When the Moon was Ours

by Anna-Marie McLemore

“If you’re trying to hide from what happened, this is how to do it,” Miel said. “Becoming someone else.”

  “Miel,” Aracely said. “This isn’t me hiding. Me trying to be her son, that was hiding. This”—the tips of her nails, painted the color of champagne, grazed Miel’s forearm—“this is me not hiding.”

  lake of spring

  Maybe she still hated Sam for lying to her. But his life, his names, all of them, did not belong to the Bonner girls.

  Neither did Miel. She left her wrist bare, so the Bonner girls could see how she’d cut away her latest rose. It had never been theirs.

  She found Ivy on the side of the Bonners’ house.

  For a second, how nervous Ivy looked stilled her. Ivy had her arms crossed, each palm and set of fingers spread just above her elbow. Barefoot on the cold brick, but wearing a scarf. One of a thousand Bonner-girl contradictions that played in the imagination of every boy in this town.

  She was looking at the pumpkins, the vines that crept closest to the Bonner house. A few more had turned to glass. One a dark blue-green. Another red as the skirt Aracely had been wearing on the floor of the closet. A third as purple as the violet house, if the color had been distilled and darkened like vinegar reduced down in a pan. Each one, once dull orange or an almost-blue green, now caught the sun inside its shell, lighting up gold.

  Miel stepped onto the brick path that hugged the house. “This ends now,” she said.

  Ivy turned, and in this light her eyes shifted to a darker gray. “Excuse me?”

  Miel stepped forward. The windows above them were cracked but not lit. She still came close to Ivy, and kept her voice low.

  “Do you want your mother and father to know what Peyton does on Thursday afternoons?” Miel asked. “I’m sure they know, in their own way. But no one’s ever really made them think about it.”

  There was something almost like pity in Ivy’s laugh. “You think I’m afraid of my parents?”

  Miel took another step toward Ivy. “How about how Lian passed her classes? I’m guessing no one’s ever put that in front of them.” Now she was so close to Ivy she could see the faint tint of blue in her gray eyes. “Or you. Maybe nobody knows your secret, but they will. Whatever you’re hiding, I’ll find it.”

  Ivy’s smile had that same pity, without being unkind. “You can’t.”

  The softness didn’t deter Miel. She leaned in close enough to whisper.

  “Try me.”

  At the corner of Miel’s vision, the last of the light flashed off those glass pumpkins, deep and shining as the tumbled stones Sam’s mother wore.

  “You don’t own any part of us,” Miel said.

  Ivy studied the reddened skin on Miel’s wrist, the small wound.

  “I could tell everyone about her,” Ivy said.

  Her. That one word made Miel press her feet harder against the brick path, trying not to show Ivy that this one syllable touched her. The thought of what it would do to Sam dragged over her skin like a safety pin.

  “Everyone’ll think you like girls,” Ivy said.

  Miel hated Ivy for everything she assumed she knew about Sam, her implication that his body made him a girl. But a ribbon of admiration tainted Miel’s rage. That Ivy could protect Peyton so fiercely and still talk about girls liking girls spoke of something fearless in her. Loyal to those other three girls, who were as much part of her as her own body, ruthless to everyone else.

  “I don’t care if they do,” Miel said. She wanted Sam, both what he was with his clothes on and what he was naked. She didn’t care what that made her. “They can call me whatever they want. But he’s not a girl.”

  She thought of Sam, of the smell of paint on his skin and the scent of black cardamom on his clothes, and the smallest movement twitched under her skin.

  She felt a new burst of growth breaking through to the light. She held her gasp in her lungs, and glanced down at the green shoot, the new leaves.

  Ivy did not see. Miel kept her arm at her side, stopping herself from wincing as the thorned stem inched out of her skin.

  “You really want everyone knowing your mother tried to drown her children?” Ivy asked, no taunting. She laced the words with neither coaxing nor threatening.

  Miel bit back every that’s not true. Her tongue wanted to let go of the words that’s not what happened.

  Instead, Miel whispered, “Just try it.”

