When the Moon was Ours (28 page)

She wanted to lift her hand to his cheek, to still any drops on his face before their salt reached his lips or his neck. There wasn't a reason to cry, or be afraid. She wasn't letting go, wasn't losing him. If her lips had given up any sound, she would've told him.

A lock of his hair brushed Miel's cheek, like a whip of cool air. But her skin was so hot she barely felt it. He was holding her so close his eyelashes feathered against her cheek. And she meant to hold on to these things, not lose them like silver charms slipping from her fingers and falling into dark water.

The soft brush of something small and wispy grazed Miel's cheek. She thought it was his eyelashes, or another lock of his hair, but then she felt it again.

The cool film of petals.

She looked up at Sam.

Instead of the salt of his tears, tiny rose petals, red as the blood she was losing, clung to his cheeks. One had caught on the inner corner of his eye. Another had stuck to his lower lip, a third on his temple.

He blinked, and another fell from his eyelashes.

A flicker of movement tilted inside her forearm. 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, covered in tiny new leaves.

It was curling out, taking on the woody look of a rose stem. Then it uncoiled, turning green and pliable, like a morning glory vine.

One thorn snagged the fabric of Sam's shirt, pulling it back enough to find its way out of the cloth he'd tied around her arm. Then it unfurled and reached Sam's bare wrist, pressing into him. He flinched but then relaxed, and for that second she thought she could feel what he felt, the pain clean and sudden as a needle.

Then Miel felt the pull, a shift between her veins.

Red lit up the stem, the leaves and thorns tinted gold like sun on a dragonfly.

The stem was drawing blood out of Sam. Miel could feel it dripping into her.

She tried to twist away from it, to stop taking from Sam when she had already taken so much from him.

But now he held on to her, his fingers sure. Before his hand had been tense and twitching against hers. Now it kept her still.

The glow traveled from his wrist to hers, like the stem was pulling from his body not blood but light.

He held his wrist closer to hers, giving his blood to the lit-up stem. She didn't want to take it from him, to strip from him something that belonged to his body. But now he held on to her harder than she'd held on to him. Now he wouldn't let her break away from him any more than she'd let his hand go.

The few petals clinging to his cheek rained onto her neck and collarbone. The stem curled away from Sam's wrist, drawing back so close to Miel's that it tucked under the fabric of Sam's shirt around her wrist. And her body began to feel like a living thing again, her heart no longer shuddering.

The world came back to her in time to hear the Bonner sisters, their voices twisting in the air like strands of a braid.

 

eastern sea

Giving her his blood had left his wrist sore, a good kind. His body felt that way after he'd spent the afternoon hauling in the biggest field and Cinderella pumpkins. The stem had pulled back toward Miel's wrist, and the cut from the thorn felt clean, already healing.

He felt Miel shifting her weight.

“Can you help me get up?” she asked.

If she hadn't been so streaked in her own blood, her shirt so dyed red, he would've laughed. She couldn't stand on her own. The flush had come back into her cheeks and her lips, but she was still shaking enough that he was ready to carry her if he had to.

She was already leaning on him, trying to get to her feet. He steadied her, standing with her, holding an arm around her waist.

“You have to leave,” she said, but she wasn't looking at him. She was watching a point between the trees, a dark space among the fingers of yellow leaves.

It wasn't until the wind calmed that he heard why.

The sound of the Bonner girls' voices, the mingling of higher and lower pitches, their shared cadence. But instead of reckless and laughing, their voices sounded taut and pressing. They hushed each other.

“Did they do this to you?” he asked. Every time he'd covered for Peyton, every time he'd tried to remind Lian that she was not as slow as everyone thought, each hour he'd worked for Mr. Bonner, stuck him like the thorns on his mother's Callery pear tree. Not the short, clean thorns on Miel's roses. The Callery pear's were little daggers, rough, and each as long as Miel's fingers.

He felt the warmth of Miel's palm on his collarbone. Her blood had stained his undershirt, and her hand left a soft imprint of red.

