When the Moon was Ours(12)

But in those two words, Miel thought she caught a little of that same sadness. Ivy’s voice matched that same blank, damp-cheeked look she’d had by the river. So she did what Ivy said.

If no one in this town had cared what happened to Miel, she would still be wild-eyed, hiding in the brush where the old water tower had fallen, or in Sam’s house, his mother wondering what to do with her. It was the least Miel could do to go over, even if the Bonner sisters, the whole Bonner house, scared her. The Bonner sisters talked to so few people outside that house that Ivy’s request seemed like something of an honor, and something dangerous to turn down.

Compared to the violet house Miel and Aracely lived in, with Aracely’s blue-green cups and her kitchen table, yellow as a Meyer lemon, the Bonners’ farmhouse looked so neat and tame. That navy paint made the white trim so bright. The shutters were hooked in place. The lace curtains in the windows looked age-softened, but Mrs. Bonner bleached them so often they never yellowed.

The door was open, only the screen shut. That seemed like an invitation to come in without ringing the bell.

The strangest thing about the house was their mother’s mint-green refrigerator, an antique that, according to Aracely, she spent more money to repair than it would have cost to replace it. The rest was so much more muted, so ordinary, compared to the girls and even the farm. The kitchen counters were plain white tile. Linen dish towels, creased and folded, were stacked next to the sink. There was no orange like the girls’ hair or the Cinderella pumpkins, flat and deep-ribbed. No deep green or gold or blue-gray like the few rare ones dotting the fields.

Miel’s eyes moved over the first floor, until they landed on those four shades of red hair.

Las gringas bonitas. All four of them. The Bonner girls clustered around a wooden dining room. Round, no bigger than needed to fit the six Bonners, or at most, them and a couple of guests. As though Mr. and Mrs. Bonner assumed their daughters would never leave them, or that they would leave and never come back, never bring their husbands and children for Thanksgiving or Christmas.

Chloe still wore those cigarette jeans, but now with a turtleneck that covered her freckled collarbone. Lian had pulled her hair, so much darker than the rest of theirs but still so red, into a bun that was already falling out. She rested her elbows on the table, one hand cupped loosely in the other. Peyton was tracing her finger along the circle of a water stain, her hair in a braid so much like Chloe’s that Chloe must have done it.

Ivy leaned against a sideboard, hip against a drawer.

They all looked at Miel.

They’d all been waiting.

“You’re not going to kill your roses anymore,” Ivy said.

It wasn’t until that moment that Miel noticed the vase at the table’s center. She wondered how she’d missed it, the glass as dark blue as the Bonners’ house.

The sleeve of Miel’s sweater covered her newest rose, as pale yellow as a candle flame. But Lian and Chloe were looking at her wrist as though they could see through the fabric.

She pulled her eyes away from the vase, to the Bonner sisters’ faces.

Miel looked at Ivy. “They don’t do what you think they do,” she said. Her roses, left under a pillow, would not make boys fall in love with the Bonner sisters. They would not give them back what they had before Chloe’s body held another little life.

“You’re not going to kill your roses anymore,” Ivy said again, opening a sideboard drawer. Each word was as calm and sure as the first time. “When you grow one, you’re going to bring it to us.”

In Ivy’s face, Miel saw a calm that fell between them like a sheet. The Bonner girls were losing their strange power, but Ivy thought these roses could get it back. They could make any boys they wanted fall in love with them. This town would understand that the Bonner girls could take whatever they wanted. And that fact would ring louder than any whispers about Chloe.

Miel looked around the downstairs, wondering where Mr. and Mrs. Bonner were. Either they weren’t home, or they were upstairs, or the sisters didn’t care. If they thought their daughters were, for once, having someone over, they might be keeping their distance, not wanting to disturb the strange, unknowable act of girls becoming friends.

“No,” Miel said. “They’re mine.” The words sounded petty, but they were true. Her roses belonged to her. Her cutting them away and then drowning them was her offering to the mother who had feared them.

Chloe tilted her head. Her braid skimmed the side of her neck and traced the outer curve of her breast. Miel wondered if her breasts were heavy and full, and if so, how long it would take her body to realize there was no baby here, no one needing her milk.

But Lian spoke before Chloe did.

“It must make you sad,” Lian said, in a way that wasn’t warm enough to sound kind or sharp enough to sound mean. “What happened with your mother.”

Miel’s neck turned as perspiration-damp as the night she and Sam saw a lynx in the woods. Its pale fur had shone in the dark, its ruff banded in black. It had eyes the color of the dark yellow veins in canyon jasper. Two wisps of dark fur curved off the tips of its ears.

Don’t run, Sam had told her. You’ll just be telling her you’re less than she is.

I am less than she is, Miel had said. The lynx’s fur, gray tinged with red and gold, had looked like strands of light.

“You don’t know anything about my mother,” Miel said.