissed him, about pollinating each pumpkin blossom by hand, she knew it was true. He hadn’t made it up. But now it felt like something he’d invented, a fairy story about an enchanted paintbrush that shimmered with pollen like gold dust. It covered her in the feeling that his fingers were brushes, and under them she was growing into something alive.

  She stayed still a few seconds too long. A stricken look crossed Sam’s face.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  He looked down at his hands like he didn’t recognize them, like they were not his to move.

  “Tell me to let go,” he said, his hand still on the back of hers, still pressing her palm into the cold curve of the rolling pin. She could feel the ridges of the calluses on his fingers. “Tell me to, and I will.”

  He kept his eyes on hers, and she could feel the hum of life in his heart like a dragonfly buzzing by her ear. His heart was not a dead thing, not weak from lack of use. It was hard and tight, a muscle that would not give.

  “Do it,” he said, and now the edge in his words sounded like a challenge. But under it was a hitch in his voice that sounded like he meant it, that he wanted her to make him let go. “Tell me not to.”

  In this second, she was not the child from the water tower. She was a girl noticing, for the first and for the hundredth time, that her best friend’s hands were warm as birch bark on summer nights. That his forearms were the brown of a yearling buck’s coat. That at the outer edge of his brown-black eyes was the thinnest ring of what looked like purple. The color of the saffron crocuses his family once farmed thousands of miles away, the men harvesting the cupped blossoms, the women picking out the thin rust-colored threads.

  “Show me again,” she said.

  “What?” he asked.

  “How you make sure the pumpkin blossoms grow into something.” She felt the shiver of remembering the pollination brush on her skin, and he got it, he understood so fast that he shared it.

  “I don’t want to do this,” he said. “Not now. Not if you’re gonna regret it.”

  “I won’t,” she said. “I never did.”

  She came toward him at the same time he pulled her into him, her mouth reaching his so fast her teeth nicked his lower lip. She tried to pull away, to tell him she was sorry, see if they could laugh about it. But he didn’t let her. He put his hand on the back of her neck and kissed her harder, a drop of the blood off his lip finding her tongue and turning to salt.

  This was the boy who’d made her unashamed of how the bottom edge of her skirt was always damp, when everyone else thought it was a sign that she was odd or cursed. It had bothered her enough that she wore jeans most of the time, not hemming them, the bottoms dragging through mud and fallen leaves until they were frayed and dyed dark and it was impossible to tell that, like her skirts, they were always wet.

  But with Sam, there was nothing she wanted to hide. Not the wound on her wrist that would not close even between roses. Not the petals she drowned in the river. Not even the way she could not sleep during the pumpkin harvest season without the light on.

  His breath feathered over her mouth. His fingers caught in her hair. He kissed her so quickly that his tongue parted her lips before she thought to do it herself.

  First he tasted like the sugared starflower petal she’d set on his tongue, and then the dulce de leche from the heel of her hand.

  People here argued about what the moon smelled like. Some said it was a crisp scent, like pressed linen or new paper. Others said no, it was sweet and alive, like night-blooming jasmine climbing on the first warm night of spring. Others swore it was new and silvery, like just-washed spoons, still warm from a sink full of hot water and lemon soap. But to her, it was Sam. The metal and paper of his moons, the rosewater from his mother’s kitchen, the sharp trace of paint and turpentine she only ever picked up when she was this close to him.

  Her hands slid down his back, her palms catching on his shirt. Her lips found flecks of paint that didn’t come off in the shower, the blues and whites and golds he had not yet managed to wash off his skin. A thread on his upper arm, a patch just above his elbow, a constellation on the back of his wrist.

  They shut off the stove, not caring that the dulce de leche would turn to crystals, that it would take them an hour to wash out the saucepan.

  This time, instead of climbing on top of him, she pulled him onto her. She wanted him covering her, soaking her like the light from his moons. She wanted her skin taking in as much of his scent as it could hold. And when he touched her, she wondered if this was how he touched himself, if this was how he’d figured out what felt good.

  In the years since she’d walked in on him changing, there had been so many times she had turned off her bedroom lamp and slid her hand under the quilt, trying to imagine she was touching him, that the place she had set her hand was not on her body but on his. But even if they were the same inside their jeans, he was so different from her that she could not imagine his body as her own. Even his underwear, the plain gray cotton, was so different than the yellow and blue and pale green ones Miel bought in packs of three colors.