  Ivy took hold of Miel’s elbow. Not a reflex of being angry, lashing out, but the slow wrapping of her fingers around Miel’s arm.

  “You really want to take us on?” Ivy asked. “You sure about that?”

  Miel leaned back to pull her arm away, but stopped.

  Ivy looked so tired, wrung out by all that blunt determination.

  “No,” Miel said. “I don’t want to do anything with you.”

  Miel glanced down at her wrist. A new bud looked red as the center of a blood orange. The more she thought of the brown of Sam’s hands or the amber of Aracely’s perfume, the more leaves twisted out of her. The leaves turned such a deep green that they looked like the blue of sky lupines. Flashes of gold streaked the petals like candle flames.

  Ivy saw the flick of Miel’s eyes. Miel was gritting her teeth to keep from crying out with pain and relief.

  “I’m walking away, Ivy,” Miel said. “You’re letting go of me, and I’m walking away. And if you threaten anyone I love again, I will take you down. All of you. I will find every secret you ever tried to hide, and I will make sure everyone knows.”

  They both looked down at Miel’s wrist, where the rosebud swelled like a bulb of blown glass.

  “What do you want with them?” Miel asked. “They’re not gonna get you what you want. And they’re sure as hell not gonna make it so Chloe was never gone.” Miel could almost smell the warmth of her own roses drifting out the cracked window and into the chilled air, the stems still inside, in that blue vase. “So what do you want with them?”

  Ivy lifted her gaze.

  A sheen crossed her eyes, like a slick of oil on water.

  That passing light, the slight opening wider of her eyes, sank into Miel.

  Fear. That was the plain, unadorned reason Ivy wanted Miel’s roses.

  It hadn’t been about power. It had been about fear. And it hadn’t been about what they could get everyone else to give them. It had always been about them, just them.

  They had almost lost Chloe. They had splintered and then tried to fit themselves back together, even if they could not control how they all had grown edges and corners, how they might scrape against one another.

  Instead of twisting like the smooth green of morning glory vines, they were wearing one another down like brambles rubbing away the thorns of other brambles.

  And Ivy must have thought that if she could control this one thing, she could keep them together, interlocked instead of breaking.

  With those roses, she believed they could have any boy they wanted. If their charms failed on a boy with glasses who played the violin like it was part of his hands, or the tall one with crooked teeth but perfect blue eyes, they could call on these roses.

  But it had never been about any one boy, or even a string of them. As long as they could have anything they wanted, they were still the Bonner girls. They were still one force in four bodies, in four shades of red hair.

  Miel didn’t care. That force, those shades of red, weren’t moving her wherever the Bonner girls wanted. And they weren’t threatening Sam.

  “If you try and hurt anyone I love,” Miel said, “I will make sure everyone in this town knows you and your sisters can’t do anything. The famous Bonner girls can’t get what they want. You can’t even get boys to fall in love with you anymore. Why don’t we ask Aracely? I bet she could tell you there’s not a single heart in this whole town that’s lovesick over any of you. The magnificent Bonner sisters? They don’t exist. You don’t rule this town anymore.”

  Miel’s own venom spread over her tongue like melted su
gar. It was dark and unfamiliar and so smooth she felt like she was drinking it. Ivy’s flinch only thickened its sweetness at the back of her throat.

  “You leave me alone, and you leave Sam alone,” Miel said. “Or everything I know, everyone will know.”

  Ivy leaned into Miel, her mouth near her ear. “You don’t know anything.”

  She grabbed Miel’s rose by the stem and pulled.

  Miel screamed, the ripping of the thorns through her skin like having a vein torn out. Her scream sounded not like her, but shrill and wild, the shriek of a downed bird.

  The thorns dragged through Miel’s muscle. They sliced across her veins. They turned the small opening in her wrist into a wound, and it throbbed like a burn, a hot coin searing her skin.

  The last of the stem flopped out, the end limp as a wet rope.

  Ivy pinched the rose stem between her fingers. The streaks of yellow on the red petals looked like bands of light crossing a blood moon.

