When the Moon was Ours (8 page)

She backed him against the bark, kissing him hard enough that it stung. Her hand brushed his chest, and without her realizing she spread it flat, fingers fanned out against his shirt.

She only noticed when he shuddered, his shoulders pressing back harder against the tree.

“Sorry,” she said, her mouth still near his. “Sorry.”

They both stayed still, taking in a long breath of air that was wet and earthy with fall but sharp from the smoke of farmers burning leaves.

Miel told her palm to move. She tried to send the impulse to her fingers to pull away from him. She knew so much of his body, but this was a place she hadn't touched. His chest had been against her when they were in his bed, but she hadn't mapped it with her hands.

Even with the undershirt that pressed it down and, through a shirt, made his chest flat as any other boy's, she never put her hands here. Not even poking a finger just under his collarbone when she teased him or flirted with him. It was a part of his body he didn't like being reminded of, and she understood, now, that her hands were the worst kind of reminder.

She checked his watch for him, always checked his watch for him, because she knew he didn't like telling her he had to get back.

“You're late,” she said.

He kissed her again, hard, and it felt like him telling her that they could forget this. He would forgive her. Not even forgive her. He would let it go, treat it like the accident it was. Like him holding her in a way that pressed the edge of his belt buckle into her, or her, without meaning to when she put her hand to the side of his neck, scratching him.

When he left, she leaned against the tree, hands flat on the bark behind the small of her back, and watched him. To her he had always been Sam, the boy who made the moon for her, the boy whose silhouette she'd found a hundred times on that wooden ladder, light filling his hands. That didn't change when she saw him, through the bedroom door he thought he'd closed but with a latch that sometimes sighed open, changing his clothes or getting dressed after taking a shower. It was only then that she saw that part of him he bound down with that undershirt, or his hips, a little wider in a way that didn't show through jeans but she could see when he had on just his boxers.

None of it had been a surprise. She knew what he was, the tension in the fact that, to anyone who didn't understand, there was contradiction between how he lived and what he had under his clothes. How he had to wear pants loose enough that no one noticed what he did or did not have.

His face was softer than the other boys in their class, but his work on the Bonners' farm had added enough muscle to his back and shoulders that he looked a little broader than before. Boys at school had almost stopped calling him a girl, a thing they meant as something else, a thing they said without knowing what they were saying.

From what little Miel knew, from what little his mother had been willing to say, this was something Sam thought he would grow out of.

He didn't seem to realize he was growing into it.

Miel walked alongside the road, the points of wet, fallen leaves brushing her ankles.

A swath of copper swept out of the woods, like a whole branch of leaves breaking loose.

Ivy Bonner stood, watching her.

“I want to show you something,” she said. No greeting, no introduction. Not even a glare for Miel's bare wrist.

Miel could have kept walking. But ignoring her would have felt like provocation. Keeping quiet, not telling her no, had cost her that candle-yellow rose.

“What?” Miel asked.

“If I could tell you about it I wouldn't need to show you.” Ivy said it like it was a secret shared with a child, not with the allure, the tilt of her neck, that the Bonner sisters liked showing both boys and other girls.

Miel looked over her shoulder at the road. But running again felt like both an admission that she was afraid and a kind of escalation.

“Will you relax?” Ivy said. “I'm not mad.”

“You're not?” Miel asked, hating the deference in her own voice.

“I don't get mad,” Ivy said. “Nobody should. What does that do?”

She sounded like Sam's mother, and Miel wondered if she'd picked it up from her. Even the Bonner girls must have appreciated the glamour of Yasmin's pressed white shirts, her thick eyeliner and jewelry made of oversized quartz and jasper. She'd tutored the Bonner girls a few times, not every week the way she did with the children of so many families, but when Mrs. Bonner had a bad cold, and they fell behind on their lesson plans.

“You're mad though,” Ivy said.

“No, I'm not,” Miel said.

“Yes, you are. You feel like I took something from you without giving you anything.”

The thought of the tarnished scissors in Ivy's hands made Miel clutch her forearm.

