When the Moon was Ours (2 page)

And this version of the story would scramble the order of events. No one but Sam had heard what Miel was screaming into her hands.
I lost the moon,
she had said, sobbing against her fingers.
I lost the moon.

He never asked her what she meant. Even then, he knew better. Her feeling that the moon had slipped from her grasp seemed locked in a place so far inside her that to reach it would be to break her open. But this was why Sam painted shadows and lunar seas on paper and metal and glass, copying the shadows of
mare imbrium
and
oceanus procellarum—
to give her back the moon. He had painted dark skies and bright moons on flat paper since he was old enough to hold a brush, old enough to look through the library's astronomy atlases. But it wasn't until this girl spilled out of the water tower, sobbing over her lost moon, that Sam began painting so many copies of the brightest light in the night sky.

He would never let it seem lost to her again.

Moon had become his name to this town because of her. Because of her, this town had christened him. Without her, he had been nameless. He had not been Samir or Sam. He had been no one. They knew his name no more than they knew who this girl had been before she was water.

 

lake of autumn

They'd touched each other every day since they were small. She'd put her palm to his forehead when she thought he had a fever. He'd set tiny gold star stickers on her skin on summer days, and at night had peeled them off, leaving pale constellations on her sun-darkened body.

She'd seen the brown of her hand against the brown of his when they were children, and holding hands meant nothing more than that she liked how warm his palm was in the night air, or that he wanted to pull her to see something she had missed. A meteor shower or a vine of double-flower morning glories, so blue they looked dyed.

All these things reminded her of his moons, and his moons reminded her of all these things. He'd hung a string of them between her house and his, some as small as her cupped palms, others big enough to fill her arms. They brightened the earth and wild grass. They were tucked into trees, each giving off a ring of light just wide enough to meet the next, so she never walked in the dark. One held a trace of the same gold as those foil star stickers. Another echoed the blue of those morning glories Sam could find even in the dark. Another was the pure, soft white of the frost flowers he showed her on winter mornings, curls of ice that looked like tulips and peonies.

The one she passed under now was the color of a rose that had grown from her wrist when she and Sam were in ninth grade. She remembered it because, in the hall at school, her sleeve had slipped back, and the rose accidentally brushed the elbow of a girl who recoiled, yelling, “Watch where you're going.”

That same afternoon, when the girl's boyfriend broke up with her, she'd blamed Miel and that brush of petals. She cornered Miel in the girls' bathroom, and looked like she was about to backhand her when Sam came up behind her and said, “Oh, I wouldn't do that if I were you.” His voice had been so level, more full of advice than a threat, that the girl had actually turned around. “You know the last girl who did that turned into a potted plant, right?” he said, and he sold it with such caution and certainty that the girl believed it. She sank into all the rumors about Miel and Aracely, and she backed away.

If Miel hadn't known Sam was her friend before, she knew after that. That was the first and last time he ever went into the girls' room by choice.

Miel could chart their history by these moons, lighting the path between the violet house where she lived with Aracely and the bright-tiled roof of Sam's house.

The closer she got to him, the more she felt it in her roses, like a moon pulling on a sea. Since she was small, the roses had grown from her skin, each bursting through the opening on her wrist that never healed. One grew, and she destroyed it, and another grew, and she destroyed it. But now she hesitated before cutting them, or pushing them underwater so the river's current carried them away. Because for the past few months, they'd responded to Sam. The more time she spent around him, the more her wrist felt heavy and sore. He caught her holding her forearm during school, and stole bags of crunchy, fluffy ice from the chemistry lab for her to put against her sleeve.

If she thought of him too much, her roses grew deeper and brighter; the one on her wrist was now as dark pink as her favorite lipstick.

Tonight, he was waiting behind his house, hands in his pockets. His stance showed neither impatience nor boredom. She always wondered if he saw her from his window, or if he just came outside early, and didn't mind waiting.

