When the Moon was Ours (9 page)

But he knew better. Even with the jokes that the Bonner sisters were now homeschooled because the only teacher who'd pass Lian was her mother, Sam knew better.

He also knew better than to push it. So when Lian told him to fuck off, he did.

That was the second Bonner sister he'd pissed off today. That had to be some kind of record. But the whole Bonner family was on edge, made nervous by the glass spreading through their fields, and the whispers about their brittle harvest. That afternoon, Mr. Bonner, a man as mild as the loaves of bread in plastic sleeves at the grocery store, had yelled at Sam for the first time since he'd started work at the farm. It had startled Sam, but he wrote it off as a result of how, each morning, the Bonners woke and found that more pumpkins had turned hard and shining, dew beading the glass.

Earlier, at school, he'd seen the Bonner sisters hanging around Ms. Owens' desk, acting like they were still enrolled. Ms. Owens, the young and pretty but bony and very pale woman who ran the school administration office, had near-permanent mascara stains around her eyes. She always seemed to be crying into a frill-edged handkerchief, but he knew from experience that asking her what was wrong just earned him her sharp insistence that it was allergies, and he should mind his own business.

Today the Bonner sisters, all of them, even though Chloe had graduated and the rest were now homeschooled, had crushed around Ms. Owens' desk. Not even in front of it, but behind it, with Ms. Owens, sharing empty desk chairs and whispering to her as she nodded. Her thin ponytail bobbed enough to reflect the fluorescent lights. What were they doing with that poor woman?

When the four of them left, Sam had caught Peyton in the hallway.

“Isn't she a little old for you?” Sam asked.

For a second Peyton looked terrified, the way she always did at any mention of the fact that she liked girls and not boys. Her eyes spread so big he could see a thread of white around each iris.

But then she glared at him and caught up with her sisters.

Sam should've known better than to cross anyone he didn't have to. In this town, he was too dark to blend in among the fair-haired boys crowding the classrooms.

A few of the blond ones, their skin so pink their necks looked red even in winter, told him to go back home, and it had taken him a week of first grade to realize they didn't mean the bright-tiled house where he lived with his mother.

The sons of the farmworkers assumed he thought he was better than they were, and he didn't know how to correct them without proving their point. Being friends with Miel didn't change anything to them. Their blood traced them back to the same parts of the world, but their grandmothers had taught them to stay away from any girl whose body grew something more than hair and skin, unless she was a saint.

After his shift, Sam walked home, the air cooling down and the sky turning from the blue-gray of Jarrahdale pumpkins to a deep, clear blue that made the clouds look sponge-painted.

On the way to his house, he always passed Miel's. That house had become almost as much of a home to him as his own.

Miel hadn't turned her bedroom lamp on. But light filled the kitchen window. As he passed the house, he found not Miel's dark hair, full and messy, but Aracely's, blond and brushed.

Aracely stood at the kitchen sink. She lifted her wet hands to her head and twirled her hair into a bun, pinning it in place by spearing it with the handle of a spoon.

Maybe sleeping with Miel had made Sam's world a little sharper. He'd already felt it, how the rinds of pumpkins felt cooler against his hands. How Miel's hair smelled like the rain-slicked lemons Aracely sent her outside for.

Maybe nothing would go dull and unnoticed now, and maybe that was why the sight of Aracely felt like a hand's worth of fingernails digging into his upper arm. Her features struck him in a way they never had, each on its own.

Her nose was longer and narrower than Miel's, thinner at the bridge, but they had the same slope. Both Miel and Aracely had the same smooth line to their top lips. No bow. Their eyes were different shades of honey. Aracely's were the near-black of buckwheat and Miel's were the gold of orange blossom or eucalyptus. But they were degrees of the same color.

These things would never have been enough to make a stranger ask if Miel and Aracely were related. But to Sam, now, they stood out, sharp as winter stars.