It wasn't about Ivy not giving her anything. It wasn't about her and her sisters keeping their stares on her, the numbing spell of those eight eyes, so she didn't realize what they were taking until the snap of those brass blades.

“That's why I want to show you something no one else gets to see,” Ivy said. “Something I haven't shown anyone.”

A flickering in Miel's rib cage told her to run. But another current inside her pushed her toward following Ivy. Both because she was a little curious, and because when a Bonner girl offered a secret, it seemed foolish and antagonistic to refuse it. Once Lian Bonner had a birthday party, one of the few the Bonner girls had invited anyone but family to. Lian heard Elise Shanholt calling the girls creepy, saying she wouldn't come within a mile of that house, wouldn't go to that party even if Nate Stuart's hot older brother wanted her to be his date to it.

So Ivy and Peyton had stolen her cat, a beautiful orange tabby as big as a raccoon. They petted it, gave it cream they skimmed themselves, laughed when a dose of catnip made it bat at its own tail.

It didn't take long before Elise discovered who'd taken it. But when she came to get it, it wailed and clawed and wouldn't go with her. It ran from her, circling Ivy's legs and then jumping onto Lian's lap. Elise's parents said they'd get her another cat, told her to look, weren't the girls taking good care of it, and it wasn't their fault if it had taken to them.

Miel remembered Elise crying in the halls for a week over that. Even her parents had taken the Bonner girls' side. And that cat roamed the Bonners' farm until it died last spring, always running back to the girls who'd stolen it.

For Miel to refuse Ivy's gift, to turn her back now, would be a declaration of war. The girl from the violet house against the sisters who lived in the navy one.

So she went with Ivy.

The deeper they walked into those gold and orange woods, the more she flitted between fear and excitement. That was the thrill of the Bonner sisters, she guessed, to the boys who loved them. That they never knew in which parts to be elated and terrified. Their time being loved by a Bonner girl might be short and sudden as a firework, or long and spun out, and they never knew which. The letdown would be either soft or brutal, and they never knew which.

Only a few columns of light pierced the trees. But this time of year the trees were their own light, amber and coral and butter-colored. Ivy stopped in a grove that was almost all yellow, the flat gold of cottonwood and birch and tulip poplar.

A large box, long and wide as a florist's case or a coffin, sat on the ground, its sides and lid and even its floor made of stained glass. It had been laid down, on the base where a body would rest flat, as though at any moment the whole box might sink into the ground and become a grave. Whorls of deep red and violet crossed the panels. Sprays of milky stars floated over a field of dark blue and green. Even the long cracks slicing the planets and constellations didn't make it less beautiful.

“So it's true,” Miel said.

“Half-true,” Ivy said. “It doesn't make us pretty if that's what you're wondering.”

Miel wondered how long it'd been here. Where the Bonner girls, whichever generation of them, had gotten the stained glass, Miel would never know. Maybe they had bought it, bartered for it, or stolen it. Not that the Bonner women ever needed to steal anything themselves. From what Miel had heard, sets of beautiful sisters glittered through this family like flecks of mica in sand. It made Mr. Bonner as terrified of his daughters as he'd been of his sisters and aunts, and Mrs. Bonner baffled by her husband's family, all those flame-haired women.

All they would have needed to do was lower the soft screen of their red-gold eyelashes to get men to tear the bright glass panels from the windows of their own church. With flashes of their cream-white shoulders, they could have gotten those same men to hand over the stained glass like boxes of violet candy. Miel imagined them flirting with metalsmiths, who would have charged them nothing to join the loose panels into this box and trim the corners and edges in rose brass.

“It got covered over for a few years,” Ivy said. “Vines and leaves practically buried the thing.” She made a half-circle around the stained glass, and Miel felt the unease of thinking that somehow, if there were smudges or fingerprints, Ivy would hold her responsible. “My parents didn't want us to know about it. They pretended the whole thing was a rumor. But we found it.”

When Ivy said something she hadn't shown anyone, she'd meant anyone except her sisters. It hadn't so much been a lie—the Bonner girls were as linked as cells in a single organism, breathing together—as the fact of Ivy keeping no secrets from her sisters was implied.

