When the Moon was Ours (14 page)

How often boys at school had called Sam gay or a girl. Even with muscle filling him out, he didn't have the hard angles to his face or the wide spread to his hands to keep them from calling him feminine.

Those boys had no idea what they'd been saying.

Miel's eyes crept over to Peyton. But she had nothing for her but that stare, her eyes the same brown as Chloe's.

There was so much art to it, how little they had to say to lay down the threat.

As far as they could take it, they would take it. They'd proved that the second they'd locked her into those walls of stained glass.

Miel's wrist needled her, like peroxide in a cut. Like something biting her. They were all watching her wrist for the first sign of a new rosebud.

Lian looked at her wrist. “You have time to think about it,” she said, and because it was Lian, it sounded like nothing more than an observation, neither a threat nor an assurance.

Miel felt the point of a thorn dragging under her skin, ready to break it as easily as wet paper. She held her throat tight, killing the gasp.

This time she did not run. She slid the paper off the table, folding it over until it was small and would not stay folded another time.

She was halfway down the brick path when Peyton appeared from her mother's herb garden, her hair bringing the smell of rosemary needles.

Miel startled. A minute ago Peyton had been next to her sisters, and now she was here, a cat that was in an attic window one second and on a porch the next.

“Miel,” she said.

The give in Peyton's voice sounded almost like an apology, but there was too much of that Bonner pride, that shared sense of being one life in the body of four girls.

“How could you do this to him?” Miel asked, pressing the folded paper between her fingers. “He's done nothing but cover for you.”

If Sam didn't lie for Peyton, girls would laugh behind cupped hands when they saw her in the streets. Undisguised glances would needle her and her family at church. Mothers would forbid their daughters from visiting the Bonner house, not realizing their daughters were never invited there anyway.

And God knew what words, or worse, the Shelbys and the Hazeltons would have for Peyton and her mother. They probably wouldn't come by the Bonner house either. They wouldn't bother with discretion. This town punctuated its quiet with enough fury to sustain the gossips for months. Last year a woman shoved her husband's mistress into a stand of tomatoes at the market, sending red and yellow heirlooms spilling down the aisles. Three Christmases ago the Sunday school teacher, in front of everyone, ordered the girl playing Mary in the pageant to relinquish her blue dress, because she'd been caught smoking one of her mother's cigarettes behind the church. If Mr. Bonner were another man, less timid, less afraid of his own daughters, he probably would have flashed his shotgun at the boy who'd gotten Chloe pregnant.

“We don't have to do anything to him,” Peyton said.

“You can't do this.” Miel leaned in close, checking that Mrs. Bonner wasn't in the kitchen window or on the landing upstairs. “You can't out him. He is so screwed up about this, and he'll figure it out, but he needs time, and he's not gonna get it if the four of you put this out there.”

Peyton's soft shrug came with a slight shake of her head. If her mother was watching from the upstairs landing, she wouldn't have even seen it. “Just give them what they want.”

“Don't you get it?” Miel's hand opened and closed, twitching with how much she wanted to grab a handful of Peyton's curled hair and pull on it to make her listen. “A town like this, you have no idea what they'll do. Don't pretend you're hiding from your parents.”

The openness in Peyton's face disappeared, quick and smooth as water slipping from cupped hands. “You don't know anything about me,” she said. “Or my parents. After Chloe, they want me to be thirty before I kiss anyone.”

Miel's laugh came out small and cruel, but she didn't bite it back. Because of the way Peyton referred to her own sister—
After Chloe,
as though the oldest Bonner girl could be reduced to the single event of her having a baby. Because of the implication that Mrs. Bonner wouldn't sob into her casserole dishes if she knew what Peyton was doing with Jenna Shelby and Liberty Hazelton.

“So that's it?” Miel asked. “That's the only reason you wear concealer on your neck?” Each word came out sharp and clipped, like yelling pressed down to keep it quiet.

Peyton flinched, and then recovered, her shoulders straightening.

