When the Moon was Ours(21)
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 se?oras 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.