  No matter what their bodies had in common, she and Sam were not the same. So the feeling of touching him
had always slipped from her fingers even while her fingers were still against her. The closest she’d ever gotten was imagining her hand belonged not to her, but him.

  Now, his fingers traced her, and the shudder up through her body made the small of her back curve away from the sheet. Her hair spread out, trailing off the edge of the bed, her neck so exposed to him he set his mouth against it, and stayed.

  With his weight on her, she was water and he was a moon, his gravity pulling her closer. He was a world unmapped, a planet of valleys and vapor seas no one but he had a right to name. If he let her, she would learn the bays and oceans of him. She would know him as well as he knew the maria in the moon atlases.

  She grabbed his belt and the waist of his jeans and pulled them away from his body enough to get her hand in. First her fingers were grasping at his boxers, feeling him through the thin cotton. Then her hand crawled up to the elastic band and found its way in, and she took hold of him, hard, like there was a single shape of him to be grabbed. She put her hand on him as though he had a body that would let him be called he and him without anyone ever daring to question it.

  He didn’t pack, didn’t stuff a pair of socks into his underwear. Didn’t fill a condom with dry grain or hair gel or any of the other ridiculous ideas they’d considered before he figured out that working on the Bonners’ farm could get him out of PE, out of changing in a locker room. And that was something she loved about him, the fearlessness, how he simply wore jeans loose enough that no one would ask questions.

  For one pinching moment, Miel wondered if that was what had made the Bonner girls suspect, if they’d looked at him close enough, seen how the shape of him did or didn’t push up against the crotch of his pants.

  But she wasn’t letting them in, not this time. She was shutting every window in this house and scaring them off with the light from Sam’s moons. It was just him, and her, his fingers flicking against her like the hot light of falling stars, her touching him in the best way she knew to remind him there was no distance, no contradiction between the body he had and a boy called Samir.

  lake of joy

  The first thing Aracely must have wondered, seeing Miel in the doorway, was why her hair was wet from the shower. Why she smelled not like her own soap, but like the kind Sam used. Why she was wearing not her own clothes, but one of Sam’s flannel shirts over a pair of his cuffed-up jeans, the hems damp because even if they were his, they were on her body.

  But before Aracely could ask about any of that, Miel spoke.

  “I want a pumpkin,” she said.

  Aracely set down the glass jar she was refilling with dried rosebuds. “What?” she asked.

  “I want us to carve pumpkins,” Miel said. “You and me.”

  They would go to a farm other than the Bonners’—any farm but the Bonners’—and they would walk through the rows of curling vines. They would pass Rouge Vif d’Etampes, and yellow-and-green-striped carnival pumpkins, and the round, orange kind called a jack-o’-lantern because it was a favorite to hollow out and fill with candles.

  Aracely would bring knives for both of them, and they would cut shallow ones to leave on their doorsteps, maybe an Autumn Crown pumpkin or the pale blue-green kind named Shamrock.

  And they would bring home others wide and round enough to carve. They would sit at the kitchen table, newspaper spread over the wood, and they would hollow them out. They would set the seeds in the oven, drying out the pepitas and then sprinkling them with salt and chili powder.

  Miel would not think of her mother, frantic and clawing the flesh out of a pumpkin big enough to hold Miel. She would blot out that memory with the yellow of the kitchen table, and the shades of the pumpkin rinds, and the smell of dark sugar in the air as she and Aracely passed each other spoons of sage and fireweed honey.

  There would be no glass pumpkins. Everything would be damp and warm and alive. Miel and Aracely would paint their lips to go out, and while Aracely touched up the edges of Miel’s color, she would remind her that the achiote Miel loved for its earth and pepper and flower taste came from a plant called a lipstick tree.

  Aracely was still staring.

  “For the lighting,” Miel said. They would use the smallest blades in the knife drawer to carve patterns in their pumpkins. Then they’d set candles inside, and they would bring them to the river. The water would carry them alongside all the other pumpkins the rest of the town had brought, all those carved, floating lanterns.

  Aracely’s laugh was not unkind, but disbelieving. “You want to carve pumpkins for the lighting?”

  Miel still tensed with the thought of holding the cool shell of a pumpkin. But she didn’t want to live fearing the way they swelled and grew on the vine, never falling, just settling into the earth. She wanted to find the beauty in the cream Luminas, and the blue-gray Jarrahdales, and the deep-ribbed Cinderella pumpkins that looked as soft as the throw pillows on Aracely’s bed.

