When the Moon was Ours(3)

She’d seen the brown of her hand against the brown of his when they were children, and holding hands meant nothing more than that she liked how warm his palm was in the night air, or that he wanted to pull her to see something she had missed. A meteor shower or a vine of double-flower morning glories, so blue they looked dyed.

All these things reminded her of his moons, and his moons reminded her of all these things. He’d hung a string of them between her house and his, some as small as her cupped palms, others big enough to fill her arms. They brightened the earth and wild grass. They were tucked into trees, each giving off a ring of light just wide enough to meet the next, so she never walked in the dark. One held a trace of the same gold as those foil star stickers. Another echoed the blue of those morning glories Sam could find even in the dark. Another was the pure, soft white of the frost flowers he showed her on winter mornings, curls of ice that looked like tulips and peonies.

The one she passed under now was the color of a rose that had grown from her wrist when she and Sam were in ninth grade. She remembered it because, in the hall at school, her sleeve had slipped back, and the rose accidentally brushed the elbow of a girl who recoiled, yelling, “Watch where you’re going.”

That same afternoon, when the girl’s boyfriend broke up with her, she’d blamed Miel and that brush of petals. She cornered Miel in the girls’ bathroom, and looked like she was about to backhand her when Sam came up behind her and said, “Oh, I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” His voice had been so level, more full of advice than a threat, that the girl had actually turned around. “You know the last girl who did that turned into a potted plant, right?” he said, and he sold it with such caution and certainty that the girl believed it. She sank into all the rumors about Miel and Aracely, and she backed away.

If Miel hadn’t known Sam was her friend before, she knew after that. That was the first and last time he ever went into the girls’ room by choice.

Miel could chart their history by these moons, lighting the path between the violet house where she lived with Aracely and the bright-tiled roof of Sam’s house.

The closer she got to him, the more she felt it in her roses, like a moon pulling on a sea. Since she was small, the roses had grown from her skin, each bursting through the opening on her wrist that never healed. One grew, and she destroyed it, and another grew, and she destroyed it. But now she hesitated before cutting them, or pushing them underwater so the river’s current carried them away. Because for the past few months, they’d responded to Sam. The more time she spent around him, the more her wrist felt heavy and sore. He caught her holding her forearm during school, and stole bags of crunchy, fluffy ice from the chemistry lab for her to put against her sleeve.

If she thought of him too much, her roses grew deeper and brighter; the one on her wrist was now as dark pink as her favorite lipstick.

Tonight, he was waiting behind his house, hands in his pockets. His stance showed neither impatience nor boredom. She always wondered if he saw her from his window, or if he just came outside early, and didn’t mind waiting.

“I stole something from work today,” he said. The moons gave enough light to let her see he was holding his tongue against his back teeth, proud of his own guilt.

“You what?” she asked.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll bring it back. I just wanted you to see it. Come on.”

Inside, he showed her the brush he used to pollinate each pumpkin blossom by hand.

They only opened for one day, Sam had told her when he started at the Bonners’ farm. An explanation for the slow, careful work of taking pollen from each anther and brushing it onto each flower’s stigma. That small act made a blossom become a pumpkin. The Bonners gave Sam this task because they thought his skill with brushes covered in paint would translate to brushes coated in pollen.

But Miel had never seen one of the brushes before. Now Sam flicked the oat-colored bristles first against her forearm and then against her rose. For those few seconds, the tiny birthmarks on her arm were grains of pollen, and her rose was the corolla of a pumpkin blossom.

The bristles made her flinch, like the petals growing from her wrist had as much sensation as her fingers. They didn’t. Yes, pulling on the stem would hurt her. Knocking the flower head against a kitchen table stung the opening her roses grew from. But the petals themselves were like her hair, rooted in her, but not the same kind of alive as her skin.

For that moment though, of those bristles skimming over that lipstick-colored rose, the sense that those petals could feel as much as her lips or her fingers shimmered through her.

Her eyes flashed up to his.

His eyes were a little more open than they always were, the brown clearer.

The brush and his fingers stilled on her skin.

He hadn’t meant it like that. She knew that. She could tell by that startled look.

This wasn’t his fingers tracing her back and shoulders, finding stars. This wasn’t her checking the flush of his forehead and then leading him home in the middle of a school day. This was a thing that turned into his mouth on hers. This was the pollination brush he’d forgotten to set down, still in his hands as he held her, bristles feathering against her neck. This was the breaking of the strange nervousness that had grown between them over the past few months, a hesitancy to touch that would vanish one day and reappear the next.

She felt the shape of pumpkin blossoms glowing on her skin, waiting for Sam’s fingers.