When the Moon was Ours

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  But for now, he knew this, that his name was Samir, and that he wanted every piece of paper declaring who he was to say it.

  They could call him Moon if they wanted. They could still call him Sam. But when he said his name, he would be Samir, the sum of the blood his mother had given him and the man he was becoming. When he met a stranger and introduced himself, he would be Samir.

  But he didn’t have to tell Miel what to call him. She knew. She knew him.

  She was outside, waiting for him in the space between their houses. And his hand was on the knob of his bedroom door, but his fingers would not turn it.

  He couldn’t settle on why they wouldn’t do it. All he had to do step into the hall, go downstairs and outside, and she’d be there. This wasn’t even the first time he was seeing her today. That afternoon he’d brought her to the Shanholts’ farm, where he was working now. He’d set a wooden-handled pollination brush against her palm, the bristles pale as wheat, and shown her the rhythm of sweeping the bristles over the anther of one pumpkin flower and then spreading the pollen onto another. He’d knelt next to her. The hem of her skirt, damp and picking up a fine coating of dust, had brushed his jeans.

  Still, he could not move from this space in front of his bedroom door. Not even for the girl tracing the path of light left by his moons.

  He may have known the surface of the moon, memorized the names of the lunar maria, but Miel had done more than that with him. She’d learned him, but left room for the way he was still learning himself. She knew the shape of him, every place that was shadow and every place that reflected light, without deciding he was hers to name.

  His hand drew back, to his own body.

  He let his hands move, not thinking enough to stop them. They stripped off his jacket, his shirt, his undershirt, his binder, until he was naked from the waist up.

  Then they put all of them back on him, every piece except one.

  This time, when his fingers found the doorknob, they turned it.

  To anyone else, anyone not looking closely, he would have been the same. A boy in the dark, a jacket thrown on over his shirt.

  But Miel noticed. As soon as she saw him, she noticed. He’d left his jacket open, and she could see the shape of his chest through his shirt.

  Her eyes flashed down his body before she drew them back up.

  He laughed. He’d expected that, her startling a little when she realized he’d come outside without his binder on under his clothes. In front of anyone else, he always wore the binder, then an undershirt, then another shirt over it. Now it was just the shirt and the undershirt, covering him but showing her more of the shape of him than he’d ever let her see.

  But he hadn’t expected the look that came with it, her mouth open a little more.

  He’d worried that any girl who ever saw him like this would look at him like a pinned insect. He’d worried that, with clothes on, he was the brown underside of a butterfly, blending in with branches and bark, but that, naked, the reality of his body would be as startling as the bright blue-green of its inner wings.

  That look though. It told him Miel was interested, not fascinated. To her, he was not a specimen.

  He was someone she wanted.

  He could give his body, as it was, to the one girl who understood it was not the whole of him. That there was a story told not just in the contours of his chest and what he had or did not have pressing against the center seam of his jeans. The rest of him was in what he chose. His haircut. His clothes.

  His name.

  Miel wasn’t looking around, searching the dark. There was no one else out there in the space between their houses, lit by a string of his moons. She knew that. It wasn’t about them being seen. But there was still doubt in her face when she looked at his shirt, not embarrassed, but protective.

  He wondered if that was the look he had when he saw a rose opening on her wrist, that feeling of wanting to guard it. He would have felt that now if anyone else was around, Miel’s newest rose showing at the edge of her sleeve. The shell of the outer petals, cream-white as a moon, held a center as dark as her lipstick. The half-open blossom let off a scent that was less perfume and more oak and moss.

  Light from the moons he’d hung out here brightened her hair, bleaching it from dark red to the color of rose apples. The white sliver of the moon in the sky traced her hands.

  She had given Ivy Bonner something Ivy had never had, a part of her that was her own, that none of her sisters could lay claim to. Ivy’s hair seemed black against the same pale coloring she shared with her sisters, and the soft brown of Miel’s skin made that red look less like fire and more like blood oranges.

  Ivy would always be a Bonner girl, and she and Miel would always have a spider-silk-thin thread between them that he only half understood. She still hadn’t told him everything that had happened.

  But these were things he needed to give her time to say. She’d given him years to tell her his name.

  He pushed a lock of hair out of her face, a ribbon the color of apricot honey.

  She caught him looking at it. “Does it bother you?”

  He looked down at his chest, unbound under his shirt and his undershirt. “Does this?”

  “It never did,” she said. “But you don’t have to do this. Not for me. Not for anyone.”

  “I know,” he said. “And you’re not anyone.”

  Miel slid one hand into the back pocket of his jeans. A flinch went through his back and hips, but he didn’t pull away. She put her other hand between his shoulder blades, and the petals of her rose brushed the back of his neck.

  She kept a little space between them, enough to keep the warmth of his body from meeting hers. She was following rules they had never set in words but that they’d held to, that there were parts of him he did not want to be reminded of.

  But right now he wanted to claim all of himself.

  When he got dressed for school, he’d put the binder back on before he put on anything else. He didn’t want anyone looking at him and deciding for him what he was.

  Tonight, though, he wanted to feel every part of his own body, and know it could not name him. It could not force him into a life that had never been his.

  “If you’re not ready,” Miel said.

  He took her hand and set it on the edge of his shirt, letting her fingers grasp the hem. “I am.”

  lake of hope

  For so long she’d been so afraid of everything that grew in the pumpkin fields that she’d never understood the small miracle Sam’s hands had held. His hands and his brushes turned paper and paint into moons, and his hands and the pollination brush turned the possibility of things growing into the truth of them growing. It made blossoms that opened for one day become flesh and seeds and so many colors.