 

lake of fear

Miel had a few memories that were only stray threads, frayed from her going over them so many times. Now, locked in these walls of stained glass, they unfurled and spread out, made brave by how little space they had to fill. The air inside these walls, hot with Miel's breath, gave them life and blood.

She shut her eyes against the deep colors of the stained glass, but when she shut her eyes, that night came back to her.

On the advice of an old woman from her church, Miel's mother had gone out into the pumpkin fields and hollowed out the biggest pumpkin she could find. A cream white one as big as the space under a chair. She had left the stem attached to the vine, the carved top clinging to it so that when she put it back on, the pumpkin would still be tied to the earth. When the shell was cleared of its seeds and string, the inside scraped so clean it was damp instead of wet, she forced Miel inside.

Miel remembered screaming, begging her mother not to make her. When her mother had shut her inside, Miel beat her hands against the shell, trying to break it. She had cried and called for her mother. She had heard Leandro begging their mother to let her out. He even tried to unpin the lid before their mother slapped his hand, telling him to stop, didn't he want his sister cured.

She didn't remember calling for her father. He must have already been gone from them.

The señoras had thought this would work, putting Miel inside the pumpkin, pinning the lid back on and leaving her there overnight. She thought that tying Miel this closely to the earth would make the earth take back her rose. It would claim it. Her rose would wither and fall off her wrist, and become part of the soil.

Miel remembered tiring herself out, being so cold and thirsty she fell asleep. And in the morning, the slices of gray light when her mother opened the top. Her mother's sadness, her disappointment, when she saw the crushed rose still on Miel's wrist.

Miel remembered overhearing the priest's advice to her mother, the judgment in his voice. The fear that ran through Miel's body when she realized what would come next.

A rush of cold air spun through the stained glass coffin. It wrapped around Miel's neck and slipped between her parted lips, and she took a breath like she'd come up from underwater.

She opened her eyes.

Peyton was leaning over her, holding the rose brass edge of the stained glass coffin's lid.

Miel sat up, startled to find neither stained glass nor the shell of a pumpkin stopping her. She put her hands against her chest, the new air stinging her.

She looked around. She found only the clean yellow of the thin hornbeam leaves and fanned gingko leaves, not the copper of Ivy's hair or the almost-maroon of Lian's.

Peyton stood over her, her curling-iron curls almost touching Miel.

“She wasn't gonna let you out yet,” Peyton said. “We had to ask.”

Miel scrambled out of the stained glass coffin, getting her breath back but too unsteady to stand. Still on her hands and knees, she looked up at Peyton. “Do you want me to say thank you?” she asked.

Peyton's wince was just enough to let Miel see it. She wondered if her guilt was because Miel was Sam's best friend, and Sam had helped Peyton so much. Peyton walked the road back to her parents' farm every Thursday night with marks on her neck that were just as often lipstick as hickeys. Miel knew because Sam had been covering for her since Chloe left, saying he was helping her with her math homework, which everyone but Mr. and Mrs. Bonner knew was a joke. Sam spent an hour writing English papers that took Miel a week, but if the two of them didn't study for math tests together, he didn't pass.

Thank God
, Miel had often thought, Peyton was one Bonner sister she didn't have to worry about. A couple of years younger than both Miel and Sam, and not interested in anyone who wasn't at least as pretty as she was. That meant Jenna Shelby or sometimes, when she and Jenna weren't speaking, Liberty Hazelton.

But now Peyton scared her worse than Ivy. She had a look that was both guilty and passive, as though she could apologize for her sisters and in the same breath run to catch up with their shadows.

“It's hard to breathe in there, isn't it?” Peyton asked, crossing her arms so she cupped an elbow in each hand. “There's the little holes to let you breathe but it's still hard.”

The air in Miel's throat turned hot and sour as the tea Aracely made her drink when she had a fever. Ivy said it was all rumor that the stained glass coffin made them beautiful. But maybe those walls of bright glass made them the Bonner sisters. Maybe they'd put Peyton in there when they realized she was leaving her lip gloss on other girls' sweaters. Maybe they'd let her out when they realized she would always put them before anyone else, boy or girl, and that the girls she liked were as expendable to her as the boys.