She knew. Peyton knew that if the truth about her and Jenna and Liberty crossed the barrier from classmates to parents—if it moved from rumors in the halls of a school she no longer attended and into the whispers that covered this town—she would feel the scorn even through the walls of the navy blue house.

After Chloe.
After Chloe, the blooms of red on Peyton's neck would make the town feel justified in calling the Bonner girls
loose, immoral, sinful.
Words the Bonner sisters would laugh off as old-fashioned, pretending each one didn't cut.

“Yeah,” Miel said. “That's what I thought. And now you want to force on him what you can't even take yourself.”

God knew what words, or worse, this town would have for a boy who'd been born female. They would wrap their contempt and their cruelty in the lie that they wouldn't have cared, if only he'd told them.

It's just the dishonesty of it all,
they'd whisper.

All that lying, it's the lying I hate.

How can you trust someone who pretends like that?

As though the truth of his body was any of their business, as though they had a right to consider how he lived an affront to them.

As though who he was had anything to do with them.

Miel could hear those voices. She hated everyone who would say those words even if they hadn't yet.

And that was if Sam was lucky. This town would scorn Peyton, but they would hate Sam. That was how it worked, judgment for girls, and hate for boys. Boys had been run out of this town for sleeping with other boys, ones meant to marry pretty, pale-eyed girls. The boys who'd called Sam gay or a girl would hate him for what they would call a lie, solid in their conviction that his life was an insult to them, a deception, a trick.

Judgment for girls, hate for boys. And because this town would not know what to do with Sam, he'd have to take both.

“This will destroy him,” Miel said.

“Then give them what they want,” Peyton said.

This town had never seen anyone like Sam. If they had, they hadn't known. And Miel's fear over this, their reaction to that which they did not know, made her fight to keep her breath quiet. Girls who'd once thought Sam was handsome might let it slip to their boyfriends, who would beat Sam up because they could not stand the thought of their own girlfriends liking anyone born female. Boys who hated that he'd matched them, hated that for so many years they had not known, would corner him when he went out to hang his moons. Fathers, holding shotguns the same as Mr. Bonner's, would threaten him to stay away from their daughters.

“If he gets hurt, it's on you. Because you should know better than any of them what this could do to him.”

“No,” Peyton said, again with that slight shake of her head, so slow her curls barely moved. “If he gets hurt, it's on you. Because all you had to do was give up something you throw away.”

It wasn't just throwing them away. It was killing them, destroying the petals her father could not heal her of and her mother could not baptize out of her.

Now she was supposed to hand them over to girls who misunderstood their awful force. Her roses didn't have the strength the rumors said, the power to compel love from those who breathed in the scent.

But her mother had feared them so deeply she was willing to do anything the señoras and the priests told her to save Miel from them.

“What do you even want them for?” Miel asked. “Just in case someone has the nerve not to fall in love with you?”

That got a tight-eyed blink out of Peyton, a tension in her cheeks.

“The four of you,” Miel said. “You're worse than anyone on Aracely's table. You want to fall in love more than you want to be in love, and you want someone falling in love with you more than you want them loving you.”

“That's not true,” Peyton said.

“Then what are you doing with Liberty?” Miel asked. “You don't like her the way you like Jenna and everyone knows it.”

Peyton's eyes opened a little more, a wild look that was closer to anger than surprise.

It satisfied Miel more than she expected. It may have been as surface-level as the cracks on the stained glass coffin, but it still cut across the color and shimmer that was the Bonner girls.

“I hope the three of them are all you need,” Miel said. “Because they're gonna be all you have left.”

Her wrist felt heavy, like the muscle had grown dense as a river stone.

It felt heavier when she realized Peyton was watching it.

A few more leaves had grown from her wrist, peeking out from her sleeve. They sheltered a tiny rosebud, the near-blue of an amethyst, shining with blood and water.

 

lake of winter

The green shoot was already thickening into a stem, and the heat turned to a slashing feeling. Miel felt the stem's base anchored in her forearm, reaching almost to the inside of her elbow, under a veil of skin and muscle.

