When the Moon was Ours(7)

Miel backed away from the edge of the pumpkin field, trying to vanish into the shadows before Sam saw her. The Bonner sisters, like everyone else in town, had seen her with Sam so many times that they noted it no more than seeing her alone. But if Miel came up to him now, he might slouch and blush in a way that traced a ribbon of cool air in the dusty heat. And when he did, Miel’s smile might glint like a coin.

The Bonner girls would see it. It would draw them.

They would watch how Sam sometimes climbed trees to set his moons where the branches met and joined, but just as often threw a thin rope over a bough and pulled the moon up. They would notice how, when he had to climb trees to put in new candles or relight ones that had gone out, he did it without hurry. How, if a moon was fragile, he carried a wooden ladder from his mother’s shed and leaned it against the trunk, so he wouldn’t jostle the moon as he climbed.

They would realize how beautiful this odd boy was, how the moons he hung in the trees at night glowed like a bowl of stars. They would see how his painted lunar seas gave off different shades of light.

No boy was ever so interesting to them as when he was interesting to someone else.

Chloe turned, her braid running the length of her spine, rubber band hitting the small of her back as she followed the brick walkway. She took the stairs to the front porch, and the soles of her feet, dust-covered, flashed a little darker than her ankles. But even the defiance in how she whipped her braid through the air couldn’t hide the way she held herself a little differently. Her stomach was flat but her hips had spread. She folded her arms, even thinner than when she’d left, like she was cold. She looked both fearless and young as any Bonner sister, but now the set to her shoulders gave her the proud but cautious look of being someone’s mother.

But maybe that was just because Miel knew. Everyone knew. The thing Chloe had tried to keep secret had become its own little life. It had grown so big it refused to go unremarked on.

No matter how tight Chloe’s jeans, people would look at her stomach and wonder if she was showing again. She may have been a porcelain figurine, repaired by the finest hands, but she had still cracked and broken. When anyone held her up to the light, the milky threads of where she’d been glued back together showed.

She’d never rule the Bonner girls again. Her reign would pass down to Ivy. Not Lian, even though Lian was the second-oldest. If anyone called Lian dim, the Bonner girls would have scratched them to bleeding with their unfiled, bright-polished nails, but that wouldn’t mean they didn’t agree.

Now that the Bonner girls were together again, they were a force as strong as the wind that ripped the leaves off maples and sycamores. They were every shade of orange and gold in an October forest. The life would come back into them, and every girl in town who loved any boy in town would take a little longer to fall asleep tonight.

If the Bonner girls knew Miel wanted to keep Sam, that she was not just a strange girl who was friends with a strange boy, they would realize how much fun it would be to take him. It was why they had never had any friends at school except one another. Whenever a girl wanted a boy, so did they. The second they sensed that Miel cared would be the second they decided he would be the next boy whose heart they broke. Not that they ever tried to break anything. They never meant to hurt anyone. They were children petting a cat too hard for no reason except that they liked the feel of its fur.

Together, they were similar enough to dazzle half the boys in this town, different enough that they’d intrigue Sam. And if he ever trusted them as much as he trusted Miel, they would ruin him. They would take everything from him without trying.

Miel’s wrist prickled. She looked down at her rose. The pink of her favorite lipstick was draining out of the petals, giving way to red, and then orange, until every petal had turned to copper or amber or rust.

Las gringas bonitas, these four girls who’d made the moon disappear, were back.





lake of hatred

She had to kill it. She’d already waited too long, not wanting to slice away the rose she’d worn on her body the night she slept with Sam. And if she kept it on her body, the Bonner girls would know. They’d see the colors of each of their hair. The copper of Ivy’s hair at the center, the soft orange and strawberry-blond of Peyton’s and Chloe’s, the almost-brown of Lian’s at the edges.

If they were witches like the rumors said, they’d know. Even if they weren’t, they would wonder why Miel’s rose held their colors in its petals, and they would look at her, and then at Sam.

Miel paused, finding a break in the familiar silhouettes along the river.

Two shapes stood against the dark, close enough to Miel that she hid in a tree’s shadow so they wouldn’t see her. Her eyes adjusted to the dark, letting her see one feature at a time. A girl. A boy. Neither standing in enough light for her to recognize them.

But she could make out their posture, the girl’s inclining forward. Eager and flirtatious, her hands flitting in the space between them like birds. From where Miel stood, a tree branch obscured the girl’s face, but the moon lit her hair enough to show the color. A veil of rich red that could only belong to a Bonner girl.

The boy’s stance did not match the girl’s. He did not lean forward. He did not try to touch her. There was no sense that he was making an attempt at persuading her. To let him kiss her, or to get her sisters to sneak out and see him and his friends, or anything at all.