When the Moon was Ours(17)

“A correction to Monday’s front page,” Miel said. “‘Bruja did it on purpose.’”

Aracely clicked her tongue and shook her head, like the women gossiping at the market. “‘Tore that poor woman’s heart straight out of her body.’”

Miel looked at Aracely. “You know my ancestors could do that in under fifteen seconds, right?”

Aracely held her hands out in front of her. “Not with this manicure.”

Miel felt the air settling between them, Aracely letting fall her irritation over needing to call Sam.

“I’m sorry,” Miel said. “About before. It won’t happen again.”

Aracely nodded, as much at the calendar as at Miel. “I know.”





lake of death

Aracely washed out a blue glass jar, the inside milky from when she’d used it during a lovesickness cure. The mix of water and egg always resisted coming clean.

Miel was at the yellow kitchen table, making a stack of books she needed and another of books she didn’t.

She felt Aracely watching her even as she scrubbed the glass.

“You’re gonna go study?” Aracely asked, in a voice she must have meant to be joking, but it made Miel blush more than laugh.

Aracely had caught on to what she was doing when she put her books into her bag each afternoon, the class assignments she’d read while she waited for Sam.

“You just make sure you let him get his work done,” Aracely said. “He’s got his hands full finding enough pumpkins to cut.”

“What are you talking about?” Miel asked.

“The glass.” Aracely set the jar on the drying rack. “It’s spreading. Now when he’s cutting fruit off the vine, he has to make sure he’s not breaking anything.”

Miel could imagine him like that, stepping through the fields, feeling for rough, living stems instead of glass. He would look like a cat, crossing a crowded shelf without knocking anything over.

But the thought of those glints in the fields still felt like a chill along Miel’s ribs. Of course Mr. Bonner would have his farmhands continue as though nothing had changed. Of course he would ignore all that glass, pretending it wasn’t there. It was the way he treated the force that was his daughters, as though they were still young girls settling ribbon headbands into one another’s hair.

“What?” Aracely asked, her eyes going over Miel’s face. “You know something about it?”

“No,” Miel said, a little too fast. But whatever was happening between the Bonner sisters, however their land felt it and reflected it back, it was neither Miel’s business to question nor her responsibility to explain.

Sam was the one thing that could get Miel close to the Bonners’ farm. But she didn’t let the sisters see her. Especially not now, a week later, when she’d grown and drowned a white rose with petals tipped in faint green. Last night the petals had spread wide, showing her the breath of yellow at the center, so she’d cut the stem and let the river take it.

In moments of lying to herself, she told herself it was just Sam, just that she wanted to see him and touch where the sweat off the back of his neck had left his hair a little damp. She wanted to kiss him when his mouth was still wet from having just taken a swallow of water.

And that was true. But in moments of letting the rest of the truth edge into her, she knew she wanted the Bonner sisters to see her. Wanted them to catch her pulling Sam into the woods, kissing him before they even reached the trees’ shadows. She wanted them to see her bare wrist and know that just because they were the Bonner girls, just because they’d gotten Hunter Cross and Jerome Carter and every other boy they wanted, didn’t mean she’d turn over to them the things her body grew.

If they thought they needed her roses, they had lost something. That left Miel less afraid of them knowing she wanted Sam, and more intent on them knowing he did not belong to them. He belonged to himself, and to his mother, and maybe even to Miel, but not to them. He wasn’t theirs any more than Miel’s roses were.

Today she caught Sam at the edge of the pumpkin fields, pulled him under a sycamore big enough to hide them both. For a few minutes, before he went back to work, and she left to finish her reading or pick up eggs from the Carlsons’ farm, this canopy of leaves, orange and gold at the edges but still green at its heart, was their whole world.

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.