When the Moon was Ours(70)

He would never let go of Samira, that girl his mother imagined when he was born. She would follow him, a blur he thought he saw out of the corner of his eye when he stood at the counter, making roti with his mother. Or he would see the silhouette of Samira crossing the woods, wearing the skirts that fit her but he could never make himself fit. Maybe one day he would see her shape, her dark hands setting the lantern of a hollow pumpkin into the water, candle lighting the carved shapes.

But this was what she would be now, his shadow, an echo of what he once was and thought he would be again. She would be less like someone he was supposed to become, and more like a sister who lived in places he could not map, a sister who kept a light but constant grasp on both his hand and his grandmother’s.

No one could make him be Samira. Not him. Not the Bonner sisters. Not the signatures on that piece of paper.

The girl he needed did not hide and wait inside him. She stood with him. She always had, this girl of wildflowers and feather grass, this girl he’d painted a thousand lunar seas, a hundred incarnations of mare nectaris and sinus iridum.

Sam pulled Miel into him, her forearm the only thing between them. “I don’t care what they have,” he said.

“Sam,” she said.

He held on to her, keeping her up. “If you’re doing this, we do this together.”

“Sam.” His name broke into pieces on her tongue.

“Samir.” He put his hand to her face, his thumb grazing her damp cheek.

She pressed her lips together, blinking against the tear caught at the inner corner of her eye.

He set the pad of his thumb against it, and she shut her eyes.

“You can call me whatever you want, but my name is Samir.”

The crushing of leaves announced the Bonner sisters. They emerged from the yellow leaves, the shades of their hair like the different colors in a bloom of flame. They wore sweaters as deep and vivid as the panels of stained glass. Dark green and purple. Blue and red.

Their eyes, two sets of brown, the others green and gray, met on Sam and Miel, their bodies crushed together.

Sam pressed his hand against the back of Miel’s neck. But he didn’t look away from the four of them. He met as many of their eyes at a time as he could. First Peyton’s and Lian’s, his stare straying to Ivy and Chloe.

He straightened his back, trying to stand as tall as his mother. The soreness in his arm felt like a charm, a coin Miel had slipped into his hand. A reminder.

“I’m a boy,” he said, because the rest did not matter.

He felt Miel watching him. Her whispered What are you doing? warmed his neck.

The lies, the rumors that might touch him tomorrow, did not matter right now. The truth was currency, new and shining. It let off light, glowing like the moon he’d set on the ground.

“I’m a boy,” he said, “and I always have been.”

The Bonner girls blinked at him, staying in their line, a row of vivid hair and sweaters.

Then a splintering sound, like a sheet of ice giving beneath too much weight, cut through the air.

Sam and Miel and all four of the Bonner sisters turned their faces to its source.

A crack, thick and deep as a line of paint, crossed the stained glass.





bay of rainbows

The six of them were watching that crack crawl across the green and violet.

Samir. He was calling himself Samir. And he was looking the Bonner sisters in their faces—their faces that seemed like different panes in the same sheet of stained glass—and telling them that he knew what they knew, and he didn’t care.

One set of eyes at a time, the Bonner girls were looking from the cracked stained glass to Sam and Miel. Brown and green and gray all swirling and settling on them.

Their stare was heavy as a coating of snow. It felt colder in contrast with the warmth of Sam’s body, his lack of hesitation when Miel dropped her forearm from between them and he let his chest touch her. He didn’t flinch away or twist his shoulder so he would not feel the front of him, would not remember what he had under the shirt that bound him down.

She thought of Aracely, coming out of the water soaked and a stranger to her own body. Surfacing as someone older than when she’d gone in, while the water had kept Miel the same age. Back then, Miel had the sorrow of a child. But Aracely’s heart carried the sadness of the woman she would become.

Sorrow kept Miel still, but had aged Aracely. And that same sorrow was keeping Miel still now.

Her mother hadn’t hated her. She knew that. She’d feared for her. She’d loved Miel, seen her as a daughter she could lose to petals and thorns. She’d been a young mother little older than Aracely, panicked and desperate to hold on to the children she’d made.

What mother could resist a hundred tales of roses that had stolen the souls of sons and daughters? What mother could stand against her husband’s insistence that their daughter was sick, and needed to be cured, and not want to find a gentler way to do it than the sting of hot metal?

What woman could ignore the warnings of se?oras and priests who said they knew how to save her child? How could she not bring her daughter down to the river when they promised the current would take this curse from her?

Miel could not choose if Ivy or the other Bonner girls or anyone else told lies.

But she could tell the truth.

Miel found Ivy’s eyes.

“My mother loved me,” she said. Maybe her father had too. Maybe all he did—the bandages so tight her fingers turned numb, the end of the butter knife in the gas flame—was the form his love had taken. Maybe fear had twisted it, leaving it threadbare.