When the Moon was Ours(18)
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.