When the Moon was Ours(65)

Miel didn’t care. That force, those shades of red, weren’t moving her wherever the Bonner girls wanted. And they weren’t threatening Sam.

“If you try and hurt anyone I love,” Miel said, “I will make sure everyone in this town knows you and your sisters can’t do anything. The famous Bonner girls can’t get what they want. You can’t even get boys to fall in love with you anymore. Why don’t we ask Aracely? I bet she could tell you there’s not a single heart in this whole town that’s lovesick over any of you. The magnificent Bonner sisters? They don’t exist. You don’t rule this town anymore.”

Miel’s own venom spread over her tongue like melted sugar. It was dark and unfamiliar and so smooth she felt like she was drinking it. Ivy’s flinch only thickened its sweetness at the back of her throat.

“You leave me alone, and you leave Sam alone,” Miel said. “Or everything I know, everyone will know.”

Ivy leaned into Miel, her mouth near her ear. “You don’t know anything.”

She grabbed Miel’s rose by the stem and pulled.

Miel screamed, the ripping of the thorns through her skin like having a vein torn out. Her scream sounded not like her, but shrill and wild, the shriek of a downed bird.

The thorns dragged through Miel’s muscle. They sliced across her veins. They turned the small opening in her wrist into a wound, and it throbbed like a burn, a hot coin searing her skin.

The last of the stem flopped out, the end limp as a wet rope.

Ivy pinched the rose stem between her fingers. The streaks of yellow on the red petals looked like bands of light crossing a blood moon.

Blood flowed out over Miel’s arm. It salted the back of her throat. Her wound dyed her shirt, the rose’s pine and amber scent raining down from her wrist. She was a lipstick tree, blooming with red so bright it did not look real.

A sweep of auburn burst into the darkening air.

Lian Bonner’s eyes flashed green as a wet pumpkin vine. She wore a heavy sweater, cable-knit in a thick yarn, but like Ivy, she stepped onto the brick path in bare feet.

Miel’s scream had called her out. Soon Peyton and Chloe would come out too. They would pull Miel into the pumpkin fields and quiet her. They would hold her down so that when Mr. and Mrs. Bonner came out asking what on earth was going on, they’d keep their hands over her mouth and her limbs, and the green of the vines would hide her.

They would pretend they were crouching in the pumpkin fields looking for an earring Ivy had lost. They would tell their mother and their father that Lian had seen a mouse, or that Chloe had been trying to scare Peyton with a grass snake. And the weight of their hands would press more blood from Miel’s body, until she could not bite Ivy’s palm or fight against Peyton’s and Lian’s fingers on her ankles and wrists.

Miel grabbed a glass pumpkin and wrenched it. The stem snapped and let off a spray of blue glass splinters.

If the Bonner girls would not face these fields, if they did not understand the force spilling out of their windows, Miel could make them. She could break it open and put it between her and them.

She shut her eyes and threw it at the brick path. It shattered, a million little clean, sharp noises. Like rain hitting the different-colored tiles on the roof of Sam’s house, sounding like handfuls of sewing needles.

Miel opened her eyes, holding her wrist against her chest to slow the bleeding.

Shards of blue littered the brick path and the dirt. Pieces had skittered into the rows of pumpkin vines. They looked like a hundred blue glass flames, a forbidding river between Miel and these barefoot girls.

And she ran.





sea of showers

The inside of him was as frozen as winter ground. He’d gotten so used to telling Miel what he would tell no one else. Now that impulse to find her, tell her that he’d done it, he’d said the words he didn’t even know were true until he heard them in his own voice, left his heart held tight. It was the hollow echoing of an instinct he could no longer lean against. Now she wouldn’t let him near her, and he was all ice and cold earth. Everything felt as sharp as frost flowers, cutting him even though they had come from him.

He always tried to stop Miel from touching frost flowers, those curls of ice that grew from the weeds on the coldest December mornings. He searched for them for her, spotting the violet-tinted white in the undergrowth. But he warned her that even though they looked soft as petals, they were sharp.

She always touched them anyway. Those petals, looking so much like spun sugar or the tongues of irises, lured her. She touched them, and they drew blood from her fingertips.

Every time, those frost flowers left her bleeding. Every time, she cut her fingers, and for that moment of her blood coloring the ice, he hated those petals for being sharp and beautiful.

Tonight he’d hang every moon he had. To give this town all the light that was in him, even if all he was to them was this paint and paper. To get Miel to hate him a little less. To show her that every moon he’d ever made her was not a lie.

So many times, he had told her in light what he did not know how to tell her any other way. Now he needed these moons to tell her why he’d done what he’d done, why he’d kept from her what he’d kept from her. That he could not betray a secret so much like the one he was keeping himself.

If he tried to turn all this light into words, he would catch himself on them. What could he say? That he hated the way he’d hurt her, but that there was no other choice, no way he could live with the decision to give up what did not belong to him? Those words would be thorns snagging his skin and clothes.