When the Moon was Ours(34)

“Yeah,” Miel said. “That’s what I thought. And now you want to force on him what you can’t even take yourself.”

God knew what words, or worse, this town would have for a boy who’d been born female. They would wrap their contempt and their cruelty in the lie that they wouldn’t have cared, if only he’d told them.

It’s just the dishonesty of it all, they’d whisper.

All that lying, it’s the lying I hate.

How can you trust someone who pretends like that?

As though the truth of his body was any of their business, as though they had a right to consider how he lived an affront to them.

As though who he was had anything to do with them.

Miel could hear those voices. She hated everyone who would say those words even if they hadn’t yet.

And that was if Sam was lucky. This town would scorn Peyton, but they would hate Sam. That was how it worked, judgment for girls, and hate for boys. Boys had been run out of this town for sleeping with other boys, ones meant to marry pretty, pale-eyed girls. The boys who’d called Sam gay or a girl would hate him for what they would call a lie, solid in their conviction that his life was an insult to them, a deception, a trick.

Judgment for girls, hate for boys. And because this town would not know what to do with Sam, he’d have to take both.

“This will destroy him,” Miel said.

“Then give them what they want,” Peyton said.

This town had never seen anyone like Sam. If they had, they hadn’t known. And Miel’s fear over this, their reaction to that which they did not know, made her fight to keep her breath quiet. Girls who’d once thought Sam was handsome might let it slip to their boyfriends, who would beat Sam up because they could not stand the thought of their own girlfriends liking anyone born female. Boys who hated that he’d matched them, hated that for so many years they had not known, would corner him when he went out to hang his moons. Fathers, holding shotguns the same as Mr. Bonner’s, would threaten him to stay away from their daughters.

“If he gets hurt, it’s on you. Because you should know better than any of them what this could do to him.”

“No,” Peyton said, again with that slight shake of her head, so slow her curls barely moved. “If he gets hurt, it’s on you. Because all you had to do was give up something you throw away.”

It wasn’t just throwing them away. It was killing them, destroying the petals her father could not heal her of and her mother could not baptize out of her.

Now she was supposed to hand them over to girls who misunderstood their awful force. Her roses didn’t have the strength the rumors said, the power to compel love from those who breathed in the scent.

But her mother had feared them so deeply she was willing to do anything the se?oras and the priests told her to save Miel from them.

“What do you even want them for?” Miel asked. “Just in case someone has the nerve not to fall in love with you?”

That got a tight-eyed blink out of Peyton, a tension in her cheeks.

“The four of you,” Miel said. “You’re worse than anyone on Aracely’s table. You want to fall in love more than you want to be in love, and you want someone falling in love with you more than you want them loving you.”

“That’s not true,” Peyton said.

“Then what are you doing with Liberty?” Miel asked. “You don’t like her the way you like Jenna and everyone knows it.”

Peyton’s eyes opened a little more, a wild look that was closer to anger than surprise.

It satisfied Miel more than she expected. It may have been as surface-level as the cracks on the stained glass coffin, but it still cut across the color and shimmer that was the Bonner girls.

“I hope the three of them are all you need,” Miel said. “Because they’re gonna be all you have left.”

Her wrist felt heavy, like the muscle had grown dense as a river stone.

It felt heavier when she realized Peyton was watching it.

A few more leaves had grown from her wrist, peeking out from her sleeve. They sheltered a tiny rosebud, the near-blue of an amethyst, shining with blood and water.





lake of winter

The green shoot was already thickening into a stem, and the heat turned to a slashing feeling. Miel felt the stem’s base anchored in her forearm, reaching almost to the inside of her elbow, under a veil of skin and muscle.

After she’d left the Bonners’ house, the round pearl of the bud had fattened to the size of a marble. Now it was as big as an unbloomed peony, one flinch from shuddering open.

Miel thought of Sam’s palm on her shoulder blade, and pain burned bright through her forearm. It felt as alive as if it had fingers and breath. Each time the stem crawled a sliver further out of her wrist, she wanted to let a scream pour from her throat.

Its perfume, like the warm sugar of figs and pomegranates, felt damning, proof to the Bonner sisters of how much she wanted him. It gossiped to the women at the market. It confessed to the priests at church. It spoke of the olives and lemon groves Sam’s father ran through as a child.

The thought of cutting it off her own wrist came to her, and stayed. It scratched at her, like noticing a trickle of blood on her lip and trying not to lick it away. It pulled her, this rose that had grown faster than any other before it.