“I stole something from work today,” he said. The moons gave enough light to let her see he was holding his tongue against his back teeth, proud of his own guilt.

“You what?” she asked.

“Don't worry,” he said. “I'll bring it back. I just wanted you to see it. Come on.”

Inside, he showed her the brush he used to pollinate each pumpkin blossom by hand.

They only opened for one day, Sam had told her when he started at the Bonners' farm. An explanation for the slow, careful work of taking pollen from each anther and brushing it onto each flower's stigma. That small act made a blossom become a pumpkin. The Bonners gave Sam this task because they thought his skill with brushes covered in paint would translate to brushes coated in pollen.

But Miel had never seen one of the brushes before. Now Sam flicked the oat-colored bristles first against her forearm and then against her rose. For those few seconds, the tiny birthmarks on her arm were grains of pollen, and her rose was the corolla of a pumpkin blossom.

The bristles made her flinch, like the petals growing from her wrist had as much sensation as her fingers. They didn't. Yes, pulling on the stem would hurt her. Knocking the flower head against a kitchen table stung the opening her roses grew from. But the petals themselves were like her hair, rooted in her, but not the same kind of alive as her skin.

For that moment though, of those bristles skimming over that lipstick-colored rose, the sense that those petals could feel as much as her lips or her fingers shimmered through her.

Her eyes flashed up to his.

His eyes were a little more open than they always were, the brown clearer.

The brush and his fingers stilled on her skin.

He hadn't meant it like that. She knew that. She could tell by that startled look.

This wasn't his fingers tracing her back and shoulders, finding stars. This wasn't her checking the flush of his forehead and then leading him home in the middle of a school day. This was a thing that turned into his mouth on hers. This was the pollination brush he'd forgotten to set down, still in his hands as he held her, bristles feathering against her neck. This was the breaking of the strange nervousness that had grown between them over the past few months, a hesitancy to touch that would vanish one day and reappear the next.

She felt the shape of pumpkin blossoms glowing on her skin, waiting for Sam's fingers.

The understanding settled on her that it was Sam, not that wooden-hilted brush, that held the magic of turning a vine-laced field into a thousand pumpkins.

Now Miel's body felt like soft, papery petals. She kissed him back, pushing him toward the stairs, him stumbling up them without turning around. Even with his eyes shut, taking the stairs by muscle memory, he was careful not to crush her rose. She reached for his belt and the top button of his jeans, and he let her. He slid his hand under her shirt, and she let him.

He let her, she let him, and then they were in his bed. The smell of paint made the air in his room bitter, sharp. A tarp covered the floor, his brushes and paints and the makings of half-finished lights scattered in a way that looked disordered to her but made sense to him.

Light from the moons spilled a layer of milky lilac over the floor. They were covered in the blue-green of his bedroom walls, and the smell of spices from his mother's kitchen that soaked into his hair and came off onto his sheets. Orange flower. Green cardamom. Pomegranate molasses. It was so sharp and vivid on him that it made her bite the back of his neck. He startled, then settled into the soft pressure of her teeth, and set his fingers against her harder.

He didn't take off his shirt. She didn't try to take it off him. He never took off his shirt for the same reason he worked on the Bonners' farm. Their school let his work weeding the fields and cutting vines stand in for the PE requirement he'd put off since ninth grade. He couldn't meet it any other way, not if it meant changing for class or team practice in a locker room.

His skin smelled like warm water, not taking on the scent of his soap. She ran her fingers over the faint scarring that shadowed his jawline, from acne he had both grown into and out of early.

The petals of her rose skimmed his neck—she did that on purpose—and then along the inside of his thigh—she did that without meaning to. He shivered, but didn't draw back. Even when her touching him made her rose petals flick against his body, she kept a little distance between him and her wrist so the thorns wouldn't scratch him.

When he traced her skin, the thought of everything he told her about the moon skimmed across her, about the lunar seas and bays.
Mare nubium
and
mare undarum,
the sea of clouds and the sea of waves
. Lacus autumni
and
sinus iridum,
the lake of autumn and the bay of rainbows
.
The features he painted with brushes and with his bare fingers.

