When the Moon was Ours (15 page)

He was her best friend, and everyone knew it. But half this town must have assumed they were best friends by default. The boy who hung dozens of copies of the moon, and the girl from the water tower. The girl afraid of pumpkins, and the boy who knew how to keep snakes away with cinnamon and clove oil and pink agapanthus. They were each so strange that only someone as odd as the other could get so close.

But if she loved him, the Bonner girls would feel it. She already had to do what they wanted, offer her roses in exchange for their silence. But she couldn't let them near him. He couldn't know that the secret held between him and his mother and Aracely and Miel was also in the hands of these four sisters. It would turn him frightened and skittish. He'd hide from the questions he needed to stare down.

She put her hands on his shoulders and pushed him away. “I can't.” She cradled her forearm against her sweater. “We never should have done this. Any of it.”

“What?” he asked. “Why?”

She reached into the dark for a lie, her fingers grasping for anything solid. “We know each other too well. We've been friends too long to do this.” Her voice was thinning and breaking. “We can't do this.”

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

“I'm sorry,” she said, the first word clipped by a hard swallow. “I care about you. But I can't be with you.” She turned her back to him before the damp sting of salt hit her cheek. “Not like this.”

Even walking away from him, she heard him catch his breath in the back of his throat.

“Miel,” he said.

But she didn't answer, so he didn't go after her.

She tried to get far enough away that she wouldn't hear the soft brushing sound of him slipping his hands into his pockets. And she didn't look back until she knew he was gone.

This time, when the Bonner girls found her in the dark space between trees, she did not fight. And because she did not fight, they did not dig their fingers into her, or drag her to the stained glass coffin. They just set their hands on her, like they were all in church and they were blessing her. Ivy parted the blades of those brass scissors, and Miel gave herself over to the blazing reds and oranges of the Bonner girls, bright as tongues of flame.

 

bay of honor

She kept the door to her room closed. She almost never kept the door to her room closed. But lately she and Aracely barely spoke. Miel didn't know if Aracely was still mad at her, and she didn't know if she should ask.

Miel lay curled on her side, cheek against her comforter.

Aracely was civil, and that made it worse. She poured Miel coffee in the morning, offered without speaking, but didn't hold her lips tight or look away like she was angry. She just handed over the cup and then went back to frying nasturtium blossoms. It reminded Miel of how badly she'd ruined the lovesickness cure, and how she'd thinned out Ms. Owens' loyalty so badly that she was open to the whispers and charms of four fire-haired girls.

Now it was all on Miel to save Sam, to make sure no one tried to force him into matching the name on that paper. She had cut into pieces the net Aracely had woven for all of them. The ache in her wrist, like Ivy was pressing the point of those brass scissors into her, would not let her forget.

The tap of knuckles struck Miel's door, the soft rhythm she recognized.

“Come in,” Miel said without moving.

The thread of Aracely's perfume snuck into the room ahead of her.

“Are you hungry?” Aracely said. “I was thinking of making something.”

Miel shook her head, cheek still against the bed.

Aracely sat on the edge of her bed, the slow lowering of her weight buoying Miel a little. It had always been a comforting feeling to her, the sense of another person sitting near her, especially Aracely. Now it sharpened the truth of how little they'd talked.

“I'm sorry I yelled at you about Emma,” Aracely said.

“I deserved it,” Miel said, her voice coming out hoarse without her meaning it to. Not a crying sound. More like her voice, within the country of this house, had fallen out of use.

“No, you didn't,” Aracely said. “And I went over there and made it right. She's cured. At least until the next time around.”

“Great,” Miel said, and the word came out so soft even Aracely missed the sarcasm.

“You can't do that again,” Aracely said. “If you're not really here, you can't help me. I'd rather you tell me that.”

Miel nodded, her cheek rubbing against the quilt.