  Blood flowed out over Miel’s arm. It salted the back of her throat. Her wound dyed her shirt, the rose’s pine and amber scent raining down from her wrist. She was a lipstick tree, blooming with red so bright it did not look real.

  A sweep of auburn burst into the darkening air.

  Lian Bonner’s eyes flashed green as a wet pumpkin vine. She wore a heavy sweater, cable-knit in a thick yarn, but like Ivy, she stepped onto the brick path in bare feet.

  Miel’s scream had called her out. Soon Peyton and Chloe would come out too. They would pull Miel into the pumpkin fields and quiet her. They would hold her down so that when Mr. and Mrs. Bonner came out asking what on earth was going on, they’d keep their hands over her mouth and her limbs, and the green of the vines would hide her.

  They would pretend they were crouching in the pumpkin fields looking for an earring Ivy had lost. They would tell their mother and their father that Lian had seen a mouse, or that Chloe had been trying to scare Peyton with a grass snake. And the weight of their hands would press more blood from Miel’s body, until she could not bite Ivy’s palm or fight against Peyton’s and Lian’s fingers on her ankles and wrists.

  Miel grabbed a glass pumpkin and wrenched it. The stem snapped and let off a spray of blue glass splinters.

  If the Bonner girls would not face these fields, if they did not understand the force spilling out of their windows, Miel could make them. She could break it open and put it between her and them.

  She shut her eyes and threw it at the brick path. It shattered, a million little clean, sharp noises. Like rain hitting the different-colored tiles on the roof of Sam’s house, sounding like handfuls of sewing needles.

  Miel opened her eyes, holding her wrist against her chest to slow the bleeding.

  Shards of blue littered the brick path and the dirt. Pieces had skittered into the rows of pumpkin vines. They looked like a hundred blue glass flames, a forbidding river between Miel and these barefoot girls.

  And she ran.

  sea of showers

  The inside of him was as frozen as winter ground. He’d gotten so used to telling Miel what he would tell no one else. Now that impulse to find her, tell her that he’d done it, he’d said the words he didn’t even know were true until he heard them in his own voice, left his heart held tight. It was the hollow echoing of an instinct he could no longer lean against. Now she wouldn’t let him near her, and he was all ice and cold earth. Everything felt as sharp as frost flowers, cutting him even though they had come from him.

  He always tried to stop Miel from touching frost flowers, those curls of ice that grew from the weeds on the coldest December mornings. He searched for them for her, spotting the violet-tinted white in the undergrowth. But he warned her that even though they looked soft as petals, they were sharp.

  She always touched them anyway. Those petals, looking so much like spun sugar or the tongues of irises, lured her. She touched them, and they drew blood from her fingertips.

  Every time, those frost flowers left her bleeding. Every time, she cut her fingers, and for that moment of her blood coloring the ice, he hated those petals for being sharp and beautiful.

  Tonight he’d hang every moon he had. To give this town all the light that was in him, even if all he was to them was this paint and paper. To get Miel to hate him a little less. To show her that every moon he’d ever made her was not a lie.

  So many times, he had told her in light what he did not know how to tell her any other way. Now he needed these moons to tell her why he’d done what he’d done, why he’d kept from her what he’d kept from her. That he could not betray a secret so much like the one he was keeping himself.

  If he tried to turn all this light into words, he would catch himself on them. What could he say? That he hated the way he’d hurt her, but that there was no other choice, no way he could live with the decision to give up what did not belong to him? Those words would be thorns snagging his skin and clothes.

  The closest he’d ever gotten to telling Miel what he could tell her in light was with his hands. His palms on her waist. When he flicked the pollination brush over her arm, and her eyes moved between his fingers and his mouth, and he touched her in a way he’d convinced himself he never could unless she moved toward him first.

  But now she wouldn’t let him near her, so all he had was the moon, this light in the sky he knew as well as his own body. He knew where it glowed brightest. Where its reflected sunlight vanished into craters and seas. The starburst of lighter contouring. And the shadowing that children in this town were taught to see as a face, but that Aracely had taught Miel to see as a rabbit.