Now she was looking at him. “You have to leave.”

“Miel,” he said, their faces close enough that he could see her pupils spreading and contracting. “Are they the ones who did this to you?”

“Go,” she said. “You have to leave.”

“So do you,” he said.

“I'm not backing down on this,” she said, looking toward the trees. Fear cut into the resolve in her voice. “I'm not backing down from them. Not anymore.”

“And I'm not leaving you alone.”

“Dammit, Sam.” She broke away from him.

The sudden movement must have hurt her. She clutched her wrist against her, rubbing the back of her forearm with her other hand. Her steps wavered, and he set a hand on her back.

Her eyes were so coated in tears she was a blink from them spilling over. She stared, her mouth half-open.

The trembling in her eyelashes and lips was more than pain. It almost looked like pity. Her pursed lips, the slight tilt to her head, the cringe of a lost cause. Like Sam was a child trying to bring back to life a bird fallen from a nest.

“They know about you,” she said.

Each word was another thorn off that pear tree. Their points didn't slide all the way into him, like the thought of the Bonner sisters hurting Miel. But they pricked him, left him scratched.

“What?” he asked.

“They saw your birth certificate,” she said. “They have a copy.”

Now those thorns were shredding his clothes, cutting them away from his body.

“They could out you to everyone,” Miel said. She stumbled forward, away from his hand. That film of water spilled over and fell down her cheeks.

He could not shrug away the sense that his shirt, his binder, his jeans, were all turning to pieces. They were falling away from him, leaving him naked to the night and all these trees.

But it was his body. It was his to name. And he was under this roof of gold and darkness with a girl who would learn to call him whatever he named himself.

He would never let go of Samira, that girl his mother imagined when he was born. She would follow him, a blur he thought he saw out of the corner of his eye when he stood at the counter, making roti with his mother. Or he would see the silhouette of Samira crossing the woods, wearing the skirts that fit her but he could never make himself fit. Maybe one day he would see her shape, her dark hands setting the lantern of a hollow pumpkin into the water, candle lighting the carved shapes.

But this was what she would be now, his shadow, an echo of what he once was and thought he would be again. She would be less like someone he was supposed to become, and more like a sister who lived in places he could not map, a sister who kept a light but constant grasp on both his hand and his grandmother's.

No one could make him be Samira. Not him. Not the Bonner sisters. Not the signatures on that piece of paper.

The girl he needed did not hide and wait inside him. She stood with him. She always had, this girl of wildflowers and feather grass, this girl he'd painted a thousand lunar seas, a hundred incarnations of
mare nectaris
and
sinus iridum.

Sam pulled Miel into him, her forearm the only thing between them. “I don't care what they have,” he said.

“Sam,” she said.

He held on to her, keeping her up. “If you're doing this, we do this together.”

“Sam.” His name broke into pieces on her tongue.

“Samir.” He put his hand to her face, his thumb grazing her damp cheek.

She pressed her lips together, blinking against the tear caught at the inner corner of her eye.

He set the pad of his thumb against it, and she shut her eyes.

“You can call me whatever you want, but my name is Samir.”

The crushing of leaves announced the Bonner sisters. They emerged from the yellow leaves, the shades of their hair like the different colors in a bloom of flame. They wore sweaters as deep and vivid as the panels of stained glass. Dark green and purple. Blue and red.

Their eyes, two sets of brown, the others green and gray, met on Sam and Miel, their bodies crushed together.

Sam pressed his hand against the back of Miel's neck. But he didn't look away from the four of them. He met as many of their eyes at a time as he could. First Peyton's and Lian's, his stare straying to Ivy and Chloe.

He straightened his back, trying to stand as tall as his mother. The soreness in his arm felt like a charm, a coin Miel had slipped into his hand. A reminder.

“I'm a boy,” he said, because the rest did not matter.

He felt Miel watching him. Her whispered
What are you doing?
warmed his neck.