“I know I've expected a lot of you,” Aracely said, and the lowering of her voice made Miel know what she meant, how Miel had been handing her eggs and lemons and glass jars since she was six, her small hands holding them up. “But you're not gonna disappoint me by telling me you can't do it. Everybody has bad days.”

Miel shut her eyes, guilt braiding thick in her wrist and snaking deeper into her.

Aracely ran a hand down Miel's hair. “Do you want to talk about what happened?”

She almost asked what she meant, the night Aracely had to bring her home, or the lovesickness cure Miel had wrecked when she did not open the window fast enough.

But it didn't matter. The answer was the same either way.

“No,” Miel said.

A knock echoed up from downstairs. Sam's mother. She was the only one who never used the doorbell. She thought it was too formal when the four of them were so much like family.

Aracely went downstairs. Miel pulled herself off the comforter, tripping over clothes she'd left on the floor yesterday and the day before, and followed her.

Sam's mother stood in the front hall.

“Have either of you seen Samir?” she asked.

Aracely's eyes crawled over to Miel. “You were supposed to meet him somewhere, weren't you?”

She could see Aracely holding her back teeth together. Her eyes flinched a little wider. Miel could almost hear what she was thinking.
Yes, Miel. Say yes.

“Yes,” Miel said, letting her gasp sound like a sudden realization, as though she'd forgotten and now remembered. “Yes.” She glanced toward the watch Sam's mother wore on her left wrist. “I'm late, but I'll make sure he's home early.”

Sam's mother looked between the two of them, her gaze careful and considering.

She did not believe them.

Miel knew how tall Sam's mother was, taller than Sam or Aracely. Her long skirts, skimming the floor, made her look even taller. But she never seemed this tall when she laughed, or when she taught Miel the difference between sweet basil and tulasi
.
She had a tulasi tree on the side of her house that she never cut or picked from, and its green and purple leaves seemed to give off a stronger scent for being left alone.

She seemed this tall only when Sam and Miel brought home grass snakes. Or when the parents of one of the girls she looked after did not notice that their daughter was so nervous so often she bit her fingernails to bleeding.

Or when she wore this kind of worried look. It was those moments, and this look, that made Miel hesitate to call Sam's mother Yasmin. It didn't matter that she'd told Miel to. This woman was so much a mother, so much an adult, and any reminder of that made addressing her by her first name feel strange and irreverent.

“Do you want to stay until he comes back?” Aracely asked. “I'll make café de olla.”

Of course Aracely would think the answer was coffee mixed with cinnamon and piloncillo in a clay pot. It made their lies feel as weak and thin as skim milk.

“No,” his mother said. “Thank you.” She nodded at Aracely and left, turning toward the door.

She must have been willing to believe them, or pretend she believed them, for now.

Aracely leaned into Miel. “Find him.”

Sam mother's had barely left, the sound of her steps on the front walk just faded, when Aracely reached for her keys.

“Are you gonna help me look?” Miel asked.

“No,” Aracely said. “I'm gonna check on Emma Owens.”

“Now?”

“You better believe now,” Aracely said. “Your boyfriend”—she shrugged into her coat—“in case you haven't noticed, isn't ready to have this whole town know his legal name. The last thing we need is to worry about that woman keeping her mouth shut. I'll let her talk all night if that's what it takes.” She sighed. “And God knows it probably is.”

She was out the door before Miel could tell her not to, that there was no reason, and no use.

 

ocean of storms

The surface of the river was as dark as juniper berries.

All the stories were lies. His mother's fables about chukar partridges and women who disguised themselves as lynx. Miel's fairy tales about stars falling in love with moons.

What had his great-grandparents' stories of stars and moon bears gotten them? It hadn't let them stay in Kashmir with their countless saffron crocuses. It hadn't saved their family trade, built of the delicate work of bringing those flowers to life and then slipping the rust-colored threads from their centers.

