When the Moon was Ours(23)

He looked at her again.

“You didn’t do that,” he said. “That’s not your fault. You know you didn’t do that, right?”

Sam was so stupid. He was stupid and kind and always had a guard up against Miel being blamed for things. He knew that the only people in this town called witches more often than the Bonner girls were her and Aracely. When anyone came to the violet house blaming them for too much rain or not enough, or because a bad cough was spinning through the grade school, his mother was the first one to tell them to go back to their homes. And Sam was the first one to say that if they didn’t, he’d tear down every moon in this town.

Both Miel and Aracely knew he’d never do it. He’d never take down anything that was letting this town’s children sleep. But he was a dark-skinned boy, a kind of dark they could not place, so when he threatened them, they believed him.

Sam and his mother were right to defend Aracely. But they should have let the town do whatever they wanted with Miel.

It was her fault Leandro was dead. It was her fault her mother was dead.

Sam reached his hand out to her, slow as the sway of the trees.

“Let’s go home, okay?” he said.

He touched her sleeve, and she pulled her arm away, her skin shrieking with everything she couldn’t say.

Please don’t touch me.

Please don’t leave me.

Please don’t let me be this anymore. Afraid of everything, and angry at everyone, and so awful at holding all of it within her own skin that it burst from her wrist as thorns and petals.

She was poison. And the last boy who had hair as black as wet ironbark and who tried to save her ended up dead.

The motion had felt small to her, pulling back her arm. But Sam looked startled, worried, the border between his dark eyes and the white looking clear and sharp.

He set the moon down so close to her that her skin turned a little blue.

“I’m gonna leave this with you, okay?” he said.

The moon, big as Aracely’s bedroom mirror, cast a faint glow on his skin like the reflection off snow at dusk. He had painted the craters and lunar seas, mare insularum and lacus hiernalis, the sea of islands and the lake of winter, in pale and dark silver. The glow looked like moonlight filtering through shallow water.

He’d already lit this one, the candle cupped and burning inside.

“And I’m coming back,” he said.





sea of serenity

He found Aracely sitting at the yellow kitchen table, rubbing polish off her fingernails.

“Where’s Miel?” she asked when she saw him. “I thought you two were making out in the woods somewhere.”

“Not exactly,” he said.

He looked down at the pattern of tiles on the kitchen floor. He’d never noticed how close the brown of the worn ceramic was to the shade of Miel’s skin in winter. In summer, her skin turned darker, cutting the sharp outlines of the foil stars he set against her skin. But after months of gray skies, this was the color she was, and he’d never noticed it before.

It made him feel odd about standing on it, like she’d feel his weight even from where she sat at the edge of the Bonners’ fields.

“Words, Sam,” Aracely said. “Use some.”

She’d been saying this since he was in middle school, when he’d gone quiet so no one would notice his voice wasn’t lowering like other boys’. They’d written it off as evidence that he was waiting out his own voice change, self-conscious of it hitching if he talked. Alone, in his room, Sam had practiced driving his pitch lower, so that when other boys, frightened into silence by unexpected cracks and breaks in their words, emerged with dropped voices, so would he.

But Aracely had little patience for his silence, then and now.

He looked up. “I need your help.”

That was all it took. She didn’t panic or ask him questions. Aracely had a calm that rivaled his mother’s. When his mother didn’t know how to talk to him when he started bleeding between his legs, Aracely spoke to him once on his own, and then herded him and Miel into the wisteria-colored house’s living room for the kind of talk their school used to give in health class, before they cut health class altogether. Aracely had been the only one who didn’t squirm through the whole thing. Sam and Miel had sat, cringing, at opposite ends of the sofa, his hand in his hair, fingers digging into the roots, while she buried her face in a throw pillow.

Aracely threw out the remover-soaked cotton balls, and went with him.

Miel shuddered when Aracely touched her, the way she had when he tried the same thing. But Aracely spoke to her in a voice so soft Sam couldn’t make out the words. She talked her down in a way Sam didn’t know how to, like her words were a rhythm she was helping Miel follow. Her voice was a frequency she was getting Miel to tune in to, until Miel was nodding, and letting Aracely take her hands. Aracely helped her stand, guided her through the constellations of broken glass.

There was something about it so different from what he would have done, different even from the way his mother talked to Miel.

There was something not quite sisterly, and not quite maternal. Not just the familiarity that had grown between a woman and the girl who’d lived with her for ten years.

Tonight Sam would paint another moon for Miel, one warmer than the bluish one he’d carried into the woods. He’d make one big enough to fill his arms, the light both full and crescent. He’d paint its face the blush of a flower moon, its edge darkened almost to red, like a strawberry moon. He’d paint its mare serenitatis and mare tranquillitatis, the wide seas of serenity and tranquility crossing the crisp white of a snow moon.