The lies, the rumors that might touch him tomorrow, did not matter right now. The truth was currency, new and shining. It let off light, glowing like the moon he'd set on the ground.

“I'm a boy,” he said, “and I always have been.”

The Bonner girls blinked at him, staying in their line, a row of vivid hair and sweaters.

Then a splintering sound, like a sheet of ice giving beneath too much weight, cut through the air.

Sam and Miel and all four of the Bonner sisters turned their faces to its source.

A crack, thick and deep as a line of paint, crossed the stained glass.

 

bay of rainbows

The six of them were watching that crack crawl across the green and violet.

Samir. He was calling himself Samir. And he was looking the Bonner sisters in their faces—their faces that seemed like different panes in the same sheet of stained glass—and telling them that he knew what they knew, and he didn't care.

One set of eyes at a time, the Bonner girls were looking from the cracked stained glass to Sam and Miel. Brown and green and gray all swirling and settling on them.

Their stare was heavy as a coating of snow. It felt colder in contrast with the warmth of Sam's body, his lack of hesitation when Miel dropped her forearm from between them and he let his chest touch her. He didn't flinch away or twist his shoulder so he would not feel the front of him, would not remember what he had under the shirt that bound him down.

She thought of Aracely, coming out of the water soaked and a stranger to her own body. Surfacing as someone older than when she'd gone in, while the water had kept Miel the same age. Back then, Miel had the sorrow of a child. But Aracely's heart carried the sadness of the woman she would become.

Sorrow kept Miel still, but had aged Aracely. And that same sorrow was keeping Miel still now.

Her mother hadn't hated her. She knew that. She'd feared for her. She'd loved Miel, seen her as a daughter she could lose to petals and thorns. She'd been a young mother little older than Aracely, panicked and desperate to hold on to the children she'd made.

What mother could resist a hundred tales of roses that had stolen the souls of sons and daughters? What mother could stand against her husband's insistence that their daughter was sick, and needed to be cured, and not want to find a gentler way to do it than the sting of hot metal?

What woman could ignore the warnings of señoras and priests who said they knew how to save her child? How could she not bring her daughter down to the river when they promised the current would take this curse from her?

Miel could not choose if Ivy or the other Bonner girls or anyone else told lies.

But she could tell the truth.

Miel found Ivy's eyes.

“My mother loved me,” she said. Maybe her father had too. Maybe all he did—the bandages so tight her fingers turned numb, the end of the butter knife in the gas flame—was the form his love had taken. Maybe fear had twisted it, leaving it threadbare.

But this was the thing she could remember, the thing she could say out loud.

Miel couldn't tell for sure from the faint light, the glow of the moon above them and the moon Sam had brought with him. But Ivy's eyes looked slicked wet like silver.

“My mother”—Miel said, letting each word fall with its own weight—“loved me.”

She felt the sky taking the words, singing them back, like thunder echoing between clouds. They were the scream of the wind.

They were the sound of another crack snaking through the lid of the stained glass coffin. The faint light of stars and the sickle moon shining off the glass, showing how the crack had cut it in half.

A flare lit in Peyton's eyes.

She took a step back from her sisters, her glance skittering between them and the stained glass coffin.

“I like girls more than boys,” she said, and a set of cracks snapped through the stained glass, with as many branches as a bare winter bough.

The rest of them flinched, drawing back.

Lian's posture rose, making her look almost as tall as Chloe.

Her irises took on a brighter color, like the green of spring leaves warming and lightening to the green of tart apples.

“I understand more than any of you know,” Lian said, and another set of branching cracks frosted the glass.

These were the truths they had to tell. And Ivy looked like each one was crawling along her shoulder blades.

Chloe did not move. But the breath she drew in sounded like a finger of wind. Wisps of her hair softened her braid, the moon making the edges look almost white. Her stance looked so upright, so much like a dancer's that Miel could imagine her twirling through the pumpkin rows barefoot.