His hands were so sure, the pressure of his fingers so gradual and steady, that she couldn't help thinking of his family, years ago. Their fields of crocuses. Their quick, delicate work of picking the saffron threads from the center of those purple flowers. She wondered if this was a thing that lived in his blood and in his fingers. A craft that started as finding wisps of red among violet petals, and that, through years and generations, became the skill of finding, easily and without hesitation, what he was looking for.

The one thing that marred it all, that made it anything shy of perfect, was the Bonner sisters. Las gringas bonitas. Those pale girls, pretty and perfect. One stray thought, and those threads of saffron turned to the red of their braids and curls. Just that single, unwanted thought, and the gradient of their hair swirled through Miel like fall leaves.

The Bonner girls hadn't felt far from Miel since the first time she saw them at the water tower. She let Sam think it was just that Peyton had been holding that pumpkin she treated like a pet. But it was more than the pumpkin. The water had barely cleared from Miel's eyes when she saw the moon, caught between last quarter and full, disappear behind their heads. Even against the not-yet-dark sky, it lit up the red and gold and orange of their hair. From where Miel stood, her eyes feeling new, blurring everything, it looked like the moon had vanished into them, like they'd absorbed it. They had taken all its light. And Miel kept screaming, wanting to warn the boy standing in front of her that the moon was a thing that could be lost.

Now the Bonner sisters were older, and beautiful, their eyes a fierce and fearless kind of open. Together, they were as imposing as an unmapped forest. Some called them witches, for how many hearts they'd broken. Some said they had hidden, in the woods, a stained glass coffin that acted like a chrysalis, turning each girl who slept in it as beautiful as every Bonner girl before her. But ever since Chloe had left town, they were no longer the Bonner sisters. It was just Lian, and Ivy, and Peyton drifting through their father's fields. Sometimes Miel saw Lian in the grocery store, picking out yellow apples, or Peyton riding her bike at the edge of town.

Miel had never understood why, with the four of them around, Sam would ever choose her. Miel was a handful of foil stars, but they were the fire that made constellations. Her hair was the dark, damp earth under their family's farm, and they were curling vines and scrolled pumpkins.

But the Bonner sisters weren't the ones who'd met Sam a thousand times in the open land between their houses. They hadn't shown him the slight differences in blues and browns of Araucana and Wyandotte chickens' eggs. And maybe these things had made Miel look different to Sam. Maybe the time he'd helped her shear a pair of jeans, the knees worn through, into cutoffs, made him overlook the fact that jeans fit her a little different in a thigh than they did the Bonner sisters. Or maybe the deep, bright colors of her roses distracted him from how her nails were almost never polished.

Maybe the day she'd helped him paint his room the color of the ocean his father was born near, that afternoon when she'd gotten that deep blue-green all over the front of her, made Sam forget that she did not stretch out a shirt like the Bonner sisters. Except for Peyton, the youngest, the Bonner sisters filled their bras like batter poured into a cake pan.

If those things made Miel look different to Sam, if that was why he was under her now, she didn't mind. Because she saw him as something different than anyone else did too. She had seen him naked. Almost naked. And she understood that with his clothes off, he was the same as he was with them on.

 

new sea

One day, they would be no more than that fairy tale. They would be two children named Honey and Moon, folded into the stories whispered through this town.

But tonight they were not those children. Tonight, they were Sam and Miel, and he was pulling her on top of him and then under him. The way she moved against him made him feel the sharp presence of everything he had between his legs and, for just that minute, a forgetting, of everything he didn't.

He thought he knew her body. He was so sure that he could have drawn it, mapped it as easily as the lunar seas he could paint without looking at a map of the moon. But under his hands, against his own body, she was both safe and unfamiliar. She was a world unknown. She was a place whose darkness held not fear, but the promise of stars.