When the Moon was Ours(31)

Sam kept his palms on his forehead, his fingers still caught in his hair. But he felt Aracely watching him, her stare landing on the backs of his wrists.

“She wanted you to have the life you wanted,” Aracely said. “So figure out what kind of life you want.”





bay of roughness

The phone rang, and Miel answered, barely getting a full breath out before Ivy’s voice came through the line.

“Come over,” Ivy said.

Miel let out a laugh so small that on the other end of the line, it must have sounded like static. “Forget it.”

“Come over,” Ivy said, “or I’m telling my father to fire her.”

For the way Ivy said it, Miel felt something close to admiration. No taunting, none of the singsong of grade school playgrounds, none of the I-know-something-you-don’t-know. Ivy’s tone came clear and without pleasure. She wanted what she wanted. The rest was all transaction.

But that didn’t mean Miel knew what Ivy was talking about. Aracely? Aracely didn’t work for anyone. No one could fire her. They could only decide whether to trust her with their broken hearts. Sam’s mother? The Bonners may have owned the biggest pumpkin farm for miles, but even they, with their acres of dark soil and their bright-haired daughters, couldn’t cost her the work a half-dozen families in town gave her.

“Who?” Miel asked.

“Samira,” Ivy said.

The three syllables cut into Miel.

Samira. The name sounded less like a thing that had once belonged to Sam than the name of some specter, a spirit that might come and take him if Miel did not keep it away. It was a name of a girl who had not died because she had never quite lived. She had never truly existed. She was a life that did not belong to Sam but that he’d tried too hard to belong to.

“Who?” Miel asked, but she heard the wavering in how she said it now. Not the true confusion of the first time she’d asked, but a false start to the word, a breath hitching before she got it out.

“Sam,” Ivy said. “Samir. Whatever you want to call her. Come over, or I’m telling my father to fire her.”

Ivy hung up.

A new rose stem twisted inside Miel’s arm. The opening it would grow through looked as smooth and round as a cigarette burn in a blanket.

When they were ten, Miel had let Sam touch it, let him set his thumb against the little knot of scar tissue. He’d touched her so lightly, so afraid of hurting her, she’d taken his hand and pressed it against her skin, making him feel it.

Now these roses, these roses she hated more than she feared pumpkins or the deepest parts of the river, were what the Bonner girls wanted so much they’d rip apart the life Sam had built. They wanted them enough to drag back a girl Sam thought he had shed years ago. He was a comet burning through the night sky, and Samira was the trail of dust and ice streaking after him.

And the Bonner girls would make everyone tilt their faces and see them both. Sam, the boy he was. Samira, the girl he wasn’t. And the blur of scattered light that would make everyone think they were the same person.

Miel was still buttoning her sweater as she left the violet house. Of course she would come, and of course Ivy knew that.

She felt a flare of anger toward his mother, that beautiful, kohl-eyed woman who told her charges stories of brazen, fearless daughters. Yasmin saw her son for what he was, a boy who would never feel like himself inside the name Samira, or inside clothes that let people see and judge his body. But she was as intent on letting things take their own course as she was indifferent to religion. She accommodated both the boy at the core of him, and his brittle, tight-held hope that one day he would want to be a girl.

So you’re just gonna wait? Miel had asked her when Sam couldn’t hear. Yasmin had just said, He’ll get there. Her shrug was more a gesture of levelheadedness than an indication that she didn’t care. Miel knew that. It still frustrated her, how well she knew Sam and how comfortable she seemed waiting him out.

Miel let that little shred of resentment float away from her. It wasn’t his mother’s fault. She had given him as much space as she could and as much time as he needed.

Neither of which would mean anything if the Bonner sisters dragged out the name he’d been born with. By saying that name that once belonged to him but that he never quite belonged to, they could strip him naked.

Mr. Bonner was in his truck, the wheels grinding along the dirt path that cut through the farm. He leaned out the driver’s-side window and nodded at Miel, like she was coming to see his daughters so they could share library books or polish one another’s nails.

She nodded back, because that was what people did in this town.

She kept her eyes up, not letting them fall to the glass pumpkins.

Las gringas bonitas sat in the same arrangement as the last time Miel had been here, as though she had left and they had stayed the whole time. The Bonner sisters had gathered around that dining room table, Ivy’s and Lian’s gray and green eyes bookended by the redless brown of Chloe’s and Peyton’s.

That blue vase sat in the center of the table. Miel saw the first rose they’d cut. It had barely wilted, the edges of the petals darkened to copper.

They hadn’t tried using it. They hadn’t yet found out that the rumors about Miel’s roses were nothing more than town lore.

Miel felt caught in a second of wondering why, but then the Bonner girls’ four faces, their four shades of red hair, made her feel so dizzy she could almost see four roses. Like they had multiplied in the vase, growing roots and new leaves.