What had Miel's fairy tales gotten her? This town didn't love her the way they loved the Bonner girls, even if they feared them. They didn't gather to protect her and Aracely when strangers threw empty bottles at the violet house, calling them witches.

To this town, Miel was as dirty as the water that had spilled from the rusted tower, and as strange as the roses that grew from her wrist. When she was a child, they thought the hem of her skirt, never drying even in full sun, meant she was possessed. Now they considered it the sign of some sin that lived as deeply in her body as her roses.

But if the moon in the sky could move whole oceans, then maybe, if he wanted it enough, every moon he'd made could pull at this water. It could draw it into the sky like a ribbon and turn it to ice crystals and clouds.

Sam stared down into the river. If he gave himself up to it, maybe it would do to him what it had done to Aracely, turning him into what he truly was. Maybe it would give him a body that matched this life he had built. Or maybe it would make him want to be a woman called Samira.

And if it did neither of these things, maybe it would have enough mercy to just take him under and turn him into water. Maybe there was enough force in him to fill in this river, drive all the water out like he was a meteor, so there'd be nothing left. Just a wetland, a damp crater in the earth.

He could not guard Miel against nightmares rooted so far into her they walked with her like shadows. But he could destroy this one thing Miel feared.

He waded down the steep bank until he found where the river dropped off to its full depth. The force of his body cutting through the water pulled him down. Almost warm near the surface, the river turned cold the farther he sank.

He lost the moon and the stars. He lost the clouds turning the sky to silver.

He drifted down, letting his body go, not fighting the dark. He shut his eyes and saw the blink of Miel's eyes, like candied ginger, and how her eyelids were a little darker than the rest of her skin. How her fingernails were short from her biting them, how she always smelled like whatever rose her body was growing, even when it hadn't yet broken through her skin.

She was amber and last light. The moment between summer and fall. The honey she ate off spoons in Aracely's kitchen.

This was one of the things he loved about her, that they called her Honey, and she was so quick to eat her own name.

He would never be free of this. Of any of it. How he wanted Miel in a way that hurt as much as the tightening of his lungs against the cold water, a desperation for a breath in matched only by the impossibility of taking one. How he was losing the feeling that one day, he could live the life that matched the name his mother had given him.

The day he needed to be a girl, a woman, had once felt so far away for so long that he believed he'd be ready. The time when he'd be as old as when a bacha posh cast off her boy's clothes and ways had seemed such a great stretch of time away from where he was that the impossibility of reaching it exceeded the impossibility of him wanting to be a girl.

He'd been pushing it for years, pretending that day was still far off. He'd pretended even when he'd started bleeding. Even when he had to start wearing binders under his clothes.

But for this moment, his body was not his. It floated and hovered. It belonged to the water, the current holding him. Its pull made him understand why he had gone into the river in the first place. It wasn't just this rage in him, or even Miel.

It was that raw hope that maybe the water would not only take him and turn him into something else, but that it would decide for him. Maybe, the way it had for Aracely, it would see him for what he really was, and make him into it. If he was meant to be a girl, maybe it would make him want to be a girl. If he would never grow out of being a boy, maybe it would spin the raw materials of his skin and muscle into a body that matched.

He wanted, more than he wanted a breath, for the water to take this decision from him.

He opened his eyes, and thought he caught the shape and light of every moon he'd ever made, faint as the reflection of fairy lights in a pond. The faint rings of violet and blue-green and gold floated around him. But the heaviness in his forehead made him shut his eyes again, and he lost them.

Arms wrapped around his waist, pulling him.

He recognized her touch, the way she dug her fingers into his sides. He tried to fight her, to let her go like she was a moon the sky could take. He didn't want to be the thing weighting her to the earth.

But his arms and legs felt no warmer and no more alive than the water. His fingers filled with a numbness that made him wonder if he was disappearing.

As long as he'd known her, she'd never gone into water so deep she couldn't see the bottom. Even when they swam together, she stayed in the shallows.