Miel grabbed the edge of the stained grass, pulling herself up.

“They lock you in there?” she asked. “They can't do that. You should tell your parents.”

“We all do it,” Peyton said. “It's just about who needs it.”

Peyton's look was calm but not cold, unafraid without being defiant.

She didn't fear her sisters, even if they'd locked her in the stained glass coffin. Even if they had taught her to do the same to them.

“Do what we want,” Peyton said. “Do what we want or we always make you.”

Her tone, like she was both herself and one cell in that body that was the Bonner sisters, made Miel feel pressed back inside those glass walls.

“Is that a threat?” Miel asked.

“No. It's advice.”

Peyton left, curls spinning like streamers, and Miel did not follow her. She looked for the way out of the woods, running so the trees turned to a blur of scarlet and rust and yellow. When she found a place where the trees thinned into open air, she took a full breath, a breath clipped when she heard the sound of glass cracking under her feet. Shards scratched her ankles.

She looked around, her stilled breath prickling the back of her throat. She was at a different corner of the Bonners' farm. And her hurried steps had smashed a few of the glass pumpkins. The bigger ones had cracked open, leaning on their sides. The smaller ones had shattered into pieces that ringed where she stood.

Miel's steps, breaking the glass of a few pumpkins, had released into the air everything they'd held, the little storm the Bonner girls had not been able to hide in their drawers. Now she could almost smell the eye shadow and blush palettes they passed back and forth, the shirts they borrowed from one another so often they forgot whose they were first. The scent landed bitter on her tongue, like wildfire smoke turning the sun red and the air to ash.

A few pumpkins shone like they were wet. Their colors were so deep that at first she thought they were the knobby, almost-black rinds of the kind sold in the grocery store as Marina di Chioggia or Musquée de Provence
.

But they weren't all deep green. Some were dark red, like the wide planet on the lid of the stained glass coffin. Others were violet and blue as the sky, or pure white as the star sprays.

And they were all glass, smooth and shining and cold.

No matter what Miel whispered or screamed, they were all glass.

 

lake of solitude

She could not move. In the woods, that stained glass coffin waited. And here, all these pumpkins, both made of jewel-colored glass and made of the same kind of flesh that held her years ago, pinned her in, keeping her from running. She could not cross these rows of glass.

Miel sank to the ground, settling onto a small patch of ground not flecked with broken glass. She pulled her knees in, clutching her ankles, trying to take up little enough space that she would not touch the vines or the pumpkins or the shards her own steps had made. But a few pieces of broken glass crushed under her feet, her heels grinding them down against the hard earth.

The world was made of everything that wanted to take her in, and make her disappear.

It was all noise. Her mother screaming. Her brother calling out for her. But the air was still and cold, no wind, and there was no trace of her mother's whispering.

She set her fingers to her temples, pressing hard, hoping the spaces inside her would go silent.

“Miel?” She heard Sam's voice, cutting through all those echoes.

His steps were so quiet she hadn't even heard glass ground down under his shoes.

She looked up.

He was holding one of his moons, the features of
palus somni
and
sinus iridum
painted on an old glass globe
.
Over his shoulder was the thin wire that would go unseen once he cut it and hung the moon. She wondered where he'd set the wooden ladder. He hung his moons anywhere he got away with it, and this town let him get away with it almost everywhere. The light of these moons, they said, so much closer and steadier than the one in the sky, kept away their children's nightmares. When children were sick, they called him, and he hooked moons onto boughs outside their weathered houses.

Sam crouched near her, tucking the moon under one arm, and now his weight crushed the glass under his feet. But he didn't startle, or pull back. “What happened?”

She looked past him, shaking her head at the pumpkin fields and the trails of broken glass.

He gave them a quick look and then looked back at her, not taking them in. He must have thought this was her fear of everything those vines grew.