  As a child, Sam had stared up at it, imagining the moon’s light spilling over him in a rush of cool air, the opposite of the sun’s warmth. But he had not truly learned it until he painted it, mixing the gradations of colors for mare cognitum and every other crater and valley, brushing on the darker shade of the vapor seas. He had done it so many times he could paint freehand now, no sketching, no outlining.

  He’d start with the trees that shaded the wisteria-colored house. Outside his mother’s house, he’d hang a blood moon and a mead moon, to match the different-colored roof tiles. He’d light up the beech tree outside Miel’s room with a rose moon and a flower moon. A grain moon and a hay moon would light the way between here and the wisteria-colored house. He’d spread the light of every lunar sea and valley.

  The shift away from the world he’d built with Miel, the knowledge that she now hated him, was so sharp, he could taste it on the air, like a salt crystal. The world they had between them was both brighter and softer than everything else, cast in deep blues and golds. It swept away the muddy haze that settled around all other things. It dulled the way Sam had to keep his eyes down if he wanted to be left alone at school but had to look up at the right time to scare off anyone who would not leave Miel alone.

  A knock clicked against his bedroom door.

  “Come in,” he said, expecting his mother, ready to show her what he’d finished so recently the paint hadn’t dried.

  It wasn’t until the door hinge’s soft creak that he realized that hadn’t been his mother’s knock.

  Aracely stood at the threshold.

  “Have you seen Miel?” she asked.

  Sam let out a curt laugh. “What do you think? She doesn’t want to see me.”

  “She didn’t come home,” Aracely said. “I’m worried.”

  He grabbed the edge of the drop cloth on the floor and rubbed paint off his hands. “She’s upset,” he said. “Did you think she wouldn’t avoid us for a few days? She’s probably not coming home until she’s sure you’re asleep.”

  “I don’t think that’s what’s going on,” Aracely said.

  He folded the drop cloth in on itself. “Why not?”

  Aracely held out her wrist.

  A trickle of blood striped the inside of her forearm. It came from an unseen wound; Sam could not find the cut. But that thin stripe, that cord of red, looked the same as when Miel bled fro
m the place her roses grew.

  lake of time

  The moon came through the ceiling of cloud cover, the reds and golds brightening the woods like the trees were catching fire.

  The rush of breaking the glass pumpkin and running had worn away, and the pain had forced her onto her hands and knees. She crawled deeper into the woods, her skin so hot with pain that the cold felt faint as the brush of a leaf. Her blood spilled on her jeans, the stains deep as the gems on one of Aracely’s necklaces.

  She was losing the feeling in her fingers. She couldn’t have screamed if she wanted to. All that came was the wet sound of her breath against the back of her throat. She lost the feeling in her wrists and ankles, the numbness opening her.

  Miel raised her head and spotted a glimmer of purple and red. The shapes of planets and constellations resolved, cut and engraved in panels.

  The stained glass coffin.

  She scrambled away from it, crawling under the ceiling of gold leaves. Under her breath, she whispered Aracely’s prayer of Santa Rita de Cascia, saint of impossible causes. But she did not know if the impossible cause was her life or her thorn-covered soul.

  Pain anchored her, keeping her down. She clutched her arm close to her body, pressing her wrist against her chest to slow the bleeding. The knot of scar tissue in her forearm felt heavy as a metal bead. Crawling with both knees but one hand slowed her down, putting too little distance between her and the stained glass coffin.

  The woods seemed endless, a whole world of green and gold. She didn’t know them like Sam. The fields of feather grasses were their place, but the woods were his. Branches offered places to hang his moons that fallow fields didn’t.

  But she crawled. She dragged herself across the ground, understanding now that nightmares were weak, silly things that would scatter in the light. They were made of dyed glass and river water and lies that grew even sharper when the truth lit them up.

  Dirt coated her clothes and her skin. She left a streak of blood on the ground, and was too weak to kick at it and cover it over.