When the Moon was Ours(28)

“That’s right,” he said. “You’d never heard of it. So don’t pretend you know anything.”

“I know that these girls live with the freedom of being boys for years and then they’re expected to become wives. They’re expected to forget everything they knew about being anything other than what they’re supposed to be.”

The words turned the back of his neck hot. They left him tense with the feeling that Aracely was lecturing not only him but the grandmother who had told him about Pakistan, and about bacha posh, and who was no longer alive to speak for herself.

These girls. What they’re supposed to be. All of it felt like Aracely’s judgment of a world she did not know, and a world that had given him a quarter of his blood.

“You want to play whose culture is more backwards?” Sam asked. “Because I can do that. Women like you, with your cures and your prayers and your different-color eggs, you know what they say about you? Those old women—what do you call them, the se?oras?—they’re nice to you to your face. They send their sons and their daughters to you. And then they call you a witch behind your back. A bruja. Even I know that word.”

Aracely’s eyes were still as open as they’d been before, neither closing with a flinch nor spreading wider.

“And these are your own people,” Sam said. A cruelty, a kind of rubbing it in, had slipped into his tone before. Now he let it wrap every word. “They want you for what you can do for them when no one’s looking, and then in church they curse you. That’s your culture. I pick mine any day.”

Aracely watched him, her face unchanged.

“And where do you get off acting like it’s any different here than where my family came from?” Sam asked. “You think girls can do whatever they want here? You think Miel can? How do think girls here would do if they got to be boys growing up and then had to be girls again?”

“But that’s what you’re counting on, right?” Aracely asked. “That one day you’ll wake up and wanna put on a dress?”

“Fuck you,” Sam said. It had never been about a dress. It had been about the clothes his grandmother would have wanted to see him in for family photos. Not a boy’s kurta, but the sunrise colors and scrolled patterns of a girl’s salwar kameez. A dupatta draped over hair longer than he ever wanted to grow it.

He looked for any cringe in Aracely’s face. Some sign that she knew she’d gone too far.

Instead there was just the trace of a smile, curving one side of her mouth.

She’d baited him. She’d wanted him angry.

“So you’ve got that in you,” Aracely said. “Good. You’re gonna need it.”

Sam gritted his teeth, hard enough to feel it in the back of his jaw. “For what?”

“To be this.” She took in his clothes again, and again he felt like they were pinching him. “To live like this.”

“I’m not living like anything,” he said. “I do this for my mother. This country’s no different than anywhere else. It’s better for a woman if there’s a man in her house, even if that man’s her son.”

“Stop pretending this is for anybody but you.”

Sam turned around.

Aracely didn’t know anything about him, or his family. Once his grandmother was gone, it had just been him and his mother. His mother had no sons, only him, born a daughter, and Sam had wanted, as badly as he wanted his grandmother back, not only to be a boy but to be a son to his mother. Years ago, when he’d first thought of living as a bacha posh, he’d felt the same shiver of triumph every time he was, in jeans and hair shorter than most girls, mistaken for a boy. He’d thought of having that all the time. How he could have something he wanted and at the same time do something for his mother.

He would be the man in their house, taking care of her. If he became a son to her, he’d thought, she wouldn’t cast a nervous glance toward the windows when she locked the door at night. If he was a son, she would have let him paint over the letters sprayed onto the side of their house, instead of her doing it herself, having to look at it. She hadn’t let him near that wall until she could get it covered over, and it wasn’t until he was thirteen that he got her to tell him what slur those letters had spelled.

“Sam,” Aracely said.

He left the indigo room and went for the front door.

“Sam,” Aracely said, a whispered yell. He could tell she wanted to raise her voice but didn’t want to wake Miel. “Get back here.”

He looked over his shoulder.

Aracely still had a basket of eggs in her hands. She’d forgotten to put it down.

“Miel may think you know everything,” he said. “But you don’t know anything about me.”

“I know more than you do.”

“Oh really?” He turned around. “How?”

“Because I used to be where you are.”

The lie of her words made him lonelier than if she’d said nothing. The fiction that anyone in this town had ever been where he was, caught between feeling bound by the clothes he wore and being so desperate to keep them he wanted to hold on to them with his teeth, made the slide toward resenting her quiet and fast.

“No, you don’t,” he said, and it wasn’t until he heard the tremble in his own voice that he noticed the prickling damp at the edges of his eyelashes. How much tears irritated his eyes when he tried to stay still, how they refused to be forgotten until he blinked and let them go. “How could you?”