After she'd left the Bonners' house, the round pearl of the bud had fattened to the size of a marble. Now it was as big as an unbloomed peony, one flinch from shuddering open.

Miel thought of Sam's palm on her shoulder blade, and pain burned bright through her forearm. It felt as alive as if it had fingers and breath. Each time the stem crawled a sliver further out of her wrist, she wanted to let a scream pour from her throat.

Its perfume, like the warm sugar of figs and pomegranates, felt damning, proof to the Bonner sisters of how much she wanted him. It gossiped to the women at the market. It confessed to the priests at church. It spoke of the olives and lemon groves Sam's father ran through as a child.

The thought of cutting it off her own wrist came to her, and stayed. It scratched at her, like noticing a trickle of blood on her lip and trying not to lick it away. It pulled her, this rose that had grown faster than any other before it.

But she couldn't cut it away and kill it.

The Bonner sisters wanted it, demanded it. And Peyton had seen the start of this one, a deeper violet than the house Miel lived in with Aracely.

Without putting on her shoes, Miel crept downstairs and outside, taking a full breath when the night air hit her forearm. The grass smelled clean and strong as citrus pith, and each blade looked a little gilded, taking in light from the house like a cloth soaking up oil.

“Miel.” She heard Sam's voice. Not the question he'd made of her name when he found her staring at the stained glass pumpkins. He was calling her.

He'd been coming from his house. Even from this distance, in the dark, she could see the tints of the roof tiles. The day she had spilled out of the water tower, her eyes damp and sore, those different-colored tiles had made Sam's house seem like a place out of a fairy tale.

Now it seemed like a place that the cruel force of her roses might wreck if she came too close.

The moon he carried was not the kind he hung outside her window, the pale blue-lavender of a frost moon, or the soft green of a corn moon, the kind he made for nightmare-plagued children. This one he'd painted in white, and black, and where they met, a thin band of gray. He painted not on paper or fabric but on a rusted metal globe, discarded by an antique shop; she'd gone with him to get it and a half-dozen others they were junking.

He'd covered it in the blue-black of a new moon, and then added the sharp slice of a waning crescent.

“Where are you putting it?” she asked.

“I don't know yet,” he said.

She wanted to ask if she could go with him, watch him climb that wooden ladder and set the moon in a high tree, this gash of light.

It scared her a little. She'd never seen him paint a moon like this, all white and black, no hint of color,
mare insularum
and
sinus honoris
in gray. It was so different from every moon he'd ever brought her, the violets and blues of lunar seas painted on paper, or the plains in a gold so faint they looked like cream.

But that stark beauty made her want to kiss him so badly that the lack of it made her lips feel cold. Her tongue was ice in her own mouth. Her breath was winter wind that stung every surface inside her.

He knew. She saw the shift in how he looked at her, the way his lips parted, a breath held between them. He set down the moon and kissed her, the taste of him like the black cardamom Aracely kept in a glass jar. The smoke and spice filled the air whenever she opened it. Like ginger made darker.

Sam tasted like the one night each year when the air turned from fall to winter, the sudden cold, the smell of damp bark.

Winged cardamom. That was what Aracely called it. For the way the pods, split open, looked like moths about to take flight. The taste fluttered on Miel's tongue like a meadow brown on an iris petal.

Even when her lips broke away from Sam's, he kept his hand on the back of her neck, his mouth still so close to hers she felt the rhythm of his breathing.

He pulled her against him, his arm holding her waist. This morning her rose had given off the scent of honey and apricot, but now its perfume had the weight and spice of copal incense. It filled the air between them.

Each time he kissed her, that faint cardamom taste of his mouth made her shut her eyes. But then it turned bitter on her tongue. The more she cared about him, the more the Bonner sisters saw she cared about him, the more they'd know he was how to get to her. The more they saw how she looked at him, touched his arm when she laughed, pulled him into the trees when he was on his breaks, the more they'd wield that birth certificate.