  With the warmth of his palm on the back of her hand, she’d learned it, this craft of taking a glint of possibility and helping it become the thing waiting inside it.

  Aracely had taught Miel that so many things worth fearing—the water, the dark—brought with them things worth wanting. The river kept this town’s fields growing and alive. The dark gave them the stars and the sudden warmth of certain fall nights.

  But there were some things only a boy named Samir could teach her, because he had lived them with her. And this was the one she held onto now, as they stood in the wild land between their houses: that they would both become what they could not yet imagine, and that they would still be what they once were. The girl from the water tower, a rose growing from her wrist, and the boy on the wooden ladder, hanging the moon close enough for them to find.

  Author’s Note

  It wasn’t long after we met, when we fell in love as teens, that I wondered if my not-yet-husband might be transgender. I wondered when I saw him wince at being included in the terms ladies or girls. I wondered when I caught his hopefulness at being called young man, and his devastation when a closer survey of his body in a T-shirt and jeans elicited an apology, an oh, I’m so sor
ry, young lady.

  If I understood him in a way he didn’t yet understand himself, he did the same for me. He knew my childhood nightmares of la llorona, the mythical spirit-woman who had drowned her children and now wailed through the night, looking to steal mestiza daughters like me from our parents. I had no idea I would later reimagine the legend of la llorona in a book about a girl who fears pumpkins and a boy who paints moons. All I knew as a child was that my fear of her was evidence that I’d been born between two worlds. And in his unease with the gender he’d been assigned at birth, my not-yet-husband knew a little about that feeling.

  We’re young enough, and all of this happened recently enough, that we heard the word transgender as we moved from our teens into our twenties. But neither of us could say it yet. Saying it would have marked a point my husband couldn’t turn back from.

  It was during this time that I learned of bacha posh, a cultural practice in parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan in which families who have daughters but no sons dress a daughter as a boy. This daughter then acts as a son to the family. As an adult, a bacha posh traditionally returns to living as a girl, now a woman.

  It’s understandable that often a bacha posh has difficulty adjusting to her role as an adult woman after years of living as a boy. From the other side of the world, it’s easy to pretend this discomfort is just a product of the culture she lives in. But what daughter, in any part of the world, could learn the language of being a boy and not feel unsettled stepping back into her role as a young woman?

  That space, between the lives boys and girls are expected to inhabit, came into sharper focus when my husband did come out as transgender, and as he transitioned to living in a way that better reflected his gender identity.

  As teens, we feel the growing weight of questions we’ve held in our hands since we were children. For my husband, that question was how he wanted to live and what name he wanted to be called. For me, it was whether I could see myself as something more than a daughter born in that space between worlds.

  Something happened when we sat with those questions, together but quiet. The boy I married became the man he’d never thought he was allowed to be. And I came to understand that the night held not only la llorona but the moon and all those stars.

  This is the thing I learned from loving a transgender boy who took years to say his own name: that waiting with someone, existing in that quiet, wondering space with them when they need it, is worth all the words we have in us.

  Also by Anna-Marie McLemore

  The Weight of Feathers

  About the Author

  ANNA-MARIE McLEMORE was born in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, raised in the same town as the world’s largest wisteria vine, and taught by her family to hear la llorona in the Santa Ana winds. She is a Lambda Literary fellow, and her work has been featured in the Portland Review, Camera Obscura, and at the Huntington–USC Institute on California and the West. She is the author of The Weight of Feathers and When the Moon Was Ours.

  You can visit Anna-Marie’s Web site at annamariemclemore.com or visit her on Twitter at @LaAnnaMarie. Or sign up for email updates here.

  Thank you for buying this

  St. Martin’s Press ebook.

  To receive special offers, bonus content,

  and info on new releases and other great reads,

  sign up for our newsletters.

  Or visit us online at

  us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

  For email updates on the author, click here.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  sea of clouds

  lake of autumn

  new sea

  bay of harmony

  lake of hatred

  sea of islands

  bay of the center

  sea of vapors

  bay of trust

  lake of death

  southern sea

  lake of fear

  lake of solitude

  sea of serenity

  lake of forgetfulness

  marsh of sleep

  serpent sea

  sea of waves

  bay of roughness

  lake of winter

  bay of honor

  ocean of storms

  bay of billows

  lake of sorrow

  sea of the edge

  sea of tranquility

  lake of summer

  unknown sea

  lake of softness

  lake of dreams

  lake of joy

  small sea

  lake of goodness

  sea that has become known

  bay of dew

  bay of mists

  lake of spring

  sea of showers

  lake of time

  sea of cold

  lake of perseverance

  eastern sea

  bay of rainbows

  bay of love

  sea of nectar

  lake of hope

  Author’s Note

  Also by Anne-Marie McLemore

  About the Author

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

  WHEN THE MOON WAS OURS. Copyright © 2016 by Anna-Marie McLemore. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.thomasdunnebooks.com

  www.stmartins.com

  Cover design by Lisa Marie Pompilio

  Cover illustrations: stars © KPG_Payless / Shutterstock; silhouettes and water tower © Greg Paprocki

  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-1-250-05866-9 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-4668-7324-7 (e-book)

  eISBN 9781466873247

  Our e-books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by e-mail at MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.

  First Edition: October 2016