  She didn’t want to fear anything. She wanted to be as fearless and generous as the woman who stood in this indigo room, for her laugh to be like Aracely’s, both reckless and kind.

  “Yeah,” Miel said. “Can we go buy some?”

  Aracely shut the wooden cabinet. “I’ll get my coat.”

  small sea

  He was already fake-tutoring Peyton. Mr. and Mrs. Bonner trusted him with so little reserve they had no idea how bad he was at math, or that he and Peyton had never even opened a book together.

  Sam had first offered to help Lian with her reading when they went to school together. Every time he caught her in the hall when no one else was there, he told her that he or Miel would go over the English and history assignments with her. Miel probably wouldn’t have been so happy about him volunteering her, but Lian was so used to her sisters’ company he couldn’t help wondering if she’d say yes to help from another girl.

  The first time he’d asked, Lian had been polite, the way she always was. “What are you talking about?” she’d asked, her smile still in place. A little shake of her head.

  “You’re not stupid,” he said.

  He knew she wasn’t stupid. He’d seen her in math class, drawing the kind of tessellations and polyhedrons that could have been illustrations in the textbook. She could be a designer or an architect. The fact that she struggled in English class to turn in one-paragraph in-class essays, that she’d given up on doing the reading, didn’t mean she was as slow as everyone thought.

  It wasn’t his business. He knew that. But he hated seeing it, her bowing to the way other people saw her, her sinking beneath the lie of what everyone else thought. So if he could say enough to remind her that she still existed, that she was both other than and more than what everyone else assumed she was, maybe she would lose the truth of herself a little more slowly.

  Lian didn’t see it that way. He’d said, “You’re not stupid,” and her expression had shifted, her green eyes half-closing, the smile turning into tension in her jaw. “Fuck off.”

  But Lian was the one he went looking for today. He found her on the brick path that ran in front of and then around the side of the Bonners’ house.

  She blinked at him, waiting for him to speak.

  “I quit,” he said.

  That blank expression slipped from her face. “What?”

  “I’m done,” he said.

  Lian’s stare flashed toward either side of them. She was looking for the shine of glass among the vines. He could tell from how her eyes were moving.

  Her face tightened, filling with a look both offended and injured, as though she was taking this insult on behalf of her family. Who was he, she must have thought, to judge anything that happened here? How could the strange boy who painted the moon over and over say anything about these fields turning to glass? And what right did he have to quit?

  “It has nothing to do with the pumpkins,” he said. “Look, I don’t know what you’re doing with Miel.”

  He could still feel Miel’s hands spreading over his back, her bo
dy pulling the heat out of his. How he’d put his mouth not against her forehead the way he had so many times but to her mouth. She’d tasted so much like honey, like sage and wildflowers.

  He looked up at the house’s windows. “All of you. But whatever your game is, I’m not gonna be part of it. I quit.”

  Lian set a confused look back into place, blinking in multiples.

  Even now that Mrs. Bonner taught her daughters at home, Lian showed no sign of shaking away the act she’d fallen into, the role of the slow sister. In summer, when the Bonners kept all the windows open, Sam had heard their lessons through the screens. Mrs. Bonner never asked Lian to read out loud, which must have seemed like a kind of cruelty, a way to point out that which her second-oldest daughter could barely do. During their discussions of books, Mrs. Bonner moderated Ivy and Peyton’s debate over whether Pip from Great Expectations was a romantic or a sap, while Lian sat staring out the holes in the lace curtains.

  “Why are you telling me?” she asked.

  “Because you’re smart,” he said. “And you’ll tell anyone who needs to know.”

  He took the brick path back to the edge of the Bonners’ yard.

  At the corner of his vision came a flicker of movement, like the ribbons of foil dancing on wooden posts in strawberry fields.

  Peyton Bonner stood, elbows cupped in her hands, the wind puffing up her curled hair. She pressed her lips tight, a worried look on her face. He knew she was wondering if he’d still be her excuse for Jenna Shelby.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’re fine.”

  Peyton nodded, her lips still pressed together. She looked younger, the way she had by the water tower, holding that gray pumpkin.

  Sam couldn’t remember when she’d stopped carrying it around. He’d never wondered until now. One day it had just been gone from her hands.

  “You remember that pumpkin you had when you were three?” he asked.

  Her mouth broke into a smile. “Lady Jane Grey?”