When the Moon was Ours(64)

Miel took another step toward Ivy. “How about how Lian passed her classes? I’m guessing no one’s ever put that in front of them.” Now she was so close to Ivy she could see the faint tint of blue in her gray eyes. “Or you. Maybe nobody knows your secret, but they will. Whatever you’re hiding, I’ll find it.”

Ivy’s smile had that same pity, without being unkind. “You can’t.”

The softness didn’t deter Miel. She leaned in close enough to whisper.

“Try me.”

At the corner of Miel’s vision, the last of the light flashed off those glass pumpkins, deep and shining as the tumbled stones Sam’s mother wore.

“You don’t own any part of us,” Miel said.

Ivy studied the reddened skin on Miel’s wrist, the small wound.

“I could tell everyone about her,” Ivy said.

Her. That one word made Miel press her feet harder against the brick path, trying not to show Ivy that this one syllable touched her. The thought of what it would do to Sam dragged over her skin like a safety pin.

“Everyone’ll think you like girls,” Ivy said.

Miel hated Ivy for everything she assumed she knew about Sam, her implication that his body made him a girl. But a ribbon of admiration tainted Miel’s rage. That Ivy could protect Peyton so fiercely and still talk about girls liking girls spoke of something fearless in her. Loyal to those other three girls, who were as much part of her as her own body, ruthless to everyone else.

“I don’t care if they do,” Miel said. She wanted Sam, both what he was with his clothes on and what he was naked. She didn’t care what that made her. “They can call me whatever they want. But he’s not a girl.”

She thought of Sam, of the smell of paint on his skin and the scent of black cardamom on his clothes, and the smallest movement twitched under her skin.

She felt a new burst of growth breaking through to the light. She held her gasp in her lungs, and glanced down at the green shoot, the new leaves.

Ivy did not see. Miel kept her arm at her side, stopping herself from wincing as the thorned stem inched out of her skin.

“You really want everyone knowing your mother tried to drown her children?” Ivy asked, no taunting. She laced the words with neither coaxing nor threatening.

Miel bit back every that’s not true. Her tongue wanted to let go of the words that’s not what happened.

Instead, Miel whispered, “Just try it.”

Ivy took hold of Miel’s elbow. Not a reflex of being angry, lashing out, but the slow wrapping of her fingers around Miel’s arm.

“You really want to take us on?” Ivy asked. “You sure about that?”

Miel leaned back to pull her arm away, but stopped.

Ivy looked so tired, wrung out by all that blunt determination.

“No,” Miel said. “I don’t want to do anything with you.”

Miel glanced down at her wrist. A new bud looked red as the center of a blood orange. The more she thought of the brown of Sam’s hands or the amber of Aracely’s perfume, the more leaves twisted out of her. The leaves turned such a deep green that they looked like the blue of sky lupines. Flashes of gold streaked the petals like candle flames.

Ivy saw the flick of Miel’s eyes. Miel was gritting her teeth to keep from crying out with pain and relief.

“I’m walking away, Ivy,” Miel said. “You’re letting go of me, and I’m walking away. And if you threaten anyone I love again, I will take you down. All of you. I will find every secret you ever tried to hide, and I will make sure everyone knows.”

They both looked down at Miel’s wrist, where the rosebud swelled like a bulb of blown glass.

“What do you want with them?” Miel asked. “They’re not gonna get you what you want. And they’re sure as hell not gonna make it so Chloe was never gone.” Miel could almost smell the warmth of her own roses drifting out the cracked window and into the chilled air, the stems still inside, in that blue vase. “So what do you want with them?”

Ivy lifted her gaze.

A sheen crossed her eyes, like a slick of oil on water.

That passing light, the slight opening wider of her eyes, sank into Miel.

Fear. That was the plain, unadorned reason Ivy wanted Miel’s roses.

It hadn’t been about power. It had been about fear. And it hadn’t been about what they could get everyone else to give them. It had always been about them, just them.

They had almost lost Chloe. They had splintered and then tried to fit themselves back together, even if they could not control how they all had grown edges and corners, how they might scrape against one another.

Instead of twisting like the smooth green of morning glory vines, they were wearing one another down like brambles rubbing away the thorns of other brambles.

And Ivy must have thought that if she could control this one thing, she could keep them together, interlocked instead of breaking.

With those roses, she believed they could have any boy they wanted. If their charms failed on a boy with glasses who played the violin like it was part of his hands, or the tall one with crooked teeth but perfect blue eyes, they could call on these roses.

But it had never been about any one boy, or even a string of them. As long as they could have anything they wanted, they were still the Bonner girls. They were still one force in four bodies, in four shades of red hair.