When the Moon was Ours(53)

“You’re not stupid,” he said.

He knew she wasn’t stupid. He’d seen her in math class, drawing the kind of tessellations and polyhedrons that could have been illustrations in the textbook. She could be a designer or an architect. The fact that she struggled in English class to turn in one-paragraph in-class essays, that she’d given up on doing the reading, didn’t mean she was as slow as everyone thought.

It wasn’t his business. He knew that. But he hated seeing it, her bowing to the way other people saw her, her sinking beneath the lie of what everyone else thought. So if he could say enough to remind her that she still existed, that she was both other than and more than what everyone else assumed she was, maybe she would lose the truth of herself a little more slowly.

Lian didn’t see it that way. He’d said, “You’re not stupid,” and her expression had shifted, her green eyes half-closing, the smile turning into tension in her jaw. “Fuck off.”

But Lian was the one he went looking for today. He found her on the brick path that ran in front of and then around the side of the Bonners’ house.

She blinked at him, waiting for him to speak.

“I quit,” he said.

That blank expression slipped from her face. “What?”

“I’m done,” he said.

Lian’s stare flashed toward either side of them. She was looking for the shine of glass among the vines. He could tell from how her eyes were moving.

Her face tightened, filling with a look both offended and injured, as though she was taking this insult on behalf of her family. Who was he, she must have thought, to judge anything that happened here? How could the strange boy who painted the moon over and over say anything about these fields turning to glass? And what right did he have to quit?

“It has nothing to do with the pumpkins,” he said. “Look, I don’t know what you’re doing with Miel.”

He could still feel Miel’s hands spreading over his back, her body pulling the heat out of his. How he’d put his mouth not against her forehead the way he had so many times but to her mouth. She’d tasted so much like honey, like sage and wildflowers.

He looked up at the house’s windows. “All of you. But whatever your game is, I’m not gonna be part of it. I quit.”

Lian set a confused look back into place, blinking in multiples.

Even now that Mrs. Bonner taught her daughters at home, Lian showed no sign of shaking away the act she’d fallen into, the role of the slow sister. In summer, when the Bonners kept all the windows open, Sam had heard their lessons through the screens. Mrs. Bonner never asked Lian to read out loud, which must have seemed like a kind of cruelty, a way to point out that which her second-oldest daughter could barely do. During their discussions of books, Mrs. Bonner moderated Ivy and Peyton’s debate over whether Pip from Great Expectations was a romantic or a sap, while Lian sat staring out the holes in the lace curtains.

“Why are you telling me?” she asked.

“Because you’re smart,” he said. “And you’ll tell anyone who needs to know.”

He took the brick path back to the edge of the Bonners’ yard.

At the corner of his vision came a flicker of movement, like the ribbons of foil dancing on wooden posts in strawberry fields.

Peyton Bonner stood, elbows cupped in her hands, the wind puffing up her curled hair. She pressed her lips tight, a worried look on her face. He knew she was wondering if he’d still be her excuse for Jenna Shelby.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “We’re fine.”

Peyton nodded, her lips still pressed together. She looked younger, the way she had by the water tower, holding that gray pumpkin.

Sam couldn’t remember when she’d stopped carrying it around. He’d never wondered until now. One day it had just been gone from her hands.

“You remember that pumpkin you had when you were three?” he asked.

Her mouth broke into a smile. “Lady Jane Grey?”

His next breath turned into a laugh. “You named it?”

“Her,” she said, prim as a teacher correcting a mispronounced word. “I named her. And yes.”

“What happened to her?” Sam asked. “You took that thing everywhere.”

Peyton sighed, but not without humor. “Lady Jane Grey, like her namesake, was beheaded after a tragically short reign.”

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

“The pumpkin was turning, and my sisters were afraid I was gonna carry it around until it rotted,” she said. “So they convinced me she wanted to be part of a pie.”

Convinced. Three Bonner sisters against one. They’d probably cut the pumpkin open without Peyton’s permission, and had to talk her down from wailing by telling her this was an end worthy of Lady Jane Grey.

“You know, I never meant to scare her,” Peyton said.

Sam shook his head. “What?”

“The night at the water tower.” Peyton’s eyes drifted toward the place on the horizon where the old water tower used to stand, a silhouette against the sky. “I never wanted to scare Miel with the pumpkin. I just thought she might want to hold her. I thought it might make her feel better.”

Peyton’s face was so open, almost apologetic, that Sam felt like they were at the water tower again, Peyton standing with her sisters, Sam slipping his jacket onto Miel. They had all been children then, so he’d never considered just how young Peyton was, the smallest of four sisters. A girl offering to share her favorite thing with a girl she did not know.