“Well, Chloe and I found it,” Ivy said. “But we all cleaned it up.”

“Why?” Miel asked.

Ivy stopped, her face scrunching into a smile like Miel was slow. “Because it's ours,” she said. “Everyone should take care of what's theirs.”

Miel caught the movement of two shadows. She couldn't make out their shapes yet. She just sensed them passing under the trees, like the minute before she and Sam had seen the lynx.

“I'm surprised you don't know already,” Ivy said.

Miel turned back to Ivy. “Know what?”

“That things go easier when you just give people what they want.”

Miel felt that pair of shadows drawing closer. The second she looked toward the trees again, Ivy grabbed her. Miel tried to wrench away from her hold. But Ivy's fingers were hot on her wrists. When she grabbed the place Miel had just trimmed a rose from, pain spun through her arm.

Miel tried to twist away from her, but then everything was orange and red, not just Ivy, but Lian's loose auburn hair and the muted orange of Peyton's curls. And when their hands all fell on her, she knew it was true, that they were one animal in many bodies. When one set of fingers lost its grip, another tightened. When Miel threw her weight against one of them, another pulled her back so the force dissipated and did not land.

Ivy pushed the lid of the stained glass coffin open, and they forced Miel in. Miel's knees hit first, the impact reverberating up to her wrist. She collapsed on her side, and all those hands shoved her limbs within its walls so Ivy could throw the lid shut.

Miel turned, holding her hands up to stop it from closing, but the weight drove her down, and the sound of a latch clicking echoed through the glass.

She pushed up on the lid. It did not move. She shoved her weight against the panel. It stayed in place, sealed shut.

That latch would not open from the inside.

She banged on the lid.

The walls barely gave her enough room to twist her body. She tried to throw her shoulder at the side, and then the lid. She tried to shove her weight against the panels, aiming for the places where long cracks cut through the patterns. But the cracks, even the long ones, were shallow, and didn't give, and she was trapped like a moth in a killing jar. Only the cold wisp of a few holes in the glass let her breathe.

Movement outside the glass made her turn her head.

The bright fall trees and the color of the stained glass blurred her view. But she thought she made out Ivy's copper hair vanishing. Peyton and Lian stayed, the orange and auburn of their hair still. They left their pale arms loose by their sides, standing guard.

Miel tried to scream, but there was so little air in here that the heat and the walls stole the sound from her throat. She tried to grab on to something that would let her breathe. The smell of Sam's skin and hair.

The way Aracely had just painted her nails with plum polish and tipped them in silver, or how she put on her alexandrite bracelet, sparkling like the soft purple of hydrangeas.

The roof tiles on Sam's house, varied like kernels on an ear of glass-gem corn. Slate blue and deep yellow. Dull rose and dusk violet. She thought of the rows of flat stones, set in the grass, that led to the door of Sam's house.

But she could only smell the salt on her own damp skin. Thinking of Aracely's nails or those roof tiles made her think of the colors of all this stained glass. She was losing her breath to it. It was taking her under.

 

southern sea

That afternoon, Sam ran into Lian on the brick path that led to the Bonners' door.

“So what do you think?” he asked.

“I think you should go fuck yourself,” she said, and turned around fast enough that her hair fanned like a wing.

Go fuck yourself
. Sometimes varied as
fuck off.
Always the same response, as classic and timeless as the moss-colored eye shadow the Bonner sisters all seemed to share.

He shrugged. “Just checking,” he said.

Sam had the distinction of being the only person in this town Lian Bonner was rude to. But he took it as a compliment, and every few months he offered.

When the Bonner sisters went to the same school as Sam and Miel, everyone thought Lian was as dull as the patina on her copper bracelets. They said she passed her classes only because her sisters did her homework, and she was so compliant and docile the school administrators couldn't bring themselves to fail her. Teachers never called on her, or asked her to read out loud, or write on the board. Sometimes, if people at school were feeling brave and sure that none of the Bonner sisters could hear, they'd laugh and say that the reason Lian's hair was the darkest red of the four of them was because every one of her sisters was so much brighter than she was.