When the Moon was Ours(32)

Then those echoed roses vanished, turning to faint washes of color.

The Bonner girls hadn’t used that rose yet because they were collecting them. They wanted four of them. They had decided that until all of them could have one, none of them would.

It made Miel unsteady with wondering how many of her roses were at the bottom of the river, whole and alive.

“You don’t care about your mother,” Lian said.

Miel tensed, even though there was no malice in Lian’s words. Only a bluntness, a carelessness evolved to make up for how long thinking took her.

Remembering that stopped Miel from rising to the insult.

“I guess you don’t care what anyone thinks of her,” Chloe said.

You have no idea what happened. She tried to say it, to cut Chloe off. Just because she wouldn’t give up her roses, just because she wouldn’t barter away the thing her mother considered so dangerous, didn’t mean she didn’t care about her mother’s memory. It meant she wasn’t willing to put into the Bonner girls’ hands the petals her mother feared, and that her father was so sure could be willed away.

But those pumpkins outside, the jewel colors of the stained glass coffin, were a threat she could wish away no more than her father could cure her with bandages wrapped so tight her fingers prickled. And her voice felt like a thing outside her, like a breath she had let out and could not pull back.

“You don’t care about everyone knowing she tried to kill her own children,” Chloe said.

Chloe’s voice was more knowing than Lian’s, but it was still soft, unthreatening, like she’d just woken Miel from a nap. Her voice was afternoon gathered in the folds of sheer curtains. It was her white hand on patterned wallpaper.

It was a lit match produced from her palm like a magic trick, and the whole room going up like kindling.

Miel looked toward Peyton, who stayed quiet. But she was looking right at Miel, not tracing her fingers along water stains, or looking for anywhere else to settle her eyes.

“But you care about this.” Ivy tapped a finger on the table.

Miel noticed, for the first time, that a piece of paper sat on the wood. A photocopy. But the edging, the familiar border and spacing of the lines, made Miel feel like the Bonners’ wood floor was buckling under her.

A birth certificate. Sam’s. Miel knew without looking. And that knowing came with the sharp drop of realizing Aracely had not settled everything with Ms. Owens. Maybe she thought she had. Maybe she thought she’d left Ms. Owens hopeful, calm, sure in her faith that when she grew lovesick again, Aracely would be ready for her.

But because of Miel, Aracely had botched Ms. Owens’ lovesickness cure. Because of Miel, Ms. Owens, scattered, sobbing, and flighty Ms. Owens, would have been so open to the kind words of four girls who told her how useless men and boys were. Miel could imagine them leaning their elbows on the office counter as though they were enrolled, their hands rising and falling in soft gestures. They would have whispered to Ms. Owens as though she was part of their club, told her how men and boys were animals that were easy to control once you knew how they worked.

Maybe they had gone in looking for Miel’s file, something they could use against her. She had refused them something they demanded. Of course they would want to wrench her up against the truth that if she defied them, they would tear into her life like teeth into muscle.

But with all of them talking and laughing in hushed tones, how easily Ms. Owens could have let slip that she’d been keeping secrets for Miel’s best friend. And the Bonner sisters would have charmed those secrets out of her so slowly, so gently, Ms. Owens would have barely noticed she was giving them up. Confiding in the Bonner sisters would have felt like an act so quiet and harmless, she wouldn’t have realized the weight of what she was doing. Showing them the birth certificate would have seemed not like a betrayal, but like chatter between girlfriends.

Miel tried to smooth the wondering out of her face.

She looked at Ivy. “How do you know I care?”

“You’re here, aren’t you?” Ivy said.

Miel held her throat tight, wound with the feeling that every small movement was one the Bonner sisters would notice. If she swallowed, they’d know they had her. If she breathed in a little too quickly, or out for a little too long, they’d know they had her.

“What I’m wondering is what you care about more,” Ivy said. “Everyone knowing she’s a girl, or everyone knowing you like girls.”

The second half of that threat was so weak, Miel felt the sudden rise of a laugh. She took a breath in, stopping it.

To this whole town, she was odd and unnerving. To them, she was the motherless girl who came from the water tower and grew roses from her wrist, a girl whose skirt hem was always a little damp even on the driest days. Whatever they said about her liking girls or liking boys was a handful of water next to the whole river. It could not make her stranger, more unsettling to everyone else, than she already was.

But what took that stifled laugh, what folded it into something so small and dense it turned to anger, was going over the rest of what Ivy had said.

“He’s not a girl,” she said.

Ivy eyed the piece of paper. “That says different.”

The grain of the photocopy pulled Miel into wondering what they’d noticed, what that birth certificate had made them look at a little more closely.