When the Moon was Ours(44)

Guilt crept over his skin like the wisp of cold air from the cracked window.

He sank back into his seat. “Thanks for picking me up.” He meant it, but it came out bitter, almost sarcastic.

“This is not okay,” Aracely said. “This is not an acceptable way to handle what you’re going through.”

“Are you gonna tell my mom?” Sam asked.

“No,” Aracely said. “You are.”

“Fine.” He unbuckled his seat belt. “Can I go now?”

“Is that what you want?” she asked.

The thoughts of everything he wanted were so bright and numerous, like threads of sun coming through at the edges of his mother’s curtains. He wanted to be a girl who wanted to be a girl, or a boy who was, in a way no one could question, a boy.

He wanted to be able to hang his moons in the trees without having his name stripped down to Moon. He wanted to remember if he’d asked to be called Sam or if his mother had decided this was his nickname, if she worried that Samir was a name that would, to everyone else, make him even more different than he already was.

He wanted to know if Miel had chosen him, or if she’d just fallen into the familiar rhythm of their nights outside because he was the first one to be unafraid of her.

He wanted not to want the girl whose attachment to him had been so tenuous that the Bonner girls had stepped into it as easily as Adair Lewis turned across a stage floor.

“No,” he said, looking up at Aracely. “I want you to cure me.”

She dropped her hand from the back of her seat. “What?”

“Is that a what like you didn’t hear me or a what like I need to say it another way?” he asked.

“Sam.”

“Please,” he said. “Don’t treat me like I’m still five. I’m not. I can pay you, same as anyone else.”

Aracely looked at her lap. “I don’t want your money.”

“Then whatever you want, I’ll give it to you,” he said. “Just cure me.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want to feel like this anymore,” he said. “And I don’t think she wants me to either.”

“Which of those is more important to you? Because…”

“I want you to cure me,” he said. “I want you to fix me.”

“I can’t fix you,” she said. “And you don’t need fixing.”

“Fix this,” he said. “Fix this one thing for me.”

“Think about this.” Aracely leaned over the gearshift. “Really think about this.”

“I am thinking about it.” He raised his voice enough that he could hear it coming back to him off the car windows. “This is my body. It’s my heart. It doesn’t belong to anyone else. I say what I do with it.”

Aracely gave him back a startled look, her fingers resting on the steering wheel.

“So cure me,” he said.

She opened her mouth, but then it fell shut again. Her polished nails scratched against the steering wheel. “Okay.”





lake of summer

She tried to tune in to some feeling in her body. Anything that would keep her from falling away from the golds of the trees, and into the memory of the river.

She tried to shut her eyes and feel the dryness on her tongue, but she felt both thirsty and choked with water. Her stomach should have clenched, but her whole body seemed weightless, floating. She’d been in here long enough that she should have felt pressure against the fly of her jeans and the hard seam between her legs. But even that she didn’t feel. She’d been sweating too much, even with the chill of the glass, and she felt nothing but the clammy layer of wet salt coating her skin.

It had been the water that killed them all, but it had started with there being so little of it. There had been a drought that year, and summer had left the river low, braided with undercurrents her mother did not know about until they took Miel, and then Leandro, and then her. The roots and stones and contours of the riverbed made whirlpools and riptides that, in most years, more rain and greater depths smoothed out.

Her mother had thought the lower waterline would make the water safer, easier to wade through even in the dark. She had no idea that the drought had given what little water was left claws.

Her mother did not guess that water could be more dangerous when there was less of it.

The memory of her mother’s screaming rang through her head. It splintered into each trembling note, and then resolved into a clear, haunted sound. And the silence, the lack of her father’s voice, the wondering if maybe the water had taken him too, turned each of those sounds jagged.

Her mother had only done what the priests told her to, holding Miel in the river. But Miel fought so hard as her mother kept her underwater that her mother took it as proof that these roses had cursed her, that her daughter was pure and good and just needed to be saved. Whatever petaled demon made her grow them was leaving her body.

But Miel fought so hard she broke out of her mother’s hold, and the current, with its hands grown from the dust and cloudless skies of this drought, swept her out of reach. It took her down so far she lost the moon, and all its distant light.

The space between the stained glass panels turned dark as the river. It was swallowing her.